With and Against

With and Against

The Situationist International
in the Age of Automation

Dominique Routhier

First published by Verso 2023

© Dominique Routhier 2023

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Names: Routhier, Dominique, 1983-author.

Title: With and against : the Situationist International in the age of automation / Dominique Routhier.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2023. | Outgrowth of the author’s thesis (doctoral)—University of Southern Denmark, 2020, under the title: The work of art in the age of automation : the Situationist movement, 1956-1968. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023020365 (print) | LCCN 2023020366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804292556 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781804292570 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Internationale situationniste. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—20th century. | Technology and the arts—History—20th century. | Technology—Social aspects—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC NX456.5.I58 R68 2023 (print) | LCC NX456.5.I58 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/05—dc23/eng/20230524

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020365

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020366

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Introduction

1  Refusal and Withdrawal: Histoire marseillaise

2  Secret Fascination: Unitary Urbanism

3  With and Against: Fin de Copenhague

4  Rage Against the Machine: L’Opé ration robot and May ’68

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

My interest in the Situationist International reaches back more than a decade before I ever thought about writing this book. The context in which I discovered the situationists, in the build-up to the violent eviction of the Youth House in Copenhagen in 2005– 07, was not through reading books but through reading the slogans that covered the walls of the city in the wake of the then-frequent riots. I begin with this anecdote to signal my gratitude to everyone involved in these riots and to everyone who helped make me aware of their situationist prehistory, in particular Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, whose radical research has been a crucial source of inspiration for me. I am also grateful to have had some formative discussions about the situationist legacy with Carsten Juhl, Julien Coupat, Joen Vedel, and comrades from Drejervej, YNKB, På Klem, and other similar contexts.

So many good friends, comrades, colleagues, and allies have had an impact on this book – directly or indirectly – through discussions, research, reading groups, sharing of ideas, and overall support. I am likely to forget someone as I extend my gratitude to Marie Louise Krogh, Louis Hartnoll, Mikkel Ibsen, Frida Sandstøm, Mads Hoffmann, Tais Beata Terletskaja, Daniel Valentin Kjer, Lotte List, Mikkel Flohr, Signe Leth Gammelgaard, Eskil Halberg, Thomas Bo Østergaard, Masar Sohail, Jean Marc Routhier, Jeppe Bach Hjort, Morten Graversgaard, Anna Routhier, Tobias Dias, Lucas Dias, Kasper Opstrup, Magnus Møller Ziegler, Nicolai Von Eggers, Katarina Stenbeck, James Day, Kerry Greaves, Joen Vedel, Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen, Haitham Badr, Matthias Dressler-Bredsdorff, Emil Leth Meilvang, Thomas Hvid Kromann, Mikkel Frantzen, Torsten Andreasen, Ellef Prestsæter, Anna Weile Kjær, Katrine Høghøj, Tobias Barenthin Lindblad, Jacob Wamberg, Mathias Kokholm, Ina Blom, Joshua Clover, Søren Mau, Jason E. Smith, and, most importantly of all, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen.

Like so many other books, With and Against originated in a PhD thesis. This book would not have been possible without the institutional support from the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark; I would like to thank Kathrin Maurer, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, and Erik Granly Jensen in particular. During my PhD, I was especially fortunate to share an office with Søren Mau, whose enduring friendship and intellectual support I am immensely grateful for.

A note of thanks is also due to those kind and helpful souls at the libraries and archives that I visited for this book, most notably Lucas Haberkorn at the Asger Jorn archives in Silkeborg, Thomas Hvid Kromann at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, and Laurence Le Bras at the Guy Debord archives in Paris.

Parts of Chapters 3 and 4 have been published as ‘Full Automation in Its Infancy: The Situationist Avant-Garde Book Fin de Copenhague’, in Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 29:60 (2020): 48–71, and ‘A Situationist Portrait of Power: Cybernetics, May ’68, and the Situationist International’, in Historical Materialism (forthcoming).

Thanks to those who have read, commented, edited, and generally improved my manuscript at different stages in the process. A special thanks to James Day, who generously read and commented on the entire manuscript and shared many key insights with me, and to freelance editor Andrew Ascherl for helping me get the manuscript in shape for submission to Verso.

At Verso I would like to thank everyone involved, especially Katrine Høghøj, Melissa Weiss, Michal Schatz, Natalie Hume, Cian McCourt, Anthony Korum, and Jeanne Tao for making all this come together in this book. Finally, a huge thanks to my editor, Sebastian Budgen, for believing in my work and for seeing it through to publication.

My greatest feeling of gratitude, of course, is to my wife, Lise Routhier Bentsen, who has always stood by me.

Note on Translations
and Abbreviations

The history of the Situationist International is a multilingual one. For this book, I have sought out existing English translations and taken the liberty to amend these translations as I see fit. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

The first time a source is introduced I leave the title in the original language and supply an English translation in parenthesis; if a published English translation exists, it is styled as such – for example, Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle). Where no existing translation has been found, I leave the title in the original language (and if translated, it will not be styled and capitalized as a publication, as in Visages de l’avantgarde [Faces of the avant-garde]). Pagination always refers to the translated source, insofar as one is provided. If an existing translation is repeatedly cited or referenced, only the translation will appear in consecutive notes.

As with any other avant-garde movement, the journal medium was key to the situationists. For the present study, two journals are particularly important: Potlatch (1954–57) and internationale situationniste (1958–69). Very often, articles and declarations in these venues were written by one individual but signed collectively, or inversely. The question of authorship attribution was of secondary importance to the situationist movement, and in many cases a number of declarations and notes were left unsigned. In cases where a clear authorial attribution cannot be established, or where I consider it irrelevant to the context of argument, I cite as ‘author’ the collective entity of the corresponding journal in which the text first appeared: Internationale lettriste (Lettrist International) for Potlatch and Internationale situationniste (Situationist International) for the eponymous journal internationale situationniste.

According to conventions in the field, I use the following standard abbreviations:

For the Lettrist International = LI

For the Situationist International = SI

Introduction

Automation, which is at once the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, confronts the world of the commodity with a contradiction that it must somehow resolve.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

‘A strange nocturnal spectacle unfolded on August 8 on the immense rooftop that caps Le Corbusier’s building in Marseille,’ reported the popular French illustrated science magazine Science et Vie in a four-page spread in September 1956.¹ On the evening in question, such prominent figures as the soon-to-be minister of culture André Malraux, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the quintessential neo-avant-garde artist Yves Klein were likely mingling when, at some point, a crowd started gathering in front of the interim stage. One can imagine the Science et Vie journalist peeking curiously over their shoulders, pen in hand, filled to the brim with expectation about what would happen next. As the bright Marseille sun melted on the horizon and the day faded into twilight, a ballet troupe led by the renowned experimental choreographer Maurice Béjart quietly appeared on the open-air stage. Surrounded by darkness, the ballet dancers began ‘gracefully gliding in front of an abstract sculpture made out of steel angles and copper sheets’, when, dramatically:

a red projector suddenly lit up. The bizarre sounds of musique concrète resounded, and, like the statue of the Commander, the sculpture came brusquely to life. It entered the dance, advancing and retreating on unexpected cadences; metal blades vibrating, it aligned its complicated steps with the supple movements of the human bodies.²

With the red projector mimicking a Wagnerian ‘cosmic sunrise’, the illusion of life was far more spectacular than the one cinema had already long since achieved with its twenty-four frames per second.³ It was not in cinema, then, but through the ancient art of the spectacle, in theatre, that the visual apotheosis of the ‘autonomous movement of non-life’ would manifest itself most forcefully.⁴ The self-moving creature – a ‘cybernetic’ robot named CYSP 1 by its creator, the Hungarian-born sculptor Nicolas Schöffer – was a mid-twentieth-century incarnation of the ‘Enlightened automaton’.⁵

It was as a strange reappearance. Publicly performing automata had been absent since the mid-eighteenth century, when Jacques de Vaucanson, the most famous maker of automatons in history, retired his spectacular mechanical toys to apply his skills more productively in the burgeoning industries of his time.⁶ After Vaucanson’s intricate toys had retreated into the depths of the collective unconscious, the automaton as a symbol of the ‘uncanny’ would only occasionally threaten to materialize itself ‘in false flesh and bone’. Until that night in Marseille, such creatures had remained trapped in a surrealist twilight zone of things to come.⁷ (See Figure 0.1.)

Figure 0.1. Invitation card to surrealist exhibition with the automaton Enigmarelle in procession, 1938.

In an article on the ‘exquisite corpses’ of the age of mechanization, art historian Hal Foster speculates that surrealism’s attraction to outmoded automata and other phantoms of ‘machinic modernism’ was the artistic processing of the shock of industrialization.⁸ But if surrealism was a working through of industrial shock and the experience of the assembly line, how then are we to understand the re-emergence of the automaton at a point in time when the organic composition of capital was changing profoundly and the industrial regimentation of life began yielding to other, more flexible forms of production, circulation, and consumption? What is the historical specificity of the post-war conjuncture from which the cybernetically reloaded automaton re-emerged? And how does the history of cybernetics play into the post-war moment in French art – a moment characterized by competing factions of modern artists claiming to be the true heirs to the avant-garde?

This book is about how one of the most distinctive post-war avant-garde movements, the Situationist International (1957–72), came into being, developed, and acquired its ‘avant-garde’ characteristics through a sustained if conflicted engagement with the perspectives opened up by the advent of cybernetics, modern computing, and automation.⁹ As this focus suggests, I do not aspire to write a comprehensive history of the Situationist International (hereafter SI).¹⁰ Instead, I contribute to existing scholarship by drawing attention to an overlooked dimension of the situationist project. What makes this part of the SI’s history particularly interesting is the conflicting and self-contradictory ways its members engaged with the utopianism of cybernetics and automation. As the title of this book suggests, the SI’s response to post-war science and technology oscillated between attraction and repulsion: they were paradoxically both with and against the forces of technical progress. In particular, the SI intensively engaged with the prospects of an emerging ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ that, as the post-situationist group Tiqqun has pointed out, held an entire generation of French artists, intellectuals, and critical theorists spellbound.¹¹

A point of conceptual clarification is required here. Unlike Tiqqun, I do not intend the shorthand term ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ to stand in for an analysis of an overarching political development in the West in the second half of the twentieth century. Nor will this text contribute to the genealogy of ‘imperial governance’, although it is an alluring idea that the classical ‘liberal hypothesis’ was supplanted by a hardwired cybernetic one that, ideologically and materially, signals the ‘end of politics’. I am concerned, more modestly, with how cybernetics imposed itself on cultural producers as a shared horizon of expectation tied to the advent of modern computing and automation. More specifically, I am interested in how the history of cybernetics maps onto changes in class relations and intersects with the history of the post-war European avant-garde. The situationist movement is the prism through which I examine this problematic.¹²

Historians of science have already gauged the transatlantic impact of cybernetics after the Second World War. My task is to relate the history of science and technology to the history of the avant-garde. The conjunction between cybernetics and art has only recently become a topic; however, this has been almost exclusively in an American or British context.¹³ One of the main tasks of this book is thus to study the impact of cybernetics in continental Europe and particularly in France, where modern artists engaged with the prospects of cybernetics five or ten years earlier than elsewhere. Although partial accounts are available, no sustained attempt exists to map out the imbrication of the cybernetic matrix and the post-war French avant-garde. My contribution to this line of inquiry is to systematically reconstruct the as-yet largely unexamined impact of cybernetics and the discourse of automation – intellectually, politically, and aesthetically – on the history of the situationist movement.

In the history of the SI, as seen from this perspective, the strange nocturnal spectacle in Marseille offers an Urszene of the cultural logic that the situationists would come to theorize and critique as ‘spectacle’. Whether coincidentally or not, the category of the spectacle began to acquire a critical edge in situationist discourse precisely around this time – 1956 – and developed into one of the group’s central terms of analysis over the following decade.¹⁴ While the term ‘spectacle’ – in its situationist inflection – cannot be reduced to the description of empirical events, however spectacular they might be, it also does not exclude actual historical fact. As Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias note, the situationist notion of the spectacle critically encompasses both ‘the particulars of the phenomenological reality of the post-war capitalist world’ and, more crucially, the way these particulars tie into general ‘forms of alienation that are the historical driving force behind these changes and from which we need to free ourselves’.¹⁵ In his famous book La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) from 1967, Guy Debord uses the term to describe not just the overabundance of images but the core social logic of a transformed capitalist society.¹⁶ A society in which all of life, as Debord famously stated, paraphrasing the opening sentence of Marx’s Capital, ‘presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles’.¹⁷ Accordingly, some of the most interesting reinterpretations of situationist theory come from the value-critical readings that, following Anselm Jappe, have restored the concept of the spectacle to its Marxist–Hegelian roots.¹⁸ Such a framework of interpretation is undoubtedly key to understanding this enigmatic concept.

However, there is a tendency in Marxist–Hegelian analyses to bracket off the historical context out of which situationist theory grew and to separate the high-theoretical realm – somewhat contrary to the spirit of Debord – from the nitty-gritty reality of everyday life. The theoretical austerity and conceptual rigour of Marxist SI scholarship, coupled with a persistent Debordian myth that art was a secondary concern to politics, have created a blind spot for an appreciation of the aesthetics at the heart of the situationist re-enactment of the avant-garde project. Conversely, art historians mostly ignore the historical entanglement of the avant-garde and the revolutionary tradition.¹⁹ Even the most lucid and richly contextualized art historical studies of SI are silent about the left communist and French ultra-gauche heritage from which the situationists drew inspiration.²⁰

As a result, an unfortunate division of labour has occurred between specialized critical theorists and equally specialized art historians, each with their own blind spots. However, the history of the avant-garde, particularly that of the SI, falls decidedly between these areas of specialization. In the quest to historicize the concept of the spectacle and, by implication, the working categories of situationist theory more broadly, I follow the lead of cultural theorist Kristin Ross, who has soundly argued that ‘theoretical categories are not free-floating analytical devices, innocent of historical content’ but the intellectual products of specific forms of historical experience.²¹ The task is to return to the origins not of the society of the spectacle itself, as might Giorgio Agamben, but more modestly to address the historical conditions that allowed for that society’s revolutionary self-critique.²² Where to start?

In this book, I suggest that we begin by taking note of the exceptional historical and political-economic circumstances in which Debord and the SI developed their analysis of the society of the spectacle. The backdrop is post-war France and the restructuring of its national economy and cultural sector in the wake of the Marshall Plan. Against this backdrop, we must reinterpret the history of the SI and try to understand its struggles with and against the French state-led modernization effort and the recuperation of the avant-garde.

The second coming of the automaton with which we began this story offers a window to the then-novel historical situation. Worth noting, to begin with, is that the automaton in question was not a refined mechanical contraption à la Vaucanson, and even less a humanoid clothed in ‘false flesh and bone’ like the Enigmarelle sauntering the streets of Paris prior to the legendary surrealist exposition of 1938. Schöffer’s CYSP 1, as the sci-fi-sounding name that might have inspired R2D2 suggests, was a distinctly modern creature made from materials including Plexiglas, steel, and wire. Art historian Jack Burnham, in his canonical 1968 essay Beyond Modern Sculpture, relates the developments that led up to the spectacular revival of the automaton in Marseille:

After 1945 experimental research in man-machine relationships was coordinated under the title of cybernetics, resulting in electronic pseudo-organisms quite unlike robots in appearance. Grey Walter’s ‘tortoises’, Ross Ashby’s ‘homeostat’, the maze-running ‘mice’ of Claude Shannon are all attempts by scientists to construct paradigms of organic behavior; these are not clever copies of flute playing or poetry writing, but working models, generally analogues of various aspects of the nervous system found in simple organisms. These pseudo-organisms constructed by psychologists, neuro-physiologists, and communication engineers are, in conception and intention, far more sophisticated than all automata preceding them; no longer complex mechanical toys, they are tenuously linked with life itself.²³

CYSP 1 epitomized the ‘electronic pseudo-organisms’ described by Burnham, who most likely first encountered Schöffer’s cybernetic sculpture in the landmark exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London in 1968. A text written by two contemporaneous art critics, Jacques Ménétrier and Guy Habasque – partially reprised in Jasia Reichardt’s catalogue for Cybernetic Serendipidity with a photograph of CYSP 1 on the Marseille rooftop from 1956 as illustration – explains that CYSP 1 is a contraction of cybernetics and spatiodynamics, and that its creation was the outcome of a collaboration between Schöffer and a team of engineers from the multinational electronics company Phillips.²⁴ CYSP 1 was a cybernetically reloaded version of an earlier sculpture, CYSP 0. In contrast to its rudimentary ancestor, however, CYSP 1 was equipped with an ‘electronic brain’ that allowed it to attain ‘total autonomy of movement’.²⁵ The enamoured art critics’ description conveys a vivid impression of the cybernetic creature’s anatomy and mode of behaviour:

The whole is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photoelectrical cells and a microphone built into the whole catch all the variations in the fields of color, light intensity and sound intensity. All these changes occasion reactions on the part of the sculpture consisting of combined travel and animation … Inasmuch as these phenomena are constantly variable, the reactions are likewise ever changing and unpredictable, which endows the mechanism with an almost organic life and sensitivity.²⁶

In other words, CYSP 1 was among the most advanced creatures of the flourishing cybernetic zoo of the 1950s. But, in sharp contrast, for instance, to Albert Ducrocq’s renard cybernétique, a fur-covered French mechanical fox akin to William Grey Walter’s more famous cybernetic tortoises, CYSP 1 showed no penchant for the creaturely or the animalistic.

Created by an artist and drawing inspiration from the constructivist aesthetics of László Moholy-Nagy and others, CYSP 1 was less an imitation of existing life-forms than a being of second order, a virtual premonition of the future post-organic or inhuman order of things. For the art critics, this ‘artificial being’ was a sign of things to come:

a prototype of a whole series of other spatiodynamic sculptures which could stage a great cybernetic spectacle on the ground and even in the air, thus creating a true synthesis between the most advanced aesthetic conceptions and the most up-to-date scientific means, capable of multiplying their attractive possibilities tenfold.²⁷

CYSP 1 catered to the ancient Wagnerian dream of a synthesis of the arts, but in the form of an all-redeeming ‘great cybernetic spectacle’. In this light, the Science et Vie journalist’s throwback to the ‘statue of the Commander’ in describing CYSP 1 invoked Molière’s comedy Don Juan or The Feast with the Statue from the late seventeenth century for a particular reason. What the journalist captured in that reference was the rising tension between la langue de Molière and the then-emerging universal language of ‘control and communication’. Soon, this cybernetic lingua franca would resound everywhere in French intellectual life: in contemporary art-lingo and in ‘structuralist’ discourses across various scientific disciplines, from linguistics to anthropology, from sociology to philosophy, semiotics, theoretical aesthetics, and beyond.²⁸

In the French post-war art world, Schöffer and a nexus of artists with ties to Galerie Denise René in Paris set the artistic perimeters of that moment with their famous 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement, which effectively captured the cybernetic Zeitgeist. Through carefully curated career moves, Schöffer’s ‘electronic gang’, as the situationists liked to refer to them, paved the way for what art historian Frank Popper described as ‘the acceptance of electronic and cybernetic discoveries and their incorporation in the work of art’.²⁹ It was but a logical step to conclude, as Habasque and Ménétrier would unhesitatingly do, that CYSP 1 announced ‘an adventure unique in the history of art’, or to claim even more bombastically, like the Science et Vie journalist, that the infantile steps of a cybernetic automaton inaugurated an entirely ‘new epoch in the history of art’.³⁰ Of course, as art historian Hervé Vanel points out, one should be careful not to inherit Schöffer’s self-aggrandizing discourse nor uncritically accept art critics’ exaggerated statements, such as that of the influential French art critic Michel Ragon, who referred to Schöffer’s sculptures as nothing less than ‘the cradle of a new world’.³¹ But, precisely because of the impact of Schöffer’s cybernetic art on art critics and the broader public alike, it might be worth examining more closely as a symptom of its time. Schöffer’s cybernetic spectacle in Marseille provides a historical snapshot of a strange and now largely forgotten dimension of post-war French cultural history. Perhaps we should even accept the proposal that Schöffer’s sculpture marks a historical threshold and proceed to rewrite the history of the neo-avant-garde with 1956 as Year One?

Of course, the Zeitgeist rarely descends into one discrete object or event. At best, such objects or events – considered works of art or not – are proxies of historical development. Art history at its best, as in T. J. Clark’s seminal reading of Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting The Death of Marat, takes such objects as the starting point for a historical analysis that simultaneously sheds light on the present moment.³² This book, in other words, aspires to do for the neo-avant-garde what Clark did for modernism: not just to understand its internal contradictions but to bid it farewell.

Clark’s analysis of modernism is a model for this book, even if, as art historian Griselda Pollock notes, it sometimes fails to notice the historical specificity of the art historian’s own (white, male, and Western) gaze.³³ I appreciate in Clark the attempt to read art history against the grain and examine material artefacts, or ‘works of art’, from the point of view of their surplus ‘dream-content’.³⁴ In the masculinist avant-garde tradition, such dream-content is inevitably libidinally charged. The situationist artistic imaginary, too, is shot through with masculinist tropes and sexist imagery of all kinds but remains open to more complex interpretations of the gender problematic.³⁵ Schöffer’s artworks, however, are more straightforwardly sexist.

Figure 0.2. CYSP 1 and woman posing, Science et Vie, September 1956. © Fonds de dotation Nicolas Schöffer.

Schöffer’s cybernetic artworks fit perfectly into the patriarchal worldview of the mid-1950s, and resonate with the deep-seated bourgeois imaginary of technology and progress intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production. Unsurprisingly, most contemporaneous (male) art critics failed to note how such conspicuously phallic sculptures perpetuate, by aesthetic means, a social arrangement that cast women as merely ‘conscious linkages’ to the (male) artist’s heroic creations. Nevertheless, even Schöffer’s staunchest admirers, such as Ragon, ‘understood well that the artist’s purpose far exceeded the sculptural objects themselves’, and that Schöffer’s artistic claims pertain to the wider historical context in an almost symptomatic manner.³⁶ Schöffer’s art, then, represents a worldview. But what are its historical circumstances?

In the wake of the Second World War, swollen wartime budgets spilled over into other parts of the economy. The Second Industrial Revolution, everyone believed, was imminent. Computers and electronics would transform industry, work, leisure, consumption, and everyday life. The social imaginary of technology of this period varies from place to place but shares certain identifiable characteristics that originated in the new communication sciences. The American savant Norbert Wiener grouped a host of scientific ideas under the philosophically evocative header of Cybernetics, which became the title of his 1948 book, sometimes described as ‘one of the most influential scientific books of the twentieth century’.³⁷

Although some concepts and ideas are more resonant with historical developments than others, no single book in and by itself changes the course of history. Wiener’s book, however influential, is only part of the reason for the global success of cybernetics as an interdisciplinary endeavour and philosophical framework. Part of the success of cybernetics was its conceptual plasticity and its appeal to researchers across disciplinary boundaries. With surprising efficacy, cybernetics transgressed the boundaries of the scientific community at the MIT laboratories and quickly evolved into the defining techno-scientific idiom of the day, shaping not only the natural sciences but also to an increasing degree the social sciences and the humanities in post-war America.³⁸

In his studies of cybernetics, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan explains how a broad set of scientific ‘material instruments and techniques’ would ‘morph into ostensibly immaterial ideals that furnished researchers with procedures for investigations unhindered by historical, political, or disciplinary difference’.³⁹ Cybernetics, with its abstract language of communication and control, united researchers in a ‘common epistemic cause’ that completely disregarded its own intellectual origins in a history of colonial dispossession, scientific racism, and experimental forms of violence.⁴⁰

What, more specifically, accounts for the fact that in less than a decade after Wiener published his book, cybernetics had grown from a set of relatively technical postulates into a broadly applicable and ostensibly neutral transdisciplinary scientific framework? The full title of Wiener’s book is worth recalling: Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. As the subtitle suggests, one of the key philosophical assumptions animating cybernetic thought was the ‘behaviouristic’ perspective. The scientist should methodically bracket all external factors and focus on the essential: the course of action or movement common to all beings, living or mechanical.

In a key proto-cybernetic paper entitled ‘Behavior, Purpose and Teleology’, published in 1943 and co-authored with physicist Arturo Rosenblueth and electrical engineer Julian Bigelow, Wiener had explained that the behaviourist method assumes that from the purely scientific viewpoint, there are no meaningful distinctions between man, animal, and machine.⁴¹ Moreover, Wiener and his co-authors argued, explanations within the traditional scientific Newtonian clockwork universe, where every action follows upon the other in linear temporal succession, would have to yield to explanations involving ‘circular causality’. The concept of circular causality makes possible interpretations of actions in time that are non-deterministic yet teleological – that is to say, actions that are purposeful but not causally predetermined, and hence open-ended in terms of finality.⁴²

In such a proto-cybernetic frame of thought, any action in time and space with a clearly delimited purpose – whether it is a human lifting her arm to drink from a cup, a cat chasing a mouse, or a radar-guided missile pursuing its target – can have its course of action calibrated. What becomes key is foreseeing the expected (statistically calculated) trajectory of the target and acting in accordance with this knowledge.⁴³ The versatility of the feedback model is at the heart of Wiener’s conception of cybernetics and explains its interdisciplinary agility. Perhaps this ‘promiscuous modeling’ is also, one might speculate, part of the reason for the grip that cybernetics exerted on the imaginary of artificial life in the emerging structuralist and post-structuralist ontologies of the 1950s and 1960s.⁴⁴

Cybernetics offered a persuasive post-Kantian framework for rethinking the question of teleology in strictly scientific language. The idea to reconfigure teleology as ‘purpose controlled by feedback’, however, was not merely a product of ‘pure reason’ or the result of these men’s scientific genius. Like many other significant intellectual and scientific innovations, cybernetic ideas grew out of the war effort. As historian of science Peter Galison has explained, Wiener extrapolated his feedback model from the antiaircraft equipment which he helped develop and refine during the Second World War.⁴⁵ From his work with the military, Wiener noticed that his ideas had a near-universal scope and might help understand much more complex patterns of behaviour than that of an enemy missile or plane:

Wiener’s attention focused increasingly on the problem of destroying enemy airplanes. His early efforts at computation and antiaircraft fire coalesced in a remarkably ambitious calculating device that he called the ‘antiaircraft (AA) predictor’, designed to characterize an enemy pilot’s zigzagging flight, anticipate his future position, and launch an antiair-craft shell to down his plane … Step by step, Wiener came to … include the vast array of human proprioceptive and electro-physiological feedback systems. The model then expanded to become a new science known after the war as ‘cybernetics’ … Finally, the AA predictor, along with its associated engineering notions of feedback systems and black boxes, became, for Wiener, the model for a cybernetic understanding of the universe itself.⁴⁶

Because cybernetics offered a new way of understanding – and modelling – complex systemic or networked behaviour patterns, it soon developed into one of the most encompassing philosophical theories available. Even if cybernetics could not explain everything about the universe, its interdisciplinary nature helped bridge the perceived divide between what C. P. Snow called ‘the two cultures’.⁴⁷

A key institutional nexus for popularizing cybernetics was the famous Macy Conferences (1946–53), which brought together engineers, mathematicians, physiologists, neurologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnologists, among others.⁴⁸ From within this nexus of disparate researchers, all the different perspectives combined into a single grand cybernetic theory ‘that could claim validity for living organisms as well as machines, for economic as well as psychological processes, and for sociological as well as aesthetic phenomena’.⁴⁹

More than any other post-war term, then, cybernetics became a veritable conceptual locomotive for a host of related mid-century sciences, such as information theory and game theory, that it would drag along as so many ‘bandwagons’ to the dismay of some scientists who were less interested than Wiener in reviving a Leibnizian project of philosophical universalism.⁵⁰ The enormous discursive efficacy of this science-of-everything is visible not only in the system-oriented approaches of the 1950s and 1960s, in structuralism and post-structuralism, or in actor-network theory, but also, I would add, in the flat ontologies of present-day new materialism(s). However, just as books do not in and of themselves transform world history, neither do ideas spread contagiously without material support.

Underlying the intellectual dissemination of cybernetics after the end of the Second World War was the economic incentive to turn the war machine towards profitable ends. Through political-economic stimuli packages such as the Marshall Plan, American surplus capital found its way to fertile soil in post-war Europe where new automatic (cybernetically enhanced) machinery revolutionized production processes in less than a decade.

Inspired by cybernetics, new computer-assisted feedback technologies now allowed a variety of mechanisms to ‘self-correct’ their course of action by perpetually checking, like a simple thermostatic device, relations between current status and a desired target of performance: be it a certain room temperature, an enemy aeroplane, or, as in the new factories mushrooming across France and other industrialized European countries, an increasingly automated production apparatus.

The application of cybernetics to the production apparatus, commonly referred to as ‘automation’ at the time, is also the baseline of some of the more spectacular post-war developments in art. CYSP 1’s arrival in 1956 was preconditioned by subterranean changes in methods of industrial production, the composition of labour, and the nature of work. The world of work and the art world, despite bourgeois assurances to the contrary, were never separate entities and must be theorized as two sides of the same capitalist coin.

In art history, any title containing the idiom ‘in the age of …’ (as in the subtitle of this book) inevitably conjures the spectre of one of the most famous essays of all time: Walter Benjamin’s 1935 text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.⁵¹ The purpose of making this association with Benjamin is not to court cliché but to bring attention to periodization. In the same way that Benjamin’s essay turns on the structural similarities between work in general and the work of art, this book examines what changes in the means of production might imply for the means of artistic creation. Although scholars use the two terms interchangeably today, it is crucial to observe the distinction between mechanization and automation as it signals an epochal change ushered in by the application of cybernetics to the production apparatus in the immediate post-war decades. From the point of view of Marxist cultural criticism, then, the history of the Situationist International is conspicuously coterminous with a distinct phase of capital accumulation that lies exactly between Benjamin’s age of mechanization and our own current ‘age of deindustrialization’.⁵² Some have referred to this intermediary phase as the golden era of capitalism. For reasons germane to this book’s historical problematic, I prefer to speak of the ‘age of automation’.⁵³

Benjamin’s famous essay provides part of the motivation for this conceptual shift. At a key point in the essay, Benjamin quotes the French author Georges Duhamel’s frustrated exclamation that film, with its constant bombardment of the senses, robs the spectator of any possibility of contemplating beauty and appreciating art: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’⁵⁴ The statement by Duhamel embodies the ardent humanist critique of mechanization. Benjamin cites it to illustrate the inability of critics to comprehend the progressive forces at work in the womb of capitalist society itself and the failure to appreciate technology as a possible training ground for political awareness. One of Benjamin’s core arguments is that art shares a secret structural affinity with the world of work in general and that the exigencies of production (the rhythm of the assembly line, for example) resound in modern art (in the rhythm of cinematic montage). The crisis of modern art, then, refracted a deeper crisis of capitalist modernity.

At the time Benjamin wrote his essay, Marxist crisis theorists from Rosa Luxemburg to Henryk Grossman had long insisted that, with the further progress of the productive forces, (abstract) labour would cease to be the measure of value, and capitalism would eventually collapse under its own internal contradictions.⁵⁵ Benjamin foresaw a parallel development in the realm of culture and speculated that the development of reproduction technologies would practically deflate the bourgeois conception of art along with the cluster of metaphysical concepts related to the idea of genius (an inversion of the figure of the worker). In the mid-1930s, however, it was still an open question as to which historical forces would manage to exploit these simultaneous crises in labour and in art: communism or fascism? Benjamin famously believed that a progressive use of the new means of technology could help avoid an imminent fascist recuperation. As we know, Benjamin’s hopes for political art were soon deflated.

In 1956, a few decades and a world war later, things were again moving quickly: Europe was reconstructing and modernizing at a furious pace, stipulated by the terms of the Marshall Plan. Curiously, in France, it was apparently none other than Duhamel himself, that inadvertent cultural seismograph, who, in July 1956, suggested to the French Académie des Sciences that a new word, automation, be introduced into the French language, to reflect conceptually the changes impending on a rapidly modernizing capitalist society.⁵⁶ Up until that point, French intellectuals such as Duhamel or Georges Friedmann (whom Benjamin also quotes in his essay) had used the term machinisme to describe either the process of mechanization, or machinic civilization more broadly.⁵⁷ Duhamel’s suggestion to introduce the term automation into the French language, now generally forgotten, registers as a semantic blip on the radar of more profound changes to the core structure of capitalist society since the time of Benjamin.

It was, appropriately, the German critical theorist Friedrich Pollock – like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other members of the Frankfurt School, exiled in the US during the war – who first took up the quest to account for and theorize these changes. In a study titled Automation: A Study of its Economic and Social Consequences – which was first published in German in the official journal for Frankfurt School critical theory, the Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie – Pollock offers the following observation:

’AUTOMATION’ is a new word in the English language. It originated in the United States and has recently been used widely but has not yet found its way into the current books of reference … The word has various synonyms such as cybernetics’, ‘automatic control’, ‘control engineering’, ‘automatisation’, and many more. It appears, however, that ‘automation’ is now ousting the other words as an expression denoting a technical development which is replacing human labour by machinery in factories and workshops in a way that would have been thought impossible only ten years ago.⁵⁸

The distinguishing feature between an age of mechanization and the ‘age of automation’, Pollock argues, is cybernetics, understood generically as the possibility of machines controlling themselves and other machines. This is made possible by new computer-assisted techniques of self-calibration, popularly known as electronic feedback mechanisms. The distinction between mechanization and automation has to do with the function of ‘automata’ and the new degree of autonomy that they can attain with the advent of computerized (or, in the idiom of the day, cybernetic) production:

It is necessary to differentiate clearly between production with the aid of ‘automatons’ – i.e. automatic machines such as automatic looms which are constructed on mechanical principles – and the entirely new methods of [cybernetic] production we have just described. It might be said that the age of ‘automatons’ precedes the age of ‘automation’.⁵⁹

In drawing attention to the phrase ‘age of automation’, I wish to shift emphasis away from the glittering aesthetic decor of the ‘space age’ or the inversely dystopian representations of the ‘atomic age’ and focus instead on the multiple ways in which the post-war reinvention of the avant-garde was structured, on a more fundamental level, by a new American techno-scientific paradigm undergirded by capital flows: cybernetics.⁶⁰

In France, where Pollock’s book appeared in translation in 1957 (with a preface by Friedmann), cybernetics had a particularly profound impact.⁶¹ The reception of cybernetic ideas in France was massive if also more complicated than in the US.⁶² A ‘diffuse nationalism’ led French scientists and intellectuals to claim cybernetics as an invention of their own, insisting not just on Wiener’s close intellectual ties to France but also on the fact that André-Marie Ampère, the famous French mathematician and philosopher, had used the term cybernétique a century before Wiener.⁶³

For reasons specific to the country’s post-war situation, French cybernetics had a bumpy ride compared to its smooth proliferation in the US.⁶⁴ As scholars have shown, the tumultuous political situation in France during the immediate post-war years – notably the May 1947 crisis that forced the French Communist Party out of government and paved the way for the implementation of the Marshall Plan – heavily affected the fate of cybernetics in that country and made it into a particularly political affair.⁶⁵ The persistent ideological inclination among intellectuals towards communism, even after 1947, led to a conflicting process of cultural appropriation of cybernetics that in many respects paralleled that of Moscow:

In France, commentators and scientists variously saw these new American sciences as bourgeois conjecture, full of mythology and mystification, or as exciting meta-theories capable of uniting diverse disciplines. Similarly, in Russia, an early anti-cybernetics campaign saw Shannon and Wiener’s work as embodiments of idealist, reactionary, American pseudoscience. After Stalin’s death, however, Russian scientists made a complete reversal of their attitude toward the two new sciences.⁶⁶

Although French intellectuals were not tied down to Party orthodoxy to the same extent as Russian intellectuals, much the same pattern can be observed in France in the course of de-Stalinization. But even outside the political matrix of debates about communism and anti-communism, cybernetics was constantly drawn back to its etymological roots in the Greek verb ‘to govern’. A good example of the imbrication of cybernetics and politics in the French cybernetic imaginary is the Dominican philosopher Dominique Dubarle’s early review (in 1948) of Wiener’s Cybernetics in the major French newspaper Le Monde. Dubarle considers the future implications of this new universal science and technology, and ponders:

Could one even imagine a state apparatus encompassing the entire system of political decision making, either in a federal coalition of States across the globe or, in a much simpler form, as one single planetary government? This is certainly a conceivable thought today. We can imagine a time when the governing machine will replace – for better or worse, who knows? – the patent insufficiency of the usual heads and apparatuses of politics.⁶⁷

Despite cybernetics’ rough beginnings in France, Dubarle’s sentiment that ‘the patent insufficiency’ of politicians (remember that France saw no less than twenty-one different government administrations during the brief twelve-year period of the French Fourth Republic, from 1947 to 1958!) could be replaced by a cybernetic ‘governing machine’ resonated strongly towards the mid-1950s as support for Communism waned and the Cold War settled in.

Hence, as the Marshall Plan gradually took hold of French society and reordered not only its economy but also its culture, what media theorist Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan calls the ‘cybernetic apparatus’ gradually succeeded – backed by the strategic funding strategies of the CIA and other major economic influencers on the ‘politics of knowledge’, such as the Rockefeller Foundation – in gaining a firmer foothold in France.⁶⁸ Influential intellectuals such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, and Jacques Lacan, among others, would help seamlessly to integrate cybernetic thought into French intellectual life, giving rise to daring ‘structuralist’ approaches in fields as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and many other humanist strongholds.⁶⁹

These famous French intellectuals figure in histories of cybernetics alongside more specialized ‘cyberneticians’ in the field, most notably Louis Couffignal (mathematician, scientist, and author of a best-selling introduction to cybernetics in the popular Que Sais-Je? book series), Albert Ducrocq (mechanical engineer, journalist, and the principal popularizer of cybernetics in French national broadcasting history), and Abraham Moles (a key figure who, as we’ll see, became a repeated target of the situationists). Three of the main drivers of the French proliferation of cybernetics, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Jakobson, took part in arranging transdisciplinary private meetings, cercles d’études, and seminars that definitively shaped the reception of cybernetics in post-war France and gave rise to a universalizing discourse that was not only resonant with but directly mediated by the CIA’s strategic financing policies at the time, known as the plan Marshall de l’esprit, the Marshall Plan of the spirit.⁷⁰

These are the coordinates, I suggest, within which the cybernetic hypothesis took form during the 1950s and 1960s, and came to shape the post-war moment in French art in ways that are still critically understudied. Although it is far more explicit in the case of Schöffer’s sculpture, the cybernetic hypothesis underpins to an equal degree the situationist project, if often only in negative form. The analysis unfolding over the next four chapters of this book positions the situationists squarely within the horizon of 1950s and 1960s proto-participatory art, as analysed by art historians such as Frank Popper or Claire Bishop.⁷¹ Despite ‘the SI’s self-proclaimed exceptionalism and distance from mainstream artistic activities’, as Bishop notes, its members nonetheless grappled with many of the same cultural deficits as their contemporaneous avant-garde contenders in the field of new cultural production, from the ensemble of artists rallying under the banner of nouveau réalisme over so-called Neo-Dadaist street-spectacles, like those of Jean-Jacques Lebel, to the cybernetically inflected kinetic or op art tendencies of artists such as Schöffer and his disciples in the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV).⁷² The various, often conflicting, manifestations of participatory art form a beneficial lens through which to navigate the post-war moment in French art. But the cybernetic origins of participatory art forms and the wider implications of cybernetics during the transformations of French society and culture in the 1950s and 1960s remain an understudied topic. Even more crucially neglected, however, is the singular and radical nature of the situationist response.

In contradiction to many contemporaneous artists, the situationists remained committed to a dissident Marxist idea of revolution and nurtured a politically radical conception of the avant-garde, which they tried to re-enact in various ways. As a consequence of these radical commitments, the situationists both offered a critique of and symptomatized, often in one and the same gesture, the exigencies of cybernetics and the changing conception of the work of art in the age of automation. This unresolved ambiguity, vis-à-vis the forces of modernization, is perhaps part of the reason why the SI continues to provoke and stimulate thought even today, five decades after its auto-dissolution in 1972.

In each of the four chapters that make up this book, I account for a different aspect of the situationist response to the advent of cybernetics and automation. In Chapter 1, I study the histoire marseillaise: an extended boycott campaign levelled against the 1956 Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille. I analyse this instance of refusal and withdrawal as a first, overtly sceptical response to the conjunction of cybernetics and art. In Chapter 2, I examine the aftermath of the boycott and the idea of unitary urbanism, which moves to the foreground of the nascent situationist movement and signals a decidedly more constructive stance, as well as a secret fascination with the cybernetic hypothesis. In Chapter 3, this fascination yields to an immanent critique that works both with and against unbridled tech-optimism. This fundamental ambiguity is operative in and around the experimental avant-garde book Fin de Copenhague, which thus functions as an aesthetic proxy for the conflicted situationist stance towards technology as a whole. Finally, in Chapter 4, I chart how this ambiguity evolved over the course of the 1960s into a rage against the machine directed at French cyberneticians, resulting in a series of strategic attacks. As I show, the situationist critique of cybernetics became a determining factor, practically and theoretically, in the run-up to May ’68, a moment which also marked the beginning of the disintegration of the situationist movement. Although I argue for a chronologically structured evolution in the situationist response, the historical trajectory is of a complex, ambiguous, and often self-contradictory nature. Hence, I aspire neither to narrative closure nor to historical completion. Rather, the four chapters are approximations to tendencies in the situationist movement that, I think, open up a fresh and original perspective on an otherwise well-rehearsed history of the SI. I hope this approach will stimulate future scholarship and invite critical reflection. But there are deeper reasons, also, to return to the situationists today. To reread the situationists today from the point of view of the ‘cybernetic matrix’ is also part of a larger project of cultural remembrance highlighting some key tenets of French radical thought before its assimilation to ‘French theory’.⁷³ Despite the inevitable limitations and shortcomings of this book, it is the first monograph-length treatment of the Situationist International that attempts to situate this avant-garde movement in the historically extraordinary political-economic circumstances of the ‘age of automation’. Beyond contributing to an understanding of the SI in its own historical moment, however, this study also serves another purpose: to remind today’s artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries that our own spectacular moment in time – where automation discourse is yet again a defining feature – has a history, and, more importantly, a history of contestation.

1

Refusal and Withdrawal:
Histoire marseillaise

Figure 1.1. Ordre de boycott, tract by Lettrist International, 1956. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

On 31 July 1956, on the occasion of an upcoming festival of avant-garde art in Marseille, Parisian-based avant-garde group the Lettrist International (LI) released a hastily completed tract into the public realm. The first thing to catch one’s eye on this seemingly run-of-the-mill paper tract (measuring 15 x 29 cm) is the caption ORDRE DE BOYCOTT printed in large, bold, upper-case type across the landscape-format page. An equally bold, black-lined rectangle boxes in the caption. Below, to the left, is a rather odd vignette of a peasant woman milking a cow (one among several interesting formal features to which I will return in the course of this chapter). Next to this, in an understated Garamond typeface, a short proclamation reads:

The festival of the Cité Radieuse, which is to open on August 4 in Marseille, will gather on the roof of Le Corbusier’s Church all the contemporary writers and artists known for having based their careers on the copying or the reactionary vulgarization of some previous novelty, itself generally lacking in reach. The enterprise is homogeneous, and in order to immediately compromise those who haven’t yet proved their nullity, they have brought together Ionesco, Tapié, Pichette, Beckett, Adamov and Agnés Varda. The participants in this parade – where nothing is lacking that in twenty years will represent the imbecility of the 50s – will find themselves definitively marked by so indiscrete an adherence to the most perfect manifestation of the spirit of an era. We thus invite the artists who were solicited, those at least who don’t feel themselves to be finished, to dissociate themselves without any delay from this amalgamation of deism, tachism, and impotence – re-chewed, re-vomited. We call on the international avant-garde to denounce the meaning of this maneuver, and to spread the names of those who have made themselves accomplices in it.

July 31, 1956. For the Letterist International,
G.-E. Debord, Asger Jorn, Gil J. Wolman.¹

To those familiar with the Situationist International, to which the LI was a critical precursor, this proclamation’s contemptuous tone will hardly come across as shocking. After all, the situationists are known for excelling in the arts of insult and polemic.² As Gianfranco Marelli sums it up in his history of the movement, abuse was heaped onto no less than 540 out of approximately 940 persons mentioned in the SI’s eponymous journal internationale situationniste, which was published in twelve issues between 1958 and 1969.³ And this count does not even include the marginalized situationist offshoots in Germany, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, nor does it cover the plethora of occasional insults scattered across a substantial output of ephemera – manifestoes, tracts, letters, postcards, graffiti, etc. – created before, during, and after the official existence of the SI from 1957–72.⁴

But, if the Ordre de boycott is yet another addition to a long and trivial list of abusive remarks from a group of artists who believed themselves to be beyond the petty concerns of the burgeoning art world, why grant this particular gesture any special attention? Existing SI scholarship seems to agree that the Ordre de boycott is peripheral to the history of the situationist movement.⁵ However, I argue in this chapter that the release of the Ordre de boycott marks an important threshold in the history of the situationist movement. The tract’s publication was the first attack in a sustained antagonistic campaign – which the Belgian post-surrealist journal Les Lèvres nues recounted as the ‘histoire marseillaise’ – that would set the terms for future developments in the SI.⁶ As something like a founding document, this humble tract will serve as the first coordinates for this book’s navigation through the tricky discursive terrain of the situationist movement.⁷ Moreover, the Ordre de boycott provides an aesthetic entry point to begin analysing the particularly political avant-garde experience that distinguishes the situationists from their contemporaries in post-war France during that period of rapid modernization and decolonization.

As noted in the introduction to this book, nascent cybernetics played a crucial role in French modernization, giving rise to a hyperbolic discourse of automation promising to transform both work and art. Is it possible that the LI had Nicolas Schöffer’s cybernetic art in mind when it claimed that participants in the Marseille festival would inevitably find themselves ‘definitively marked by so indiscrete an adherence to the most perfect manifestation of the spirit of an era’? Or did the intense animosity towards Schöffer that became a staple of the SI (as I detail in this book) develop ex post facto? It is difficult to say. However, Debord and his co-signatories could very likely have encountered Schöffer’s cybernetic creature, CYSP 1, on a prior occasion as it had already performed at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris as early as in May 1956. Or, perhaps Schöffer caught the LI’s attention when his robot roamed the streets of Paris in a proto-Happening that same year.⁸ Be that as it may: in contrast to Schöffer’s dancing robot and many of the other artworks exhibited in Marseille – a substantial part of which happily indulged in the 1950s art-and-tech conundrum – an ordinary piece of paper that could be handed out, passed around, pasted up, or torn apart at will, appears entirely unspectacular. This is perhaps one reason why the tract’s historical significance has escaped scholarly attention. In this chapter, I argue that the Ordre de boycott was precisely aimed at these spectacular tendencies in the French art world – with Schöffer’s cybernetic art being a case in point. In aesthetically subtle ways, building on and repeating gestures of the historical avant-garde, the tract critiques how the French state instrumentalized art and culture to prop up its narrative of progress and modernization, and deflect attention away from French colonial repression.

Avant-Garde Tactics

As a publicly released art-political statement, the Ordre de boycott inscribes itself in a longer trajectory of the historical avant-garde’s countless public manifestations. The historical avant-garde – whether it called itself futurist, constructivist, Dadaist, surrealist, or something much more obscure – famously employed a range of fantastic, imaginative, unreasonable, deluded, megalomaniac, and masculinist strategies to make their presence felt. A combination of fascism and war put a temporary lid on these manifestations before they began resurfacing, among other places, in post-war Paris.

Historian of the avant-garde Marjorie Perloff has superbly analysed what she calls the ‘futurist moment’: a historically specific confluence of art, politics, and the brave new advertising world that gave rise to the avant-garde manifesto. While insisting on ‘the esoteric’ and ‘the antibourgeois’, the artistic avant-garde latched on to the existing political manifesto’s aggressively declarative mode to address a new ‘mass audience’ more effectively.⁹ Under the impact of the explosive visual culture of printed art and advertising at the beginning of the twentieth century, the artistic avant-garde added to the political manifesto’s quasi-literary tradition a particular ‘emphasis on the page’, that is to say, an emphasis on the visual formatting of the printed unit and the effects of the typographic arrangement on the ‘lyric fabric’ itself.¹⁰ Hardly a full-fledged manifesto itself, rather an undertheorized subgenre, the Ordre de boycott still exhibits several of the formal features of the classic avant-garde manifesto: the ‘violence and precision’ of the title, the unifying graphic emphasis, the attention to typographical arrangements, the juxtaposition of images and words, and so on.¹¹

The situationists thus partook in a ‘long tradition of manifestic dissent’ that, following in the wake of Dada and surrealism, they helped hone to ‘iconoclastic perfection’.¹² Certainly, the Ordre de boycott recalls the highly paradoxical legacy of the avant-garde manifesto, a ‘form that is at once political and aesthetic, rational and irrational, angry and restrained, and always poised between the violence of the armed insurrection and the stasis of the written word’.¹³ The historical avant-garde’s hyperbolic rhetorical strategies were a mimesis of violence: the surrealist André Breton, famously, never actually fired into the crowd.¹⁴ While certain LI members did not necessarily shy away from violence – for instance, the tract Deutschland über alles (1954) boasts of ‘fractured jaws and broken arms’ – the Ordre de boycott clearly assaults its opponents in an artistic register, at some remove from actual street-brawling.

Figure 1.2. Deutschland über alles, Lettrist International, 1954. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

If one consults the 1953 edition of the Robert French dictionary – at the time when the Ordre de boycott was conceived this would have been the most recently updated and authoritative French language source – the term ‘boycott’ indeed suggests an intervention in the more intangible moral realm:

Boycotting … to inflict or try to inflict a material or moral damage on an individual, a group, [or] a country, by refusing to maintain relations with it or by engaging in aggressive acts against it, especially in the economic and social domain.¹⁵

Following Robert’s definition, the refusal staged by the Ordre de boycott seems to enact a paradoxical and passive-aggressive gesture which can both be interpreted as an act of withdrawal (to the minimal gesture of the written denunciation) and as a more aggressive strategy of attacking an opponent with the aim of inflicting damage (material and/or moral). The very definition of the word ‘boycott’, then, returns us squarely to that fundamental ambiguity inherent in the rhetoric of exaggeration that defines the manifesto-form. Its historical meaning is suspended somewhere between the apparent inertia of the printed word and the impetus to leap off from the material support of the page and bring about a violent confrontation. The desire to move from passive contemplation to action and thereby transgress the fixity of the material support is, moreover, literally boxed in a Suprematist-like rectangle: a metonym for the historical avant-garde’s ambition to transcend the constrictions of ‘representation’ if there ever was one.

Comparing the Ordre de boycott to Deutschland über alles, which, in many respects (size, shape, typography), prefigures the Ordre de boycott, one immediately notices that, in the exact same spot where Malevich’s Red Square once figured there is now instead that odd Dada-like vignette of a peasant woman milking a cow. Is this an intended pun, a translation of the title of Malevich’s Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (more commonly known as Red Square) into a nonsensical Dada-style vignette? This would indicate a shift from Russian Suprematism to Dada, then. But does this reconfiguration of Malevich’s monochrome square into a neo-Dadaist gesture alert us to something more profound about that moment in post-war French art and the ways in which the would-be situationists responded to it? In what follows, I address the ways in which the Ordre de boycott reactivates avant-garde tropes (the manifesto-form, the monochrome, neo-Dada imagery, and so on), and thus raises the vexed question of the value of historical repetition.

The Agit-Tract

As art-historian Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen points out, ‘the post-war period was characterized by a marked absence of manifestoes. Apparently, there was no longer room for the manifesto’s particular imperative modality and only few would continue to make use of its prescriptive force and its emphasis on historical agency.’¹⁶ Rasmussen reads this absence as a symptom of a more general closure of the revolutionary horizon and a restructuring of capitalist social relations that would tend to absorb gestures of protest and to turn the avant-garde into an institutional appendix to the state’s modernization efforts. Despite a period of a relative absence of manifestoes after the war, the genre did not entirely die out: manifestoes continued to appear, and increasingly so around the turn of the 1960s. But insofar as the manifesto was still pursued by artists in the first decade after the Second World War, as it was to some degree in the ranks of the LI (and elsewhere), it was, arguably, in a markedly changed and much less programmatic form.

One primary means by which the LI sought to avoid simple repetition was to privilege the fleeting, momentous, and ephemeral aspects of the single page tract over the more permanent, programmatic features of the established manifesto-form, a form that some scholars have since referred to as ‘manifesto-art’.¹⁷ The Ordre de boycott attempted a performative break with the manifesto-form and, by implication, with the ‘dialectic of modernism’ that returns every attempted act of transgression to an accepted discourse of art’s self-renewal.¹⁸ A crucial difference between the Ordre de boycott and the traditional manifesto is its fundamentally negative character, instructing readers not to attend an event rather than spelling out a position, a set of principles, or a plan of action. At a moment when the ‘undermining of the manifesto by the avant-garde itself ‘ was already a historically accomplished fact (most notably in Dada’s self-parodic manifestoes), other, more adequate interventionist strategies were apparently needed.¹⁹

The Ordre de boycott seems to fit the bill of what specialist in political imagery Zvonimir Novak calls the agit-tract: an entity that is distinct from yet overlaps with the manifesto-form.²⁰ As an ‘ephemeral document apt to political and military propaganda able to be passed from hand to hand without further ceremonial ado’, the single-page or recto–verso tract reaches back much further (if not in name then in essence) than the ‘futurist moment’ in art, namely to the thousands of ‘Mazarinian’ leaflets distributed in mid-seventeenth-century Paris (so called because they incited people to rebel against the tyrant cardinal Mazarin).²¹ A survey of the history of the LI by way of its ephemeral output suggests that its members clearly favoured the short, punctual, polemical, interventionist, and indeed ‘situationist’ (in the literal sense of the word) character of the tract over the manifesto, which had become in the hands of surrealism a more elaborate, quasi-literary, and discursive form.

Although it is impossible to draw any neat distinction between the manifesto-form and the tract, the LI’s Ordre de boycott points to a revision of the existing artistic and political means of expressing dissent at a point when the manifesto had already become an established and accepted genre of communication. The LI privileged the tract as an alternative, impermanent, and transient modality of the manifesto-form, or as a new modality to be used in lieu of that form. LI’s drift towards the ephemeral was a response to the emptying out of the political dimension of the manifesto-form and its recuperation by inoffensive artistic ‘styles’ or ‘movements’. In this way, the LI practised a performative critique of what Janet Lyon calls the ‘singularly overdetermined form’ of the manifesto.²² Their ambition seems to have been to bring the formal tensions of the manifesto-form to the point at which they, if we recall Tristan Tzara’s canonical 1918 Dada Manifesto, would ‘explode’ in the single-page setup of the tract: a compact agitational unit suited to historical circumstances.²³ The LI’s ephemeral turn registers concretely in one of the group’s few actual manifestoes, the second issue of the short-lived leaflet internationale lettriste, which appeared in February 1953.

Figure 1.3. ‘Manifesto’, Lettrist International, 1953. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

In sharp contrast to the Ordre de boycott and later tracts, this ‘manifesto’ (if that is even the appropriate term) is carelessly thrown together. A single recto–verso sheet of typewritten text ridden with orthographical errors, coupled with an apparent disregard for all stylistic and aesthetic conventions, gives the impression that the intention of this ‘manifesto’ is to parody the form of the manifesto itself. As the authors state, it is only out of a ‘lack of anything better to do’ that they even bother to write manifestoes. The ‘manifesto’ serves no other purpose, its authors declare, than ‘to pass time’. Having recently broken away from lettrism and the cult around the eccentric personage Jean-Isidore Isou, the LI emphatically distanced themselves from any conception of the avant-garde as a group of people who produce tangible works, make important artistic and political statements, and write manifestoes. One of the reasons the authors of this ‘manifesto’ oppose Isou is on the grounds that he ‘still believed in the utility of leaving behind traces’ at a point when ‘everything that maintains something contributes to the work of the police’.²⁴ The authors insist that revolutionary thought is to be found in everyday life’s fleeting moments, ‘chance encounters’ that cannot be transformed into ‘literature’. The restrained space that opens up beyond literature (‘au-déla de la litterature’) is where the politics of everyday life takes place. The critique of the ossified bourgeois forms of literature became a key situationist principle which Michèle Bernstein carried to its most extreme consequence in her two ‘anti-novels’ Tous les Cheveaux du roi (1960) and La Nuit (1961).²⁵

In Debord’s correspondence, the brief declaration of this manifesto is seen as ‘marking a stage, however transitory, in our intellectual agitation’.²⁶ Over time, the manifesto’s unpresumptuous aesthetics would yield to an ever more luxurious aesthetic (in material terms at least), one in closer proximity to the world of ‘abundance’ it ostensibly critiques. The transition from an ascetic approach to an aesthetic of abundance is evident in the transition from the LI to the SI: compare, for instance, the modest internationale lettriste with the precious metallic covers of internationale situationniste.

The transitory gestures from one aesthetic to another are so many traces of the ‘transcendental’ conditions of art making and theorizing: that is to say, the political-economic situation which circumscribes aesthetic production. In political and economic terms, the period of French history between 1953 and 1958 is exceptional. In this five-year span, the economic stimuli of the Marshall Plan completely restructured social and political life in France. Working-class discontent was funnelled into a social-democratic class compromise, spurring a ‘crisis of Marxism’ and a feeling of disarray among political dissidents on the French left.²⁷ Perhaps there is a deeper connection between the subtle shifts in avant-garde aesthetics and the broader crisis in the political imaginary of the French left?

At this precise historical conjuncture, the question of what constituted an avant-garde – a question answered officially by the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille, and unofficially in the LI’s campaign to discredit it – was inseparable from the broader social questions arising from the advent of cybernetics and the onslaught of automation. With the progress of science and technology, many believed, the abolition of work was on the horizon. Apparently, this abolition would be carried out by capital itself. Would the communist revolution still need its avant-garde gravediggers?

Periodizing the 1950s: the End of Programmatism and the Advent of Cybernetics

Confronted with a process of relentless modernization which appeared to sweep any form of revolutionary ‘romanticism’ off the board, the French avant-garde wavered in its commitment to and affirmation of the communist programme. One key philosophical symptom of mid-1950s French radical thought was that the notion of dialectics shifted from being a revolutionary watchword into what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called a philosophy of ‘ambiguity’.²⁸ The French ‘communization’ theorist Roland Simon (of Th éorie Communiste) maps the crisis in Marxist thought onto the eclipse of the era of ‘programmatism’.²⁹ Programmatism can be defined as:

a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organization which become the programme to be realized. This revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalized self-management, or a ‘society of associated producers’. Programmatism is not simply a theory – it is above all the practice of the proletariat, in which the rising strength of the class (in unions and parliaments, organizationally, in terms of the relations of social forces or of a certain level of consciousness regarding ‘the lessons of history’) is positively conceived of as a stepping stone toward revolution and communism.³⁰

The key word here is ‘positively’. Programmatism is the historical affirmation of the workers’ class identity, and all the institutions built around it to support and represent its proper aims. The progressive decentring of the worker as an incarnation of the revolutionary Subject, the proletariat, is conspicuously coterminous with the history of the avant-garde. The disintegration of the figure of the worker, and of Homo faber more generally, can be traced through the ‘critique of work’ that, as intellectual historian Alastair Hemmens shows, runs like an undercurrent through modern French thought.³¹ From Charles Fourier onwards, the critique of work provided a stimulus for French radical thought and parts of the international avant-garde, notably (German) Dada and (French) surrealism, the two main pillars upon which the Situationist International stands.³²

One could plausibly argue that the gulf between the affirmative agenda of the workers’ movement and the Dadaist penchant for negation rests on their differing conceptions of work. The idea of the ‘liberation of work’ that animated the socialist workers’ movement sits uneasily with the avant-garde’s root-and-branch opposition to labour, which was most clearly expressed, as Hemmens points out, in the passage from Dada to surrealism.³³ In this regard, Breton’s statement in 1920 that ‘Dada devotes itself to nothing, neither to love nor to work. It is unacceptable for a man to leave a trace of his passage upon the earth’ is emblematic.³⁴

In light of the critique of work, the history of the avant-garde looks something like the obverse of the historical demise of the workers’ movement. The rise and fall of the avant-garde manifesto, then, would be a formal symptom of the workers’ movement’s inability to address the relation between revolutionary means and ends. Worth nothing is that the manifesto as a genre, an artistic recoding of revolutionary desire if there ever was one, reached its formal apogee with the simultaneous apex of the historical avant-garde and the socialist workers’ movement in the 1920s and 1930s. But how do the post-war avant-gardes fit into this parallel – if by no means congruent – trajectory between political and artistic movements?

In many ways, the advent of cybernetics, electronic computing, and automation upended the traditional Marxist assumption that revolution would ensue from the maturing of productive forces. If, for the political avant-garde of the 1920s, communism was, as Lenin memorably said, ‘Soviet power plus electrification’, then after the end of the Second World War the communist hypothesis became ‘cybernetic’, and many optimistically held that electronics and modern computing would assist the proletariat in its rush towards the fabled classless society.³⁵ Although the cybernetic hypothesis was interpreted differently by the various shades of Marxists and revolutionaries, from Stalinists to dissident left communists and beyond, many on the French left shared a fundamental belief that society, with the advent of cybernetics, was technically ripe for revolutionary change.

Starting around the mid-1950s, France, like many other European nations under the Marshall Plan, experienced soaring growth rates, rising real wages, and a political-economic reconfiguration of the capital–labour relation that, if only momentarily, relaxed class antagonism and led many people to believe in a general economic upswing, a rising tide that would lift all boats. But at the same time, the industrial workers who kept the wheels of the economy spinning in increasingly automatized factories saw the basis of their class coherence and power slowly erode. As changes in the organic composition of capital propelled both real and imagined changes in the composition of the workforce, a new managerial stratum emerged: a broad middle class with values and worldviews that could not be reduced to traditional class interests. The age that saw the emergence of the jeunes cadres – those ‘healthy and brave representatives of a new streamlined middle class, the spearhead of French modernization’, as Kristin Ross has put it – also spelled out a crisis of working-class identity.³⁶ As the Endnotes collective writes:

The 1950s were, according to some, the Golden Age of socialist planning; consumer goods finally became more widely available. Yet at the same time, any remaining appeal to a working-class identity or class solidarity was reduced to a kitsch aesthetic, the source of many bitter jokes.³⁷

Traditionally, Marxism had remained committed to the figure of the industrial worker, which, as the feminist Marxist Roswitha Scholz argues, was essentially ‘white, male and western’.³⁸ Though their politics do not exactly qualify as feminist, the LI vehemently critiqued dominant representations of the working-class identity and the aesthetics that came with it. In a 1955 text entitled ‘Pourquoi le lettrisme’ (‘Why Lettrism’), the LI noted that ‘the glaring weakness of the working-class aesthetic’ had degenerated into an officially consecrated ‘Socialist Realism’. This Stalinist degradation, they argued, originated in a ‘serious setback of revolutionary politics’ that had occurred thirty years earlier.³⁹ The setback referred to here is the failure of the German revolution, the rise to power of Stalin in the USSR, and the advent of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, which crushed the revolutionary movement in Europe and left communism to be defined by the Soviet Bloc. When the question of communism emerged again in France after the Second World War, it was under radically different historical circumstances.

Beginning with the expulsion of the PCF (French Communist Party) from the Ramadier government in May 1947 – something the US honoured by awarding France hundreds of millions of dollars in Marshall Plan aid over the next few years – French Communism began its slow decline.⁴⁰ Despite its parliamentary defeat in 1947, however, the PCF retained much of its strong electoral base (counting 1 million members at the time), was staunchly supported by prominent intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, and continued to dominate French political culture in the first decade after the end of the war.⁴¹ But with the death of Stalin in 1953 and the revelation of the extent of the crimes against humanity committed under his leadership, many on the French left began reconsidering their political allegiances. However, it was not until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956 – an event linked to the emergence of the New Left generation of Marxist critics – that the full effects of de-Stalinization took shape. As Henri Lefebvre recalled many years later, in an interview with Kristin Ross, the period around 1956 was a ‘moment of great fermentation’ among the French intelligentsia in which many (including Lefebvre himself) would lose all faith in and break with the Communist Party:

It’s important to understand the periodization of the times. Politically, 1956 was an important year because of the end of Stalinism. There was Khrushchev’s famous report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in the USSR, where he demolished the figure of Stalin – a report that was much discussed, argued about … We have to keep the periodization in mind. During the post-war years, the figure of Stalin was dominant. And the Communist movement was the revolutionary movement. Then, after ’56 or ’57, revolutionary movements moved outside the organized parties.⁴²

Lefebvre and other intellectuals of his generation responded to the Communist Party’s ‘deep incapacity’ towards the question of Stalinism, its lack of support for Algerian independence, and, particularly in 1958, its ineffectiveness in preventing de Gaulle’s seizure of power, by bidding farewell to the established Party.⁴³ Although the LI’s Ordre de boycott was published prior to the invasion of Hungary, it appeared at a moment when the end of Stalinism could be seen on the horizon. The invasion of Hungary merely affirmed the LI’s conviction, which the group voiced on several occasions over the course of the 1950s, that the Soviet Union was nothing but a totalitarian form of state capitalism.

From such a perspective, the gradual loss of faith in the established declarative modus of the manifesto, of which the LI is the clearest example since Dada, indexes a simultaneous loss of faith in the logic of political and artistic representation. The crisis of Marxism also implied a break in the shared trajectory of artistic and political avant-gardes and signals the end of a collective affirmation of mass politics, historical agency, the revolutionary subject, the Communist Party, and history itself. The whole Marxist teleology of historical stages that would lead towards an emancipated society was thrown into question along with notions of the avant-garde as bearers of the true revolutionary consciousness. In short, the crisis of Marxism affected the entire traditional Marxist framework of thought, which had ossified into the doctrines of Marxism–Leninism, the official worldview of ‘actually existing Socialism’.

The French Ultra-Left

The situationists’ ‘iconoclasm’, as their ambiguity towards matters of representation, mediation, and images is often called, needs to be placed in this specific historical and political context. To appreciate the political aesthetic at work in the Ordre de boycott and the other tracts under consideration in this chapter, it is crucial to recall that the problem of Stalinism was front and centre at the time. Former situationists T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith (who were part of the Situationist International in 1966–67), explain that:

For the Situationists, the overwhelming reality was Stalinism: the damage and horror it had given rise to, and its capacity to reproduce itself, in ever newer and technically more plausible forms, within a Left that had never faced its own complicity or infection. (We shall never begin to understand Debord’s hostility to the concept ‘representation’, for instance, unless we realize that for him the word always carried a Leninist aftertaste. The spectacle is repugnant because it threatens to generalize, as it were, the Party’s claim to be the representative of the working class.⁴⁴

The situationist critique of representation is therefore inexplicable without reference to this broader overturning of the established revolutionary canon and the dethroning of its towering figures: Stalin, Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and others. But more than just opposing the official Communist cult of personality, with its logic of concentrating the forces of the spectacle into one charismatic leader, it was the entire ideological edifice of Marxism–Leninism that the SI and other groups of dissident Marxists called into question.

While some prefer to gather everything that was even remotely Marxist after 1956 under the broad heading of the New Left, I prefer the more restricted term gauchisme, or alternatively ultra-gauchisme, which signals more clearly the opposition to traditional centralized Marxist–Leninist working-class politics.⁴⁵ The situationists developed out of a historical nexus in which the traditional working class and its mediations (the Party, unions, the officially sanctioned ideology of Marxism–Leninism and its philosophical correlate dialectical materialism) were facing a severe crisis of legitimacy. Many on the French left saw themselves inclined, as the French writer Richard Gombin chronicled in his now classic book Les Origines du gauchisme, towards more ephemeral, anti-authoritarian, autonomous, spontaneous, and decentralized forms of revolutionary organization, theory, and practice, as opposed to what was now understood as the rigid ideological system of Marxism–Leninism.⁴⁶

Compared to Marxist intellectuals in other parts of Europe – Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Karl August Wittfogel in the 1910s and 1920s, or Frankfurt School figures such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Friedrich Pollock, alongside fellow-travellers Walter Benjamin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel in the 1930s – French intellectuals had not engaged with the rich body of Marxist thought to the same extent.⁴⁷ With the exception of a brief revitalization of Marxist thought in the late 1920s – in the small Marxist group Philosophies (which counted among its members Henri Lefebvre and George Friedmann) for instance, as well as in surrealism to a certain degree – most French Marxists drifted towards the Party and, under the pressure of incipient fascism, more or less willingly renounced critical and philosophical dissidence to position themselves more wholeheartedly ‘in the service of the revolution’.⁴⁸

Around 1956, after three decades of what the French intellectual Edgar Morin referred to as ‘Stalinist glaciation’, French Marxist intellectuals began a project of collective catharsis, an integral philosophical revision of the entire body of Marxist thought that aimed at the ‘ruthless critique of the Marxist-Leninist system which has monopolized the revolutionary project since 1917’.⁴⁹ In post-war France, prior to this broad enterprise of Marxist revisionism, only Trotskyist satellite groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie or Noir et Rouge had been engaged in a substantial critique of Soviet Communism.⁵⁰ The most important discussions outside such ultra-gauche venues now took place in the journal Arguments, founded at the turn of the year 1956–57. Crucially, this was where the SI encountered the work of Lukács and other important Marxist thinkers in French translation: Arguments reached a much broader audience and set the terms for that period’s revision of Marxism. Although the SI would heap abuse on Arguments, this more mainstream venue for a critical revision of Marxism is, arguably, the intellectual backdrop against which the radical position of the SI is historically comprehensible.

For the present purposes, a précis of the intellectual coordinates for the ultra-gauche position will suffice. As noted above, Gombin emphasizes features common to the different factions of gauchisme or ultra-gauchisme: first and foremost, there was a marked antipathy towards the Leninist idea of the party-form of organization. What they opposed in this was the idea of the Party as a centralized quasi-militaristic organization that keeps the masses in line by means of streamlined propaganda and ideology (the kitsch working-class aesthetic being the outcome of this). Second, they were at odds with the teleological philosophy of history in Marxism–Leninism, specifically with the theory of historical ‘stages’ according to which the forces of production only had to ‘mature’ to a sufficient degree to bring about a quasi-automatic passage to an emancipated communist society (as allegedly prophesied by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto).

Contrary to such an evolutionary stage-theory, all gauchistes agree ‘on the principle of autonomy, which consequently excludes all authoritarian, centralist, interventionist, planned and ideological models’.⁵¹ Third, as following from this anti-authoritarianism, the gauchistes were against the bureaucratic state and the ideology of planning. From 1956 onwards, then, the search for new forms of revolutionary organization, theory, and practice more adequate to historical circumstances acquired an experimental character in which the past was mined for perspectives beyond those codified in the doctrines of Marxism–Leninism. Gombin describes in the following way what was at stake at this point, when the economic, technical, and political exigencies of the post-war moment (combined with a growing awareness of a degenerate Stalinism) forced a rethinking of Marxism and the traditional forms of working-class organization that correspond to it:

In a world of relative abundance, of unprecedented technological, scientific, and economic change, of completely new sociological groupings, the labour movement suddenly and spontaneously rediscovered its most natural, and also most ancient, preoccupations, which the years of ‘quantitative’ struggle had helped to disguise. The workers, tentatively and uncertainly at first, are beginning to express their will to determine the objectives of this struggle themselves, from the grass roots, and above all to fashion in the society of the future an authentic socialism founded on autonomy of decision, that is to say a decentralized and self-governing socialism.⁵²

Decentralization (self-organization vs the party-form), autonomy (spontaneous decision-making power in the hands of workers themselves, not in the hands of a managerial strata or state officials), and, most importantly, self-government: these are the main coordinates that structured the moment of intellectual fomentation among dissident Marxists and in the radical sections of the post-war French avant-gardes. At a later point, the SI would rediscover and start to promote a left-communist heritage of horizontal and spontaneous organization: that of the ‘workers councils’. The rediscovery of this particular form of political organization, which was developed practically and theoretically among left communists in the 1920s, is clearly resonant with the organizational and theoretical assumptions of cybernetics (which, in turn, would feed into new public management theories over the course of the so-called neoliberal era). The ultra-gauche ethos thus offers a striking example of the ideological elasticity of the cybernetic hypothesis and of how both ends of the political spectrum would celebrate virtues of decentralization and self-organization, if for opposite reasons. The histoire marseillaise retrospectively maps on to the cybernetically inflicted crisis of the Marxist imaginary and testifies to the search for new political and aesthetic repertoires on the threshold of the age of automation. For the situationists, the search included a consideration of earlier avant-garde tactics that could mediate the struggle.

Reinventing the Avant-Garde: the Political Aesthetics of Post-Surrealism

As the era of programmatism drew to a close, artists actively engaged in a process of rediscovery and reinvention of the historical avant-garde to try to reach beyond the stalemate of socialist realist aesthetics. While the growing number of groupuscules on the de-Stalinizing French left and ultra-left were steadily employing the same visual tropes with a noticeable level of detail (‘red or black flags snapping in the wind, raised fists, the workers hammer and the peasants sickle’), Debord and his associates apparently started over from scratch when they began publishing their writings during the 1950s: ‘no logos, no flags, no visual allegories’.⁵³ The ‘austerity of the page’ and the consideration of the written word as something ‘close to sacred’, as Novak puts it, reflected the purity of their theory while also betraying the inspiration of the surrealists’ massive output of tracts and collective declarations (which amounted to more than 180 tracts plus an unknown number of minor printed works, leaflets, handouts, and invitation cards between 1924 and 1966).⁵⁴

Considered from a formal point of view, Ordre de boycott fits well into the graphic style favoured by the LI at this point, a style which was deliberately distinct from the usual political imagery of the French left.⁵⁵ But as an art-historical document, the formal economy of the Ordre de boycott points both backwards to earlier post-surrealist tracts by the LI as well as forwards to the continued refinement of the aesthetics of détournement that would come to characterize the political aesthetics of the situationist movement at large.

A brief overview of the LI’s many visually gratifying and politically radical printed works demonstrates an aesthetic development in books, bulletins, tracts, manifestoes, posters, and declarations of various sorts: from the most modest typewritten leaflets such as Finis les pieds plats (1952), to the more carefully designed bilingual tract Si Vous vous croyez du génie / If you believe you have genius (1955), and further on to more exuberant works such as Aux Producteurs de l’art moderne (1958) or the iconic graphic composition of a poster such as Fin de l’université (1968).

Considering the development of the art-political tract in the history of the situationist movement, the Ordre de boycott seems situated halfway between the ascetic and the luxurious. In contrast to the less than spectacular colours of the Ordre de boycott, the tract If You Believe You Have Genius is printed on bright orange paperboard. The black against orange creates a stark juxtaposition reminiscent of advertising, an ironic mimicry of avant-gardism for sale: ‘If you believe you have GENIUS or if you think you have only A BRILLIANT INTELLIGENCE write the letterist internationale.’ The use of capitalization, bold lettering, and underlining to emphasize select buzzwords such as ‘genius’ and ‘brilliant intelligence’ mocks the idea that one can adhere to this or that avant-gardist tendency just as one would go shopping for this or that commodity in Le Bon Marché – or, more to the point, as one would go shopping for this or that avant-garde identity in the existentialist bazaar of life on the Left Bank in the mid-1950s. In bringing the idea of aesthetic autonomy (centring on terms such as ‘genius’ and ‘exceptionality’) into contact with the profane realm of everyday life visually saturated by commercially coded desires, the tract defames the last vestiges of the bourgeois doctrine l’art pour l’art.

Figure 1.4. Varied printed matter from the situationist movement, 1952–68. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

In the broader historical context of what Ross has described as a ‘cargo-cult-like, sudden descent of large appliances into war-torn French households and streets in the wake of the Marshall Plan’, language was unavoidably tinged by the fetishistic commercial discourse that had begun to mediate social relations.⁵⁶ In that light, the tract’s central adjective ‘brillante’ (brilliant), so characteristic of the marketing strategies of that time, bespeaks a double-coding of language, in which an appeal to the exceptional (the transcendent, metaphysical, or otherworldly) encounters the quotidian (the trivial and the mundane) in discrete objects of mass desire. Two such objects in particular, the car and the refrigerator would, by virtue of both their omnipresence and their shiny surface appearances, come to embody post-war object fetishism in France.

The tensions of that moment, in which the mesmerizing language of modernization was vocalized against a muted backdrop of anticolonial struggles, are eloquently captured by Ross’s analysis of how the smooth surface of the refrigerator ‘with its pressed steel casing and seamless finish’ became supercharged with racialized connotations as it seemingly conveyed an ‘image of absolute cleanliness and newfound hygiene: its brilliant white finish was the physical embodiment of health and purity’.⁵⁷ Admittedly, one would have to stretch the imagination rather far to see in the tract If You Believe You Have Genius any possible critique of the gendered problematic of French modernization discourse, in which the ‘ideal’ organization of the household invariably reflected a sexist division of labour with the housewife assigned to the kitchen assembly line (while, in reality, also simultaneously slaving away in factories like most men). The tract more decisively, if rather subtly, alludes to the twin problematic of decolonization and modernization, a problematic to which the LI returns in the Ordre de boycott.

In 1956, the use of the term ‘boycott’ resonated with the nascent American civil rights movement’s then ongoing campaign to boycott the Montgomery transit system, a campaign famously set off by the iconic world-press images of a black woman, Rosa Parks, seated in the whites-only section of a bus. One formal tension of the Ordre de boycott, then, is the ‘black-on-white’ introduction of a distinctly Anglo-American term into a French-language context. Adopting a term that was charged with connotations from the American struggles to end racial segregation might appear to be a strange equivocation in the given context. But, with the imperative to boycott the festival in Marseille, the LI juxtaposed French culture and art with the politics of decolonization that in 1956 – two years into the Algerian War of Independence – had started to become a defining horizon for artists and intellectuals alike.

As art historian Hannah Feldman forcefully reminds us, decolonization and the Algerian question were central to the intellectual debates of the French left at this time.⁵⁸ The Ordre de boycott fits into a more general pattern of a heightened attention to so-called Third World problems, in which the questions of decolonization and the Algerian War in particular ‘would force many intellectuals’, as Feldman argues, ‘to question their earlier assumptions regarding their commitment to the disengaged formulation of alterity that was current at the end of the Second World War’.⁵⁹ The Ordre de boycott and the aesthetic equivocation it produced in relation to the question of art’s colonial Other was part of that interrogation of assumptions. When seen against the backdrop of official French reconstruction culture, in which colonial liberation struggles were strategically repressed and officially muted, the Ordre de boycott appears as a gesture meant to ‘provincialize’ the French narrative of progress (for which the term ‘avant-garde’ was to a certain extent synonymous).⁶⁰

From this point of view, the Ordre de boycott appears as an appeal to protest the hypocrisy of a Festival that claims to celebrate the avant-garde while completely ignoring the politics of anti-colonialism that had been a stable trope of the interwar avant-gardes in France. One particular episode in the history of surrealism, from the time when the Parisian surrealists were engaged in a complicated political endgame with the PCF, stands out as a likely reference point for the Ordre de boycott.⁶¹ In response to the Exposition Coloniale Internationale held in the outskirts of Paris in 1931 – a highly spectacular six-month celebration of the cultural and economic ‘diversity’ of the colonies – the surrealists issued the tract Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale. It denounced the concept of la grande France as an emblem of the ‘the complicity of the entire bourgeoisie’ in French colonial repression abroad. As historian of surrealism Hans T. Siepe has argued, Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale belongs to a longer trajectory of surrealist anticolonial politics reaching back to the group’s opposition to the Morocco war in 1925.⁶² And, in January 1956, only a few months before the LI issued their Ordre de boycott, the surrealists issued another tract, Cote d’alerte, which called for a ‘systemic boycotting’ of the Poujadist support for the war in Algeria.⁶³ As this was the first time (as far as I am able to tell) that the term ‘boycott’ appears in a French avant-garde context, the Ordre de boycott clearly echoes not only the American civil rights campaign but also, more specifically, French surrealist anticolonialism.

Milking the Cow, or, Dada Recycled

The LI’s ephemeral production was, visually as well as politically, something like a mix of ultra-gauche and post-surrealist aesthetics. But in comparison to these avant-garde currents in politics and art, the aesthetic profile favoured by the LI appears much less rigid and more openly contradictory, as later developments in the SI’s practice of integrating pop-cultural imagery demonstrate.⁶⁴ In a tract such as Construisez Vous-Mêmes une petite situation sans avenir from May 1955 (which was also, like many of the other printed works discussed in this chapter, posted on the walls of Paris like an affiche, blurring the neat distinctions between fixed categories), the LI picked up the idea of introducing kitsch elements into the otherwise rigid, formal economy of the printed post-surrealist tract.

The banner-carrying knight on a horse immediately comes across as a parodic gesture (which it certainly was) but seems also to contain a more earnest dimension. As art historian Tom McDonough notes, there was a more general rediscovery of the medieval age going on at this point in French intellectual life. Debord, for one, was nearly obsessed with medieval history, and he found in the world of chivalry a continuous source of inspiration for alternative ways of life.⁶⁵ The image of a cow being milked on the Ordre de boycott displays much the same ambiguity between parody and symbolic intent. As was the case with the idea of a boycott, the resonances of the image converge upon French art’s colonial ties, with the cow echoing the article ‘Le boeuf gras’, which the LI had published in the summer of 1955. In this article, the esteemed résistant and acclaimed author André Malraux (who was, however, also widely known to have pillaged temples in colonized Cambodia) was accorded ‘Le prix de la bêtise humaine’ for his contribution to aesthetics – an honour he was made to share with King Baudouin (official Belgian sovereign of the Congo before its liberation in 1960). Referring to Malraux as le bœuf gras was an explicit reference to the traditional folk parade known as the Fête du Bœuf Gras, an annually recurring festival dating back to the eighteenth century. The event, though briefly repressed during the French Revolution, became one of the main popular attractions of the Second Empire, with the head of the cortège tellingly referred to as the avant-garde du bœuf gras, an oft-caricatured figure.⁶⁶

Figure 1.5. Construisez Vous-Mêmes une petite situation sans avenir, tract by Lettrist International, 1955. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

Figure 1.6. L’avant-garde du bœuf gras, illustration, ca. 1855.

While the bœuf gras festival never regained its historical pomp from Second Empire Paris, it continued to appear – if at unregular intervals (the Communards of 1871, for instance, repressed it) – throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. After a period of absence, the festival briefly resurfaced in Paris at the start of the 1950s.⁶⁷ It is worth noting, as an aside, that the LI’s replacement of the bœuf (bull) with a vache (cow) on the Ordre de boycott recalls a counter-festival organized by Montmartre bohemians in 1896 and 1897 under the title Fête de la vache enragée.⁶⁸ As historian Venita Datta notes, this counter-event proceeded in the spirit of anarchist and socialist virtues and did not celebrate ‘the fatted calf, a symbol of plenty’ but was dedicated instead to the Montmartre district’s poor and starved.⁶⁹ The Montmartre bohemians also published a popular monthly journal La Vache Enragée, that indeed prefigures the motif seen on the Ordre de boycott, as well as the name les Enragées, which a handful of situationists chose to call themselves during the run-up to May ’68 (discussed in Chapter 4 of this book).

Figure 1.7. La Vache enragée, front page of the Montmartre journal, 1922.

One could speculate endlessly about the possible (art-) historical references for the vignette, which is evidently also a prime example of kitsch (and thus satirically evokes a preestranged Greenbergian past that existed before mechanization transformed everyday life and art). But one could just as plausibly argue that the image of a cow being milked was devoid of any reference and was cut out, like a Dada poem, from a randomly selected page in an illustrated weekly. And, judging from a batch of images available on today’s stock-image market, it is likely that the vignette in question has precisely such quotidian origins.

Figure 1.8 Present-day stock images.

However, quite a few things indicate that this image was not snatched randomly from the 1950s pre-digital stock-photo economy. In fact, a closer look suggests on the contrary that it was meticulously chosen for the specific purpose of recalling the legacy of Dada. One detail provides a hint: while it has been erased in its current-day stock-photo version, the vignette on the Ordre de boycott still visibly carries the name Deberny in the bottom-left corner:

Figure 1.9. Ordre de boycott, detail, 1956. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

Deberny was the name of the French type foundry that originally made this particular vignette. On closer inspection, the cow is part of the batch of vignettes from which the Dadaists culled some of their most iconic emblems, for instance those in Tristan Tzara’s 1922 pamphlet Le Coeur à barbe, which was a response to André Breton’s perceived co-optation of Dada.⁷⁰

The LI’s loosening of the surrealist ban on imagery in political matters, the agit-tract being exemplary in this regard, points towards a re-enactment of Dada’s tendency to introduce apparently meaningless quotidian imagery, graphic elements, and words into their compositions. It is also worth noting that the practice of integrating ready-made imagery coincides roughly with the formulation of the theory of détournement, which two of the Ordre de boycott’s signatories, Debord and Wolman, would formulate more explicitly in a text published in the Belgian post-surrealist revue Les Lèvres nues in May 1956.⁷¹ The Ordre de boycott might thus even be considered among the earliest visual experiments of détournement, which was initially conceived as a method for developing a ‘literary communism’.⁷² The intrusion of a kitsch element into the otherwise strict typographical arrangement of the Ordre de boycott marks a change in the LI’s aesthetic from a post-surrealist austerity towards an ironic provocativeness inspired significantly by Dada. Seen in the light of the theory of détournement that proposes to dissolve the work of art into the art of sampling and rearranging existing materials (artistic and otherwise), the Ordre de boycott poses the problem of the historical impasse of the avant-garde under new and changing historical circumstances of the production, distribution, and consumption of art.

Figure 1.10. Le Coeur à barbe, Dada pamphlet, 1922. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

It is evident that the image of the cow being milked was intended as an allegory of the impasse of the avant-garde, not only because it sits in the exact same place as Malevich’s Red Square had in the tract Deutschland über alles, nor because it re-enacts a Dadaesque protest against surrealism, but also because of the historical context to which it belongs. Immediately preceding the release of the Ordre de boycott, one finds the LI-authored tract Toutes ces dames au salon, which took aim at a major exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels entitled ‘L’Industrie du pétrole vue par des artistes’. As the title suggests, the exhibition was sponsored by one of the world’s leading enterprises in the oil-industry, the Royal Dutch-Shell corporation, which had declared that it was going to take on social responsibility and spend some of its accumulated riches by functioning as a patron of modern art.

To the LI, the Shell exhibition – comprising works from no less than sixty-one artists from six different nations, and which, before it arrived at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, had already been shown in Britain, France, and Switzerland – was an ill omen of a broader cultural offensive on behalf of the ruling class. As perceived by the LI, this exhibition was an attempt to appease traditionally unrulier subjects, the free artists, and lure them into indecent compromises with big capital:

This exhibition creates a precedent. A grave precedent. It is nothing less than an attempt to diminish the artist’s last sentiments of revolt and to generalize the habits of submissiveness that open the floodgates to all sorts of despicable acts and to all sorts of compromises.⁷³

The LI went so far as to liken the participating artists to prostitutes, who had not only brought paintings to fix on the walls but also ‘a red lantern’ to hang beside them. It is in the red light of this declaration, so to speak, that the Ordre de boycott should be interpreted. Much as with the Ordre de boycott, Toutes ces dames au salon was an appeal to the international avant-garde to resist and denounce the historical forces of ‘compromise’. What links the two art events in Brussels and Marseille is that each in its own way accentuates what the LI understood as a historical compromise between the bourgeoisie and the avant-garde. The image of the cow being milked, when related to the declaration on the Ordre de boycott, thus amounts to something like a proto-Bürgerian critique of the neo-avant-garde. It is a critique according to which the artistic innovations on offer in Marseille were merely ineffective formal repetitions, ‘re-chewed, regurgitated’ (remastiqué, redégeulé), as the Ordre de boycott’s reference to the digestive cycle of a cow suggests. The spectacle in Marseille was far from being avant-garde, the LI insists; rather, it was something historically digested several times over, choked up and presented anew.

If, on one level, the milking of the cow stands in for a critique of the neo-avant-garde’s empty formal repetitions, then, on another level, it also points to the idea that the post-war avant-garde was being exploited, as in the French exp ression être une vache à lait (to be a dairy cow). At the same time, a dairy cow, bred for production and separated from its offspring, needs to be milked. In the same manner, the participating artists in the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille were engaging in a mutually beneficial arrangement with their exploiters. The image of a cow being milked thus not only signals exploitation but, taking things one step further, also serves as an allegory of the fact that the soi-disant avant-garde in Marseille were engaging in a cultural version of the social-democratic class compromise.

Refusal or Participation?

To recapitulate: with the release of the Ordre de boycott, the LI performed anew a number of classical tropes handed down from the historical avant-garde. Taking up and reconstructing a decidedly political legacy, relying primarily on Dada and surrealism for inspiration, the nascent situationist movement was deliberately at odds with most other contemporaneous attempts to reconfigure the avant-garde in terms that were materially and ideologically compatible with the French reconstruction economy. The LI believed any attempt to resume the project of the historical avant-garde that did not reckon with the nature of the transformations in the bourgeois public sphere was doomed to complete art’s integration into it. More than a gesture of opposition and moral condemnation, however, the Ordre de boycott also reads as a reverse image of the historical conjuncture characterized by the advent of cybernetics, the onslaught of automation, and a crisis in the Marxist political imaginary. How does this analysis tie into existing narratives of post-war French art?

As nascent situationists, the LI neither self-identified as workers nor as artists but saw themselves as something closer to professional do-nothings or drifters. This refusal to create lasting works of art registers in the ephemeral material examined in this chapter and finds its most adequate form in the short-lived and unpretentious agit-tract. On another level of analysis, this drift towards the ephemeral, and the charging of marginal subversions like that of the Ordre de boycott with ‘agency’, arguably also resonates with a then-encroaching cybernetic ontology of art.

As art historian Pamela M. Lee and historian of science Fred Turner explain, cybernetics ‘set the terms for any number of fields in the post-war era: international diplomacy, management science, psychology, biology, computer science – and, far more than many remember today, art’.⁷⁴ Although the would-be situationists sometimes believed that they stood outside of history, it is clear that their own course of action aligns with the broader cybernetic counter-cultural moment of the 1960s, where, as Andrew Pickering describes, a ‘performative idiom’ increasingly replaced the representational idiom of modernism.⁷⁵

In the Ordre de boycott, we see this performative idiom at work in the expressed belief that even the most marginal acts in the periphery of the art world can affect the entire social system and disturb the equilibrium of the forces at play in it. It is also evident in how the Ordre prioritizes horizontality by means of distribution. We might say the tract levels out material hierarchies: a simple piece of paper, as the most modest and quotidian of art materials, is thrown into the circuit of symbolic circulation, instead of an artwork proper. As such, the paper tract functions as an unpretentious distribution of art that is positioned as essentially democratic (or more precisely, as a form of prefigurative communism) because it is reproducible by default and thus unable or unlikely to be converted into a commodity.

Despite its radically opposed political objectives, the Ordre de boycott shares an investment in the cybernetic hypothesis that underpinned the post-war moment in French art and gave rise to various flat or democratic art ontologies.⁷⁶ So, even as the LI refused to have anything to do with mainstream art tendencies enamoured of science and technology, the Ordre de boycott paradoxically indexes the cybernetic turn to a transient, decentralized, and immaterial art ontology. In a cybernetic ontology of art, works of art are made not for the contemplation of beauty but to be performatively suspended in circulation, constantly interacting or communicating with the surrounding milieu. The rebirth of the political agit-tract on the fringes of the French art world thus enacts a low-tech feedback economy that could be loosely interpreted as converging on a broader field of cybernetically inflicted proto-participatory art forms in post-war France.⁷⁷

Zooming out from the Ordre de boycott to the wider historical context of the French reconstruction economy and the reordering of culture, as I do in the next chapter, it becomes clear that the boycott campaign, or histoire marseillaise, belongs within the extended purview of what art historian Claire Bishop has theorized as participatory art: an approach to art ‘founded on a binary of active and passive spectatorship, linked in turn to the desirability of working outside the gallery system’.⁷⁸ The apparently thin dividing line between refusal and participation, which the situationists crossed several times in the course of their history, testifies to the underacknowledged proximity of the situationists and their neo-avant-garde counterparts.

One example of the fine line between refusal and participation, and a fitting anecdote with which to end this chapter, is the case of Gil J. Wolman, a co-signatory of the Ordre de boycott and key member of the LI. In one of those ironic twists of fate that characterize the history of the situationist movement, Wolman, who had been expelled from the LI on 13 January 1957 (merely six months before the foundation of the SI in July 1957), accepted an invitation to participate in the third Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Paris (1960). Such inconsistencies in character are, apparently, the stuff history is made of – or, in any case, the stuff that the history of the Situationist International (widely known for its sectarian practice of exclusions and purges) is made of.

The many purges in the situationist movement and the supposed transition from an early artistic to a late political phase reflects the strained relations within a post-war French avant-garde wracked by conflicting desires to be both with and against the forces of progress. The LI’s categorical refusal to participate in the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille was founded on a principled rejection of the French state’s cultural reconstruction project, which implied co-opting the term avant-garde to legitimize imperial cultural hegemony under the guise of progress. The LI’s attitude of refusal and withdrawal as detailed in this chapter should not be confused with a rejection of scientific modernity or technological progress as such. Rather, the opposition to mainstream cybernetic artists like Schöffer was rooted in a rejection of the ideological constrictions of post-war modernization in France and the imperialist state–led cultural amalgamation of science, technology, and art.

As I will show in more detail in the next chapter, the three successive instances of the Festival of Avant-Garde Art – Marseille 1956, Nantes 1957, and Paris 1960 – were a crucial nexus for testing and developing official French cultural politics at a time when the crumbling French Empire was in desperate need of legitimation. Indeed, as historian Michel Corvin has argued, it is not hard to see how the Festival of Avant-Garde Art inspired André Malraux – in 1959, as the first-ever French minister of cultural affairs – to supplant the festival with a contemporaneous brainchild of his own: the Paris Biennale.⁷⁹

Over the course of the 1950s, the cybernetic art-and-technology conundrum moved from the fringes of the art world to the centre of French cultural politics. This shift also forced a change in the budding revolutionary organization that became known, after 1957, as the Situationist International. The LI’s self-effacing acts of negation, boycott, and related strategies of refusal and withdrawal soon yielded to a kind of secret fascination for scientific progress undergirded by a belief that it might be possible – indeed imperative – for the avant-garde to assume a much more progressive stance towards late capitalist modernity. The situationist imagining of an alternative modernity took place under the broad rubric of unitary urbanism – a cybernetic utopia that is the topic of the next chapter.

2

Secret Fascination: Unitary Urbanism

Consider the two images in Figure 2.1: on the left, Monument voor de wederopbouw (Monument for Reconstruction), a now destroyed public sculpture by the Dutch artist Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys; and on the right, CYSP 0, Nicolas Schöffer’s precursor to CYSP 1 that was ostensibly the first cybernetic sculpture to appear in public in France. Both sculptures were conceived and realized around the same time, in 1955. The similarity between them is striking, not only in style or choice of artistic materials but also in artistic vision. We know this because the two works coincide with Schöffer and Constant’s co-founding, along with other likeminded spirits, of the group Néo-vision, which promoted a distinct ‘cybernetic vision’ of art as capable of transgressing the strictures of the self-enclosed modernist art object.¹ The two artists had been exchanging ideas since about 1953 and were part of a broader nexus of artists, architects, intellectuals, and critics who came together around the trend-setting Groupe Espace, founded in 1952 by André Bloc, editor of the prominent architectural review L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui and an affiliated art journal called L’Art d’aujourd’hui.² Situated at the crossroads between art, architecture, and urbanism, Schöffer and Constant, who had both previously been painters, came to see sculpture as more integrally part of the environment and thus a more suitable medium through which to explore the exigencies of post-war urbanization and modernization.³ In their choice of technical procedures and materials – sharp-angled stainless-steel frames, aluminium and/or Plexiglas plaques, but, most importantly, ‘space’ itself – these two neo-constructivist sculptures are poised towards the same cybernetic horizon of expectation.

Figure 2.1. Two sculptures, c.1955. Left: Monument voor de wederopbouw. © Constant Nieuwenhuys / VISDA. Photo by: Jan Versnel. Right: CYSP 0. © Fonds de dotation Nicolas Schöffer.

In this regard, notice the base on which Schöffer’s sculpture is placed. Contrary to what one might think, this is not a pedestal: it is a temporary, empty trunk into which Schöffer, in collaboration with industry, would soon pack an ‘electronic brain’ that would make the sculpture autonomous vis-à-vis its surrounding environment.⁴ CYSP 0’s empty trunk thus functions like an allegory for the work of art at the threshold of an age of automation. Despite the absence of automatic electronic devices in either of these sculptures, they were imbued with the cybernetic assumptions of that age. While this is more obvious in the case of Schöffer’s CYSP sculptures, which even include the word ‘cybernetics’ in the title, it was a less visible if equally central component in Constant’s work. As architect Mark Wigley pertinently reminds us:

The effect of electronics on space, like that of the nineteenth-century techniques of steel and glass construction that mobilized modern architecture, was understood by the next generation of architects to be a new kind of freedom, a new kind of lightness. Most of the idyllic images of experimental architecture were underpinned by electronics, even in the work of those who never addressed the subject. The absence of many traditional architectural elements in the images is made possible by the fantasized structural possibilities of the new electronic technology. The only hint of the computer presence is often the absence of familiar elements in the spaces. This has made it easy for subsequent generations of architects to respond to the forms rather than the electronics that was understood to make those forms possible.⁵

That the two sculptures by Constant and Schöffer were also structured by cybernetics and the advent of electronic computing and automation is evident from the historical context. But the visual similarity between Constant’s and Schöffer’s work betrays an ideological discrepancy that would eventually place the two friends in opposite camps. Schöffer, for his part, developed his sculptures alongside his master-project of a Cybernetic City, which, in one phallic form or another, would preoccupy the artist for decades.⁶ His cybernetic ambitions were, however, disproportionate with his means: at the heart of his plans stood an unrealized Cybernetic Tower for the heart of Paris’s financial district La Défense, which would have dwarfed even the Eiffel Tower.⁷ The cybernetic tower’s control facilities, Schöffer believed, was the only adequate response to capitalist urbanization. He wanted his cybernetic art to respond constructively to its time, and maintained consistently that the artist should take on a new role as public innovator, supported, if necessary, by capital, state, and industry.⁸ Constant, in turn, drifted off to test his ideas in an explicitly anti-reformist, revolutionary avant-garde setting.

Today, Constant is first and foremost known as a founding member of the Situationist International, and for conjuring up New Babylon, one of the most imaginative and enduring urban visions of the twentieth century.⁹ Whereas Schöffer readily accepted the term ‘sculpture’ for his work, Constant’s work for New Babylon consisted, rather, of ‘scale models, not sculptures’ as he stated in an interview with art critic Benjamin Buchloh in 1999.¹⁰ The many scale models, drawings, maquettes, objets trouvés, reliefs, maps, and other creations that Constant started producing around the mid-1950s as he joined ranks with the Situationist movement were not sculptures and even less architectural renderings; they were material approximations to what was referred to at the time as Urbanisme unitaire, or Unitary Urbanism. In Constant’s work, as well as in the Situationist discourse on Unitary Urbanism more broadly, there is hardly any mention of cybernetics nor visible trace of electronics of any kind. And yet, taking a cue from Wigley, it is rather obvious that the envisioned Situationist city, like most other urban imaginaries at the time, was premised precisely on the ‘fantasized structural possibilities of the new electronic technology’. In this chapter, I examine the SI’s architectural interlude and ask if there is a kind of secret fascination for the cybernetic hypothesis at work in the idea of Unitary Urbanism.

As I will show, Unitary Urbanism was a historically specific response to post-war modernity in France that was developed explicitly in opposition to Le Corbusier and the ideas, values, and lifestyles defined by his still more influential functionalist urbanism. Unitary Urbanism implied breaking away from the reformist modernist movement and imagining a radically different path for modernity. In keeping with their avant-garde ethos, the situationists reckoned that an alternative path would necessarily have to pass through existing forms rather than circumvent them. Hence, as stated in the first issue of the Situationist International journal, it would be a matter of using all means necessary and engaging with the enemy on its own terrain in a veritable race towards the finishing line:

It is necessary to understand that we are going to be taking part in a sprint [course de vitesse] between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the use of the new techniques of conditioning. The police already have a considerable head start.¹¹

A Unitary Revolution

A turning point in Constant’s artistic orientation was the First World Congress of Free Artists. The Congress took place on 2–8 September 1956, in the small mountain village of Alba, Italy. Here, Constant – on the initiative of Asger Jorn, whom he knew from their joint adventures in the avant-garde group COBRA (1948–51) – joined forces with sections of the revolutionary-minded artistic avant-garde in what is today considered ‘a founding moment in the Situationist International, prior to 1957’.¹² The Alba Congress boasted participation from eight different nations (Algeria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia) and represented three close-knit avant-garde groups: the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the Arte Nucleare Movement.¹³

The congress’s stated purpose was to discuss the doctrine of Unitary Urbanism and define its possible uses and perspectives. In the congress report published in November 1956 in the LI journal Potlatch, one finds the following transcript of Gil J. Wolman’s presentation (written in fact by Debord, who was involuntarily absent due to military conscription processes):

Whatever prestige the bourgeoisie may today be willing to grant to fragmentary or deliberately retrograde artistic endeavors, creation can now be nothing less than a synthesis aiming at the construction of entire atmospheres and styles of life … A Unitary Urbanism – the synthesis we call for, incorporating arts and technologies – must be created in accordance with new values of life, values which we now need to distinguish and disseminate.¹⁴

This proposal clearly echoed a statement from a fellow traveller of the situationist movement, Gilles Ivain, who in the poetic rapture ‘Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau’ (‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’) had proclaimed that ‘the latest state of technology allows unbroken contact between the individual and cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects’.¹⁵ In a critical response to Le Corbusier’s functionalist architecture froide, Ivain sang an unconditional hymn to progress and proposed to surpass the modernist grid by ‘inventing new, changeable decors’.¹⁶ Like the programme of Unitary Urbanism that it foreshadowed, Ivain’s vision rested on an argument for the use of any means necessary in the reconstruction of modern life. Architects should strive to surpass the traditional focus on isolated form and start designing instead a dynamic environment (a key cybernetic term at the time) that would allow for the integration of life itself into a new organic, urban metabolism. Equally optimistic was the ‘final resolution’ reached at the Alba Congress, which emphasized in the same vein the ‘necessity of an integral construction of the environment by a Unitary Urbanism that must utilize all the arts and modern techniques’.¹⁷

Much as Ivain’s urban vision explicitly opposed itself to the ruling functionalist paradigm in architecture and urban planning (epitomized by the work of Le Corbusier), the Alba delegation carefully distinguished its own unitary conception of the future city from competing visions of a ‘synthesis of the arts’.¹⁸ Hence, the delegation found it necessary to compose the following addendum to the final resolution:

In addition to this final resolution – signed by J. Calonne, Constant, G. Gallizio, A. Jorn, Kotik, Rada, Piero Simondo, E. Sottsass Jr., Elena Verrone, Wolman – the Congress unanimously declared itself against any relations with the participants in the Festival de la Cité Radieuse, thus following through with the boycott initiated the preceding month.¹⁹

Once again, we encounter the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille 1956. Although the festival has disappeared from the historical radar, this ‘addendum’ confirms that the event was of crucial importance in the SI’s formation. Tellingly, the Potlatch report from the Alba Congress rhetorically settled accounts for the histoire marseillaise (the boycott campaign chronicled in Chapter 1):

On the 4th of August, the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille, organized with the support of various official bodies promoting tourism and the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning, saw the light of day. It was obvious from the chosen décor – Le Corbusier’s building ‘Cité Radieuse’ – as well as from the list of expected participants, that this event would be the apotheosis of the confusionist and retrograde tendencies that have consistently dominated modern expression for the past decade. Public consecration of such a gathering came, as is usual, just as the hollowness of these tendencies was becoming obvious to a growing sector of intellectual opinion; at a time when an irresistible momentum is beginning to carry us towards an overwhelming liberation in all areas. Four days previous to the opening of the Festival of Avant-Garde Art, the Lettrist International launched a boycott appeal, on the grounds that the Marseille event would contribute strongly to a future division between two camps with no possibility of dialogue between them … The truth is that by August 1956, it was too late to impose a coherent vision of modern art based on a repetition of past experiments … It was therefore ill-advised to try to extend the undertaking – simply by setting the theatre festival, the poor cousin of the Avignon festival, in a ‘modern’ décor and by hastily tacking on painting and cinema – to the point of a spectacle of a unity that has never existed. Its only chance of existence lies with the unitary revolution [révolution unitaire] that is now getting underway.²⁰

Entitled ‘Échec des manifestations de Marseille’ (‘Failure of the Marseille Exhibition’), the article claims that the press and public response to the festival was one of ‘almost universal indifference’.²¹ Obviously this is a partisan view: the festival was, arguably, anything but a failure.²² Be that as it may, precisely because of its partisanship this balance sheet of the histoire marseillaise serves to magnify the core tensions of that moment in post-war French art. The contrast between a ‘spectacle of unity’ and a ‘unitary revolution’ brings us to the heart of the conflicting conceptions of the avant-garde, at a time when an ‘irresistible momentum’ seemed to be opening up entirely new horizons.

An Inventive Optimism

These reports and ‘resolutions’ are prime examples of how the nascent situationist movement, like their avant-garde precursors, narrated their own proper history through the use of the journal medium.²³ In the SI’s understanding of itself, the Alba Congress marks a shift from a negative rhetoric of refusal and withdrawal to a more positive, future-oriented, and constructive stance. The idea of a ‘unitary revolution’ suggests an even stronger attraction towards aligning the avant-garde programme with scientific and technological progress.

From Paris, Debord hailed these new ‘constructive’ developments as a sign that the international avant-garde was finally getting under way and had started moving from the margins of cultural life to occupying centre stage. Since the break from lettrism in 1952, Debord and the LI had attempted to carve out a niche for their own radical avant-garde programme, but had eventually reached a historical impasse of negativity and critique. In a 1953 text, Visages de l’avantgarde (Faces of the avant-garde), apparently intended to be read aloud and recorded in several voices on a reel-to-reel tape machine, the LI distanced themselves from the purely negative practice of ‘scandals that enamelled the intellectual life of Paris in the years from 1945–1947’.²⁴ In a most dismissive tone, the LI described lettrism as saturated by ‘the sarcasms of critique, these eternal grunts of pigs’.²⁵ With the founding of the Situationist International in 1957, Debord saw a new day dawning. As he would explain in a letter to his old friend Patrick Straram, who was setting up a situationist outpost in Quebec, the SI’s new positions were oriented towards constructive goals that required a break with the ‘pure, inactive extremism’ that had characterized the LI from around 1952 onwards (and which Wolman, according to Debord, never managed to leave behind; this is perhaps one reason why he was expelled shortly before the official foundation of the SI).²⁶ The SI’s central idea of ‘constructing situations’ – as their close collaborator and mentor at the time, Henri Lefebvre, pointed out – was inseparable from the overarching ambition to refashion the entire urban environment: ‘when the “Situationists” have constructs in mind, it is towns they are thinking of.’²⁷

Considered in the light of this evolution, Ivain’s visionary urban poetics seems to have fed into a growing feeling of dissatisfaction with the self-inflicted artistic impotence of an ‘extremist’ position outside the field of actual historical development. The formulation of the programme of Unitary Urbanism around 1956 and its official ratification in Alba thus marks the culmination of an artistic evolution towards more positive forms of action. Unitary Urbanism entailed a new form of immanent critique, one that encouraged tapping into the current of cultural evolution and technical-scientific progress instead of standing outside and merely grunting like a pig True to the literal meaning of the term avant-garde as troops on the frontline, Debord and his comrades rebranded themselves as the sole artistic force capable of embracing objective historical development and rejecting outmoded values. In an echo of a historical-philosophical postulate in Marxism known as the ‘fettering thesis’, they staged a fundamental contradiction between the possibilities brought about by scientific and technological acceleration and the regressive and unimaginative ways that artists were responding to this development. In the text ‘Pourquoi le lettrisme’ (‘Why Lettrism’), they stated:

Confronting this dismal and profitable mess, in which each repetition has its disciples, each regression its admirers, each remake [English in original] its fans, a single group shows universal opposition and complete contempt in the name of the historically necessary supersession of old values. A kind of inventive optimism has taken the place of refusal, affirming itself beyond refusal.²⁸

The article further speaks of the ‘healthy role’ that Dada had played historically, emphasizing that it was not about ‘re-doing Dadaism’ but about coming up with an adequate response to the objective realities of their time. This statement must be read against the backdrop of a generalized Dada-craze in post-war French art. As art historian Laurent Bertrand Dorléac has argued about the Parisian avant-garde scene at this point: ‘Nothing can be understood about the 1950s and 60s without taking note of the omnipresent reference to Dada, born out of the First World War, occulted for many years, resurrected here and there and renewed by circumstances.’²⁹ Navigating the moment of neo-Dadaist repetition and making their own ‘cut through time’ was one of the central problems with which the nascent situationist movement grappled.³⁰ In its earliest phase, the situationist movement was trying to come to terms with the task at hand for an avant-garde project that had been temporarily suspended by fascism, war, and political reaction, and which was now – with the advent of cybernetics, automation, and atomic power – facing entirely different historical circumstances. What would a reconstitution of the avant-garde project look like in the age of automation? As we will see, Constant’s unabashed affirmation of the ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ appeared (if only temporarily) as a solution to the historical impasse of the avant-garde.

The Post-war Art Bazaar

In a letter to his comrades in the LI, the Danish artist Asger Jorn – who had already taken part in several aspiring post-war avant-garde endeavours such as Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire, COBRA, Mouvement Internationale pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste, and Arte Nucleare – explicitly posed the problem of the reprisal of the avant-garde project in relation to the events in Marseille in 1956 (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2. Letter, Asger Jorn, 1956. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

Under the header ‘TROP TARD, VIEUX PÈRES’ (Too late, old fathers), Jorn charged the new generation of post-war artists with accommodating an inoffensive cultural hodgepodge of outdated ‘progressive’ artists, including Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier, instead of pursuing their own radical goals for art. Regarding Le Corbusier, Jorn states:

After having carefully avoided for all his life any form of collaboration with or mutual respect for fellow artists and friends (like Fernand Léger), he has now cordially invited all imaginable and unimaginable artists from the current artistic bazaar to participate in an expressive celebration on his rooftop in Marseille on August 4, 1956. THAT DOESN’T ADD UP, IT IS TOO LATE FOR YOU AND TOO EARLY FOR US. Voilà, the situation. We are partisans of spontaneity, but we will not spontaneously join the rooftop party.³¹

The problem, as Jorn saw it, was the avant-garde’s temporal suspension and the absence of its post-war reconstitution. With the collective and revolutionary avant-garde spirit having degenerated into a bizarre posthumous celebration of Modernism, the task of resuming the avant-garde project would have to take a different, if not opposite, orientation from that pursued by the artistic bazaar in Marseille.

However, apart from Schöffer, who were these artists that Jorn, Debord, and Constant would ‘unanimously’ denounce, as we saw, in the Alba Congress’s final resolution? One can get a sense of the artistic bazaar in Marseille from a quick glance at the list of participants, which was published in the same issue of Potlatch as the Alba resolution.³²

Some on the list, including Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, or César, are the usual suspects of what would become known as nouveau réalisme. Other names, such as Isou and Maurice Lemaître – champions of the avant-garde tendency lettrism – appear frequently in the SI literature but are much less familiar outside this frame of reference. Until recently, even nouveau réalisme, arguably the most discussed and publicized tendency at the time, had received but scant attention in the Anglophone context.³³ Though presently subject to a revival, Schöffer was for a long time relegated to the margins of mainstream art history and considered mainly as a forerunner of op-art, while his cybernetic art was discussed mostly on the fringes of art discourses around new media.³⁴ Yet others, such as the renowned ballet choreographer Maurice Béjart or the curator and theatre director Jacques Poliéri (Schöffer’s partners in the previously discussed ‘grand cybernetic spectacle’ in Marseille 1956), are much more rarely discussed. Martha Pan, whose teak sculpture Le Teck was the most critically appraised of all the works in the festival, has, following a common pattern of neglect of women artists, been almost entirely forgotten. Other names on the list, including the famous playwright Eugène Ionesco, have today attained a canonical status.

The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to reinstall these artists, critics, and curators to their rightful place in art history. Nor do I want to rehearse the details of discussions about the troubled prefix ‘neo’, which Bürger made so central to his disputed argument that the resurgence of avant-garde-like gestures after the Second World War were but empty, ineffectual repetitions devoid of any critical purchase on society.³⁵ Instead, by presenting the notion of Unitary Urbanism in its historical context as an alternative or competing vision to the post-war art bazaar’s ‘repetition of past experiments’, I take a step back and analyse the historical configuration that made Bürger’s critique possible (and plausible).

Monochrome Moments

One step back, then, but first, two steps forward: more precisely, to the 1980s. In response to what was perceived by critics as Bürger’s overly abstract theorization of the avant-garde, some canonical art-historical studies took up the problem of the ‘neo-avant-garde’ anew.³⁶ Unhappy with Bürger’s generalizations based on limited historical material, prominent art historians on the periphery of October, the influential American journal of art and criticism, focused on the ‘very minute material and procedural features’ of singular works of art from a time when artists – Klein taking up monochromy is a key example here – had begun to rediscover forgotten avant-garde ‘paradigms’.³⁷ Many of the most original essays of twentieth-century art history were produced during this period, at the height of self-declared postmodern art criticism, with most discussions turning on the vexed problem of difference and repetition raised by Bürger.

However, restricting the scope of the discussion around the neo-avant-garde to an examination of formal procedures such as ‘collage and assemblage, the readymade and the grid, monochrome painting and constructed sculpture’ (as critics of Bürger have done before) makes it difficult to retain the necessary distinctions between competing factions of artists who all claim to be the avant-garde.³⁸ Aside from more recent attempts to conceptualize the avant-garde as relevant to contemporary art practices, I think that Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde still offers the best available framework for historical analysis.³⁹ To recall the substance of Bürger’s famous argument in his own words:

The significance of the concept of the avant-garde … still seems to me today to lie in the fact that it does not draw up a list of individual characteristics that can be arbitrarily extended, but rather that, starting with Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism, it develops a concept whose individual elements are integrally related. At the center of this constellation is an interpenetration of two principles: the attack on the institution of art and the revolutionizing of life as a whole. Both principles go hand in hand, indeed they mutually condition each other.⁴⁰

According to this definition, the situationist movement would likely be the only one to be able to lay claim to the title of ‘avant-garde’, at least after August 1956. The rest of the artistic bazaar, to put it bluntly, belongs in the category of the ‘neo-avant-garde’. Be that as it may, Bürger’s approach to the avant-garde was more concerned with theory than with concrete (art)-historical examples. His original claim was left open to criticism as he failed to support his argument with sufficient attention to actual historical context So, just as one should indeed be careful, as Bürger warns, not to ‘play (theoretical) construction and history off against each other, as critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde have repeatedly done’, one should be equally careful not to translate one’s disappointed utopian aspirations unconsciously into theory, as Bürger retrospectively admitted to doing.⁴¹

In the following analysis, I try to balance theoretical generalizations, which are necessarily set at a higher level of abstraction, with detailed historical analysis. I am interested in examining in more detail the conditions under which a fundamental rift occurred in the post-war French avant-garde landscape. As we ought to recall, this rift was so deep that it divided artists into ‘two camps with no possibility of dialogue between them’.⁴² If one wants to avoid forcing artists as diametrically opposed as Schöffer and Debord, or Klein and Jorn, into the same master narrative, with no possibility of distinguishing between them in terms other than style, it seems necessary to follow Bürger’s attempt and provide a workable definition of what constituted the avant-garde project in the first place.

As pointed out in Chapter 1, the LI had already engaged with monochromy in 1954 in the tract Deutschland über alles, that is, around the same time that Klein began tinkering with his own monochrome propositions (a year prior to the first public exhibition of these quintessential neo-avant-garde works at the Club de Solitaires in Paris, October 1955). However, the monochrome was invested with radically different motives in each case. ‘Paradigm repetition’ notwithstanding, the recurrence of formal tropes in post-war European art needs to be seen in the context of the cultural conflicts that circumscribed Europe’s post-war reconstruction and belated modernization process. This is because, as American art historian Meyer Schapiro famously argued in his 1937 essay ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, one cannot explain artistic development or changes in ‘period style’ solely in terms of ‘a theory of immanent exhaustion and reaction’.⁴³

Even the pure ‘experience of objectlessness’ and the end to representation that the monochrome supposedly transmits in its crystalline abstract form, was, as Schapiro noted with regard to Malevich, underwritten by ‘the conflicts and insecurity of the artist and his conception of art as an absolutely private realm’.⁴⁴ Exteriority always weighs in, and even the end of representation is burdened by the constraints from which it struggles to be emancipated. Hence, there is no logical and inevitable conclusion to representation in art, no transcendent artistic principle or spirit that materially exhausts itself in (art) history. There are only different ways that representation is refracted through the lens of historically specific circumstances. To make sense of the recurrence of a given avant-garde trope, it is necessary to tend carefully to the actual circumstances in which it was rediscovered and reemployed.

In the previous chapter, I drew on insights from what we might call second or third-generation new social art history to argue that the recurrence of particular avant-garde tropes (like the monochrome) and the evanescence of yet others (such as the manifesto-form) was structurally tied to the eclipse of the workers’ movement’s ‘programmatism’ and to the ensuing crisis in the revolutionary Marxist imaginary.⁴⁵ I also suggested that this general breakdown of fixed ideas in the revolutionary tradition (whether it was the idea of labour as the source of all culture or the convergent affirmation of ‘work’) was already a latent theme for anti-work avant-garde movements such as Dada and surrealism.⁴⁶ In the post-war setting, however, this crisis is paralleled and accentuated by an emergent cybernetic ontology that was, in turn, the result of secular developments in the capitalist economy. These are the basic theoretical coordinates for understanding the work of art in the age of automation. And this is also, more specifically, the context from which one must begin discussing the vexed problem of the neo-avant-garde. With these analytical coordinates in place, I now leave Klein’s monochrome hanging on the wall in Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse – where it was showcased during the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in 1956 – and expand my scope to include the post-war French reconstruction culture that propelled the rival, opposing vision of Unitary Urbanism.

Architecture or Revolution

Le Corbusier’s ground-breaking ideas profoundly marked the interwar years, giving form to the modern architecture movement. The full breadth of Le Corbusier’s urban vision, however, only came to fruition in the French reconstruction efforts of the post-war years, albeit on a somewhat diminished scale compared to the monumental ‘clean sheet’ urbanism initially envisioned by Le Corbusier in unrealized master projects such as Plan voisin or La Ville radieuse.⁴⁷

Le Corbusier’s post-war rise to stardom was partly a result of favourable timing. Due to a combination of lingering effects from the economic crisis in the 1930s and a near standstill in housing construction during the Second World War, the general state of housing in post-war France was so poor that many housing officials gravitated towards Le Corbusier’s interwar idea for planned apartment projects, the so-called grands-ensembles.⁴⁸ By the mid-1950s, as urban historian Norma Evenson points out, the ‘housing crisis’ had reached an all-time historical high and was becoming a highly publicized media scandal.⁴⁹ In this context, Le Corbusier’s interwar ideas were served up anew as a solution to the housing problem. The dire state of housing in France, though exacerbated by circumstances of war, destruction, and the long-term effects of a global economic standstill, was nothing new. What was new, however, was the operationalization of a particular type of response to that crisis, a response for which Le Corbusier had devised the plans several decades prior. As Evenson reminds us, Le Corbusier had previously, in the midst of the Great Depression in 1935, attempted to seize a similar opportunity of crisis to promote his vision of La Ville radieuse as a viable solution to the health problems in Parisian slums:

When Le Corbusier presented his theoretical urban concepts, he made frequent reference to the unhygienic aspects of the congested districts of Paris … Attempting to bolster his conception of an open-textured urban pattern, he employed such quotations as: ‘Once tuberculosis has made its way into unhealthful houses, it’s there for good: one after the other, all of those whom their fate has led into this den will be struck down by tuberculosis.’⁵⁰

It was just such an appeal to the politics of fear which eventually helped persuade official planners of the expediency of Le Corbusier’s housing unit projects. The post-war triumph of Le Corbusier’s ideas thus connects to a much longer history of urbanization in France. The question of housing and concern about public health in the urban slums are recurring issues in French politics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These questions are closely tied to real and imagined histories of insurrection and counter-insurrection. One frequently invoked precursor to Le Corbusier’s urban modernization programme is Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second Empire. Hausmann set in motion an unprecedented reconstruction of the city that apart from beautifying Paris and ensuring better circulation also served counter-insurrectional purposes. Building a barricade across a boulevard is considerably more difficult than building one across a much narrower street. Moreover, Hausmannian boulevards could more easily accommodate massive military interventions into the heart of the city.

In the introduction to his landmark anthology, The Situationists and the City, art historian Tom McDonough describes post-war urbanism as a repetition of Hausmann’s grand renovation under changed historical circumstances:

the period stretching from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s has rightly been termed one of a ‘new Haussmannization’, a reprise of the mid-nineteenth century renovation of Paris that sought to displace the city’s restive working class and create a more sympathetic environment for the bourgeoisie. The rapid modernization of the post-war years was nothing less than a new push in this long-term process of capitalist modernization.⁵¹

The close connection between capitalist accumulation, urbanization, and modernization also became one of the focal points of analysis for the LI during the 1950s. For the LI, the question of the social domination of capital could be reduced neither to a schema of exploitation, however violent it might be, nor to a schema of ideology, however effective the propaganda apparatus. Rather, violence and ideology coalesced into a more subtle form of material coercion embodied in the very texture of everyday life. In this sense, urbanism was capital’s way to ensure the possibility of accumulation on an (ever-)expanding scale by tightening its grip on social life and building police control into the urban fabric. LI’s critical urban analysis was developed in shorter articles in the group’s journal Potlatch, under the influence, most notably, of Lefebvre’s Marxist analysis of modernity, urban space, and ‘everyday life’.⁵² A good example of this critical analysis can be found in the LI’s July 1954 text ‘Les Gratte-ciels par la racine’ (‘Skyscrapers by the Roots’).⁵³ This article claims that French urbanism from Haussmann to Le Corbusier was essentially a form of police control embedded in the organization of the urban environment:

In this epoch more and more placed, in all domains, under the sign of repression, there is one particularly repugnant man, clearly more of a cop than the average. He is building cellular unités d’habitations, he is building a capital for the Nepalese, he is building vertical ghettoes, morgues for an age that has good use for them, he is building churches … It should not be forgotten that if modern Urbanism has not yet been an art – and even less a setting for life – it has on the other hand always been inspired by Police directives; and after all Haussmann only gave us these boulevards to more conveniently bring in the cannon.⁵⁴

Although, as of 1954, Le Corbusier’s architecture had not yet proven its strategic affinity with modern urban warfare (no cannons had yet been rolled out on the boulevards between Le Corbusier’s housing units), it was perfectly obvious to the LI that this urbanism embodied neo-Haussmannian counter-revolutionary ideals. Moreover, Le Corbusier actively promoted a view of the architect as a social engineer who could intervene strategically in society to mitigate social ills through rational planning and urban reform. The stated architectural aim for Le Corbusier was to contain and prevent the social revolution. As Le Corbusier had unequivocally stated in the concluding paragraph of his main work, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), from 1923:

Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.⁵⁵

As this oft-quoted passage makes clear, Le Corbusier’s vision for modern architecture originated in a broader concern for social reform as an alternative to revolution. Le Corbusier held a firm belief that social conflict resulted from a discord between traditional ways of living and the realities of a modern, mechanized society. This tension could only be resolved by improved housing schemes capable of accommodating the uneasy working class and containing its revolutionary desires. As architectural theorist Reyner Banham accurately describes it, the ‘explicit theme [of Towards a New Architecture] is the inadequacy of housing as then standing or as then conceived, for a mechanized society, with new needs, and new psychological drives, such as that esprit de corps that could be found in the factories, but had no counterpart in social life outside’.⁵⁶ In the turbulent political climate of early post-war France, where workers’ unrest reached a historical high and government coalitions were changing faster than fashion trends, Le Corbusier’s ideas about sculpting a harmonious society by means of better architecture and urban planning found particularly fertile ground.⁵⁷

Reconstructing the Avant-Garde

In the reconstruction era, French culture came to mediate these latent social conflicts in various ways, and Le Corbusier’s urban planning schemes apparently offered a particularly persuasive framework to politicians and other influential members of French society. During the 1950s, as art historian Hannah Feldman reminds us, cultural politics became a tool to navigate ‘the newly reconfigured parameters of the political geography’ of the Cold War and was used ‘to articulate an alternative cultural modality to those proposed by the Soviet Union and the United States’.⁵⁸ This was a double operation, since ‘the country first had to redeem itself from the blows that history had dealt it, including the disastrous embarrassment not only of German occupation (collaboration was not yet, or better, not yet again, a political focus), but, even more significantly, it had to justify itself in terms of the Marshall Plan and the accelerating dissolution of its colonial enterprises in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa’.⁵⁹

As Jaleh Mansoor suggests in a related argument, to this dialectic dance of capital with statecraft one must add ‘culture, as it provides a metric for both’.⁶⁰ Mediating the broader political-economic conjuncture, Mansoor argues, culture must be seen as an integral part of ‘the crisis of accumulation – channeled into warding off communism on the one hand and contributing to the American hegemony on the other – that opened onto capital’s great triumph between 1949 and 1973’.⁶¹ In France, during this phase of capital accumulation, Le Corbusier’s architecture stood as the cultural symbol for regeneration in a new geopolitical situation structured by the twin dynamics of decolonization and modernization. And, as historian Todd Shepard has shown, the decolonization narrative played into an ethos of reconstruction and modernization which it ‘reinforced, rather than challenged’ by presenting ‘France, its form of government, and its values’ as ‘a universal template for progress’.⁶²

In this context, the 1956 Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille – for which Le Corbusier was the ultimate symbolic patron – became the historical testing ground for a reinvention of French culture through modern art. In fact, the 1956 festival in Marseille was one of the first major events outside of the established Parisian gallery scene to attempt to address and synthesize in a coherent way the ensemble of post-war developments in the major arts under a single unifying header: that of the avant-garde. Or, at least, that was the festival’s declared ambition: to gather and celebrate for a broader lay-public the diverse tendencies of the most modern sectors of French post-war cultural production. A short prefatory statement to the official festival programme clearly relates the intention to bridge the great divide between the cutting-edge arts and the French public at large:

The ambition of this festival is to present to the public the most authentic works of art today. Certainly, the different modes of artistic expression have been brought together on previous occasions. But it is perhaps the first time that a manifestation of this kind proposes to present not just this or that ‘label’ of art but to present the works of art that most clearly express our age. We hope that this experience will prove enriching for all the artists and that the public, in having for the first time the chance to get a view of the ensemble, will be able to perceive the involuntary coordination that exists between these different modes of expression of a natural and spontaneous modern art.⁶³

The artistic and pedagogic ambition to assimilate the notion of the avant-garde to an ‘authentic’ and ‘natural and spontaneous’ expression of ‘modern’ art seems designed to underscore the physical (and symbolic) distance to Paris and to historically established connotations of avant-gardism (as an elitist, cosmopolitan enterprise).

Setting up the festival in Marseille seems to signal an attempt on behalf of the organizers to relieve the troubling association of the avant-garde with a certain culture of academicism, infighting, and scandal, along with an ethos of épater la bourgeoisie. The festival in Marseille was keen on promoting a decidedly more positive and inclusive view of the avant-garde that made it synonymous with the newest and most ‘authentic’ experiments in modern art.

This semantic shift in the term avant-garde registers in a letter of support for the festival (reproduced in the very first pages of the programme) by Bernard Chocoy, French secretary of state and head of the reconstruction strategy, who emphasized that the choice to hold the festival in Marseille (as opposed to Paris) was in line both with French cultural heritage and with this culture’s most advanced and modern impulses:

Marseille, city of tradition, Marseille, a city charged with history, welcomes the first Festival of Avant-Garde Art. There is no paradox in this event, since the old Phocaean city has already made room for the housing unit of ‘Le Corbusier’ and it is precisely on the roof-terrace of this ‘cité radieuse’ – conceived by the architect of sunshine, light, vegetation, verdure, and the future – that these manifestations will unfold. This building, itself an avant-garde housing solution, could hardly have been better suited for such an initiative.⁶⁴

The geographical transposition to a site in Marseille – and not just any site but the Cité radieuse – signalled the organizers’ ambitions to reach out to a public unaccustomed to modern art. More fundamental, however, was the apparent desire to recode the very notion of the avant-garde and wrest it away from any possible connotations with negativity, destruction, and revolution, and to bring it into line with the outspokenly constructive values of the French reconstruction era. Moreover, the festival in Marseille was expressly presented as the first of its kind, clearly implying a much broader vision. And in fact, with the unwavering support of the French state, the event would be repeated on two further occasions: in Nantes, 1957; and again in Paris, 1960.⁶⁵

The first festival of avant-garde art in Marseille relied heavily on both public and private economic and material support. Several private corporations (most notably the multinational electronics firm Philips), banks, local Marseillais politicians, and French statesmen weighed in.⁶⁶ Among the most important supporters we find Marseille politician Robert Mitterrand (brother of the future French president François Mitterrand) of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance party (UDSR), plus a number of high-ranking French state officials: André Billière (minister of national education); Jacques Bordeneuve (minister of the Department for Arts and Letters); Bernard Chocoy (secretary of the French state and reconstruction); Gaston Defferre (deputy mayor of Marseille and minister of the French outre-mer, a euphemism for the colonies); Raymond Haas-Picard (prefect of Bouchesdu-Rhône); Pierre Keller (president of the French Chamber of Commerce); and Eugène Claudius-Petit (former minister of reconstruction who was initially responsible for ensuring the Cité radieuse of his good friend Le Corbusier would be built).⁶⁷ As this brief but non-exhaustive roll-call suggests, the French state had a keen interest in aligning itself with and promoting a particular understanding of the avant-garde.

Furthermore, the institutional and economic framework for culture at this point foreshadowed, in important respects, the establishment in 1959 of the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs, with André Malraux appointed as the first-ever French minister of culture. In that context, the 1956 roll-out of the first Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille, as Corvin argues, takes on a particular historical significance. It provided both the artistic vision and institutional infrastructure that would soon enable Malraux to accomplish his first major task in office, in 1959 – the foundation of the Paris Biennale – entirely in the spirit of avant-garde festivals.⁶⁸

Retrospectively considered, the festival in 1956 marked if not the beginning then certainly a decisive historical turning point in what we might call, following Bürger’s analysis, the post-war institutionalization of the avant-garde.⁶⁹ The situationist programme of Unitary Urbanism was forged against the backdrop of this fundamental restructuring of French cultural politics. This institutional context also helps to explain why the boycott of the festival was such an important symbolic reference point for the nascent situationist movement that its members returned to it again and again when struggling to define their own alternative vision for an urbanizing modernity.

All-Redeeming Synthesis

In the letter quoted earlier in this chapter, Jorn stated in categorical terms: ‘We are obliged to squarely oppose the type of manifestations unfolding on the roof of Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse … as well as to oppose the idea of patrons in free art: quite to the contrary, a free art has no need of patrons. Art that is supported by a patron can never have any other goal than to serve that patron.’⁷⁰ Such were the stakes that separated one avant-garde faction from another, as well as one vision of synthesis of the arts from another. The remaking of French culture so as to mediate the twin interests of state and capital is also the background against which the situationist movement’s competing urban imaginary, that of Unitary Urbanism – originally defined as ‘a synthesis aiming at the construction of entire atmospheres and styles of life’ – begins to make sense.

The French state’s active patronage of the arts and Le Corbusier’s symbolic and artistic patronage of the avant-garde need to be understood in the broader context of a campaign of US cultural propaganda. As art historian Stephen Petersen notes, the mid-1950s was a time in which almost any American enterprise, artistic or otherwise, was automatically deemed progressive.⁷¹ The influential American art critic, Clement Greenberg, would effectively sum up this view in a 1965 essay, ‘America Takes the Lead, 1945–1965’, in which he argued that the centre of modern art was gravitating ‘naturally’ from the old continent to the new.⁷²

As the US settled into the politics of the Cold War, tensions rose not only geopolitically but also culturally, with the realm of the arts increasingly becoming a way to assert global hegemony. In the words of art historian Serge Guilbaut:

It all started on a grand scale in 1952 when cultural battles engulfed the French capital. This was the beginning of a continuous display of American cultural artifacts in the capital. Indeed, every year, Paris saw an armada of exhibitions covering the entire spectrum of American cultural life, from popular culture to high art. This offensive was taking place while art styles in Paris were hotly debated, politicized, and squarely placed in the larger Cold War context, destabilizing an already weak and divided Parisian art scene.⁷³

It is by now a well-established historiographical fact that culture and the arts were instrumental to Cold War politics. As the story goes, American art, and the style of abstract expressionism in particular, became supercharged with global political connotations of ‘freedom’ that would ostensibly support the values of US world-making.⁷⁴ However, the story of how New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris (with the covert help of the CIA) is itself problematic, as art historian Catherine Dossin remarks, insofar as it tends to reinforce narratives in which the decline of Paris and the triumph of New York is portrayed as the inevitable outcome of US world-making.⁷⁵ As she argues, one cannot adequately explain events in post-war French art by ‘simply affixing references to events that took place in France within the official story of post-war art’, since that would be to use ‘reference points that are meaningful in a US context but would not necessarily make sense from a French one’.⁷⁶

For the overarching argument of this book, and for this chapter more particularly, it is crucial to heed the distinctions between competing factions of the French avant-garde. One cannot reduce every single event to the dominant schema of ‘an already weak and divided Parisian art scene’ (Guilbaut) defending its last holdings. However, in this case France was on the defensive against the onslaught of the American super-avant-garde. The French response took the form of a ‘synthesis of the (major) arts’, a programme intrinsically linked to Le Corbusier, who was one of the most fervent proponents of this idea. From his perspective, the synthesis of the major arts would entail that architecture, sculpture, and painting would merge into a more potent totality that would truly express modern life.

As art historian Romy Golan has convincingly argued, Le Corbusier’s ‘all-redeeming synthesis’ served a dual purpose: to rebuild the cultural integrity of the nation inwardly and to help restore and display to the outside world that France’s interwar position as a cultural superpower had not yet yielded to the American super-avant-garde.⁷⁷ Le Corbusier’s state-backed synthesis apparently redeemed not only Klein’s monochrome or Schöffer’s cybernetic sculpture but also the very notion of the avant-garde, which was now in the service of the state rather than in the service of the revolution. But was this really the end of the avant-garde’s transgressive and revolutionary ethos? Does Klein’s solipsistic monochrome mark the end of the avant-garde and a return to the concept of art as an absolutely private realm?

To demonstrate the conflicting gestures of competing avant-garde artists, I will briefly turn to one of the single most massive works of art from this moment: I am speaking, of course, of the building which has loomed over our discussions so far: Le Corbusier’s 165-metre-long, 24-metre-wide, and 56-metre-tall concrete tower: Cité radieuse – Marseille. The site of the 1956 Festival of Avant-Garde Art, this building not only had Klein’s monochromes hanging on its inside walls but it also (as chronicled in the Introduction) set the scene for Schöffer’s ‘great cybernetic spectacle’. Cité radieuse thus, quite literally, set the stage for the neo-avant-garde while also providing Debord and the would-be situationists with a physical anchor for the critical analysis of an emerging cultural logic of the ‘spectacle’.⁷⁸ In the next section, we will take a closer look at the peculiar décor of this emblematically modern building.

A Peculiar Décor

On 14 October 1952, after five years of troublesome construction, Le Corbusier had the great pleasure to present to the public his Cité radieuse: ‘the first manifestation’, as the famous Swiss-French architect grandiloquently stated, ‘of an environment suited to modern life’.⁷⁹ Le Corbusier began his inaugural speech comme il faut by thanking the French state and its representative, monsieur Eugène Claudius-Petit, minister of reconstruction and urbanism, for helping him realize an idea that had haunted his architectural imagination since the beginning of his career: the idea of a housing unit [unité d’habitation] as a means to remedy social ills.⁸⁰

Figure 2.3. Cité radieuse – Marseille under construction, c.1951.

Although the ministry of reconstruction and urbanism created a dizzying number (seven, according to Le Corbusier) of different governmental coalitions in the five years it took to construct the building, Claudius-Petit had managed to keep his post to ensure the continuity and support necessary for the project’s progress in the context of the turbulent political climate of the Fourth French Republic. A personal friend and long-time professional collaborator of Le Corbusier, Claudius-Petit undoubtedly perceived the Cité radieuse as an embodiment of the ambitiously modern spirit that he had conjured up in his 1950 ‘manifesto’ for a new kind of urbanism, the Plan national d’aménagement du territoire, in which (inspired by the American urban planning tradition) he laid out an officially sanctioned template for the total refashioning of the natural and human environment in post-war France.⁸¹

The Cité radieuse was originally conceived of as one node in a web of self-sustaining ‘organisms’ that could house several million people at once. Despite the more modest scale of the completed housing unit as it stood in Marseille that autumn day in 1952 – hovering gracefully on its cone-shaped concrete pillars several metres above the ground, in apparent defiance of the laws of gravity – it was still something like a ‘partial utopia of the plan’.⁸² Considered in a broader historical perspective, the Cité radieuse comes across, as cultural historian Donald D. Egbert has argued, as the culmination of a tradition of French social radicalism in the arts reaching back to Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier.⁸³ In this ‘modern version of a sort of Fourierist phalanx’, perfect harmony was supposed to prevail as a function of social and material engineering.⁸⁴ As a (partially) realized socialist utopia, the Cité radieuse was a (non-)place where social difference and strife were ostensibly subsumed under a new organic unity, a ‘vertical community void of politics’ in Le Corbusier’s memorable words.⁸⁵ In sharp contrast to Fourier’s socialist utopianism, Le Corbusier’s housing unit was not intended as an alternative to a profit-oriented capitalist economy; rather, it was such an economy’s most adequate architectural expression – less a Fourierist phalanx than a Saint-Simonian church for the latest mutation of an ‘industrial religion’.⁸⁶

As something closer to a self-contained petit-bourgeois microcosm than to a radical socialist experiment of cohabitation, the Cité radieuse embodied the burgeoning belief in a ‘post-industrial’ society where rigid class-division would supposedly yield to a more flexible and dynamic composition of the workforce. During the years of the housing unit’s construction, the idea (if not the reality) of a ‘new working class’ was on the rise.⁸⁷ Moreover, it was a widely shared belief at the time that the nature of labour was about to change fundamentally: according to the sociologists of work (sociologie du travail) at the CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the dullest and most repetitive tasks associated with mechanical industry and assembly-line production would soon be replaced by an army of self-acting ‘automatic’ machines that would never tire.⁸⁸

According to the new gospel of automation, the arrival of the robots would free workers from the hardships of manual labour and allow them to pursue more fulfilling professional careers in mid-level management. In the more radical versions of that same social imaginary, workers would be freed from work altogether and spend their days casually fishing in the river Seine, as René Clair had famously projected in his 1931 film, À Nous la liberté, one of the early cinematic visualizations of a fully automated society. Le Corbusier’s vision for society was, of course, less radical than Clair’s, insofar as he aimed to strike a work–life balance rather than to abolish labour altogether. In contrast to Clair’s untimely interwar projections, however, Le Corbusier’s post-war schemes tapped into real political-economic trends and provided a perfect index for that ‘strange, half-forgotten world of endless vistas of abundance that existed on the high plateau of the post-war growth’.⁸⁹

Constructed from the most modern of all building materials, the much trumpeted prefabricated concrete slabs, Cité radieuse in a very literal sense appealed to the promesse de bonheur of a society on the brink of an age of automation. It was the physical projection of a fantasy in which social conflict and class division had ceased to exist, a microcosm of harmonic coexistence premised on more leisure time for all. To be sure, inside the Cité the inhabitants of the 337 individual air-conditioned apartments of varying sizes would have plenty of things with which to fill any possible temps mort. In his speech, Le Corbusier proudly inventoried the services offered along the interior shopping avenue, la rue marchande du ravitaillement, which impressively included

a fish store, meat market, charcuterie, spice, wine, and cheese shops, a bakery and a pastry shop, fruits, vegetables and cooked meals. A delivery service to the apartments. A restaurant, tea house, and a snack bar with take-away options. Furthermore, there is a laundromat, a cleaning and ironing service, drugstore, hairdresser, a post office, tobacco and newspaper stands, a library, and a pharmacy depot. Along the same corridor lies the hotel and a restaurant snack bar with room-service.⁹⁰

There was anything a petit-bourgeois heart could possibly desire. But the real thrill, according to Le Corbusier, was that ‘the seventeenth and last floor, which contains a kindergarten and a nursery, leads out via a ramp to an open-roof terrace with an open-air recreation-space, a shallow wading pool for children, a garden, a physical education center, an outdoor gym, a tanning salon, a 300 meter running course, a bar-buffet, etc.’⁹¹ The Cité radieuse (as its translucent name indeed suggests) was something like a brutalist concrete stairway from Earth to the Heavenly City. It was up here that Schöffer’s CYSP 1 performed in Jacques Polieri’s cybernetically reloaded experimental theatre, which was much akin to the interwar ‘Bauhaus spectacles’ from which it drew inspiration.⁹²

Culture: A New Battlefield

The examination of Unitary Urbanism and the SI’s architectural interlude more broadly thus leads us back to where this book’s narrative first began: standing on a rooftop in Marseille, watching the interim stage, waiting for the spectacle to unfold. Whether the inspiration came from early Futurist street spectacles or from the convergent theatre aesthetics of Art et Action in France with that of Walter Gropius and Bauhaus in Germany, Poliéri’s cybernetically reloaded spectacle exemplifies a more general trend in French experimental theatre towards opening up to the outside world of industry, science, and technology. The drive to transgress by all means necessary the traditional proscenium stage is one of the most fundamental impulses in experimental theatre, reaching back to Antonin Artaud, who famously proclaimed: ‘We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of the action.’⁹³

The push in French theatre to overcome limits and break down barriers, real or imagined, was part of that moment’s artistic drive to go beyond the confines of self-enclosed modernist artworks and the flat conception of space that modernism implied. As art historian Larry Busbea explains, artists ‘would question the very distinction between actual and phenomenal space that had been the bedrock for modernist discourse in the visual arts up until this point in time’.⁹⁴

Michel Ragon is a prominent example of someone who saw, in the turn away from fixed objects of visual contemplation, the prospect of realizing a truly ‘democratic’ art, an avant-garde art for the metropolitan masses.⁹⁵ Ragon – a figure who embodies that moment in French post-war art – drew on his experience as curator for the plastic arts section of the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille to envision how a democratized form of abstract art would ‘modify the character of the streets and the cityscape itself ‘, the way it had already transformed housing spaces like Cité radieuse into what he described as ‘a Mondrian in which people circulate’.⁹⁶

A similar if more critical impulse was also at work in the situationist conception of Unitary Urbanism. Take, for instance, the situationist tract from 1958, Nouveau Théâtre d’operations dans la culture (New theatre of operations) which reads as a riposte to French nouveau théâtre while also commenting critically – with its urban-grid ‘square’ composed of individual aerial photos of Paris – on the modernist space of representation. The tract is, in other words, a détournement of a tendency in nouveau théâtre specifically and in post-war French art and culture more generally. At the hands of the SI, Ragon’s ‘expanded’ definition of art is returned to a state of conflict, contradiction, and indeed war, as the Clausewitzian pun in the title suggests. ‘Already in the title,’ as SI scholars Emmanuel Guy and Laurence Le Bras explain, the newly founded SI ‘clearly spells out its avant-garde ambitions (“new”), its strategic perspective (“theater of operations”), and its battle-field of choice (“culture”)’.⁹⁷

Figure 2.4. Situationist tract Nouveau Théâtre d’operations dans la culture, 1958. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

The situationist city, and the idea of constructing situations more generally, runs in a parallel trajectory to contemporaneous developments in French post-war art, specifically in the realm of theatre. As the situationist tract testifies, there was a heightened attention to the dynamic relation of art’s own outside space: whether it was the space of the city, or, by imaginative extrapolation from the coordinates of the urban grid, the space beyond the earth’s own enclosed atmosphere.⁹⁸ Staying earthbound, it is unsurprising that attention drifted towards urban space, considering the feverish building and reconstruction efforts in France in the wake of the Second World War. As Constant noted at the beginning of the aforementioned lecture on Unitary Urbanism in 1960:

The post-war years have witnessed tremendous activity in the field of urban development: villages have become towns, towns have turned into metropolises, metropolises have spread into such immense conglomerations that people have started devising ways of limiting the concentration of buildings, of decentralizing the city.⁹⁹

The urge to transgress limits did not merely imply going beyond the four corners of a picture frame, but also beyond the confines of the city:

Not only are human beings, with the help of technology, preparing to leave the earth’s surface and to go adventuring in outer space; they are even roaming, flying over, the earth’s surface itself, in every direction, without omitting a single spot. And wherever they go, which is to say everywhere, nature gives way to technology. As such, the living space of each individual is getting bigger and bigger, their radius of action is extending further and further afield, the tracks they leave behind them form an increasingly complicated pattern. Human beings are leaving the closed community for a nomadic existence that will cover ever larger areas. Their existence is becoming more adventurous, their impressions more varied, their horizon wider, their need for change, for excitement, greater.¹⁰⁰

Constant’s ideas of ‘an increasingly complicated pattern’ and a networked, nomadic existence is an example of what Busbea has described as a ‘spirit of interactivity that would infuse much artistic production at this time’ and which prefigured what is sometimes referred to, following Lefebvre or Fredric Jameson, as the ‘spatial turn’.

Endless Flexibility

At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested the two sculptures by Constant and Schöffer intuited an emerging ‘cybernetic’ period style and toyed, materially and by imaginative extrapolation, with the structural possibilities of an age of automation. These kinds of light, dynamic, and flexible sculptures composed of materials such as titanium, aluminium, steel, nylon, wire, and, in some cases also ‘electronic brains’, were, as Sadler notes, ‘sincere bids at unifying art, architecture, science, and environment’.¹⁰¹

I also suggested adding to this list of materials ‘space’ itself. This is because Constant and Schöffer’s turn to the medium of sculpture in the mid-1950s, in tune with an encroaching cybernetic ontology of art that emphasizes performativity over representation, exemplifies a heightened attention to the spaces beyond any material fixtures. The urban landscape that Constant’s ‘scale models’ materially approximated were conceived of as expanded theatre scenes of life with ever-changing décors: ‘Unitary Urbanism is flexible, it respects our freedom to change our way of life, it adapts to every situation, to every need, to every technical, geographical or psychological possibility’, as Constant stated in a lecture in 1960.¹⁰² So it comes as no surprise that Constant originally modelled his understanding of the future cityscape on the (projected) ‘nomadic’ life-form of the Roma people.¹⁰³ Cultural theorist McKenzie Wark offers the following synthesis of New Babylon’s nomadic structure:

Constant thought modernity was already accelerating a return to a nomadic existence. New Babylon is nomadic life fully realized. It is an architecture of duration, of thresholds, of collaborative place-making, writ large. Freed from the fixity and uniformity of property, space could again have its qualities. A short trip in New Babylon should offer more variety than the most interminable journeys through the concentrated city of spectacular society. ‘Life is an endless journey across a world that is changing so rapidly that it seems forever another.’ The New Babylonians could wander over the whole surface of a world that was in flux. ‘New Babylon ends nowhere (the earth is round).’¹⁰⁴

What Wark calls Constant’s ‘experimental geography’ was premised on an endless, creative expansion of urban space that would eventually sprawl to cover the entirety of the globe in complete disregard for borders and private property.¹⁰⁵ Constant’s 1956 scale model of the Alba Roma camp was thus ‘less a singular three-dimensional image of the future than a stage set for multiple fantasies’.¹⁰⁶ This particular version of Unitary Urbanism can best be described as a ‘science-fiction of urbanism’ that used ‘cybernetic agendas’ as a ‘high-tech, quasi-science-fictional stick with which to beat the sensibilities of mainstream modernism’.¹⁰⁷

So, although Constant had drifted off in an opposite direction from Schöffer, his work partakes in the same quest to scale the work of art to a truly ‘modern’ urban existence in a cybernetic dépassement of Le Corbusier. Constant’s ‘spatial’ coordinates for New Babylon, his various scale models, provide a tangible link to the cybernetic hypothesis that underpinned this moment in post-war French art. Hence, Constant’s imaginative ‘claims for structural technology’, as Sadler notes, ‘were not as maverick as they might have seemed. They simply pushed the Zeitgeist to its limits.’¹⁰⁸

In Constant’s view, the advent of cybernetics and its systematic application to production, popularly referred to as ‘automation (by which we mean the mechanization of all routine work, including regulation and control of mechanical processes)’, had made an entirely different life possible.¹⁰⁹ But social anxiety about science and technology coupled with an irrational fear that increased leisure time would lead to uncontrolled hedonism had put a brake on progress: ‘automation is progressing at a slower pace than is technically feasible’, Constant argued.¹¹⁰ His temporary constructs in nylon, wire, Plexiglas, steel, and invisible electronic components were a blueprint for an unfettered urbanism in step with the age of automation:

We may nonetheless assume that automation will not only remain a technical possibility, but that it will, within the foreseeable future, become a social fact, and town planning should even now be addressing this fact. Whatever the case, the development of the robot to perform slave labor (Norbert Wiener compares the electronic machine to the imported slaves of antiquity), will sooner or later bring humanity, which is to say the masses, unprecedented freedom, an undreamt-of opportunity for the free disposal of time, for the free realization of life.¹¹¹

Constant’s urban vision was stimulated by a sense of catch-up modernization. Discussing the context of Constant’s ideas, Busbea explains that it was ‘a matter of catching up the shape of the city with the technologies flowing through and around it. The modern-ist grid of rationally designed streets and architectural blocks was seen as being terribly outmoded.’¹¹² This was a moment when artists were abandoning the modernist grid in favour of new, dynamic, topological conceptions of space.¹¹³ Although topology had only recently been foregrounded, the situationists were among the first to seriously grapple with its cultural implications, and to consider it in the context of Unitary Urbanism.¹¹⁴

If one considers modernism, as art historian Daniel Spaulding suggests, in terms of its constitutive relationship with the adventures of the capitalist value-form, one can see the transgression of pictorial space in post-war art as refracting capital accumulation at large. From this perspective, the gradual formal decomposition at work in Mondrian’s famous grids from the 1910s to the 1940s would be modernism methodically anticipating the spatial or topological turn by continuously destroying the conditions of its own formal closure.¹¹⁵ Much like capital, which perpetually confronts its own limits to overcome them, modern art’s continuous formal investments led, eventually and through a series of crises, to a kind of ‘mutant Mondrian’:

Every solution to a problem recomposed itself as another problem, another limit to overcome, though also, in each instance, another provisional totality or self-sufficient system. It is not adequate to describe Mondrian’s achievement as wholly positive or wholly negative, wholly classical or avant-garde. Rather, it was, like modernism at large, a practice that reproduced itself, or posited its own presuppositions, only at the cost of repeatedly throwing itself into the negative and hence confronting the limits beyond which it would cease to be legible.¹¹⁶

A similar logic of ‘mutation’ applies to what we might call Constant’s proto-accelerationist vision of the city. There are no longer any fixed spatial coordinates, no city boundaries, only a perpetual confronting of the limits. The city becomes a deterritorialized urban sprawl, continuously making and unmaking itself in an endless spiralling process. From a point of view that acknowledges nothing beyond capitalist modernity – for someone like Constant who was secretly fascinated with the cybernetic hypothesis – the only choice was to swim with the current: ‘Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process”’.¹¹⁷ First as avant-garde, then as farce.

3

With and Against: Fin de Copenhague

Figure 3.1. Double-page spread from Fin de Copenhague, 1957. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

‘What do you want? Better and cheaper food? Lots of new clothes? A dream home with all the latest comforts and labour-saving devices? A new car … a motor-launch … a light aircraft of your own?’ asks an anonymous British ad that found its way into the chaotic jumble of cut-out materials comprising Fin de Copenhague, a joint artistic enterprise by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord of May 1957. Clippings from various newspapers, illustrated weeklies, advertisement catalogues, women’s magazines, and other visual debris from the booming post-war economy, form the bulk of this paint-stained, thirty-something pages of ‘montage wrapped in flong’.¹

In a seamless shift from addressing the necessities of life (‘better and cheaper food’) to propositions about the wildest eccentricities imaginable (‘a light aircraft of your own’!), the ad builds up an imaginary world that it promises to deliver in the blink of an eye:

Whatever you want, it’s coming your way – plus greater leisure for enjoying it all. With electronics, automation and nuclear energy, we are entering on the new industrial revolution which will supply our every need, easily … quickly … abundantly.

’Easily, quickly, abundantly’ … these three last words line up neatly with the triad of ‘electronics, automation and nuclear energy’, a bourgeois Holy Trinity that underwrote the post-war promise of general progress, upward social mobility, and an abundance of luxury commodities for everyone. Fin de Copenhague whirls us deliberately into the maelstrom of capitalist accumulation at a point where American-led modernization spelled out the ‘reordering of French culture’.² From America to France, and from the shop floor to the glittering pages of the lifestyle magazines from which much of the material for Fin de Copenhague was culled, the capitalist economy appeared to be moving from a production-centred age of mechanization to a society of leisure and consumption: what Frankfurt school associate Friedrich Pollock theorized as an ‘age of automation’.³ The British ad perfectly distils the collective phantasmagoria of that particular historical conjuncture: ‘… et voilà votre vie transformée!’ (… and just like that your life is transformed!), as Debord and Jorn added, tongue-in-cheek, like a secularized French ‘amen’ to the American gospel of the commodity. But, taking a methodological cue from T. J. Clark, what kind of relation does the actual material work establish with the ‘dream-content’ of its proper historical moment?⁴ Beyond obviously being ‘critical of publicity’, as Jorn stated at one point, is there a more profound sense in which a work like Fin de Copenhague critically interrogates the age of automation?⁵

Beginning from the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky’s original thoughts about the book of the future, the present chapter places Fin de Copenhague in a longer trajectory of avant-garde political aesthetics in which capitalist production is seen as inseparable from artistic ‘creation’. Fin de Copenhague, from this perspective, is a reprisal and reworking of the avant-garde book under changed conditions of artistic production, distribution, and reception. Considered as heir to the Russian avant-garde book, Fin de Copenhague is swimming with the current of economic, scientific, and technological progress, and clearly shares the constructivist ethos of mass-production. But it is also a material proposal to go against the utilitarian or functionalist drive of a late capitalist culture where all kinds of creative excess are inevitably channelled into, and pass through, the value-form of the commodity.

With and against, Fin de Copenhague presses to the limit the representational forms that capital takes at that particular historical conjuncture: it co-opts the style in which it communicates, appropriates the modes of perception it privileges, and subverts the aesthetic categories that correspond to and mediate its social rule, up to and including the oxymoron of an avant-garde ‘work of art’. Fin de Copenhague, then, is a performative ‘unworking’ of the work of art in the age of automation.⁶ Or, in more medium-specific terms, an ‘anti-book’.⁷

The Book of the Future

In 1927, when Lissitzky reflected on the future of the book, he stressed the need to bring it on par with cinema and other art forms that had managed more fully to exploit the new means of mechanical reproduction towards artistic ends.⁸ To Lissitzky’s mind, the book was still lagging in the field of the arts, and there was an urgent need to search for a new ‘overall structure’ that would bring the book up to date with ‘the record-breaking speed of social development’.⁹ Lissitzky wanted to bring the book format up to date with developments in the forces of production and to let, as he described regarding F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist form-experiments, ‘the action of a new content’ be ‘intensified by the form’.¹⁰ But what kind of form does Fin de Copenhague assume?

Neither a livre illustré nor an artist’s book proper, and not even a ‘work of art’ in any uncomplicated sense of the term, Fin de Copenhague is difficult to assimilate to established art-historical categories.¹¹ Lissitzky’s programmatic text, ‘The Future of the Book’, and the revolutionary rethinking of art that it inspired in thinkers like Walter Benjamin, offers a constructive point of departure for framing Fin de Copenhague within an art-historical view.¹² In a wider sense, the analysis of this deeply anomalous avant-garde book experiment will contribute to an understanding of the historically specific concerns that propelled the situationist movement into existence and structured their (post-)artistic responses to questions of form, content, and the work of art as such.

Lissitzky’s argument proceeds from the idea that innovations in human language or ‘verbal traffic’ always brought about corresponding technical innovations in ‘general traffic’: for instance, ‘articulated language’ correlates with the ‘upright gait’, ‘writing’ with the ‘wheel’, and the ‘Gutenberg printing press’ with ‘carts drawn by animal power’.¹³ But Lissitzky leaves a blank spot and a question mark to correlate with the era of the automobile and another blank to correlate with the aeroplane, suggesting that the means of ‘verbal traffic’ had not yet been brought up to date with their technical equivalents.¹⁴ To Lissitzky’s mind, art was not merely one but two evolutionary steps behind.

By the 1950s, confirming Lissitzky’s far-sightedness, Marinetti’s semi-divine ‘roaring automobile’ had long since been profaned by the masses.¹⁵ Capitalist development was apparently also catching up with the aeroplane, which was no longer an awe-inspiring novelty but increasingly one among several options for mass travel, and holding little sway over the artistic imagination at a time when space-exploration and sci-fiscenarios took centre stage.¹⁶ An accompanying feature of the spectacular space age was the nascent cybernetic dream of full automation, with its promise of a society of unending abundance and growth. In this historical context, the prospect of ‘a light aircraft of your own’ would symbolically underscore the beginning of a new epoch.¹⁷ When placed in a longer art-historical continuum, then, Fin de Copenhague might be read as a material approximation to fill those ‘blank topological spaces’ in Lissitzky’s schema that, according to philosopher of art Peter Osborne, were in a way ‘already reserved for the computer and the digital’.¹⁸

Following Osborne in seeing Lissitzky’s ideas as foreshadowing the articulation of conceptual art fifty years later, Fin de Copenhague reads as an early index of the impending transformations in art towards more conceptual models inspired by information theory and associated ideas of immateriality. This historical turn was partly symptomatized, partly theorized in Lucy Lippard’s landmark 1973 anthology Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 …¹⁹ But long before the concept of information gained traction in the wake of the Second World War with the advent of cybernetics and information theory, and long before it eventually entered into the discourse of the art world of the 1960s and 1970s, Lissitzky put forward pertinent speculations on the possibility of creating a book in which the ‘sluggish masses of matter are replaced by liberated energy’.²⁰

The Constructivist Ethos of Mass-Production

Lissitzky’s retrogressive turn to the book format, at a time when cinema was celebrated as the new progressive mass medium, was not merely a question of ‘re-styling’ an old medium. Rather, it was an integral step in the constructivist masterplan to exploit the technical edifice of mass enlightenment handed over from the bourgeois mode of production (to use it, of course, to transgress its proper ideological constrictions). As art historian Susan Compton points out:

Constructivism is often discussed as a ‘style’ – especially in the field of book design – but the original protagonists saw it not as the way things might be made to look different but as a means for shaping the new society.²¹

Importantly, in the historical context of post-revolutionary Russia, Compton reminds us, the call for a new book and the avant-garde enthusiasm for book design was part of an answer to a situation where ‘the greater proportion of the population could neither read nor write’.²²

Hence the need for inventing and promoting a new kind of visual communism. The production of books and the revolution in design thus followed, in the words of another expert in Russian avant-gardism, Margit Rowell, a single ‘overriding aim’: ‘to generate objective methods for the rational ordering of materials so as to create practical, economical, and mass-produced objects of everyday use’.²³ The Russian avant-garde book, scholars agree, needs to be understood in the broader context of a communist world-building project, which implied seizing the means of, and determining the conditions for, the mass distribution and reception of art and political propaganda (to the point where a distinction between art and propaganda would cease to make sense).

Seen in the light of societal expediency, constructivism was both a communist tempering of Marinetti’s nihilist need for speed – where the emphasis was on the constructive rather than the destructive use of productive forces – as well as a communist supersession of it. By its international and even cosmic outlook, constructivism far exceeded Italian Futurism’s nationalist and parochial worldview. Integral to the laboratory-ethos of constructivism was the idea that, by equipping itself with up-to-date technology, art could become an active force in shaping the classless communist society of the future. To help fulfil the historical vocation of communism, artists would thus have to make use of all technical and scientific means available.

Following the constructivist programme, Lissitzky’s vision for the book of the future was to find a new form adequate to the changes in the collective reception of art. The goal, ultimately, was to help surpass the passive and spectacular mode of reception that characterized the Gutenberg book, exemplified, of course, by that (in the eyes of a devoted Marxist like Lissitzky) most pacifying of all mass-distributed books: that opiate for the people, ‘the Bible’.²⁴ Modernism had already taken several crucial steps towards abolishing the predominantly passive mode of reception that had been the flipside of the print revolution initiated by the Gutenberg press. The invention of the pictorial means of mechanical reproduction – notably photography, and later cinema, as Benjamin stressed – helped overcome the limits of the printing press.²⁵ As Lissitzky pointed out, new modes of universal art-political instruction were made possible as the fixed edifice of the Gutenberg press opened up to a new visual array of broken-up and combinatory forms (that is, literary plus visual material) inspired by cinema and photomontage methods.²⁶

As already mentioned, Benjamin would echo the constructivist ethos of mass production and rejoice in the possibilities of using the new means of mechanical reproduction. Not only would the new technology destabilize the authorial position, but it would also help divest the work of art of its last attachments to religious cultism, including art’s secularized ‘ritualistic’ afterlife in the capitalist religion of everyday life.²⁷ The crux of Benjamin’s art theory was that the pictorial means of mechanical reproduction points in the direction of art as inherently reproducible. The technical tendency towards abolishing the singularity of the work of art (which constitutes its ‘aura’) objectively supports the progressive artist’s struggle to purge it of its cultic remnants in a bourgeois metaphysics of art founded on the problematic concept of ‘authenticity’.²⁸ Potentiated by subjective categories such as ‘creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery’, Benjamin argued, the idea of authentic art played into the rising fascist promotion of the exceptional individual’s right to mould mass societies into total works of art.²⁹ Against the background of the fascist exploitation of aesthetics in the realm of politics, Benjamin suggested that artists opt for a political use of the new means of mechanical reproduction: a use that sought to promote and further the objective tendency towards dissolving the bourgeois metaphysics of art. The cultural logic to be advanced, according to Benjamin, was evident from the simple fact that ‘from a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense’.³⁰ What follows from this observation is that the technical conditions serve to undermine ‘the criterion of authenticity’, which thus ‘ceases to be applicable to artistic production’; Benjamin’s central point is that, under these circumstances, ‘the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics’.³¹

Imagining Communism

Whereas Benjamin saw a clear historical and technical (if not necessarily moral) progression from the Gutenberg press to film, Lissitzky took a step back and focused, instead, on what was distinct for the book. Considered an artistic medium in its own right, Lissitzky analysed the book’s didactic and political potentials and limitations. Due to its technical inflexibility, the revolutionary reproduction of writing associated with the Gutenberg press had come up against its historical limits, Lissitzky believed. It had served not only as an instrument for mass enlightenment but also, so to speak, as an instrument for religious orthodoxy. The task for artists, according to Lissitzky, would be to take note of technological evolution and on that basis advance a new revolutionary proposition in book design:

Gutenberg’s Bible was only printed with letters. But letters alone will not suffice for the handing down of today’s Bible. The book finds its way to the brain through the eyes, not through the ears; light waves travel much faster and more intensely than sound waves. But humans can only speak to each other with their mouths, whereas the possibilities of the book are multi-form.³²

Exploiting the new pictorial means of mechanical reproduction in the domain of the book would help educate the masses and get a message across to a new international audience. A decidedly post-religious form of mass enlightenment, the book’s ‘multi-form’ options pointed in the direction of truly democratized knowledge, bound neither to the church and its clergy nor to the nation-state and its language-of-power. Hence, the book of the future would be not merely international but emphatically ‘anti-national’.³³

Lissitzky’s vision of literary communism thus taps into the secular development of ‘print-capitalism’: what Benedict Anderson, in his seminal book Imagined Communities, describes as a ‘half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity’.³⁴ The book, according to Anderson, is the basic form-unit of print capitalism’s historical morphology because it is ‘capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially’.³⁵ As such, the book was an essential driver in the emergence of the secularized ‘imagined communities’ that would evolve in tandem with, and ideologically bolster, the appearance of modern nation-states.³⁶ Based on this perspective, Lissitzky envisioned the book as a message about an imagined community to come after the era of nation-states: communism.

For communism to occur, a new common language would have to leap out from the pages of the book and enter into direct explosive contact with the masses. The structure of the book would have to accommodate this vision, making it possible for language to cut its ties to the alphabetic system of phonetic representation and open up to other, as yet unknown, forms of ideoplastic communication. It was thus necessary for the book to evolve in lockstep with the forces of technical progress that had already transformed the arts more generally and opened up towards the ‘fourth dimension, living movement’.³⁷ In post-revolutionary Russia, theatre played a most decisive role in revolutionizing the arts, and Lissitzky makes the following comparison:

Of course, today’s book has not found a new overall structure, it is still a single volume with a cover, a back and pages 1,2,3, … The same is true of the theatre. Even our most modern drama plays in a theatre like a peepshow, with the public in the stalls, in boxes and in rows in front of the curtain. But the stage has been cleared of all the paraphernalia of painted scenery, the stage-space as a painted perspective has perished. A three-dimensional physical space has been born in the same peep-show, allowing maximal unfolding of the fourth dimension, living movement. Within the book modernism may not yet have gone so far, but we must learn to see the tendency.³⁸

As art historian Benjamin Buchloh has pointed out, the ‘at-first surprising equation’ in this oft-quoted passage from Lissitzky, ‘between the reading space of the printed page and the space of dramatic experience in theater’, testifies to ‘the degree to which [he] focused at the time on the question of audience as a determinant of form, and on the perspective of creating conditions for simultaneous collective reception’.³⁹ Buchloh describes Lissitzky’s idea for transforming book design as a parallel development to the avant-garde theatre revolution. Towards the late 1920s Lissitzky was involved, alongside other prominent avant-garde figures such as the Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, in an orchestrated attack on the ‘peepshow’ logic of traditional theatre’s enclosed proscenium stage.⁴⁰ This attack would resonate not only through interwar European avant-garde experiments in open-air theatre – for instance on the roof of the Bauhaus in the 1920s – but also several decades later in post-war France, most notably, as detailed in the previous chapter, in Polieri’s New Theatre. That the cybernetically reloaded total theatre on the top of la maison du fada (madhouse) – as Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse in Marseille is now colloquially referred to – appears today, alongside heterogeneous works including Fin de Copenhague, to be a tribute to Russian constructivism testifies both to the ideological flexibility of constructivism itself and to the post-war avant-garde’s paradoxical appropriation of it. Within the SI, Constant and Jorn, who had known one another since the COBRA days, represent two opposing tendencies in the resurfacing of neo-constructivist impulses. While New Babylon more obviously recalls constructivism, Fin de Copenhague is also heir to the Russian revolution in art. Like Lissitzky, Jorn and Debord struggled to surpass the constrictions of the Gutenberg printing press and tried to institute a fundamentally ‘different relation to the world and space, to image and colour’.⁴¹

The Avant-Garde Book

Fin de Copenhague is ‘still a single volume with a cover, a back and pages 1,2,3’, but there are several ways in which it answers the call for a new kind of book that would help develop a different relation to the world and institute a visual communism.⁴² First, the pages are deliberately unpaginated, and the book is designed to be read in all directions. Second, while Fin de Copenhague apparently remains partly tied to the alphabet – which Lissitzky designated ‘national’ because it was built from sound-imitation – it is decidedly ‘international’ in both scope and ambition.⁴³ One might even say that Fin de Copenhague lives up to the most important criterion that Lissitzky stipulated for the book of the future, namely that it should be not only international but essentially ‘non-national’, in the sense that one ‘needs the least education to understand it’.⁴⁴ In any case, the constructivist ambition to produce a work of art that was truly on par with the real and imagined state of the ‘general traffic’ at a given stage of capitalist development finds a crystal-clear echo in a letter of instructions Jorn sent to the printers of Fin de Copenhague, Verner Otto Permild and Bjørn Rosengreen, in the context of its sequel, Mémoires:

I do not know if you realize how close we are coming to an entirely new understanding of the book. The two books [Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires] we are making here together will become focal points for this renewal. Books printed in offset are not an entirely new phenomenon, but up until now they have been made to imitate Gutenbergian books.⁴⁵

Jorn stages the situationist book experiments as surpassing the Gutenberg book and heralding a form more appropriate to what he describes in the same letter as the ‘new freedom’ offered by offset printing technology.⁴⁶ In so doing, Jorn projects Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires onto the empty, blank field in Lissitzky’s schema of technical evolution. If one can detect a constructivist impulse, it was not thanks to Debord, who in 1957 admitted in personal correspondence that he was practically unaware of the Russian constructivists and had up until that point somewhat naively assimilated everything of the kind to Malevich’s famous Black Square.⁴⁷ More likely, then, the constructivist gist of Fin de Copenhague was due to Jorn’s influence.

Jorn had been exposed to Russian avant-gardism through his political and artistic formation in Denmark before and during the Second World War. His massive book and print production as an artist was, as one scholar notes, ‘deliberately targeted at different approaches to avant-garde aesthetics’ and betrays his longstanding interest in Russian avant-garde book craft.⁴⁸ Although not one of the main international influences on the Danish avant-garde – which, as art historian Kerry Greaves has shown, borrowed more from Parisian surrealism – constructivism was among the topics Jorn occasionally addressed in his publications, as in the Danish wartime journal Helhesten for instance.⁴⁹ Like most other artists from the Helhesten collective, who were ‘either committed Communists or identified with revolutionary politics’, Jorn was attuned to Russian impulses through a longstanding commitment to the DKP, the Danish Communist Party.⁵⁰ The DKP’s politics, especially under the German occupation of Denmark during the war, was closely linked to international modern culture and art.⁵¹

Also, some Danish artists loosely affiliated with Jorn – Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, for instance, whose Bauhaus-influenced book Symboler i abstrakt Kunst (1933) Jorn greatly admired – had studied directly under Lissizky and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus during the late 1920s and early 1930s, before the school was involuntarily shut down as the National Socialists rose to power.⁵² Moreover, Lissitzky exerted a strong influence on modern European art and design (rather than the other way around), and throughout the 1920s he was, as Rowell notes, in contact with ‘most of the major non-objective artists and graphic designers active at the time, including members of the Bauhaus’.⁵³ In fact, ‘the radical transformation of Bauhaus graphic design’ can be ‘attributed to Lissitzky’s influence’.⁵⁴

Another possible brush with constructivist ideas would have been through the French painter Fernand Léger, with whom Jorn studied in 1936. Jorn’s biographer Troels Andersen relates that, around 1938, Jorn filled his sketchbooks with Suprematist drawings supposedly inspired by works of Lissitzky that he had probably seen in the Dutch avant-garde journal De Stijl.⁵⁵

More specifically, revolutionary ideas in the domain of the book were likely passed on to Jorn by ‘Denmark’s first avant-gardist’, Rudolph Broby-Johansen, who was a source of profound inspiration for Jorn in his life-long engagements with the traditions and innovations of book craft.⁵⁶

Jorn would render homage to Broby-Johansen on several occasions, for instance, in a personal letter from 1963 that applauded him for being nothing short of ‘the most significant and revolutionary book artist’ of a generation, and ‘not just in Denmark, but in the entire world’.⁵⁷ In a 1964 article with the alluring title ‘Art and Orders: On Treason, the Mass Action of Reproduction and the Great Artistic Mass Effect’, Jorn would publicly confirm Broby-Johansen’s crucial importance, stating that the ‘great success’ of Fin de Copenhague was founded entirely ‘on the basis of Broby-Johansen’s book craft’ which he had simply ‘enlarged to American size’.⁵⁸ As a Communist and experimental artist and poet, Broby-Johansen was engaged early on in an international exchange of perspectives with like-minded revolutionary artists. Among those that made a lasting impression on Broby-Johansen’s conception of book craft and typography, as he recalls in his book Sort og Rødt: 64 Grafiske Glimt, were the Russian constructivists, most notably Lissitzky.⁵⁹

But, even if there are striking similarities in scope and ambition between the Russian avant-garde book and its post-war reprisal, it is also important to take heed of the historical period that lies between; a straightforward claim that Fin de Copenhague is heir to the Russian avant-garde can only be maintained with important reservations. Broadly speaking, the project of the historical avant-garde – its political programmes, its material techniques, and its aesthetic procedures – was passed on to its post-war successors in a fully disintegrated state. The post-war generation of avant-garde artists were, so to speak, delivered over to an impossible project of reassembling the fragments of an always-already distorted historical unity.⁶⁰ If Fin de Copenhague was an at least partial reprise of the constructivist mandate in art, how does this particular artistic experiment fit into my broader claim that the situationist adventure maps onto a profound crisis in the socialist imaginary, a gradual loss of faith in the ruling productivist representations of labour which I have referred to, borrowing from Roland Simon, as a waning of programmatism?

Representing Work

Art historian Jaleh Mansoor offers one of the most powerful frameworks within which to begin interpreting ‘patterns of recurrence’ and differences within repetition across spans of time. Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s idea of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’, Mansoor situates these patterns within the broader ‘historical development of capital’ as seen ‘through the dynamic of recursive cycles of accumulation’.⁶¹ In this view, the recycling of certain avant-garde tropes is connected to broader socio-economic movements, in which ‘each historical cycle revisits aspects of former cycles, picking up some and rejecting others in the growing expansion of the capitalist world system’.⁶² By taking into account the political and economic expansion of the post–Second World War and Marshall Plan era, Mansoor provides the basic coordinates from which we can begin to rethink the specificity of the post-war avant-gardes.

A similar frame of analysis applies to the history of the situationist movement, whose relation to art, perhaps to an even stronger degree than the Italian artists Mansoor studies, self-reflexively indexes the (fourth) accumulative cycle of global capital: a historically unmatched economic expansion that flooded markets (and minds) with a new range of commodities. But, more specifically, how does the restructuring of capital register in and around a work like Fin de Copenhague: in its choice of materials, formal conventions, and discursive embedding? To answer this, I think it is useful to consider the notion of work itself, as a concept that falls between oeuvre and labour, striking an ambiguity that is exploited differently by the constructivists and the situationists, respectively. What kind of representations of work are at play in each case, and what might these representations tell us about the similarities and differences between the historical avant-garde and its post-war re-enactment?

Constructivist artists showed, if not a disdain for fashion and ornament, then at least a penchant for the ordinary and the unadorned. Think, for instance, of the work clothes that famous constructivists typically wore: ‘clothes that can be worn everywhere, which have no independent value and are not an art product’.⁶³ These are the words of one of the leading constructivists, Varvara Stepanova, who – following a common pattern of neglect of women’s contributions to art history – is less well known than the overalls she designed for her husband, Alexander Rodchenko. If constructivists like Rodchenko or Vladimir Tatlin could sport such ‘normal clothes’ as ‘prototypes for industrial production’, straightforwardly aligning the domain of work with the domain of art, such fashion postures became unthinkable after several decades of Stalinist worker kitsch.⁶⁴ The changing historical evaluation of work also applies to Fin de Copenhague, and to situationist discourse more broadly.

Compare, for instance, an image from Jorn’s book Pour la forme (1958) – which was in the making by the time Jorn and Debord produced Fin de Copenhague – with an image from Lissitzky and Hans Arp’s joint book from 1925, the famous Kunst-ism, 1914–1924 (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3).

Figure 3.2. Page from the book Kunst-ism, 1914–1924, 1925.

Figure 3.3. Page from the book Pour la forme, 1958. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

The similarities are striking, if most likely accidental; but it is the difference to which I attach historical meaning. Whether or not Jorn intended it, the image from Pour la forme contrasts with the one from Kunst-ism on several important points.⁶⁵ On first impression, Jorn’s image suggests a rather schematic labour theory of art. He marshals a simple visual analogy to prove that what is going on in the depths of the factory is expressed on the surface of modern art. I would argue, however, that this interpretation misses the point. Whereas Tatlin’s 1917 ‘counter-relief ‘ is accompanied by a picture of the artist-as-producer, Jorn presents the ‘painting by [Roberto] Matta’ alongside an anonymous ‘worker in an automated factory’, as the caption states. In contrast to the image of Tatlin, dressed in work garments and surrounded by co-workers in the studio, the image of the worker in the automated factory represents an altogether different if not directly inverted situation (as the positioning of the hands of the two men would indeed suggest). Notice, also, how the middle-aged (white) man wearing a white-collar shirt and glasses does not resemble an industrial worker so much as an overseer or manager who has only temporarily stepped into the sphere of the self-acting (automatic) machinery, to tend to some minor technical detail.

In Kunst-ism the artist-as-producer is the central figure: it is art and not work that is profaned. It is artistic subjectivity which is called into question, not the subjectivity of the proletarian worker as such. By contrast, in Pour la forme, the human presence appears as an anomaly. What the comparison to Lissitzky and Arp brings out, then, is the fact that the worker in question is by no means an unmediated representation of a situation from everyday life (in casu labour). Rather, like the ready-made elements from which Fin de Copenhague is composed, the image of the (white, male) machine operator is part of the spectacular visual economy of the age of automation: he is a ‘gimmick’ on par with the smiling housewives in 1950s advertisements for gendered and racialized consumer products such as laundry soap.⁶⁶

What the visual comparison brings out, then, is that the figure of the ‘worker’ (and, by implication, the representation of work) no longer functions according to the same coordinates or metaphors as before: the idea of the ‘human motor’ has apparently run out of steam.⁶⁷ There are (at least) two interrelated aspects of this shift. First, during the 1950s, the French sociology of work, led by figures such as Alain Touraine, gained prominence with the theory of an ‘ABC’ of industrial evolution: an imagined process consisting of three stages in which the deskilled working class would be transformed into a segment of upskilled managers tending the new fully automated factories that were appearing everywhere in France at this point.⁶⁸ In Touraine’s projected ‘post-industrial’ society, labour strife, wildcat strikes, and riots would be left in the dustbin of history with the faded memory of Tatlin’s project for the Monument to the Third International (which is, of course, what Tatlin is pictured constructing in the image in Figure 3.2).

To Jorn and Debord, the figure of the worker was no longer a ‘gravedigger of capitalism’ but an integral part of what would soon be analysed under the term spectacle, defined as ‘capital that has accumulated to such a degree that it becomes image’.⁶⁹ Indeed, it appears Jorn snatched this particular photograph in Pour la forme from the popular illustrated science journal Atomes (see Figure. 3.4).

Figure 3.4. Cover of the French illustrated science magazine Atomes, October 1956. Photo courtesy of Denis Blaizot.

Given that Atomes was the 1950s French equivalent of Science Illustrated and thus a major venue of spectacular investment, it is clear that Jorn’s visual proposition in Pour la forme is founded not on any schematic labour theory of art nor on a crude Marxist reflection theory; rather, it is something like a historically specific meditation on work and its modes of representation. With the conspicuous absence of questions about shop-floor reorganization or labour struggles (on the level of content as well as in the choice of cover art), Atomes perfectly indexes the depoliticized social imaginary of technology in post-war France. As even a quick glance at the covers of Atomes from the late 1950s reveals, the post-war French visual economy was saturated by recurring cultural tropes that functioned as primers for an American-led economic expansion. Consider, for instance, this specific Atomes cover from 1957, a special issue on ‘the grandiose perspectives of cybernetics and automation’ (see Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5. Cover of the French illustrated science magazine Atomes, October 1957. Photo courtesy of Denis Blaizot.

The reader of this book will recognize the metal structure in the background as Nicolas Schöffer’s cybernetic automaton CYSP 1. This time, however, it was not spinning on the rooftop of Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse but photographed in an intimate studio session with two adroit women dancers. Schöffer’s automaton, apparently, had become a mainstream cultural curiosity for its invocation of human–machine symbiosis. As a visual trope, it is conspicuously coterminous with the rebranding needs of a burgeoning nuclear industry which, only a little more than a decade after the atom bomb proved its destructive powers on Hiroshima, was striving – as the British ad illustrates – to present itself as a historically unmatched, effective, and stable power source. Atomic power was portrayed as an unlimited source of energy perfectly suited to the age of automation: ‘Whatever you want, it’s coming your way.’ In this light, the discursive embeddedness of Fin de Copenhague bespeaks a historical situation in which the representation of work (and of all the metaphors and cultural valences surrounding human labour) was fundamentally changing.

To sum up the argument so far: Jorn’s gesture of détournement attests to a situation in which labour had finally lost its charm for the avant-garde and was no longer positioned as ‘the source of all wealth and culture’, just as the manual worker was no longer the role model of the revolution. The loss of faith in work and in ‘worker identity’ maps onto the waning of ‘programmatism’, a theory and practice oriented towards the horizon of the worker’s class identity and its countless programmes.⁷⁰

With the onset of post-war automation and the restructuring of the class relations that it entailed, the affirmative vision of work that had also historically structured the avant-garde experience was entering the terminal phase of a protracted crisis – symptomatized in part by Touraine’s post-industrial conundrum to which Fin de Copenhague and other early situationist works specifically responded. Fin de Copenhague is the product of a moment in which ideas about the human motor were being sifted through a resurrected cultural trope, the automaton. But, like Schöffer’s CYSP 1, the automaton was now cybernetically potentiated and electronically hardwired to fit better with the emerging ideology of full automation. This is the context for Fin de Copenhague, which – to paraphrase T. J. Clark’s view on critical art practices – ‘takes a certain set of technical procedures and traditional forms, and makes them the tools with which to alter ideology’.⁷¹

The Ideology of ‘Full Automation’

In his letter to the printers, considered here as a proxy for similar concerns in Fin de Copenhague, Jorn specified that the ‘intention’ was that the work ‘should be finished without us having anything to do with it – so total industrialization’.⁷² The original Danish term in the letter to the printers (preserved in the Jorn archive in Silkeborg) is komplet industrialisation (which in itself sounds like an Anglicism). Clearly, given the context, the term ‘industrialisation’ functions as a generic stand-in for ‘automation’, which, at this point, had recently gained currency in languages such as English and French but had not yet been fully established in Danish.⁷³ For reasons immanent to the problematic, an alternative translation of komplet industrialisation (and one resonant with contemporary political theory) would be ‘full automation’. And automation was, in fact, a topic of great concern to the situationists at this point. In a letter to Jorn dated 1 September 1957, Debord writes:

After the Fin de Copenhague experiment, I gathered a great number of elements to construct the story I’ve been telling you about [a reference to Mémoires which appeared in 1959]. I’ll ask you for some colored lines complex enough that they can form the ‘load-bearing structure’, as they say in architecture. If Permild is ready for a much greater shock, it will work out well. I’ve also gathered some citations for an article on the prospects held out by automation, an article that we should, I think, write together.⁷⁴

This letter to Jorn, written in the aftermath of the founding conference of the Situationist International (SI) in July 1957 in Cosio di Arroscia, Italy, lists some of the projects that Debord hoped would help to create ‘a new legend’ about their newly founded organization.⁷⁵ Debord’s letter to Jorn, which is included in the author’s published correspondence, provides an entry point into the woefully understudied topic of automation in the SI.⁷⁶ If one consults the original letter (currently in the Debord archive in Paris), one notices a minor but telling detail that looks like this:

I am also assembling some citations for an article on the perspectives of automation, which, I believe, we should write together.⁷⁷

Crossing out words as he wrote, Debord was apparently at odds with himself as to whether he should use the neutral word ‘citations’ or the more straightforward ‘ideological elements’ to describe the text fragments and cut-outs that he was in the process of gathering. It is clear, then, that the proposed article was intended both as a critical response to the ideology of automation – as encapsulated in the British ad’s hyperbolic discourse about a capitalist society of abundance – and as a development of the perspectives foreclosed by such ideology.

In addition to this, one finds among the preparatory drafts for Pour la forme (held in the Asger Jorn archive at Museum Jorn, Denmark) a series of chaotic and hitherto overlooked handwritten manuscript pages on the topic of automation, which apparently predate Debord’s letter. It appears that Jorn had already – either shortly prior to or more directly in conjunction with the making of Fin de Copenhague – engaged intensely with the question of automation. First jotted down sometime around March 1957, in response to a lecture by the Argentinian designer Tomás Maldonado at the ICA London, Jorn’s two major drafts (each comprising around five handwritten pages) carry allusive titles such as ‘L’Âge robot. Sur le rôle de l’incertitude pour le développement de l’intelligence’, and, more simply, ‘Contre l’Automation de l’homme’.⁷⁸

These texts, though following their own anarchic Jornian development of thought and argument, clearly prefigure the more concise ‘Les Situationnistes et l’automation’, which was first published under the sole signature of Jorn in the collection of essays that made up the book Pour la Forme (and which, like most Jorn’s French texts, Debord helped revise and edit).⁷⁹ Debord apparently considered the article a cornerstone in emergent situationist theory, as it was included in the first issue of the SI’s eponymous journal (1958) and republished on several occasions during the SI’s existence, for instance in the little-remarked bulletin Cahier pour un paysage à inventer (Montreal, 1960) that was conceived as a situationist outpost in North America.⁸⁰

Figure 3.6. Manuscript, Asger Jorn, c.1956. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

In this crucial text, Jorn engages with the concept and reality of automation primarily by way of adversarial or ‘ideological’ viewpoints. One of the principal antagonists was the Catholic, tradition-alist, right-wing writer Louis Salleron, whose book L’Automation had recently appeared in the popular Que Sais-Je? series. The series – with its unique mix of a tendency to vulgarize complex matters (often philosophical, scientific, or technical in nature) and a flair for singling out topics that would resonate across the public imaginary – had instituted the livres de poches sales revolution in France.⁸¹ Any title appearing in the series would have been printed, according to the publisher’s minimum requirements, in 10,000 copies per edition.⁸² As one author quipped on the subject of the Que Sais-Je? series, the bulk output taken together formed one of the world’s largest printed encyclopaedias and provided an ‘answer to everything’.⁸³ In the first three decades of the series’ existence (from 1941 onwards), so many paperbacks had been pumped into circulation that, if stacked on top of one another, they would have dwarfed the Eiffel tower twenty-four times over!⁸⁴

Salleron’s L’Automation, together with George-Th éodule Guilbaud’s La Cybernétique, which had appeared in the same series and to which Salleron repeatedly refers, undoubtedly matched the publishing house’s criteria for haute vulgarisation and helped set the stage for a broader public discussion of cybernetics and automation.⁸⁵ Salleron opens with the following précis:

In 1947 a new concept destined to a singular fortune was born: automation. Two men have claimed paternity: D. S. Harder, executive vice-president of Ford, Cleveland, and, John Diebold, professor at Harvard University … What is automation? Hundreds of definitions exist already. We could say, in the simplest manner, that automation is the ensemble of automatic procedures that replace the labor of man.⁸⁶

As Salleron admits, replacing the labour of man has always been an incentive for capitalism even in the age of simple mechanization. One of the great points of discussion in relation to the topic of automation, a topic that, according to Salleron, already ‘counts articles in the thousands’, was to define the term vis-à-vis the term mechanization.⁸⁷ ‘How is automation different from mechanization?’ Salleron asks, and runs the reader through attempts to define the essence of the word.⁸⁸ Like Pollock, but without the Marxist class analysis that distinguishes his approach, Salleron stresses cybernetic control systems and electronic feedback mechanisms as the core distinguishing feature for automation proper. But Salleron ignores capital’s core incentive to reorganize production cybernetically – to reduce the costs of human labour power and boost productivity – and thus fails to see beyond the standard narrative of technological progress. This is where the situationist analysis of automation becomes relevant.

Beyond Mechanical Reproduction

What might have sparked Debord’s and Jorn’s interest in a critical rethinking of automation is the SI-adjacent French ultra-left journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.⁸⁹ As early as July 1956, the journal had treated the topic of automation in relation to reports from a series of strikes in the British automobile industry.⁹⁰ In an article penned by Pierre Chaulieu (one of Cornelius Castoriadis’s many pseudonyms), the term ‘automation’ was subjected to critique for producing an ideological mirage that naturalized capitalist progress and obscured the analysis of the actual historical transformations in the organic composition of capital.⁹¹

According to Castoriadis, automation, when returned to its basis in capitalist exploitation, pointed to problems related to the reorganization of labour and the restructuring of the class relation at a given historical conjuncture:

In order to understand the effects automation has on the concrete structure of the capitalist factory, we must grasp the social function it is called upon to fulfill in an exploitative society and its place in the history of capital-labor relations. Considered in the abstract, the major technical changes in the field of production in capitalist society appear as the result of a relatively ‘autonomous’ technological evolution, and their employment in production appears as the result of an application of an equally ‘autonomous’ principle of profitability – that is, independent of all social considerations. In fact, the application of these changes en masse to industry takes on an extremely precise social content; bluntly speaking, it almost always constitutes a moment in the class struggle, a capital offensive against labor, considered as the originating force in production.⁹²

Automation changed the forms but not the content of alienation. That technology has always been used as a weapon in class struggle, and on the level of politics as an argument to install a class of ‘specialists’ in power, was also one of the main points in the hotly debated articles that Castoriadis published in Socialisme ou Barbarie between 1955 and 1957 under the title ‘Sur le contenu du socialisme’ (‘On the Content of Socialism’).⁹³ In the second article of the series, Castoriadis argues that to see the crisis of managing society politically (the crisis of politics or modern society was one of the controversies of the Keynesian era) as the result of an ‘inevitable’ technical evolution leaves only two options. Either one can adopt a defeatist stance that decries technological evolution but comes up with no alternative – here, Castoriadis is targeting the French critic of technology Jacques Ellul – or one can, inversely, embrace technological development as a pretext for strengthening class-based domination and exploitation, typically arguing something along the lines that ‘the content of politics – namely, the direction and management of society – has become highly complex, embracing an extraordinary mass of data and problems, each of which can be mastered only through advanced specialization’.⁹⁴

Castoriadis’s critical point, foreshadowing Debord’s later arguments, is that the separation between life and politics, mirrored on the level of class by the separation of workers from the means of production, is the root problem of modern alienation no matter the historically specific form:

We discuss this sophism because it puts us on the road to an important truth. In the case of politics as in the case of production, people tend to blame modern technique and modern ‘technicization’ in general instead of seeing that the problems stem from a specifically capitalist technology. In politics as in production, capitalism does not only mean the use of technically ‘neutral’ means for capitalist ends. It also means the creation and development of specific techniques, aimed at ensuring the exploitation of the producers – or the oppression, mystification, and political alienation and manipulation of citizens in general. At the level of production, socialism will mean the conscious transformation of technology. Technique will be put in the service of the people. On the political level, socialism will imply a similar transformation: technique will be put in the service of democracy.⁹⁵

Castoriadis’s intervention in the automation debate in France around 1956–57 clearly anticipates the situationist analysis. Another important text that resonates with the SI’s critique of automation is an article that appeared in March 1957, in the reformist Marxist journal Arguments. In an article entitled ‘L’Automation et ses ideologies’ (Automation and its ideologies), Franco Momigliano charged both left and right with failing to see how automation opened up as yet unexplored horizons for overcoming capital by way of its own internal contradictions.⁹⁶ According to Momigliano, even Marxists systematically failed to imagine a transition to a communist society that did not correspond to a Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy of mechanical progress and historical determinism. In a passage that could have been taken from the Internationale Situationniste, Momigliano sets forth a ‘hypothesis of new possible alternatives, new dialectic developments, new qualitative jumps made possible by the new quality of the productive forces’.⁹⁷ But, despite the arguments of both Castoriadis and Momigliano, the situationist analysis of automation would remark, ‘it is rather astonishing that almost no one until now has dared to examine the ultimate implications of automation’.⁹⁸ Why is this so?

Part of the reason why the SI did not pay adequate tribute to existing critiques of automation was most likely (apart from avant-garde snobbism) that they were unhappy with the implied solution offered by Marxists of all stripes who wanted to ‘socialize’ the means of production and redistribute wealth. One of the basic critical points that Jorn makes in his article is that to socialize production does not fundamentally change the problematic capitalist nature of automation. To socialize the means of production without at the same time establishing counter-values (redefining the form of wealth) would be to continue the capitalist devaluation and neutralization of the singularity and uniqueness of human existence:

The goal of socialism is abundance: the greatest number of goods for the greatest number of people, which statistically implies reducing the unexpected to the level of the improbable. Increasing the number of goods reduces the value of each. This devaluation of all human goods to a level of ‘total neutrality’ will be the inevitable consequence of a purely scientific development of socialism. It is unfortunate that many intellectuals fail to get beyond the idea of mechanical reproduction, and are instead contributing toward the adaptation of humanity to this bland and symmetrified future.⁹⁹

Pointing to ‘abundance’ as the highest goal of socialism, and showing that adherence to the capitalist course of technical progress contradicts that goal, Jorn argues against socializing production without revolutionizing the foundations of this kind of production at the same time, to wit: capitalist production oriented towards the extraction of surplus value and the realizations of profits. The much fabled ‘takeover’ of the means of production would merely imply a formal change of ownership in which workers would then take part in the exploitation of all, by all, to the detriment of free individual expression. But what alternative proposal did Jorn and the SI offer?

Asger Jorn’s Ontological Inversion

In this and other articles from the late 1950s, Jorn imagined that art, if wrested from the claws of a bourgeois and alienated form of expression, could again provide a productive counter-value: a human surplus of excess, festivity, and luxury incommensurable with the value-form of the commodity.¹⁰⁰

To Jorn, going beyond the ideological stalemate of socialism – which shares with its proclaimed class enemies an unblinking faith in historical progress and nurtures an impoverished illusion of abundance – meant imagining communism differently. Communism could not be the result of technological development, in and by itself, but was, rather, a collective project that would emerge in the process of its own becoming, if it were fostered by an artistic experimentation with new forms of life and ‘constructed situations’.

Echoing Marx’s famous statement that ‘what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’, Jorn argued that the artistic imagination was something like a distinctively human capacity without which no collective future project – communism – would even be possible.

Hence, to Jorn, traditional Marxist theory had failed to think the question of technology through. Consequently, the problem of automation, to the bourgeois mind as well as to the socialist mind, appeared as a problem of how to plan for a future conceived as an extension of the present, rather than planning for a future oriented towards what technical progress had made imaginable and hence also possible. Automation expends with labour and frees up time for leisure – everyone agreed on this point. But, as Jorn sarcastically notes:

The new leisure time appears as an empty space that present-day society can imagine filling only by multiplying the pseudo play of pathetic hobbies. But this leisure time is also the basis on which could be built the most magnificent cultural construction that has ever been imagined. This goal is obviously outside the concerns of the partisans of automation. It is in fact antagonistic to the direct tendency of automation … Automation can develop rapidly only once it has established as a goal a perspective contrary to its own establishment, and only it is known how to realize such a general perspective in the process [au fur et à mésure] of the development of automation.¹⁰¹

Considered in the light of Jorn’s theory of art, the situationist project comes across as a necessary ‘artistic’ corrective to Marxist thought. The artistic imagination, Jorn believed, was a precondition for the eventual overthrow of capitalist relations of production. An ontological inversion thus takes place in Jorn’s theory, where ‘art’, as Graham Birtwistle argued in his seminal examination of Jorn’s theoretical oeuvre, is ‘placed in the base and not in the superstructure’.¹⁰²

This ontological inversion reads not only as a response to orthodox Marxist thought, or to what Jorn calls the ‘moronic optimism’ of the prophets of the end-of-labour, such as Alain Touraine and other prominent voices in the sociological cacophony of the post-industrial conundrum. Jorn’s theory of the ontological primacy of art was also, if implicitly, a riposte to a competing current of situationist thought secretly fascinated with the prospects of cybernetics and automation. I am thinking, of course, about Constant’s vision of the future, New Babylon (discussed in Chapter 2). One of the most speculative and future-oriented approaches pursued at that point, New Babylon comes across, as cultural theorist McKenzie Wark notes, as though it has been extrapolated from an imaginary unfettered capitalist development.¹⁰³ Constant pushes the traditional Marxist assumption of a ‘fettering thesis’ – the idea that capitalist relations of production at some point begin to function as a brake on development but also at the same time necessarily produce the means to overcome these limitations – towards its own immanent conclusion.¹⁰⁴

By contrast, throughout his theoretical oeuvre, Jorn insists on the necessity of a Nietzschean (or Bataillean) overturning of values as a precondition for a successful revolution that would not merely ‘complete’ the bourgeois revolution. In fact, Jorn’s critique of automation reads as an early approximation to a value-critical method insofar as he singles out the historical specificity of the value-form of the commodity. Jorn’s critique essentially aims to show that it is

possible to accept Marx’s analysis and critique of the capitalist form of value, the commodity, without thereby accepting the identification of this form with value as such [la valeur en soi]. That is to say that is possible to accept the scientific side of Das Kapital without thereby automatically accepting the political conclusions that have been drawn from it.¹⁰⁵

Having made an impoverished economic conception of wealth the basis of its programme, the workers’ movement, Jorn charges, has imagined communism as simple ‘socialization’ without inquiring critically into the historical specificity, the social form, that wealth acquires under capitalist relations of production.¹⁰⁶ This is why automation, which is a tendency in capitalism pushed to its most extreme and inhuman consequence (making labour itself superfluous to production), will never in and by itself accomplish communism as something qualitatively different from capitalism. According to Jorn, what is required is an inversion of the principles upon which automation is founded. The basis of communism, if we take Jorn’s argument to its conclusion, will not be work, with abstract labour as the supreme social value, but the creation of a different kind of surplus irreducible to the value-form of the commodity.

This reading of Jorn, to return to Fin de Copenhague, also points to a latent conflict between the constructivist ethos of mass production (which historically implies a celebration of work) and the ‘critique of work’ in situationist discourse. Considered in the context of its enunciation, Fin de Copenhague complicates standard conceptions of the relationship between Debord and Jorn. As Jorn scholar Ruth Baumeister notes, Jorn is usually portrayed as the ‘artist-impresario’ while Debord is cast in the role of the ‘theoretician and/or philosopher’, even though Jorn contributed in equal measure to shaping the theoretical output of the SI.¹⁰⁷

And what about art, then? Although Jorn sees art as a point of departure for establishing a ‘counter-value’ and emphasizes the singularity of human creative existence, he is no more arguing to reinstate artistic subjectivity in its specialized and historically specific bourgeois form than he is arguing to revalorize human labour or work. For Jorn, work and art, as historically separated domains, are equally problematic. This is why Fin de Copenhague cannot be unproblematically assimilated to the category of a work of art. The separation between art and labour is at the heart of the bourgeois social ontology that Fin de Copenhague critically addresses, as do many other situationist works from that period, for instance Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s industrial paintings of Jorn’s series of painterly modifications. Likewise, Debord and Jorn situated Fin de Copenhague, to use once more Mansoor’s terms of analysis, ‘as at once a repository of historical symptoms and as a form of resistance’.¹⁰⁸ In this sense, Fin de Copenhague embodies a performative strategy of being with and against, a simultaneous devalorization/revalorization of the work of art that becomes legible through an analysis not just of its intellectual content but of its material form.

The Performative Dimension

It is sometimes said that one should not judge a book by its cover. But as Thomas Hvid Kromann’s analysis of Fin de Copenhague details, Fin de Copenhague is a book that literally wears its heart on its sleeve. The sleeve, in this case, is made of flong: an anonymous readymade material that Jorn and Debord chose to wrap their publicity-montages in. ‘Flong’, as Kromann explains, is a residual ‘waste-product from the production of newspapers by stereography’.¹⁰⁹ The choice of material thus

combines a unique element of the mass-produced with a mass-produced element of the unique: the flong was fabricated as part of an industrial process, but represented a one-off. At the same time, this unique part was a waste product. In this paradoxical process, an auratic artefact was re-established, an artwork in the format of the book.¹¹⁰

But no sooner is an auratic quality re-established on the level of form before it is called into question again on the level of performativity: Fin de Copenhague, as Kromann notes, ‘was priced as a book and not as an artwork, despite its unique cover, and despite the fact that each copy was numbered and signed’.¹¹¹ In addition to the 200 numbered and signed copies of the book’s first edition, one must add an ‘unknown quantity’ that were hors de commerce or circulated in some other way outside the established channels of art-world distribution.¹¹² How many additional copies were printed remains on the level of pure speculation. But, with regard to the sequel to Fin de Copenhague, the Mémoires, Jorn wrote to the printers that:

We need a thousand copies and you can print as many as you would like in addition to that. Even if you print ten thousand. Of our one thousand copies we want 250 bound and numbered. If you want to raise this number, you can.¹¹³

One wonders, then, if it is not fair to assume that the same cavalier attitude to art-world conventions would equally have applied to Fin de Copenhague. The point here is that the nascent situationist art-political strategy apparently consisted in subverting the category of the work of art from within – by simultaneously appealing to the ‘structures of meaning, expectation and reception’ of the art world and undermining these conventions in one and the same ‘performative’ act; this is what Foster suggests calling the avant-garde’s ‘performative dimension’.¹¹⁴ On this reading, Fin de Copenhague is a performative gesture that brought the constructivist ethos of mass production to bear on the post-war moment’s resurfacing of modernist art practices and intended the former’s destabilization by its own proper means.

What is significant is the fact that Fin de Copenhague brings the art world and the world of the commodity (as a diagram for labour, time, and value) onto a single plane of evaluation: that of the book. The dizzying whirls of paint and the elements of collage that make up the ‘aesthetic content’ of the book not only nods to American abstract expressionist painting or pop art, or to bodily fluids or some such thing.¹¹⁵ More profoundly, when placed in conjunction with the formal contradictions spelled out above with reference to the avant-garde book tradition, Fin de Copenhague forces a point about the spiralling logic of capital accumulation and the aesthetic disorientation that ensues.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that in ‘Fin de Copenhague, the dominant and obligatory practical information given on a standard book cover – names of the authors, title and publisher – was replaced by a highly visual and tactile but authorless surface’.¹¹⁶ Kromann suggests that the authorless surface highlights the ‘social authorship’ of the book that was also implied by the actual production process that included ‘the professional knowledge and skill of the printer’.¹¹⁷

Fin de Copenhague’s performative attack on the idea of singular authorship (and artistic subjectivity more generally) is resonant, moreover, with historically specific changes to the legal super-structure of art at this point. In March 1957 (directly preceding the making of Fin de Copenhague), a much-discussed bill on ‘immaterial rights’ – la loi du 11 mars 1957 – was passed. As French historian Anne Latournerie explains, this law followed years of heated parliamentary debate and had the perceived effect of institutionally ‘sacralizing and idealizing the author and the idea of original creation’, all while inaugurating a new epoch in the ‘mediation’ of culture and art by the state.¹¹⁸

Against this backdrop of statecraft and cultural politics, Fin de Copenhague’s most obvious artistic statement – the colourful paint drips on all the book’s pages – comes into renewed focus as a gesture towards the raging 1950s culture war between New York and Paris.¹¹⁹ As art historian Serge Guilbaut shows, the wild painterly style of abstract expressionism came to mediate American claims to cultural hegemony through a cult of individual creativity centring on artists such as Jackson Pollock. Significantly, Pollock was played against his French counterpart, Jean Dubuffet, by the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg, who saw in the American painter a ‘rougher and more brutal’ but also a ‘completer’ modern artist than Dubuffet: ‘In any case,’ Greenberg stated about Pollock, ‘he is certainly less conservative, less of an easel painter in the traditional sense than Dubuffet.’¹²⁰ Jorn’s paint drips, then, as Kurczynski convincingly argues, ‘depict the reminiscence of a gesture twice removed, in a combination of homage and critique of Pollock’.¹²¹

The drips are indeed a gesture of détournement of then celebrated art forms, including abstract expressionism. But the détournement, in this case, takes on a more literal dimension too: Jorn turns the artistic proposition of Pollock upside down. As the Danish printer Verner Otto Permild recalls, Jorn climbed back down the ladder from which he had been pouring ink, picked up the still wet printing plates from the floor, and held them upside down to make the paint drips deliberately ‘run’.¹²² Apart from Kurczynski’s comment that these ‘spatters’ contrast with Pollock’s more ‘graceful loops and splashes’ and creates a heightened sense of ‘disorder’, Jorn’s gesture also points to something else.¹²³ Jorn’s running drips performatively suggest that abstract expressionist paintings, despite claims to the contrary, were evidently (economically) premised on everything that the floor was not: to wit, the gallery wall.¹²⁴

This specific aesthetic feature of Fin de Copenhague comes across, then, like a satirical response to Greenberg’s insistence that abstract expressionist painting, in contradistinction to what he saw as outdated French painting, was borne by ‘a persistent urge, as persistent as it is largely unconscious, to go beyond the cabinet picture which is destined to occupy only a spot on the wall’.¹²⁵ Even before the paint on a Pollock canvas is dry, Jorn seems to be saying, it is fondled by a thousand hands, twisted and turned over in the commercial art gallery mill, pulled through the accelerating cylinders of the rotary press, and reproduced in full colour image spreads in major American magazines such as LIFE (1949) or Vogue (1951), before, eventually, being hung on a ‘spot on the wall’ for which it was destined from the beginning.

It is difficult, and largely irrelevant, to say whether Jorn intended this gesture as an overt critique of Pollock or as an homage, or both at once. Regardless of the self-proclaimed standpoint of a work of art – overtly critical, ambiguously satirical, jubilantly affirmative, or supposedly neutral – any work, statement, or representation inevitably ties into and is shaped by the social and material horizon of the world against which it is poised. But what kind of world is Fin de Copenhague responding to – and how?

A World in Its Own Image

What is significant about Fin de Copenhague from an art-historical perspective is the fact that it brings the art world and the world of the commodity together on a single plane: that of the book. The book format becomes charged with all the symbolic weight of the capitalist world in its entirety, and the extravagant swathes of paint and heightened sense of disorder mirror the spiralling logic of capital accumulation. Seen from this point of view, the book closely traces a path that led from Gutenberg via Lissitzky to Marshall McLuhan, for whom, famously, the front page of any given newspaper, as stated in his 1951 classic The Mechanical Bride, refracted in miniature ‘the image of a world society’.¹²⁶ I do not necessarily mean to imply that McLuhanism was a ‘hidden referent’ for the situationists, as Andreas Huyssen has claimed for Jean Baudrillard and French theory more generally.¹²⁷ But in light of the fact that Debord would later refer to McLuhan as the ‘spectacle’s first apologist’ and the ‘most convinced imbecile of the century’, it seems at least worth noting how Fin de Copenhague is also a détournement of the then-popular idea of the global village. Where McLuhan celebrated the fact that modern science and technology had led to a conception of the entire ‘planet as a single city’, Fin de Copenhague, by contrast, points to an ambiguously positioned coordinate on an imploding world map, a place, paradoxically, both somewhere specific and nowhere at all.¹²⁸ The ‘end’ of Copenhagen, then, is also in a sense the end of the world.

And La Fin du Monde was, coincidentally, the title of an experimental 1919 book by Jorn’s former teacher, the French painter Fernand Léger, who, under the influence of Lissitzky and Russian constructivism became one of the European pioneers of book design. More than referring to a specific geographical location, as marked out by the cartographic renderings of Denmark scattered over the book’s pages, Copenhague also becomes an allegory for the world considered as part of an anonymous global process of capital accumulation. In this, Fin de Copenhague prefigures a concern with the problem of representing capital. As cultural theorists Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have shown, the topic of representing capital’s ‘production and circulation’ fundamentally structures Debord’s later work, The Society of the Spectacle, as neatly illustrated by Debord’s own choice of cover art, a historical map of global commodity flows, for the 1971 re-edition.¹²⁹

According to Debord (and contrary to McLuhan’s idea that advertising agencies are responsible for a ‘distorted’ world-picture):

The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a Weltanschaaung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm – a world view transformed into a material force.¹³⁰

In this famous passage, Debord is echoing the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which Marx and Engels provide a most vivid description of a world that not only produces ideology (or distorted forms of representation) but which also, inversely, shapes that world itself according to its own internal needs, wants, and desires – in short, in the image of itself:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.¹³¹

If capitalism ‘creates a world after its own image’, to sample the famous phrase from the Communist Manifesto, that image was clearly the object of critique in Fin de Copenhague – and in the Situationist International more broadly.

Like the British ad in Fin de Copenhague that opened this chapter, the ideological mirage of the age of automation obscures the constitutively asymmetric contours of the class relation, which was being restructured from the ground up. Fin de Copenhague thus represents a double crisis: that of production and that of circulation, or that of work and that of art. Former situationist T. J. Clark provides a clue about how to assess the work of art in relation to its proper historical moment: ideology, he says, is a term that captures all those

bodies of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation by which social classes, in conflict with each other, attempt to ‘naturalize’ their particular histories’ … All ideologies claim for a quite specific, and disputable, relation to the means of production a quality of inevitability, a seat in human nature. They take as their material the real constraints and contradictions of a given historical situation – they are bound to, otherwise what content would they have, what would they be for? – but they generalize the repressions, imagine the contradictions solved.¹³²

Ideologies, in other words, belong to and symptomatize the ‘real constraints and contradictions of a given historical situation’. The given historical situation to which Fin de Copenhague belongs is one where automation-debates were front and centre of French intellectual life, and the cybernetic hypothesis was rehearsed both by revolutionaries such as Castoriadis and reactionaries such as Salleron. In its choice of materials as well as in its performative strategies, Fin de Copenhague comes across as a fiercely original, if ambiguous and conflicted, response to this historically specific context – a context from where our present-day phantasmagorias of full automation also first emerged.¹³³

4

Rage Against the Machine:
L’Opération robot and May ’68

On 26 January 1968, at the Université Paris-Nanterre, a series of minor disturbances allegedly caused by ‘activists, situationists and revolutionaries’ turned into a ‘veritable riot’.¹ The riot erupted from a student protest that unexpectedly found itself face-to-face with the forces of authority, summoned by the university dean, Pierre Grappin, to crack down on troublemakers and restore order.²

Calling the cops, however, contravened centuries of French custom demarcating the university as politically neutral ground: with the arrival of armed police on campus – as one participant later remarked – the situation turned violent and abruptly transitioned ‘from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era’.³ Some of the more radicalized students belonging to the para-situationist group the Enragés – which would soon ‘officially’ join ranks with the SI – improvised a shower of projectiles and effectively forced the cops to retreat. In celebration of their victory, the students triumphantly set several vehicles ablaze in the surrounding parking lot.⁴ Little could they have known that they had just ignited a fire that would ‘set all French universities aflame and shake up the entirety of French society’.⁵

One of the few remainders of this riot that so clearly prefigures May ’68 is a poster picturing the dean, Grappin, encircled by cops holding up their matraques for his protection. Above the picture, a caption set in bold type and capital letters: ‘EN ATTENDANT LA CYBERNETIQUE, LES FLICS’ (Waiting for cybernetics, the cops).

Figure 4.1. Poster on the wall of Université Paris-Nanterre, 1968.

In this atmosphere of post-riot urgency, three members of the Enragés – René Riesel, Patrick Cheval, and Gérard Birgogne – had swiftly designed and printed this poster over the weekend. On the morning of 30 January, the students at Nanterre walked into hallways plastered over with freshly minted posters that greatly ‘impressed everyone’.⁶ The poster apparently captured the radical mood at Nanterre while aesthetically assuming the situationist portrait of power that was arguably a determining factor in the build-up to and unfolding of May–June 1968.⁷

The depiction of Grappin, while specifically levelled against a ‘university ghetto on the brink to cybernetization’, was also, in a broader sense, a representation of a capitalist character mask equally fit to all of society’s ‘cops, priests, cyberneticians, professors, and sociologists’ (to use the terms of an Enragés tract of the time).⁸ From this perspective, the poster’s aesthetic equation of the term ‘cybernetics’ with a broader nexus of social domination, violence, and control aligns it with the situationist critical analysis of late capitalist society: an analysis spelled out in two pivotal SI publications of 1967, the Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations by Raoul Vaneigem and The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.⁹

Echoing these key situationist works, the poster draws attention to cybernetics as a new form of post-sovereign, impersonal, and abstract social domination. One cannot help but notice, for instance, how Grappin, the patriarchal figure at the centre of attention, seems to be dissolving – quite literally – in the mechanisms churning beneath him, and supporting, if only for a little longer, his sovereign stance. In the broader visual economy of the poster, the term ‘cybernetics’, then, clearly functions as shorthand for a more elaborate diagnosis of capital’s extended sway over social life under changed – or changing – historical circumstances: what Debord and Vaneigem would analyse under the respective rubrics of le spectacle and le pouvoir, spectacle and power. Notice also how the chair under Grappin is suspended in mid-air, creating the impression that the seat of his power, his professorial chair in this case, is being kicked away from underneath him and whirled into the maelstrom. But is it a crisis of power? Grappin appears remarkably stoic: his chin is held up, gaze firmly fixed on the horizon of the future. Is he blissfully ignorant, the poster seems to ask, of the fact that the era of personal authority is coming to an end, or is he calmly awaiting his cybernetic redemption, the point when society will be, to borrow from Richard Brautigan’s famous contemporaneous poem, ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’: when power will no longer have to resort to overt, corporeal violence to maintain a fragile social equilibrium but can instead rely on the cybernetically potentiated ‘mute compulsion’ of capital?¹⁰

In this chapter, I historically and conceptually develop the situationist critique of cybernetics while analysing the role that this conceptual trope played in the build-up to May ’68 – as emblematized by the Nanterre poster. The purpose of this chapter is thus twofold. On one level, it completes the survey of the situationist movement’s mixed engagements with the cybernetic hypothesis; on another, it contributes to an understanding of what Fredric Jameson, in his attempt to periodize the 1960s, calls the ‘general mutation in culture’ that foreshadowed postmodernism.¹¹

The Police

The text on the Nanterre poster, hardly legible in the photo, gives us an idea of how high the stakes were at Nanterre by this point. An English approximation of the somewhat convoluted French would read something like this:

Comrades! Grappin-the-truncheon, shoulder to shoulder with his [François] Bouricaud, supported by the arguments of [Edgar] Morin and [Alain] Touraine, has shown the extent of what he would like to ‘deny’ by placing his ghetto and their rackets under police protection. The Lateran Treaty that still governs this old world and its modernist university has proven its last resort and raison d’état: the recourse to police violence clarifies what is meant by ‘dialogue’ on campus. Abuse of confidence to the Left, abuse of power to the Right.

So that spirit be wrested from its cell

Let us fan the forge’s flames ourselves

And strike while the iron is hot

(The Internationale),

Nanterre, 29 January 1968.¹²

The text itself requires some discursive unpacking, but one thing that stands out on the original poster is that the text’s punctuation consists of swastikas; a not-so-subtle reference to insults of ‘Nazi’ that students had hurled at Grappin during the protests.¹³ The motivation for such insults was the rumour that Grappin had asked members of his teaching staff to draft a blacklist with the names of particularly unruly students. With Daniel Cohn-Bendit, son of German Jews who had fled to Paris during the Second World War, repeatedly singled out as a troublemaker, it was a short step to assume anti-Semitic motives on behalf of the administration. But this provocative typographical innovation on behalf of the Enragés’ design committee did not land well with all students. Grappin, after all, was publicly known as an ancien Résistant (the French honorary term for a former resistance fighter) and a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party.¹⁴

The date on the poster, 29 January, suggests that the text responded to Grappin’s official disavowal of what he considered ‘gratuitous accusations’ in an open letter addressed to the students at Nanterre.¹⁵ According to Grappin, there never was a blacklist of any kind. Grappin’s denial, to which the poster’s text refers, was ‘unanimously’ supported by his trusted staff in the Assemblée: a printed circular affirmed ‘categorically’ that ‘there is not and has never been any “blacklist”’.¹⁶ Historically, however, this affair has been complicated by the comments of Henri Lefebvre, who, like other prominent French intellectuals at the time (notably Edgar Morin and Alain Touraine, both mentioned on the poster) was a professor at Nanterre at the time:

The stimulus [for the March 22 movement] was this business about the blacklist, and I was the one who concocted the blacklist. What actually happened was that the administration phoned my office and asked for a list of the most politically disruptive students. I told them to get lost; I frequently had to say to the dean in those days, ‘Sir, I am not a cop.’ So the blacklist never existed, in black and white. But they were trying to do it, and I told the students to defend themselves; I stirred things up a bit. One has one’s little perversities, after all.¹⁷

Whether this anecdote is unfounded, as Kristin Ross, who conducted the interview, soundly speculates, it appears that there might have been some not entirely ‘gratuitous’ reason for the students to protest the blacklist, even in the face of its apparent non-existence.¹⁸ What aggravated the students even further in the days before the riot broke out were sightings of plainclothes police officers on campus. On 26 January, students carried enlarged cop portraits attached to sticks with them in the procession. Conveniently, these sticks doubled as weapons when the cops arrived later that day in full riot gear to shut down the protests with their truncheons. From that point on, the dean who called the cops would be known, according to the poster, as Grappin-lamatraque (Grappin-the-truncheon).¹⁹

To many radical students, the police intervention on 26 January confirmed a sneaking suspicion that the supposed political neutrality of the university was an illusion that veiled its real function: to help the capitalist state maintain its social rule. Behind the neutral functionalist façades, the partisans of the state and les forces de l’ordre were apparently at work. As the text on the poster states, the rhetoric of dialogue is always on the tip of the tongue, spelling out police violence. The police, in this context, was a concept refracting a more complex social dynamics of power. The figure of the police, as Ross reminds us by way of Jacques Rancière, is ‘a kind of logic of the social: the logic that assigns people to their places and their social identities, that makes them identical to their functions’. This has developed into a steady trope of French post-’68 critical theory:

In the wake of ’68, a period of massive concern with public order and its breakdown, when the government’s tangible fear of the population taking to the streets again had manifested itself in a dramatic increase of police presence everywhere – in cafés, museums, on street corners, wherever more than two or three people gather – philosophy and theory begin to bear the trace of that presence.²⁰

The police as metonym for power was, as the Nanterre poster suggests, already familiar in situationist-inflected critical discourse. The situationists came up with one of the earliest and most original analyses of the police as a social logic extending its reach from the depths of the factory to the peculiar décor of modern urban existence, and further on into the most intimate fabric of everyday life. The Nanterre poster’s association of cybernetics with cops points to a nucleus of French intellectual history, a particular historical conjuncture somewhat abbreviatedly chronicled as ‘May ’68’.²¹ In the following, I wish to broaden the scope of May ’68 by focusing on the cultural and intellectual mutations that prefigured it by a decade or so.²² I do this by tracking the situationist critique of cybernetics and examining how this particular theoretical concern evolved in tandem with a series of strategic attacks on the representatives of a perceived nexus of cybernetic power.

The Spirit of the Age

In their May ’68 balance sheet, the situationists highlighted an event at the University of Strasbourg in 1966 as ‘evidently a prelude to the activities of the Enragés in Nanterre’.²³ The so-called prelude was a rather carefully orchestrated attack on one of the leading French cyberneticians of the time, Abraham Moles, who, on 26 October 1966, was about to take up the position of departmental chair as a newly promoted full professor in social psychology at the University of Strasbourg. A few minutes into his inaugural lecture, Moles began to receive a shower of overripe tomatoes, forcing him to retreat from the lecture to seek cover. According to the historical record, several ‘incredulous and confused’ students came to the professor’s aid.²⁴ While some followed Moles, offering him towels and convincing him to return to finish his lecture, other more vigilant students tried to apprehend the situationist troublemakers.²⁵ In the midst of the confusion, the situationists hurled a flurry of paper sheets through the air which, in a font that unmistakably mimics that of an early IBM computer, were printed with the text: ‘MOLES: Programme les Futurs Cadres’ (Moles, programming the future cadres).²⁶

Zooming out, this incident belongs to the expanded historical anatomy of the ‘Strasbourg scandal’, a now well-chronicled chapter in the history of the SI.²⁷ The Strasbourg scandal took place in late November 1966, a few weeks after the Moles incident, and turned on the fact that some students, apparently acting in accord with situationist directives, had succeeded in getting themselves elected into the AFGES (Association fédérative générale des étudiants de Strasbourg) – the local chapter of the French national student union, UNEF (Union nationale des étudiants de France) – only to declare its self-dissolution. The historical centrepiece of the scandal was a now-infamous pamphlet, which carried the (self-explanatory) title: De la Misère en milieu étudiant, considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier (on the poverty of student life: a consideration of its economic, political, sexual, psychological and notably intellectual aspects and of a few ways to cure it).

A group of student partisans of the SI distributed the pamphlet at an official ceremony at the Palais universitaire de Strasbourg, where all the most important figures of Strasbourg’s elite and representatives of the local press were gathered in formal dress to take part in the annual alma mater celebration.²⁸ Apart from the explicit content of the pamphlet itself, which certainly must have caused some of the haute bourgeoisie to choke while singing the Marseillaise, part of the reason this pamphlet became the main-spring of the scandal was that the press revealed that it had been funded in part by the AFGES – an extremely costly affair, considering that it was printed in a first edition of no fewer than 10,000 copies(!).²⁹ While the circumstances of the funding, printing, distribution, and reception of this pamphlet belongs, by now, to the official prehistory of May ’68, scholars have paid less attention to the seemingly more marginal events that, as the SI stated, ‘announced’ the pamphlet: in casu the attack on Moles.

Figure 4.2. Situationist pamphlet, Strasbourg 1966.

As two of the Strasbourg protagonists, André Bertrand and André Schneider, recall in their revisionist account of what is now publicly commemorated as part of France’s ‘immaterial patrimony’, the Moles affair constituted a crucial backdrop for the unfolding of events.³⁰ A letter from Debord to Mustapha Khayati, one of the principal authors of the pamphlet and a leading situationist instigator at Strasbourg, corroborates the claim. Referring to the attack on Moles as ‘L’Opération robot’, Debord describes the attack on the cybernetician as nothing less than a historical achievement in the history of the situationist movement:

Dear Mustapha,

Bravo for the Robot operation (Useful detail for history: was it yesterday or Tuesday?) We hope that the operation will become widely known – even without official reaction … The post festum reaction of Moles is quite sublime. Secure in his robotized world … [his] ideas are, now, flung back into his face in a precisely befitting historical figure. One can say that he has finally seen the Spirit of the Age [l’Esprit du Temps] appear in a tomato!³¹

The term ‘Spirit of the Age’, while it invokes Hegel’s World Spirit or the notion of a Zeitgeist, appears more specifically to be a reference to Edgar Morin’s book L’Esprit du temps: essai sur la culture de masse, which theorized the effects of the so called Second Industrial Revolution on everyday life.³² When L’Esprit du temps was first published in 1962, it was considered, as one reviewer noted, ‘the first in-depth study of mass culture ever published in France’.³³ Considering the situationists’ (and particularly Debord’s) animosity towards anything associated with Morin (the journal Arguments that he co-founded in 1956 was a favourite target of abuse for Debord and the situationists), the reference to Morin’s book was hardly meant as praise.³⁴ The implication in Debord’s use of the term ‘Spirit of the Age’, considering the context, is clear enough: a society of capitalist mass culture – for which Moles was considered a first-rank apologist – would inevitably turn against itself in an autoimmune response or cybernetic feedback loop. The story of the overripe tomato, in other words, becomes a parable of nature’s vengeance against civilization. In a diagnosis akin to that of Adorno and Horkheimer in their famous book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Debord suggests that the Moles affair points to a dialectic inversion where scientific rationalization and cybernetic mass control turns into its opposite: riots, mass spontaneity, and, potentially, revolution.³⁵

‘In hindsight’, as Anselm Jappe notes, the attack on Moles might ‘seem a little tame, and it would doubtless have aroused but scant attention had it occurred two years later than it did’.³⁶ But, in France, at this point, it was unheard of to defy the authority of an honoured professor such as Moles. The fact that within only a few years from this incident, the university walls would cry out to the professors the crudest insults, like crève salope, testifies to the turbulent pace with which students challenged existing norms in the run-up to May ’68 (see Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3. French graffiti, Nanterre University, 1968.

In that light, the toppled chair underneath Grappin on the Nanterre poster acquires a special historical significance. Whether or not the attack on Moles in 1966 was ‘the first time’ that a ‘university professor was chased from his chair’, as the situationists would claim, the so-called Robot Operation set in motion a series of violent disruptions that contributed to growing disrespect for the academic establishment as May ’68 approached.³⁷

The situationists later noted with apparent content that their guerrilla tactics resonated with the spirit of the times, since soon after the attack Moles was:

given the same treatment in March [1967] at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, where this certified robot was to lecture on urbanistic methods for controlling the masses; this latter refutation being carried out by about thirty young anarchists, belonging to groups that want to bring revolutionary criticism to bear on all modern issues.³⁸

However, these two consecutive attacks, in October 1966 at Strasbourg and in March 1967 in Paris, were merely the culmination of a more protracted campaign against Moles.

Correspondence with a Cybernetician

In August 1964, when the ninth issue of internationale situationniste was published, a correspondence with Moles appeared as ‘Correspondance avec un cybernéticien’ (‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’).³⁹ Moles’s open letter to the situationists begins, apparently politely:

Monsieur,

I learned about the Situationist Group through my friend and colleague Henri Lefebvre. The significance of the term ‘Situationist’ therefore comes largely from what Lefebvre has told me and from reading a number of your bulletins, to which I kindly ask you subscribe me.⁴⁰

At first glance, Moles seems genuinely interested in the perspectives the situationist analysis of society opened up. Moles grants the SI that within the ‘drama of technological alienation’, the remaining ‘interstitial liberty is being reduced, little by little, to zero’.⁴¹ But in the next breath Moles notes that the margin of freedom diminishes all the more quickly ‘as the technocratic cyberneticians, to which I myself belong, succeed in progressively recording the three billion insects in existence’.⁴² This kind of tongue-in-cheek discourse makes reading Moles’s letter a strangely schizophrenic experience. The tone constantly oscillates between an apparent sincerity and a thinly veiled irony bordering on satire:

I certainly would like to see in your publications a study on what you call a ‘situation’: an individual who, for some reason, walks upside down on the ceiling rather than the floor, would he be in a new situation? A tightrope walker, is he in a rare situation?⁴³

Moles’s point is that, instead of aligning the term ‘situation’ with anything out of the ordinary, or with whatever might be considered ‘slightly queer’, it would be preferable to reconceptualize this ill-defined notion in a strict information-theoretical framework. ‘Novelty’ or ‘rarity’, Moles argues, could then be accurately measured against the average performance of a given system, pointing out that ‘the theoreticians of Information are capable (in pure theory) of measuring the quantity of novelty that a given system brings’.⁴⁴ At this point in the letter, Moles lets his true motives shine through as he slyly drives the situationist notion of a situation ad absurdum. ‘Sexuality is most obviously’, Moles muses, ‘open to a great number of new situations’:

The manufacture, biologically conceivable, of women with two pairs of breasts is, without any doubt, a proposition from biology to tradition. The invention, in addition to the two traditional sexes, of one, two, three, n different sexes, offers a sexual combination which follows the theory of permutations and suggests rapidly an immense number of amorous situations (n factorial).⁴⁵

Moles implies here that the situationist conception of a situation is so vague and general that it dissolves in the n factorial. He enumerates a dozen or so (perceived) morally transgressive acts, criminal activities, or types of deviant behaviour that would all qualify as situations if one followed the situationist logic to its own – to Moles’s eye absurd – conclusion. Moreover, each of these ‘slightly queer’ situations could potentially be varied infinitely with the aid of new cybernetically potentiated technology, Moles argues. On this basis, he concludes (on a more serious note) that it is therefore ‘on the axis of technology’ that one must begin the search for new situations.⁴⁶ Having brought the discussion onto his favoured terrain, Moles turns to discuss the implications of the notion of a situation in art:

In the artistic domain, a very large number of other situations will follow in the near future from technical capacities – and if American film directors only know how to make Cinerama (even more so Circlorama), perhaps it is legitimate to hope here for a source of new arts. The dream of Total Art is conditioned by the poverty of the artistic imagination.⁴⁷

Moles knew how to press all the right buttons in his open letter to the situationists. Hardly anything could be more out of tune with the situationist notion of a situation than the idea that novelty, in and of itself (and, to make matters worse, mathematically reconfigured in an information theoretical scheme), would constitute progress: not, at least, progress that would be acceptable to an avant-garde movement whose ultimate aim in ‘constructing situations’ was to bring about a revolution and put an end to the capitalist system in its entirety. Not only had Debord the avant-garde filmmaker already both theoretically and practically denounced American cinematic innovations for being capitalist recuperations of potentially liberating technologies, a ‘passive substitute for the unitary artistic activity that is now possible’.⁴⁸ He had also made it clear on several occasions – including in one of the founding documents of the SI, the 1957 Rapport sur la construction des situations … – that the term situation was itself incompatible with the ‘debased forms of novelty’ through which cultural expression passed under capitalist relations of production.⁴⁹

If Moles had any prior knowledge about the situationists, he could hardly have believed in earnest that his rapprochement would lead to any constructive dialogue. Considering the fundamental differences in the conception of a situation, with the SI aiming to overthrow capitalism and Moles hoping to expand its field of operations, it is difficult to sustain the idea that the letter was anything like a ‘hopeful enquiry’.⁵⁰ In any case, Debord’s response is particularly rude, even for him:

Tiny brain,

It was useless to write to us … the capacity to think of anything else does not enter into your programming. Scarcely is it necessary, therefore, to point out that you have understood nothing in any of the situationist materials you have read (in which, evidently, you missed all the basics). Tilt. Redo your calculations, Moles, redo your calculations: here is a satisfaction that no positive result will ever rob you of. If we looked for your ‘open letter’ – which was lost to us, but which various people have read – it is because we thought that, coming from a being of your type and addressed to us, it could only be a letter of insults. Not even! We have no need of knowing if your letter truly reflects the average level of your clumsiness, or if you aimed sometimes at a joke. False problem, because all that you can ever do, in our eyes, is contained in the redundant and coarse joke that constitutes your existence. Knowing the human appearance which your programmers have cloaked you in, one can appreciate that you dream of the production of women with n series of breasts. One supposes that you have difficultly having sex with less. Your personal circumstances aside, your pornographic dreams seem as ill-informed as your philosophical and artistic pretensions …⁵¹

Debord adds to this tirade some capricious accusations that Moles had unfairly flunked a situationist comrade at an exam due to ‘extracurricular grievances’ of some sort.⁵² Although Debord’s vindictiveness gives his response a slightly pathetic air, it is clear that Moles’s ‘philosophical and artistic pretensions’ are at the heart of this feud. As one of the most fervent French popularizers of cybernetics in the field of aesthetics, Moles was the perfect target for the situationists.

The Marshall Plan of the Spirit

Moles’s itinerary as a researcher, lecturer, and popularizer of the new communication sciences spans the entirety of the post-war era.⁵³ His fervent activity to close the gap between the two cultures brought together science, culture, and art under a unifying perspective, that of cybernetics, which to Moles’s mind encompassed ‘virtually every realm of contemporary phenomena: art, the theory of objects, kitsch, computers, experimental music, architecture, economics, popular scientific knowledge, and so forth’.⁵⁴ In total, Moles managed to publish no less than ’40 books and some 900 articles on these issues’.⁵⁵

On several occasions, Moles travelled to the US and visited MIT, where he met, along with other prominent post-war scientists, the respective ‘fathers’ of cybernetics and information theory, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, whose work and ideas he helped popularize in France.⁵⁶ As an integral part of the cybernetic matrix of post-war Europe, through his publications and teaching Moles played a crucial role in promoting a multi-disciplinary research programme in tune with the exigencies of the Marshall Plan era.

Eventually, Moles’s international affiliations led him to the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, Germany, where he was an associate professor between 1961 and 1966. The HfG, founded in 1953 by Inge Scholl and her husband Otl Aicher, with the Swiss functionalist architect and former Bauhaus student Max Bill as its first rector, quickly developed into a critical node for the emerging field of ‘industrial design’. The opening of the new or ‘second Bauhaus’ was made possible by a large donation from the American fund McCloy and from matching investments from the West German state and industry.⁵⁷ The school relied for much of its existence on an influx of American capital (heavily subsidized by the CIA) through foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.⁵⁸ The close financial ties to the US-led world expansion of capitalist industry befitted the school’s working ethos that was, one might say, more akin to the spirit of the Marshall Plan than to the spirit of the original Bauhaus.

When the Argentinian designer Tomás Maldonado took over the leadership at HfG from Max Bill in 1957, he made his differences with the artistic tradition at the old Bauhaus abundantly clear. In his lecture for the World Fair in Brussels in 1958 and titled ‘New Developments in Industry and the Training of the Designer’ (transcribed in the Ulm: Quarterly Bulletin of the Hochschule für Gestaltung), Maldonado approaches the style of a manifesto:

The ideas which supply the basis for what might be called the Bauhaus ideology are today, a quarter of a century after that institution closed, difficult to translate into the language of our present-day preoccupations. Furthermore, as we shall see, some of these ideas must now be refuted with the greatest vehemence as well as with the greatest objectivity.⁵⁹

The refutation of the Bauhaus arts-and-crafts ‘ideology’ was already part of Bill’s programme when he founded the school in 1953. The post-war turn in ideas about the Bauhaus exemplifies the growing schism between different conceptions of art and the historical role of the avant-garde. In this light, we might recall that a historical preamble to the Debord–Moles feud occurred as early as in 1954. At this point, Asger Jorn, on the heels of the dissolution of COBRA, approached Bill with a proposition to set up an institutionally anchored art programme that would carry on the free and experimental artistic spirit of the original Bauhaus in Weimar. As art historian Nicola Pezolet recounts, Jorn’s initial enthusiasm about the prospects of a revival of the Bauhaus was quelled by a dismissive response from Bill:

In Ulm, we consider the arts as the foundation of all the things we make here. But by ‘art’ we do not understand any kind of ‘self-expression’, but rather objective (wirklich) art. We do not agree with most of what the Cobra group or similar groups do, because these experiments have, in our opinion, already been done or superseded a long time ago. In Ulm, we will deal with much more extreme, new, and generally more current questions of design [Gestaltung].⁶⁰

Shortly after this, and as a direct critical response to Bill’s notion of ‘objective art’, Jorn founded the Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. In doing so, he founded one of the three post-war avant-garde organizations that would eventually feed into and become the Situationist International from 1957 onwards; the other two were the Lettrist International and the London Psychogeographical Association (represented by its sole member Ralph Rumney). Jorn’s trajectory between COBRA and the SI – which, importantly, includes his involvement with a nexus of Italian post-war artists such as Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo in the Arte Nucleare movement and the art journal Eristica – evolves, as Kurczynski notes, around the idea of the primacy of the artistic imagination, which was directly opposed to the rigidity of Bill’s merely imaginary new Bauhaus in Ulm and its sterile conception of ‘objective art’.⁶¹ And, if Bill were already anathema to Jorn, his replacement with Maldonado a few years later would not be much of an improvement. For Jorn, Maldonado represented the apotheosis of the reformist usurpation of art and creativity. In an unpublished text of 1960, Jorn recalls how the conflict with Bill, to whom he refers as ‘the perfect type of neutral reformism’, merely ‘served to assist the reaction by replacing him with that sinister imbecile Maldonado’.⁶²

Maldonado would pursue even more fervently than his predecessor the ambition to align artistic production with the exigencies of post-war mass consumption. As part of his new vision, Maldonado advances a maximum argument for a more exact data-driven market research strategy to help bridge the gap between points of production and points of consumption. Gathering adequate information, according to Maldonado, helps to know ‘objectively what a consumer is, without making abstract generalizations’.⁶³ Because, as he argues,

Although each one of us may be a consumer, or perhaps precisely because of this, the information at our disposal is insufficient. I repeat that today we have many reasons to mistrust our market and motivation research organizations. But we would like to be able to hope that empirical sociology, cultural anthropology, descriptive semiotics, hereditary psychology, the psychology of individual and social behaviour, perception theory etc., could at some time join together in a systematic study of the most subtle aspects of consumption.⁶⁴

Today, research-driven market optimization is most familiar from discourses surrounding the capitalist buzz-phrase ‘big data’. But the ambition to perfect market transactions through research and planning was never exclusively a capitalist entreprise. Around the same time, socialist-plan economists set forth quite similar proposals that would feed into political cybernetic experiments in, for instance, Salvador Allende’s socialist Chile.⁶⁵ Despite the shared belief in cybernetic market-planning across the post-war ideological divide, Maldonado’s brazen assertion to combine the arts and the qualitative sciences ‘in a systematic study of the most subtle aspects of consumption’ stood out, not least because of his affiliation to Bauhaus. Jorn, as Pezolet explains, had always associated the name Bauhaus with an international avant-garde that was naturally as ‘opposed to bourgeois values’ as it was to ideas of a ‘market-oriented trade school’.⁶⁶

However, the proponents of Bill’s ‘objective art’ at HfG saw no such conflict whatsoever. They were clearly aiming for an art based on ‘abstract-geometrical mathematical reasoning and focused on producing high-priced items for professionals and upper-middle-class clients … thereby positioning Constructivist art in relation not to models of socialistic mass-production but to status symbols of an affluent class’, as Pezolet explains.⁶⁷

The HfG strove to realize through advanced ‘industrial design’ a perfect social equilibrium in which art had truly merged with life. Through carefully fitted educational programmes, the teaching staff and the plethora of guest lecturers in Ulm – which included several prominent figures in the history of cybernetics, such as Wiener and the eccentric personality Buckminister Fuller, who played a pivotal role in the cross-pollination between cybernetics and American counterculture – instructed the cadres of the future and prepared for a truly disenchanted democratic world: a world in which the notion of art (along with its metaphysical remnants) would have melted not into thin air but into the ether of communication.

The Ideology of Communication

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, intellectuals of all branches extrapolated from Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s seminal work in The Mathematical Theory of Communication and, in equal measure, from Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, to arrive at the idea of communication as a social panacea.⁶⁸ Whether in the decentralized theories of markets and prices developed by liberal economists such as Friedrich Hayek or in its Soviet-plan economic counterparts, the dominant conception was that communication – reconfigured as the outcome of successful exchange of systemic information (in living, organic tissue, in electronically controlled environments, or in a systemic cyb-org combination of both) – essentially kept the world spinning: not capital, not labour, not surplus value. When recoded in information-theoretical terms, communication became the ‘“strong currency” which allowed for free conceptual trade among disciplines’.⁶⁹

As cultural theorist Michael Denning notes, one of the keywords for a generation of intellectuals coming of age around the mid-1950s was precisely ‘communication’, a term that, to critics of a Marxist bent at least, carried with it some of the libidinal energies previously invested in the idea of communism.⁷⁰ Raymond Williams’s classic 1962 book Communications is, as Denning notes, the Anglo-Saxon touchstone for a critical Marxist reinterpretation of culture in the light of post-war developments in the field of communication sciences. It is worth also remembering, however, that a year earlier,

in 1961, three of the most important French Marxist intellectuals at the time – Georges Friedmann, Roland Barthes, and Edgar Morin – had founded the journal Communications, which encountered a huge success (and remains in print to this day). Bringing together writings by thinkers as disparate as Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, and Daniel Bell, the journal seems the perfect example of that French amalgam of Western Marxism, emerging Structuralism, and the end-of-ideology discourse that fed into the so-called post-industrial conundrum.

While Debord indeed belongs (in terms of age at least) to the generation of critics that Denning describes as New Left, he did not share its reformist ethos, nor the (sometimes) uncritical affirmation of the idea of communication. To Debord, rather, the study of culture from the point of view of a sociology of communication was seen as insufficient and one-sided:

Sociological and cultural theories so well hide the question of power that experts can write thousands of pages about communication or the means of mass communication in modern society without ever observing that this communication they speak of is unidirectional, that the consumers of communication have nothing to respond to.⁷¹

Debord, to whom the text can be attributed, addresses the ballooning ideal of a frictionless, neutral, and apolitical state of perfect ‘communication’ from the point of view of an essentially Brechtian model of the critique of unidirectionality. For Debord the problem exceeded solutions in the form of participatory cultural engagement: he had little hope for models of didactic art.⁷² Debord’s critique of the cybernetically inspired intellectual fads in the journal Communications (structuralism, most notably) corresponds, on another level, to his critique of how new, potentially revolutionary technologies are co-opted by counter-revolutionary forces: a prime example is ‘the way the state kept total control of French television throughout de Gaulle’s presidency from 1958 to 1969’.⁷³

The situationist critique of communication – a cybernetic watchword if ever there was one – has to do, at bottom, with the dialectics of decolonization and modernization.⁷⁴ With the waning of the overseas colonial empire, the grip on the metropolitan population, a growing part of which consisted of immigrant workers from decolonizing countries, was tightened. The situationist catchphrase ‘the colonization of everyday life’ ultimately refers to the profound mutation in the concept of culture as French society responded to the decolonization process by introducing new forms of perceived ‘cybernetic’ control mechanisms across society.

Faced with repression and control through softened forms of cultural coercion and mute economic compulsions, the avant-garde would have to rethink its strategies of resistance by learning from the decolonization struggles abroad. The only ‘worthy sequel’ to the historical avant-garde’s affront to the capitalist order, as Debord stated, would be ‘the spontaneous revolt of a people’.⁷⁵ Debord was referring more specifically to the upheavals in then-newly liberated Congo, and to how the Congolese had immediately appropriated ‘the foreign language of the masters as poetry and as a form of action’:

We should respectfully study the expression of the Congolese during this period in order to recognize in it the greatness and effectiveness (cf. the role of the poet Lumumba) of the only possible communication that, in all cases, accompanies intervention in events and the transformation of the world.⁷⁶

In an echo of Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis, Debord aligns the SI’s programme of ‘realized poetry’ and the dépassement of art with ‘intervention in events’ and the ‘transformation of the world’.⁷⁷ While this also implied supporting struggles abroad, Debord was not content with a Third Worldist perspective like many on the French left at the time. Instead, while never losing sight of liberation struggles abroad, one of the SI’s guiding motives throughout the 1960s was to prepare the terrain in metropolitan France for synchronous forms of action, for ‘intervention in events’ within the French hexagon itself. As pointed out by cultural theorists Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, when Debord first theorized détournement in 1956, it was in the context of a symbolic inversion between home and abroad.⁷⁸ On the front cover of the issue of the post-surrealist journal Les Lèvres nues, in which Debord and Gil J. Wolman published their seminal text ‘Mode d’emploi du détournement’, the French hexagon was fittingly ‘reoccupied, counter-colonised by Algerian place-names’.⁷⁹

The SI’s proposition to overthrow bourgeois culture in one single poetic breath, as inspired by the poet Lumumba, began from a reappropriation of the creative legacy of the historical avant-garde to counter the impoverished and mind-numbing effects of contemporaneous art and poetry by recognizing the revolutionary power inherent in language itself:

Information theory straightaway ignores the chief power of language, which lies on its poetic level: to combat and to supersede … Despite the magnificent hypotheses of a ‘poetics of information’ (Abraham Moles), despite the moving confidence of their misinterpretation of [Kurt] Schwitters or [Tristan] Tzara, the technologians of language will never understand anything but the language of technology. They do not know who will pass judgment on all this.⁸⁰

As opposed to an empty language that merely reflects the state of communication technologies, the SI saw language as charged with a revolutionary surplus: poetry as a form of practical, not merely theoretical, ‘intervention in events’.⁸¹

Their main opponents were Moles and his close colleague at Ulm, the German philosopher Max Bense. Together, these two men spearheaded the post-war reconfiguration of art in information theoretical terms. Although disregarded in art history and in conventional histories of the avant-garde, Moles and Bense promoted from the ‘command centre’ in Ulm a novel art-theoretical agenda that became known as ‘information aesthetics’. It was arguably one of the single most ambitious yet crucially overlooked attempts in the history of modernism to liquidate any metaphysical remnants in the work of art and redefine, from the ground up, the entire discipline of philosophical aesthetics.

Information Aesthetics

Few even remember their names today, but Abraham Moles and Max Bense were arguably the two most influential thinkers of aesthetics in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Their programmes of ‘information aesthetics’ grew out of their dissatisfaction with recurrences of mysticism, mythologemes, and strands of vitalism in post-war art.⁸² Their longstanding preoccupation at Ulm with cybernetics and its mathematical adjunct science, information theory, led them to conceive of the necessity of reconceptualizing art in altogether different terms and of wresting criticism from its philosophical stronghold in the humanities.⁸³ In Stuttgart, Bense began lecturing on information aesthetics between 1956 and 1958, and around the same time published the second book in his series on philosophical aesthetics, Aesthetica II: Aesthetische Information.⁸⁴ In France, Moles published his equally influential book on a related topic, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique, in 1958.⁸⁵ Briefly described, information aesthetics borrows from Shannon and Weaver’s original formulation of information theory the assumption that questions of meaning are irrelevant and that tomorrow’s engineers of beauty should deal with aesthetic impressions statistically.⁸⁶

The information aesthetic reconceptualization of art rests on the idea that a work of art is nothing more than a set of material impressions conventionally accepted as ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, or ‘interesting’. The impact of a work of art on its beholder should also, therefore, be statistically calculable. Rid of its metaphysical assumptions, the philosophical discipline of aesthetics could proceed, Bense and Moles agreed, in a manner compatible with the formalizable language of the natural sciences. Although one finds little explicit mention of Moles and Bense’s information aesthetics in the journals of the SI, it was arguably the backdrop for much of the critical discourse on cybernetics. Jorn, for instance, held copiously annotated copies of Bense’s three books on aesthetics in his personal library (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4. Books from Asger Jorn’s personal library. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

Theoretical matters and art-politics were inseparable for the SI, and Bense and Moles’s information aesthetics was anathema. The ‘futility of the theoretical knitting of Max Bense’, Jorn remarked in an unpublished text from 1960, was already ‘put in its place in 1958’ by the Gruppe Spur.⁸⁷ The incident Jorn refers to may be considered the inception of the series of interventions traced in this chapter. Art historian Mia Lee provides the best available account of the hoax:

In January 1959, the Munich-based art group Spur co-organized an art exhibit titled ‘Realists-Extremists’ at the Museum for Ethnology. Flyers for the exhibit advertised that the highly esteemed German philosopher Max Bense would deliver the opening night lecture. On the evening of 23 January, a large, well-dressed audience congregated at the Museum for Ethnology to hear Bense. They were thus duly surprised when 23-year-old Spur artist Hans-Peter Zimmer walked to the podium and switched on a tape recorder. A voice purporting to be Bense apologized for unforeseen hindrances and proceeded to deliver a talk on a wild mix of concepts including aesthetic information, continuity, coincidence, perfection, and civilization … After the lecture, the audience dutifully applauded. Then, over the course of the next few days, nonplussed journalists contacted Bense to ask him about the highly unorthodox presentation. Bense reacted with as much astonishment as the journalists. The professor had not actually received an invitation to the exhibit, and the talk had in fact been a textual collage of his writings cut-and-pasted and recorded by Hans-Peter Zimmer.⁸⁸

The Gruppe Spur’s first venture in the situationist practice of détournement led them to be officially welcomed into the SI.⁸⁹ The form and content of this intervention brings it into line with later developments in the SI. Hans-Peter Zimmer’s recording consisted of extracts of Bense’s aesthetic philosophy but mixed with a ‘deliberately nonsensical cut-up of German, Latin and French phrases with garbled quotations from Marx and Hegel’, in such a confused way that it self-declaredly amounted to a message in ‘cybernetic form’.⁹⁰ The aversion to the apologists of ‘cybernetics’ evidently reaches deep into the theoretical and political texture of the SI. After the turn of the 1960s these kinds of interventions would take renewed priority, if in a less humoristic and more malign form.

The attacks against Moles in 1966–67, and the concurrent critical jabs at cybernetics found in situationist discourse more generally throughout the 1960s, appear to have developed out of these early interventions. When considered chronologically, it becomes evident that the critique of cybernetics constitutes a little-noted trajectory in the situationist movement that cuts across the supposed divide between an artistic and political phase. One last historical coordinate, maybe the most significant, needs to be added to complete the picture of this decade-long critical campaign against the ‘cyberneticians’.

The Neo-Artist and Its Model

On 1 December 1964, Debord wrote in a letter to Khayati that he had been ‘thinking again about the ideas’ they had discussed at their last meeting. Apparently Khayati, who was part of a nexus of situationist sympathizers at Strasbourg, had suggested to Debord a retaliation against Moles for having sent the open letter to the situationists. Moles was, at this point, still teaching at Strasbourg alongside Lefebvre but had not yet attained a professorial chair to be chased away from, as would happen in 1966. Debord wrote to Khayati that, in the event of an uprising, it would be ideal to redistribute the ‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’, unabridged and in the form of a tract. Debord and Khayati tossed ideas back and forth until March 1965, when they decided on the perfect occasion for the attack: Moles would be chairing a conference on 24 March at the University of Strasbourg together with none other than Schöffer himself – the perfect opportunity, in other words, to settle the score with not one but two of their most despised cybernetic creatures. In a letter preceding the attack, Debord wrote:

Go ahead then for the attack on Moles on the 24th! With regard to Schöffer, I do not have time to write an article about him. The best – in fact the only right way to do this – would be if you quickly composed a text by yourself, signed by you, presented as an appendix or précis of sorts [to the ‘Correspondence …’] You could cite – or make a détournement of – as it seems appropriate, the texts from the SI on the general idea of this matter: Schöffer is the typical representative of the art of integration (of housing projects, of cybernetics, of consumption, and of the police). Take, for instance, what we said in SI # 8 in the article ‘L’avant-garde de la présence’. For one, Schöffer is the prototypical artist of the signal (with all the authoritarian connotations of that word). Secondly, even if he is not a member of the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel, he is something like their father. You could perhaps quote the praise in [the journal] Planète … those who are praised by Planète deserve Planète. Have you seen that [Kostas] Axelos collaborates now with Planète? Logical conclusion to Arguments. Make sure to keep me updated,

Amitiés, Guy

[PS] Here’s a first stab at some possible titles for your tract:

THE PROGRAMMERS THEMSELVES MUST HAVE BEEN PROGRAMMED

THE DIALECTIC OF THE ROBOT AND THE SIGNAL

THE ROBOT AND ITS DOUBLE

THE ROBOT IS MATING

THE CREATOR (AND ITS MODEL)

THE ARTIST (AND ITS MODEL)

THE NEO-ARTIST (AND ITS MODEL)

But only this one appears any good: DIALECTIQUE DU ROBOT ET DU SIGNAL, [The Dialectic of the robot and the signal] to be used in the text itself if not for the title? Or you can perhaps come up with something better yourself, or even a détournement of Lautréamont:

BEAUTIFUL LIKE THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER OF A ROBOT-MOLES AND A SIGNAL-SCHÖFFER AT TABLE WITH [MAURICE] PAPON (or: OF A PREFECT OF POLICE).⁹¹

These remarks by Debord clearly show that he was closely following Schöffer’s trajectory as an artist and was keeping a vigilant eye on developments in contemporaneous art, which, as Claire Bishop has shown, stood under the sign of participation.⁹² As Larry Busbea notes, it is important to remember that ‘though the critique of spectacle culture has come down to us as a condemnation of the popular or mass media, it was historically also addressed to participatory forms of art, with which the situationists were deeply involved’.⁹³ Key to understanding the origins of the SI’s critique of the ‘spectacle’, Busbea convincingly argues, is their strong opposition to contemporaneous figures such as Schöffer and the group GRAV. It is worth recalling the relevant passage that Debord refers to from the Editorial Notes to international situationniste no. 8 entitled ‘L’Avant-garde de la présence’ (the avant-garde of presence):

Some technicians would like to reform the spectacle. [Julio] Le Parc, in a tract published in September 1962 by the ‘Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel’, thinks it possible for the passive spectator to evolve into a ‘stimulated spectator’ or even an ‘interpreter-spectator’, but still within the framework of specialized old-hat ideas that would provide ‘some kinds of sculptures to be grappled with, dances to be painted, swordplay paintings’. At most, Le Parc reaches the point of using a few para-situationist formulas: ‘In frankly admitting the reversal of the traditional situation of the passive spectator, one distorts the idea of the spectacle.’ This is an idea, however, that it is better not to distort, but properly to gauge its place in society. The futility of Le Parc’s hopes for his spectator who will gratify him by achieving ‘real participation (the manipulation of elements)’ – oh yes! and visual artists will certainly have their elements already – takes on more solidity when, at the end of his text, he extends a hand toward ‘the notion of programming’, i.e., to the cyberneticians of power.⁹⁴

Considering the proximity between GRAV and the SI, at least in terms of rhetoric, one might mistake one for the other. But despite superficial similarities the differences were profound. As the SI stated, ‘the dialectic of history is such that the victory of the Situationist International in matters of theory already obliges its adversaries to disguise themselves as situationists’.⁹⁵ The ‘neo-artists’ in GRAV, to whom Schöffer had given the signal (so to speak) as early as in 1956 on the rooftop of Le Corbusier’s gratte-ciel in Marseille, were merely recuperating the situationist agenda to be able to ‘speak of a new problem, so as to popularize it themselves after having rejected it as long as they could, and now extirpating only its violence, its connection with general subversion, thereby watering it down to an academic statement, or worse’.⁹⁶

These considerations went into the planned attack on Moles and Schöffer on 24 March 1965. Approaching the day of the intervention, on 20 March, Debord received a copy of the reprint of ‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’ from Khayati and replied approvingly that it was ‘très beau!’ but that he was still struggling to come up with a good title for the appended tract:

In order to find a title for your tract, we had a quick brainstorm with Jean-Pierre and François George; we didn’t come up with anything good in the half an hour our session lasted. But now Michèle [Bernstein] suggests ‘La Tortue dans la vitrine’ [The turtle in the window], the turtle being the cybernetic animal number one (and resembling Moles well enough); the window [mur de lumière] being the artistic ideal and the profound model of N. Schöffer; and finally, all of this evokes the ‘girl in the window’, the famous form of prostitution in Hamburg or Antwerp. But perhaps this title would need some explication in a few lines of text? In any case, the overall impression should be that Moles and Schöffer inevitably fit together, by virtue of their nullity as well as their function.⁹⁷

It was Michèle Bernstein, then, who eventually came up with the title for Khayati’s tract. Following Debord’s directives closely, the tract was composed and distributed as an appendix to a reprint of the Correspondance … It was Khayati, along with Jean Garnault and the siblings Théo Frey and Édith Frey, who assured the distribution of the tract at the conference. The local press described the disturbance ‘by a small Situationist commando’ only in passing, noting that it did not even prevent the unfolding of the events.⁹⁸ In the SI’s own remarks on the event in their journal internationale situationniste, they quipped: ‘What were they expecting, a killing perhaps?’⁹⁹

Figure 4.5. Situationist tracts. © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

But why was it precisely Schöffer and Moles who were targeted by the situationists and not, say, Louis Couffignal, Albert Ducrocq, or one of the countless other influential popularizers of cybernetics in France in the 1960s? Apart from the reasons already indicated, the targeting of Schöffer and Moles (the neo-artist and its model) had to do with their proximity to art. So, beyond the fact that Moles had stepped on Debord’s toes by circulating an open letter to the situationists in which he more or less covertly ridiculed their programme and satirized the implications of the idea of a situation, the main reason Moles repeatedly became the prime target of the situationists was, arguably, his proximity to art and particularly his alignment with Schöffer, the GRAV and other new tendencies of the European neo-avant-garde.

New Tendencies

The post-war idiom New Tendencies (NT) refers, more specifically, to what art historians consider one of ‘the first major art movements to break through the stalemate in art after the Second World War’.¹⁰⁰ What that means is hard to grasp considering the proliferation of movements such as COBRA, surréalisme révolutionnaire, lettrisme, internationale lettrisme, and other collectivities that emerged ‘after modernism’.¹⁰¹ More exact would be to describe NT as one of the most significant neo-avant-garde movements to break through on a major commercial scale. And this was precisely the reason why the situationists opposed these artists wholeheartedly.

Art historian Armin Medosch provides one of the fullest accounts of how the NT emerged from former Yugoslavia but developed over the course of 1960s into a loose-knit trans-European network of collaborating artists.¹⁰² This quintessential neo-avant-garde movement shared, despite its internal differences, something like a ‘collective ethos’ that was, Medosch explains, largely inspired by the post-war ‘cybernetic matrix’ at the HfG in Ulm and the information aesthetic programme nurtured by Moles and Bense. The artists participating in this European ‘network of networks’ came from various artist groups, such as the German group ZERO, Italian groups N and T, the Spanish Equipo 57 and, most importantly, the already mentioned Paris-based Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV).¹⁰³

Perceiving their practice as less oriented in producing ‘works of art’ than facilitating an open-ended process of artistic research, ultimately geared towards an application of the emerging communication sciences to the production process, the NT artists’ approach (though it was by no means a unified perspective but rather precisely a tendency) can best be described as a cybernetically reloaded neo-constructivist approach. Consider, in this regard, Medosch’s summary of the NT’s working method:

Their way of working eliminated the subjective element of ‘creativity’. The artistic genius, who had preoccupied the bourgeois understanding of art since the days of Immanuel Kant, was put back into the bottle. The search for structures that corresponded with the psycho-physical reality of perception led to the invention of what came to be called ‘programmed art’, art based on the objectification of the production process. The research process, undertaken with a cool mindset, aimed at inventing a specific procedure for producing work. This procedure could also be carried out by a machine or by workers in a workshop without any further interference.¹⁰⁴

The NT artists left any possible conflicting political-aesthetic perspectives by the wayside and affirmed the neo-avant-garde’s art-into-life programmatic head on, with little or no concern that this life was already premised on the existence of capitalist social relations of production. GRAV, the most prolific node in the network, amplify the new tendencies in post-war art, which, as Medosch explains, tended towards ‘turning the artist’s studio into a psycho-physiological research laboratory’.¹⁰⁵ In a broader historical sense, NT arguably fits the Bürgerian bill of the neo-avant-garde: retaining the historical avant-garde’s radical quest for an integration of art into life, these artists nonetheless deployed various means (cross-disciplinary collaboration, creative methods aligned with the demands of mass production, a cool mindset, team research, an emphasis on technological innovation, design, market accommodation, etc.) that had in the meantime become internally accepted and encouraged procedures within the capitalist post-war economy.¹⁰⁶

In contrast to this form of cybernetic collectivism, the SI defies assimilation to the category of the neo-avant-garde. One might say, following Jelena Stojanovic’s characterization of the SI, that what makes the movement’s trajectory unique to the post-war moment in art’s revival of internationalism and collectivism was that they developed a ‘grotesque’ critique, an ironic and performative reprisal of the interwar avant-garde project aiming to:

negate the rhetoric that there were two avant-gardes – one political, the other aesthetic – that are in turn divided along imaginary lines of demarcation and positioned by mutual subordination and subservience. This same utopian drive led them to challenge both official Marxist doctrine and institutionally established, artistic avant-gardism. They strongly believed that international collectives provided, inadvertently perhaps yet uniquely, the underpinning for both the aesthetical and the political avant-garde, and that the very existence of collectivism profoundly challenged any form of specialization, spatialization, or demarcation.¹⁰⁷

At this point, it is important to underscore that, even though the situationist movement in the period examined in this chapter, from the turn of the 1960s to May ’68, is often described as leaving artistic concerns behind in favour of a purely political praxis, their distinct contribution to the radical thought of the 1960s largely developed in response to tendencies in contemporary art. The ‘neo-artists’, under the influence of cyberneticians like Moles, had uncritically aligned their practice with the exigencies of capital and market rather than putting themselves, as (parts of) the historical avant-garde had done, in the service of the revolution. Contrary to this, the situationists insisted on the continued relevance of the most political concept of all, that of the revolution. Significantly, this insistence took place at a point when this concept, like that of the avant-garde itself, was being fundamentally transformed and depoliticized. These were the stakes, in other words, of the situationist critique of capitalist society in the run-up to May ’68.

In this framework, the moniker ‘cybernetics’, appearing here and there in the critical discourse of the situationists and on the Nanterre poster discussed at the beginning of this chapter, became a signifier for a counter-revolutionary emptying out of historical and political experience in art and politics: a secret counter-revolution that passed unnoticed by most orthodox Marxists at the time.

Waiting for Cybernetics

The turn of phrase on the poster ‘EN ATTENDANT LA CYBERNÉTIQUE, LES FLICS’ (Waiting for cybernetics, the cops) invokes more than Samuel Beckett’s famous play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot). From within the history of the avant-garde, it inevitably also echoes the internal dispute between two factions in the surrealist movement in the late 1920s over whether to join ranks with the French Communist Party (PCF) to participate wholeheartedly in the service of the revolution. As chronicled in the earliest histories of surrealism and handed down to posterity as an episode that in many ways summed up the existential conflict between art and political engagement, André Breton famously defended his views contra Pierre Naville that, while waiting [en attendant] for power to be wrested from the bourgeoisie and handed over to the proletariat in an act of political revolution, it was no less important that ‘the experiences of inner life were pursued, and, naturally, without any outside interference, even if it is Marxist’.¹⁰⁸

For Breton and his faction of surrealists, in other words, the absence of revolution remained a time for the free and unrestrained pursuit of art – if only for a moment, as Breton would soon after the dispute have a change of heart and decide to join ranks with Naville in the PCF. For the situationists, in contrast, art as a supposedly revolutionary pastime was no more a viable option than the PCF or orthodox Marxism. Under changed historical circumstances, the idea of a political revolution as a transfer of power from one class to the other was being replaced by an apolitical scheme of revolution understood as the supposedly neutral progress of science and technology. This transformation in the concept of revolution, an emptying out of any political content, is perfectly captured in a speech that Moles delivered in Zagreb in August 1968:

We are currently experiencing a new revolution of much greater importance than the mechanical revolution that inspired Marx. A revolution of automation, of artificial thought, of symbiosis with the machines, and of mastery of communication: that is precisely what we have referred to, for quite a few years now, as a ‘secret revolution’, because those who are taking part in it, all of us, are not even conscious of it. In the age in which we find ourselves, a change is operative that will naturally impact our consciousness and determine what we become: from now on, this revolution which has been concealed, occulted, and diffused, emerges as one of the determining factors of the world of tomorrow.¹⁰⁹

Moles – as stoically unmoved by the political turbulence of his time as dean Grappin on the Nanterre poster – appeals to a secret revolution of technical progress that he considers inevitable, natural, and unstoppable. By contrast, the history of the Situationist International in the age of automation reminds us that the idea of progress is a bourgeois conceit that would-be revolutionaries can, and must, contend with and struggle against.

Conclusion

SIGMA was the term that the situationist Alexander Trocchi applied to his ‘revolutionary proposal’ in the 1960s.¹ Coincidentally, it was also the name of a newly established art festival in Bordeaux in 1965: a distant echo of the Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille in 1956 with which our story of the situationist movement began.² In the spirit of its Marseille precursor, the Bordeaux festival took up ‘Art and Cybernetics’ for its inaugural theme. Appropriately, the two main protagonists in the French cybernetic adventure, Nicolas Schöffer and Abraham Moles (the ‘robot and its double’, as Debord referred to them) participated in the events. As the French art critic Michel Ragon reports in his seminal book about that moment in post-war French art, Vingtcinq ans d’art vivant (1969), Moles raised a most pertinent question during his lecture:

Are we at the end of a long period of calling into question and experimentation that will prove, in the final analysis, to have brought about a total destruction of artistic form? … Will there no longer be any works of art? Perhaps what our present society calls a work of art is but a historical residue from a past society that valued things by the sole virtue of their rarity?³

Ragon well understood the challenge that modern technology posed to received ideas about art, and concurred with Moles that beyond ‘speculative phantasies’ the field of ‘cybernetics opens up to new horizons’ and prepares the future for a ‘democratization of art’.⁴ Moles’s statement underscores one of the central claims of this book, namely that the post-war moment in French art was supercharged with expectation about the withering away of the aura of the work of art and the replacement of this category with other terms more adequate for mediating aesthetic experience, whether communication or communism. Even though they posed the question in different terms and set forth radically different proposals, the situationists were at bottom grappling with the same fundamental problem raised by Moles and the proponents of cybernetic art: What would become of the work of art in the age of automation? Or, in terms closer to those of the situationists: What happens when the conditions that allowed art to exist as a separate sphere of life-activity wither away, along with the capitalist relations of production? When capital, compelled by the forces of competition, has eventually introduced enough automatic technology to make labour structurally superfluous to production and, consequently, to dispose of the distinction between work and leisure: would it still make sense to speak of a work of art? What was the role of the free artist and of the avant-garde in the process of capital’s historical self-overcoming and dialectical transformation into communism for which the situationists hoped?

All these questions, whatever specific form they took, were modalities of a single basic assumption that undergirded the post-war moment in art, which I have referred to throughout this book under the rubric of a cybernetic hypothesis. In the Introduction, I heuristically defined the cybernetic hypothesis as ‘a shared horizon of expectation tied to the advent of modern computing and automation’. I have shown how the cybernetic hypothesis was operative across a wide range of neo-avant-garde practices and media, and I have argued for ways in which the situationists gestured towards this horizon of the new, practically and theoretically.

By way of conclusion to this book, I would like to consider further the evolution of the situationist response to the cybernetic hypothesis, and to reflect more deeply on the nature of this evocative term. These final remarks thus shift to a higher level of abstraction, to discuss how the situationist theorization of spectacle and power relates to the political-economic conjuncture referred to throughout the book as the age of automation.

In each of the four main chapters of this book, I have tried to distil a predominant attitude towards the cybernetic hypothesis that underpinned the post-war moment in French art and structured the trajectory of the situationist movement from its inception through May ’68. I resist narrative closure and continue to see the situationist movement as structured more by contradiction and antinomy than by any fictive coherence. Nevertheless, it is also clear that there is an evolution of the situationists’ response to the cybernetic hypothesis from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s: an evolution that coincides with what Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot calls the ‘maturing’ of situationist theory.⁵ As Anselm Jappe notes: ‘Around 1965 the working out of the situationist analysis was essentially complete, and the group turned its attention to the search for ways of putting it into practice.’⁶ In Chapter 4, we saw how the situationist response turned decidedly more critical and culminated in a carefully orchestrated campaign directed at the cultural representatives of a perceived nexus of cybernetic power and social domination. But how, more precisely, does the cybernetic hypothesis tie into the dual analysis of spectacle and power as developed by Debord and Vaneigem, respectively?

I have deliberately chosen the intriguing concept of a cybernetic hypothesis – in contrast to, say, a cybernetic vision – to shift emphasis away from traditional art-historical discourse (with its privileging of visual phenomena) and to frame my analysis in terms more resonant with those of the heterogeneous revolutionary tradition to which the SI belongs. As the avid reader of this book will know, the term ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ originates in the short-lived and distinctively post-situationist French journal Tiqqun (produced by the eponymous collective).

In a text entitled ‘L’Hypothèse cybernétique’ (‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’), which extends over more than forty pages of the journal, the authors propose to study the historical nexus of post-war cybernetics to excavate the foundation of a ‘new governmental mentality’ that transformed ‘both the nature of capitalism and the possibilities of its contestation’.⁷ The core of Tiqqun’s argument – drawn in large part from Debord and in particular from Vaneigem – is that in the wake of the Second World War cybernetics went from a mere ‘laboratory hypothesis’ to a fully wrought ‘social experiment’ – an experiment oriented towards transforming humankind into a biological appendix to the capitalist machinery of production, or into what Giorgio Cesarano described as a ‘stabilized animal society’.⁸ The cybernetic hypothesis, we are told, developed into ‘an autonomous world of apparatuses so blended with the capitalist project’ that it became ‘a political project’ in its own right’.⁹

Tiqqun’s analysis of the cybernetic hypothesis originally distils an emerging cultural logic superimposed on traditional capitalist forms of power and offers a compelling alternative theorization of late capitalism or postmodernism. The somewhat sweeping terms of the analysis, however, tend to obscure the contours of the argument. As the Endnotes collective critically points out, Tiqqun glosses over a structuring analytical concept such as class to produce an image of capitalism as a simple monolith of power.¹⁰ Endnotes gives the following – in my estimation excellent – explanation for the theoretical deficiencies of Tiqqun:

In the moment in which Tiqqun was born, as the structures of the old workers’ movement lay behind it and the field of action became an indeterminate ‘globalization’ – the horizon of a triumphant liberal capitalism – class belonging appeared as something which had been already cast aside, a mere shed skin, and capital too became correspondingly difficult to identify as the other pole of an inherently antagonistic relation. Here lies the historically-specific content represented by these texts: the indeterminacy of the object of antagonism, the voluntaristic relation to the totality constructed around this antagonism, the indifference to the problem of class and its overcoming. The ‘desert’ in which Tiqqun built its sandcastles was the arid, featureless horizon of a financialized, fin-de-siècle capitalism. Setting out in this desert, unable to grasp it as a passing moment in the dynamic of the class relation, Tiqqun could never have anticipated the present crisis, and the struggles that have come with it.¹¹

Despite the neglect of the continued importance of a concept like class struggle in Tiqqun’s analysis, the notion of the cybernetic hypothesis remains one of the most thought-provoking and original attempts to think through the recent genealogy of our current predicament. From the perspective of this book, Tiqqun’s concept of the cybernetic hypothesis also helps bring out a hitherto ignored aspect of the history of the situationist movement and what its members were gesturing towards, practically and theoretically. In this, the situationist analysis of society prefigures key tenets of French post-Marxist thought.

Summing up this analysis, we might say that, while Vaneigem attended closely to the cybernetic nexus of power, pre-empting Michel Foucault’s analysis of power in important respects, Debord tied his analysis into a more elaborate scheme of dissident Marxist thought to show how social domination functions (spectacularly) in the age of automation.

Vaneigem’s Traité de Savoir-Vivre … and Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, both begun around 1963 and published in 1967, share a set of theoretical assumptions about the nature of capitalism and the possibilities of its contestation. Differences in style and scope notwithstanding, the dual critique of spectacle and power comprises one of the most original contributions to French critical theory at that moment. However, it is a little-noticed fact that the emerging phenomena of cybernetics and automation played a significant part in the forging and outcome of the SI’s critical analysis of society. The extensive historical material drawn from the archives and analysed in this book contribute to shedding new light on the situationist movement from this angle.

There are, however, partial exceptions to the general neglect of the topic of cybernetics, and the critique of technology more broadly, in the situationist movement. Worth mentioning is Patrick Marcolini’s remarkable study, Le Mouvement situationniste (2012), which highlights some crucial intellectual coordinates in the SI’s critique of cybernetics.¹² Marcolini notably suggests that the works of the ‘anarchist Protestant theologist’ Jacques Ellul might have exerted an influence on the SI, and on Debord in particular, with whom he amicably corresponded.¹³ Ellul’s most famous book, La Technique (1954), for instance, engages with Wiener’s cybernetics to arrive at a socially indignant analysis of industrial society.¹⁴ Moreover, Marcolini draws attention to the importance of the work of Marxist thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis or Henri Lefebvre.¹⁵ I have already discussed these thinkers in the framework of a broader Marxist theorization of technology taking place in the SI-adjacent French left and ultra-gauche circles at the time, particularly in venues such as Arguments and Socialisme ou Barbarie (see in particular Chapters 1 and 3).

While Castoriadis is less often discussed in SI studies, Lefebvre’s influence on the SI is more widely acknowledged. Lefebvre, however, is rarely discussed as a thinker of technology and even less as a theoretician of cybernetics and information theory. Nevertheless, his understudied critical essays from the second half of the 1950s hinge on precisely these topics and provide an early intellectual rapprochement to the cybernetic hypothesis that, as I have argued, also underpins situationist discourse.¹⁶

Now largely forgotten or otherwise obscure, numerous of Lefebvre’s essays on modernity grapple with the problem of emerging cybernetics. In one particularly noteworthy essay from 1958, ‘Marxisme et théorie de l’information’ (Information theory and Marxism), Lefebvre discusses cybernetics and its proximate information-theoretical paradigm as a challenge of the first degree to Marxist thought.¹⁷ He argues that the cybernetic breakthrough merits theoretical attention but warns against overstepping the legitimate limits of its scientific episteme, as a postulate can easily pass into an ontological or normative claim. It is tempting, Lefebvre points out, to blow out of proportion the simple cybernetic assumption that it is possible to control artificially any closed system via a stabilizing feedback mechanism. Cybernetics, after all, is simply the theory that disorder can be kept at bay and equilibrium maintained. ‘Why not attribute to this tendency a metaphysical meaning, an origin in a transcendent spiritual realm?’ Lefebvre asks, tongue-in-cheek:

Why not apply this theory to biological life in its entirety, including human life? Or to the economy? To psychology? To sociology? To politics? Why not attribute to all domains this double tendency of order and disorder from which all growth and equilibrium supposedly ensue? Why not define, beginning from this hypothesis, the conditions of equilibrium, and why not apply these conditions ‘operationally’? The slope from rigorousness to extrapolation, from knowledge to philosophy and from philosophy to ideology is steep and slippery.¹⁸

The ideological pitfalls of the cybernetic hypothesis influence other more famous aspects of Lefebvre’s thought too. Although Lefebvre rejects the tendency to extrapolate, he maintains that cybernetics constitutes one of the most ‘enigmatic and fertile’ fields of thought, and that this new science corresponds to historical changes in the structure of the ‘real’. A more careful reading of Lefebvre’s writings on modernity, requiring a more detailed study of its own, would reveal that cybernetics was a primary underlying concern. Lefebvre’s influential notion of ‘revolutionary romanticism’, for instance, clearly takes stock of the exigencies of cybernetic modernity.¹⁹ The central claim of that essay is that one must seize the ‘unlimited possibilities and the open horizon’ of that particular moment and ‘affirm the intrinsic beauty of modern life’ beyond its alienated forms.²⁰ Written in 1957, the year the Situationist International was officially founded, Lefebvre’s ‘manifesto’ resonates deeply with the SI’s future-oriented – if also (to borrow a term from Marcolini) ‘Janus-faced’ – outlook; with one eye turned towards the past and the other towards the future.²¹

In this book, I have examined the ways in which the situationist movement engaged with art and revolutionary politics beginning from the same ambiguous and conflicted, not to say ‘cockeyed’, stance on modernity as Lefebvre. But the cybernetic hypothesis gradually lost its spell over the situationist movement. Conspicuously coterminous with the falling out between Debord and Lefebvre, a more negative stance – on the level of rhetoric (if not consistently on the level of ontology) – prevailed. This was largely due to the influence of Debord, who, during the 1960s, came to have a most central position in the situationist movement.

A crucial moment, when the cybernetic hypothesis crossed over from a sort of ‘transcendental’ presupposition undergirding the situationist movement to an explicit object of critique, can be rather exactly pinpointed to May 1962. At this point, Lefebvre, who served as an intermediary for the District of Paris at the time, passed a survey on urban planning issues to the self-proclaimed avant-gardist and anti-specialist Debord. According to the formulation on the survey, the respondents were ‘sought out for their knowledge, their experience, and their taste for “thinking ahead”’.²² Debord’s lengthy response to the survey, entitled ‘Note sur la consultation visant à définir “la région parisienne à la fin du siècle”’, was never mailed and thus passed unnoticed into obscurity like so many other of his unpublished notes.²³ In this note, Debord spells out the stakes of the cybernetic hypothesis, as he sees it. He accords the values A and B, each representing a likely future scenario, to the two opposing postulates of the underlying assumption (this is the etymological meaning of hypothesis) common to both thesis and antithesis:

A) A totalitarian and hyper-hierarchized cyberneticization, which would naturally be very different from both the present fantasies of cyberneticians and the past experiences of fascist dictatorships, but which will have some recurring traits mixed with those that appear everywhere in the social democratic society of abundance: all aspects of people’s lives controlled to perfection and decimated to a maximum state of passivity, in automated production as well as in the sphere of consumption that is oriented entirely towards the mechanisms of the spectacle by the possessors of those mechanisms.

B) A revolutionary society, radically different form all elaborated programmes, as well as from anything the workers’ movement ever came up with up to this point (all that it has done hitherto were but superficial modifications of the old world into which it was integrating itself), but rediscovering, at the same time, more than a century of proletarian struggles from which it would retain many of the most beautiful moments: workers’ councils directly managing societal affairs, the reconstruction of all aspects of life, and the ever more free experimentation with new reasons to live.²⁴

Debord, apparently, conceived of the cybernetic hypothesis as an electronically reloaded version of Kant’s third antinomy of reason (which opposes causal determinism and spontaneity) with which any revolutionary theory worth its salt would have to come to terms. This note points to a threshold in Debord’s thought. As I have argued, by the turn of the 1960s and in the run-up to May ’68, Debord and the situationists started conceiving of modern cybernetic technology less as a liberating force than as a potentially totalizing form of power (see in particular Chapter 4). The SI placed less and less emphasis on Lefebvre’s ‘unlimited possibilities and open horizon’, and their critical analysis began to resonate still more with Ellul’s wholesale claims along the lines of:

A total transformation of technology has taken place since 1945 in which society has passed from an industrial era, not to some sort of ‘postindustrial’ phase, but rather to a ‘technocratic’ phase in which technology influences everything, and has indeed become the chief determinant not only of man’s habitat but also of his [sic] history.²⁵

Vaneigem, for instance, would argue in similarly sweeping terms for the emergence of nothing short of a ‘cybernetic society’. Nevertheless, for Vaneigem, in contrast to Ellul – for whom la technique denotes a civilizational downfall – technology expresses, at all times, a historically specific mediation of power. Like Marx, who argued in Capital that the ‘system of machinery’ constitutes a new form of ‘the power of the “master”’, Vaneigem argues that the emergence of cybernetics and automation merely changes the form, and not the content, of the exercise of class-based power.²⁶ Although capitalist relations of production historically superseded personal relations of serfdom and slavery, the power of the ruling class persists in bourgeois society, albeit in forms other than the master’s whip.

Vaneigem distinguishes three stages in the evolution of power, characterized by three distinct principles: ‘the principle of domination (feudal power), the principle of exploitation (bourgeois power), and the principle of organization (cybernetic power)’.²⁷ But, ‘in reality,’ Vaneigem explains, ‘all three principles are always in play … [and there is] no domination without exploitation and organization’.²⁸ What happens, historically, is that the armatures of power and their

relative importance varies with the period under consideration. As one stage gives way to the next, the independence of the masters and the scope of their responsibility decline. As their humanity tends toward zero, the inhumanity of disembodied power tends toward infinity.²⁹

In a characteristically hyperbolic situationist style, Vaneigem projects that, in comparison to the cybernetic society to come, ‘the clinical hecatomb of Auschwitz still has a lyrical quality’.³⁰

Compared with Vaneigem’s analysis of power, Debord’s concept of the spectacle relies on a more careful philosophical reworking and critique of traditional Marxism.³¹ Still, the object of analysis is the same for Debord as for Vaneigem: the spectacle also applies to a society in which power is increasingly exerted by cybernetic means. But, whereas Debord, as late as 1962, was still opposing one possible use of technology with another, this view would soon become more critically informed by Marxist criticisms of science and technology, as can be abundantly confirmed in the archive dossier entitled ‘Marxisme’.³²

Anselm Jappe has trawled through this dossier to show how Debord’s critical theory – apart from its deep engagement with Hegel, Marx, and many of the classic works in the tradition of Hegelian Marxism – was equally informed by a tradition of left communist and dissident Marxist thought. Among those thinkers who most profoundly inspired Debord one finds Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek, Kostas Papioannou, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich Pollock (from whom I adopted the periodizing term ‘age of automation’), Dionys Mascolo, Otto Rühle, Maximilien Rubel, and Karl August Wittfogel.³³

As Jappe notes, Wittfogel was especially crucial to Debord’s development of a critical theory of late capitalist society. Debord retains from Wittfogel a critique of the intertwinement of society’s technological infrastructure and structures of power.³⁴ In Jappe’s brief review, the possible link between the emergence of cybernetics and the society of the spectacle is circumscribed but not developed to the point of making an explicit claim. Debord himself, however, definitely suggests something along those lines. A transcription of a passage from one of Debord’s reading notes on Wittfogel reads:

The S[ociety] of the S[pectacle] is:

economically – a soc[iety] of consumption

politically – a cyberneticized State

as a historical model of cap[italism] – a society of the spectacle³⁵

Debord, much like Vaneigem or Tiqqun, saw cybernetics as at once a technological and a political project. Through his reading of Wittfogel and others, Debord thus reached the fundamental insight, initially intuited by Marx in Capital, that technology by no means supplies a neutral framework for social interaction, but that every specific technological feat is inevitably tied into the valorization of capital.³⁶ In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord was specific about this:

The spectacle is by no means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural; on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle – understood in the limited sense of those ‘mass media’ that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation – seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle’s internal dynamics.³⁷

Contrary to a popular misconception, the analysis of the spectacle takes aim not at the ‘mass media’ but at the ‘internal dynamics’ of capital. These dynamics foreground the cultural logic of mediation through images and necessitate apparatuses that are adequate to it. Debord introduces the term ‘spectacle’, in other words, to make a periodizing claim about capital accumulation. In linking the analysis of technological development to the historically specific contingencies of the valorization of capital, Debord refuses the traditional Marxist outlook on historical ‘progress’ as unquestionably coterminous with technological innovation. Much like contemporaneous materialist critics of technology such as Hans-Dieter Bahr in Germany, Raniero Panzieri in Italy, or Raya Dunayevskaya in the US, Debord insisted that the existing technical infrastructure embodies class antagonism on the level of design and thus could not simply be repurposed by the working class after a revolutionary seizure of power.³⁸

Capital’s interweaving of technology and power is part of why, as we have seen in the preceding chapters of this book (notably in Chapter 1 and in Chapter 3), Debord sees the image and the cultural privileging of visual representations as thoroughly implicated with capital. Debord’s oeuvre – by which I mean the entirety of his output, theoretical and ‘artistic’ – is defined by the struggle to find alternative modes of expression (or representation) for revolutionary thought: forms of representation, in other words, that do not easily conform to the value-form of the commodity. Debord’s ‘art’, and, in particular, his cinema, is therefore not so much iconoclastic as it is a search to escape the isomorphism between the value-form of the commodity and the image-form.³⁹

In other words, Debord introduces the term ‘spectacle’ to underscore – through a détournement of Marx’s first sentence in Capital – both continuity and rupture with Marx’s analysis. Changing the accent from commodity to spectacle (which, as its etymology suggests, has to do with the sense of sight and optical phenomena), Debord is making an argument, compressed in the first sentence of his book, that capital (or value) is increasingly fixed in the form of an image: images of commodities, or images of a commodified lifestyle that will further stimulate consumption of commodities (and thus ensure that the valorization circuit is completed). Only in a second step does value descend from the realm of representation into a corporeal use-value that can be properly consumed. Part of the spectacle’s mode of operation is thus to fix the gaze, literally, on these surface appearances. This is part of the explanation for Debord’s denigration of vision.⁴⁰ But did the analysis of the spectacle correspond to real changes in the economy? Or was it merely an untenable extrapolation from the sphere of circulation, made by an artist whose own gaze was perhaps too firmly fixed on the glittering decor of modern life?⁴¹

My answer, I suppose, is not hard to guess. Debord, like Marx, begins from surface appearances but descends into the hidden abode of production. He does this not to give production ontological primacy, however, but to ground the analysis of the means of exchange in the total cycle of production of capital. Debord’s analysis of the spectacle, in political-economic terms, begins from the observation that in periods of sustained growth and expansion – such as that which followed the Second World War and led bourgeois economists in the wake of Jean Fourastié to refer to the three-decade-long boom in France as les trentes glorieuses – consumption becomes an ever more accentuated moment in the total cycle of production of capital. In classical Marxist theories of crisis, such as that of Rosa Luxemburg (who was a great inspiration to Debord), capital tries to resolve structural problems of overaccumulation through an expansion of its markets, both externally and internally.⁴² Referring to Luxemburg, political geographer David Harvey explains that in its attempt to stimulate effective demand, capital has two main options: it can expand beyond its existing limits and try to create new markets through fresh rounds of ‘primitive accumulation’ (this was the solution in the Imperial era), or it can turn inward and try to multiply its channels of surplus absorption (a Keynesian solution).⁴³

Harvey argues that ‘since 1950 or so, but even more markedly since the 1970s, the capacity of imperialist practices of this sort to perform the role of grand stabilizer has been seriously impaired’.⁴⁴ With the waning of colonialism and the extension of a capitalist world market to the farthest ends of the earth, only the second, Keynesian option seemed to propose a viable solution to the ‘effective demand conundrum’ of capital.⁴⁵ Politically, this process implied, as historian of the left Geoff Eley has shown, extending basic social rights to segments of the labouring population who had been excluded to varying degrees from those democratic entitlements historically claimed by a rising bourgeoisie in its fight against feudal privilege.⁴⁶ In the post-war reconstruction economies of European welfare states, new general entitlements were accompanied by new forms of consumption. As part of a Keynesian solution to the problem of the overaccumulation of capital, the post-war increase in rights reflects not only a historically strong labour movement but also a simple political-economic imperative to expand internal markets. Consumption had to become geared towards the needs, wants, and desires of the masses rather than to a small bourgeois elite, whose wants and desires, however excessive, could never effectively stimulate demand and absorb capitalist surplus on a grand scale. Addressing workers as fully entitled citizens of democracy, at least in their role as consumers, implied offering a new range of lifestyle choices and encouraging new forms of participation on all levels of society. The emergence of the society of the spectacle coincides with new forms of organized participation, whether in the workplace, the ballot box, or in the white cube.

In a key paragraph from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, one finds this rather precise description of the transition in the perception of workers’ subjectivity from that of an outcast to a partially accepted junior partner in managing society:

Whereas at the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation ‘political economy treats the proletarian as a mere worker’ who must receive only the minimum necessary to guarantee his labor power, and never consider him ‘in his leisure, in his humanity’, these ideas of the ruling class are revised just as soon as so great an abundance of commodities begins to be produced that a surplus ‘collaboration’ is required of the workers. All of a sudden the workers in question discover that they are no longer invariably subject to the total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production; instead they find that every day, once work is over, they are treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers. The humanity of the commodity finally attends to the workers’ ‘leisure and humanity’ for the simple reason that political economy as such now can – and must – bring these spheres under its sway …⁴⁷

Debord’s analysis of the spectacle points to how images – and the entire aesthetic décor of the advertising industry undergirding ‘consumption’ – had become structural to production as they mediated an economic necessity for stimulating effective demand and maintaining growth. In terms close to Luxemburg’s, Debord argued that the external drive to expand translated into an internal intensification of commodification in the metropolitan regions where workers – as consumers stimulating effective demand – were suddenly recognized as human subjects. This inversion of the capitalist world dynamic – where the outward expansion of capital that in its so-called ‘primitive’ stage of accumulation implied colonization, plundering, and violence is suddenly reversed in a kind of capitalist humanism – is at the heart of Debord’s conception of the spectacle as a form of colonization of everyday life:

The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see – commodities are now all there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity. The growth of the dictatorship of modern economic production is both extensive and intensive in character. In the least industrialized regions its presence is already felt in the form of imperialist domination by those areas that lead the world in productivity. With the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, alienated consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses … a cycle is set in train that must be maintained at all costs.⁴⁸

What we see with Debord is a claim about a structural correlation between the realm of production and that of the other moments in the total process of capital accumulation. Debord’s analysis of the spectacle points to how images – and the entire aesthetic decor of the advertising industry undergirding consumption – had become structural to production because they mediate the economic necessity for stimulating effective demand and maintaining growth. If capital was in the process of developing new cybernetic forms of social domination and exploitation, extending its reach from the dimly lit shop floor to the peculiar decor of everyday life, it was not merely to strengthen its grip on society but because the internal dynamics of capital were confronting their own limits. The prospects of applied cybernetics or cybernation, an alternative term for automation, signalled a looming crisis in capital that Debord, like Paul Mattick and other left-communist critics of that moment, saw as one of the fundamental problems of their age.⁴⁹ As Debord stated:

Automation, which is at once the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, confronts the world of the commodity with a contradiction that it must somehow resolve: the same technical infrastructure that is capable of abolishing labor must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity – and indeed as the sole generator of commodities.⁵⁰

A core paradox of capital that Marx had already addressed in his Grundrisse, in the now infamous ‘machine fragment’, was exacerbated by the post-war emergence of cybernetics and its application to the production apparatus in processes of automation. The advent of cybernetics brought one of capital’s immanent contradictions to the fore. It is only natural that this was noticed by the aspiring avant-garde movements of that moment.

Through an examination of mostly ephemeral traces – tracts, manifestoes, magazines, books, manuscripts, letters, posters, flyers, maquettes, scale models, urban templates, and various other constructed situations – I have attempted to show how the situationist response to the cultural exigencies of the age of automation evolved over time. I have highlighted some of the ways that the situationists worked with and against the cybernetic hypothesis undergirding the age of automation: intellectually, aesthetically, and politically. My analysis has shown that even if the SI shared a horizon of expectation with competing post-war avant-garde groups – and were, at times, equally mesmerized by the possibilities of science and technology – the parallel trajectory breaks off at a decisive point. This point – alpha and omega to the situationists – is, of course, the revolution. No other post-war group so relentlessly continued, and so originally reinterpreted, the historical avant-garde’s ambition to put themselves in the service of the revolution. An appropriate note of contrast on which to end this book is the French curator Roger Lafosse’s closing remarks to the SIGMA festival in Bordeaux in 1965:

I did not found SIGMA to make a revolution. I did it because I thought I had perceived new sensibilities, different attitudes, cracks in the artistic discourse … I did it for the pleasure of drawing together a crowd. In all of this, I was merely observing the signs of change and I wanted to share this experience …⁵¹

SIGMA – the renegade situationist version as well as its domesticated neo-avant-garde counterpart – slipped into oblivion, quietly petering out into the forms of participatory art and generalized interactive art frenzy that we have become so familiar with today. The failure of the avant-garde project, then and now, ‘coincides with its success within the institution’.⁵²

Notes

Introduction

1   Gerard Cottin, ‘ “CYSP 1”: danseuse-étoile est un robot’, Science et Vie, September 1956: 62.

2   Ibid.

3   The term ‘cosmic sunrise’ refers to Richard Wagner’s break with tradition in deciding to begin his opera, The Ring of the Nibelung, in complete darkness.

4   See Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967), and The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 3.

5   See Simon Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 126–65.

6   Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

7   In Paris in 1938, the surrealists announced in advance of their upcoming art exhibition: an ‘authentic descendant of Frankenstein, the automaton “Enigmarelle”, built in 1900 by the American engineer Ireland, will cross the exhibition hall at half an hour after midnight in false flesh and bone’; the automaton, however, apparently missed its appointment. See Colin Jones, ‘Surrealist Exhibitions, Parisian Expositions’, in Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris, ed. Therese Lichtenstein (Berkeley: University of California Press; Nashville, TN: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2009), 127. Thanks to Kerry Lynn Greaves and Emil Leth Meilvang for providing this and other valuable information about surrealism.

8   Hal Foster, ‘Exquisite Corpses’, Visual Anthropology Review, 7:1 (1 March 1991): 51–61.

9   In terms of composition, ‘the record of the SI’s membership involves 19 resignations, 2 “scissionists” and 45 exclusions. At any one time, however, the SI averaged 10 to 20 members. In total, the SI comprised 63 men, 7 women and one transsexual, from 16 different countries.’ Frances Stracey, Constructed Situations: A New History of the Situationist International (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 3–4. For a detailed membership chart, see Christopher Gray, ed., Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998), 132–3. For an updated membership chart, see James Trier, ‘Membership of the Situationist International’, in Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 405–8.

10   For an aperçu of the historical knot that I attempt to help untie, see Céline Lafontaine, ‘The Cybernetic Matrix of “French Theory” ‘, Theory, Culture and Society, 24: 5 (1 September 2007): 27–46, and L’Empire cybernétique: des machines à penser à la pensée machine: essai (Paris: Seuil, 2004). For some canonical histories of the SI, see: Mirella Bandini, L’Estetico il politico da cobra all’Internazionale situazionista 1948–1957 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1977); Jean-François Martos, Histoire de l’Internationale situationniste (Paris: Editions Gérard Lebovici, 1989); Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde: eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1990); Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press); Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992); Gianfranco Marelli, L’Amère Victoire du Situationnisme pour une histoire critique de l’Internationale situationniste, 1956–1971 (Arles: Editions Sulliver, 1998); Fabien Danesi, Le Mythe brisé de l’Internationale situationniste: l’aventure d’une avant-garde au coeur de la culture de masse (1945–2008) (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2008). For more recent histories, see McKenzie Wark, The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2015 [2011]); Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot, L’Internationale situationniste: de l’histoire au mythe, 1948–2013 (Paris: PUF, 2015); Patrick Marcolini, Le Mouvement situationniste: une histoire intellectuelle (Montreuil: L’Echappée, 2012); Stracey, Constructed Situations; Éric Brun, Les Situationnistes: une avant-garde totale (1950–1972) (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2014).

11   See Tiqqun, ‘L’Hypothèse Cybernétique’, Tiqqun, 2 (2001): 40–83.

12   Although my study is squarely centred in France, I nonetheless want to heed historiographies that emphasize the ‘inconsistencies and paradoxes’ of a movement that can be neither organizationally delimited nor geographically fixed. For example, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, eds, Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, 2011); Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, Cosmonauts of the Future Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, 2015). See also Ellef Prestsæter, ed., These Are Situationist Times! An Inventory of Reproductions, Deformations, Modifications, Derivations, and Transformations (Oslo: Torpedo Press, 2019). My own contribution to decentring standard historiographies consists primarily in repositioning the Danish artist Asger Jorn as a key figure in the SI alongside Guy Debord (particularly in Chapter 3); I also reassess the instrumental role of the Tunisian member Mustapha Khayati in the build-up to May ’68 (see Chapter 4). See also Bertrand Cochard, “Internationalism,” in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, ed. Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 290–300.

13   I provide an overview of the history of cybernetics further on in this introduction. For relevant studies of the cultural implications of cybernetics, I would highlight the following: Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Edward A. Shanken, ‘Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s’, in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 255–77; Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner, ‘The Cybernetic Vision in Post-war Art’, in Post-war: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes (Munich: Haus der Kunst; New York: Prestel, 2016); Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). Of this handful of representative works, only the latter convincingly attempts to tie the analysis of cybernetics to historical changes in the composition of capital.

14   ‘While Debord invoked the category of spectacle as early as 1955, it is only in the 1960s and finally within The Society of the Spectacle that it emerges as a critical concept for a structured totality.’ Eric-John Russell, ‘From the Commodity to the Spectacle: Debord’s Marx’, in Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image – Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today, ed. Peter Osborne, Eric Alliez, and Eric-John Russell (Kingston: CRMEP Books, 2019), 60.

15   Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias, ‘The Spectacle’, in Hemmens and Zacarias, The Situationist International, 150.

16   Debord, La Société du spectacle and Society of the Spectacle.

17   Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12; Cf. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1976), 125: ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”.’

18   Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Tom Bunyard, Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (Brill, 2018); Russell, ‘From the Commodity to the Spectacle: Debord’s Marx’.

19   An important exception to this trend is Daniel Spaulding, ‘Value-Form and Avant-Garde’, Mute Magazine, March 2014, metamute.org.

20   A case in point would be the otherwise richly contextualized work by Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Post-war France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Several other canonical accounts of the SI equally overlook or gloss over the group’s engagement with French ultra-leftism. For more on the SI in relation to the French ultra-left, see Roland Simon, Histoire critique de l’ultragauche (Marseille: Senonevero; Avignon: Les Chemins non tracés, 2015); Anthony Hayes, ‘The Situationist International and the Rediscovery of the Revolutionary Workers’ Movement’, in Hemmens and Zacarias, The Situationist International, 71–93.

21   Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5.

22   Giorgio Agamben, Mezzi senza fine: note sulla politica (Torino: Bollati Borlinghieri, 1996), and Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Other attempts to return to the origins of the spectacle can be found in Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Jonathan Crary, ‘Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory’, October, 50 (1989): 97–107; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). By contrast, my argument concerns the historicity of the concept and my primary interest in this book is to show how the concept of the spectacle was forged in the context of 1950s French art world controversies. My analysis also implies that Debord’s extended social analysis of the society of the spectacle retains this fundamentally aesthetic dimension alongside its broadly Marxist–Hegelian theoretical scope.

23   Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Brazilier, Inc., 1975), 203–4.

24   Jacques Ménétrier and Guy Habasque, ‘Cybernetic Light Tower’, originally published in Nicolas Schöffer: The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, ed. Marcel Joray, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Neuchâtel: Éditions du Griffon, 1963), 50.

25   Ibid.

26   Ibid.

27   Ibid., emphasis mine.

28   For an in-depth study of the birth of kinetic art, see Frank Popper, Naissance de l’art cinétique (Paris: Gauthier-Villard, 1967). For historical mappings of the crossover from cybernetics to structuralism, see Lafontaine, L’Empire cybernétique; Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus’, Critical Inquiry, 38:1 (2011): 96–126; and Ronan Le Roux, Une Histoire de la cybernétique en France: 1948–1975 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), esp. 511–37.

29   Frank Popper, Art, Action and Participation (London: Studio Vista, 1975), 7.

30   Joray, Nicolas Schöffer, 50; Cottin, ‘“CYSP 1”’. For an exploration of the concept of an ‘all-redeeming synthesis’ in French post-war art, see Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. Ch. 5.

31   Hervé Vanel, ‘Cybernetic Bordello: Nicolas Schöffer’s Aesthetic Hygiene’, in France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Post-war and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 109.

32   Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from the History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), esp. Ch. 1. In this incomparable art-historical study, Clark provocatively proposes to turn the clock of modernism back to 1793, when the French painter Jacques-Louis David first presented his painting The Death of Marat. But, as Clark points out, although conventional histories of modernism seem to be fond of inaugural dates, such dates are inherently problematic. History is never as clear-cut as one would like to imagine.

33   ‘The nature of the societies in which art has been produced has been not only, for example, feudal or capitalist, but patriarchal and sexist. Neither of these forms of exploitation is reducible to the other.’ Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2006), 27.

34   T. J. Clark, ‘The Conditions of Artistic Creation’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1974, 561–2.

35   For a discussion of gender issues in relation to the Situationist International, see: Kelly Baum, ‘The Sex of the Situationist International’, October, 126 (1 October 2008): 23–43; Helle Brøns, ‘Masculine Resistance: Expressions and Experiences of Gender in the Work of Asger Jorn’, October, 141 (2012): 133–54; Ruth Baumeister, ‘Gender and Sexuality in the Situationist International’, in Hemmens and Zacarias, The Situationist International, 118–37; Helle Brøns, ‘Maskulin standhaftighed: Køn, materie og populærkultur i Asger Jorns kunstpraksis [Masculine steadfastness: Gender, matter, and popular culture in Asger Jorn’s art practice]’, PhD thesis (Copenhagen University, 2014); Stracey, Constructed Situations.

36   Vanel, ‘Cybernetic Bordello: Nicolas Schöffer’s Aesthetic Hygiene’, 110.

37   Christopher Johnson, ‘ “French” Cybernetics’, French Studies, 69:1 (1 January 2015): 60–78; Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Paris: Hermann &#x0026; Cie; Cambridge, MA: Technology Press; New York: Wiley &#x0026; Sons, 1948).

38   Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group: Constructing a Social Science for Post-war America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

39   Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory’, 98.

40   For a more developed version of this argument, see Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).

41   Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, ‘Behavior, Purpose and Teleology’, Philosophy of Science, 10 (1943): 18–24.

42   Ibid., 4–5.

43   Ibid.

44   Anders Michelsen, ‘The Imaginary of the Artificial: Automata, Models, Machinics – On Promiscuous Modeling as Precondition for Poststructuralist Ontology’, in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 233–47; see also Lafontaine, ‘Cybernetic Matrix’.

45   Peter Galison, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 21:1 (1994): 228–66.

46   Ibid., 229.

47   C. P. Snow, ‘The Two Cultures’, Leonardo, 23:2/3 (1990): 169–73.

48   See Claus Pias, ed., Cybernetics – the Macy Conferences 1946–1953: The Complete Transactions (Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2016); and Heims, Cybernetics Group.

49   Claus Pias, ‘The Age of Cybernetics’, in Cybernetics, 15.

50   The best example of an engineer taking heed of the situation is Claude E. Shannon, who in an editorial from 1956 warned that information theory, partly due to its ‘connections with such fashionable fields as computing machines, cybernetics, and automation’ had become ‘something of a scientific bandwagon’. He added: ‘although this wave of popularity is certainly pleasant and exciting for those of us working in the field, it carries at the same time an element of danger. While we feel that information theory is indeed a valuable tool in providing fundamental insights into the nature of communication problems and will continue to grow in importance, it is certainly no panacea for the communication engineer or, a fortiori, for anyone else.’ Claude E. Shannon, ‘The Bandwagon’, IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 1956, 3.

51   Walter Benjamin, ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 7 vols, 1991), 100–3, and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1986 [1969]), 217–52.

52   Bernes, Work of Art.

53   For the best available account of automation in a contemporary perspective, see Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (London: Reaktion, 2020). Another highly recommendable perspective on automation can be found in Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso, 2020).

54   Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, 238. The quote in question is from Duhamel’s 1930 book Scènes de la vie future.

55   Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer GmbH, 1913); Henryk Grossmann, Das Akkumulations-und Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalistischen Systems (Leipzig: Verlag von C. L. Hirschfeld, 1929). For a more recent defence of Marxist crisis theory, see Robert Kurz, ‘Krise und Kritik: Die innere Schranke des Kapitals und die Schwundstufen des Marxismus’, Exit!: Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 10 (2012): 26–61.

56   Louis Salleron, L’Automation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), 15.

57   François Vatin, ‘Machinisme, marxisme, humanisme: Georges Friedmann avant et après-guerre’, Sociologie du travail, 46:2 (22 April 2008): 205–23.

58   Friedrich Pollock, Automation: A Study of Its Economic and Social Consequences, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 3.

59   Ibid., 6.

60   For an account of the same period from the point of view of a ‘space-age aesthetic’, see Stephen Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Post-war European Avant-Garde (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

61   Friedrich Pollock, L’Automation – ses conséquences économiques et sociales (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957).

62   The most comprehensive work to date on the reception of cybernetics in France is Le Roux, Une Histoire de la cybernétique en France.

63   David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, and Slava Gerovitch, ‘From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union’, in Science and Ideology, A Comparative History, ed. Mark Walker (London: Routledge, 2002), 89.

64   For an overview of the history of cybernetics in a global perspective, see Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), Ch. 1.

65   Ibid., esp. Ch. 1.

66   Mindell, Segal, and Gerovitch, ‘From Communications Engineering to Communications Science’, 67.

67   Dominique Dubarle, ‘Une Nouvelle Science: la cybernétique. Vers la machine à gouverner …’, Le Monde (28 December 1948), 49.

68   Geoghegan, ‘From Information Theory to French Theory’.

69   Ibid.

70   Le Roux, Une Histoire de la cybernétique en France.

71   Popper, Art, Action and Participation; Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012).

72   Bishop, Artificial Hells, 78.

73   With its particular attention to the SI’s strong ties to the revolutionary interwar avant-gardes, French Marxism, and the ultra-gauche tradition, this book supplements existing studies of the transformation of French intellectual life, i.e., in Lafontaine, ‘Cybernetic Matrix’; Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory.

1. Refusal and Withdrawal: Histoire marseillaise

1   Lettrist International, ‘Order for a Boycott’, trans. Mitchell Abidor, 2008, marxists.org. I have amended the translation of the passage ‘sur le toit de Firmin le Corbusier’ from ‘on the roof of the Firmin Le Corbusier’ to ‘on the roof Le Corbusier’s Church’. Firmin derives from Latin firminus (firm or steadfast) and should be translated as ‘Saint’, but given the context it is clear that the elision is intended. Moreover, Le Corbusier actually built churches around this time, for instance the La Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in the French region Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in 1955.

2   See Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pierre Voyer, L’Internationale situationniste: chronologie, bibliographie, protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultés) (Paris: Champ Libre, 1972).

3   Gianfranco Marelli, L’Amère Victoire du Situationnisme pour une histoire critique de l’Internationale Situationniste, 1956–1971 (Arles: Editions Sulliver, 1998), 221.

4   The Scandinavian situationists, for instance, were no strangers to the art of insults and would refer to Guy Debord as ‘Guy the bore’. See the comprehensive overview of Scandinavian situationism in Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, Cosmonauts of the Future Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, 2015).

5   None of the canonical histories of the movement deal with the historical meaning of the Ordre de boycott, which, if mentioned at all, is usually dealt with only cursorily. For instance, despite the fact that she focuses her attention on the LI and the other avant-garde tendencies that led up to the formation of the SI in 1957, Mirella Bandini’s early account reproduces a copy of the tract as an appendix but fails to assess its historical significance. Mirella Bandini, L’Esthétique, le politique : De Cobra à l’Internationale situationniste, 1948–1957 (La Rochelle: Editions Sulliver, 1998), 274. Marelli’s history likewise mentions the tract only in passing. Marelli, L’Amère Victoire. Although Simon Sadler analyses the situationist project in relation to urbanism and notes the group’s strong opposition to Le Corbusier, he mentions the boycott only briefly and omits to discuss its historical implications at any length. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998), 50. The same pattern of neglect that can be gauged from these key works repeats itself in the more recent literature.

6   Marcel Mariën came up with the term histoire marseillaise for the boycott campaign. Marcel Mariën and Roger Langlais, eds, Les Lèvres nues: collection complète (1954–1958) (Paris: Éditions Plasma, 1978), 9, 37.

7   Tricky because, as scholar of situationism Emmanuel Guy argues, ‘The movement itself largely contributed to establishing its own history: put simply, the SI was its own historian, and provided its readers and analysts with a convincing readymade narrative whose pull is not easily escaped.’ Emmanuel Guy, ‘Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist Dérive’, in France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Post-war and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 60.

8   For an overview of CYSP 1’s public life and for an (exceptionally weird) online interface mediating Schöffer’s oeuvre, see Eleonore Schöffer de Lavandeyra, ‘Les Apparitions de CYSP 1 en public’, 2020, olats.org.

9   Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 81.

10   Ibid., 93–5.

11   Ibid., Ch. 3.

12   Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 205.

13   Ibid., 5.

14   Adrian Marino, ‘Le Manifeste’, in Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle, ed. Jean Weisgerber, vol. 2 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984), 825.

15   Paul Robert, ‘Boycotter’, in Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française: les mots et les associations d’idées (Paris: Société du Nouveau Littré/Presses Universitaire de France, 1953), 1.

16   Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Avantgardemanifester (Aarhus: Klim, 2018), 329.

17   ‘Manifesto-art’ is a term that literary critic Martin Puchner employs to sum up the continuous process of formal displacements from Filippo Marinetti and the Futurist moment onwards to the SI. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). While the term ‘manifesto-art’ might be useful in some contexts, its relevance to the SI is limited because it obscures the distinction between the interventionist tract and the more elaborate, sometimes quasi-literary form of the manifesto (for example, the surrealists’ lengthy manifestoes clearly contrast with their myriad shorter, interventionist tracts).

18   ‘The chief function of the dialectic of modernism in the visual arts has been to provide a principle by which painting can change, transform and renew itself, and by which it is enabled to perpetuate virtually intact, and sometimes even enriched, through each epoch of self-renewal.’ Michael Fried, ‘Modernist Painting and Formal Criticism’, American Scholar, 33:4 (1964): 647. Although Fried was referring specifically to painting, it is clear that he was proposing a theory of modernism at large.

19   Walter Fähnders, Avantgarde und Moderne 1890–1933: Lehrbuch Germanistik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 202–4. For a more in-depth discussion of the manifesto, see Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, eds, ‘Die Ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation’: die europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997).

20   Zvonimir Novak, Agit Tracts: un siècle d’actions politique et militaire (Paris: Éditions l’échappée, 2015).

21   Ibid., 6–9.

22   Lyon, Manifestoes, 5.

23   See Cécile Bargues, ‘Dada et La Typographie’, Artpress, 2:49 (August 2018): n.p.

24   The manifesto is reprinted in Gérard Berreby, ed., Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale situationniste (Paris: Allia, 1985), 154–5.

25   Michèle Bernstein, Tous les Cheveaux du roi (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1960) and La Nuit (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1961). Both books have been reprinted by Éditions Allia (2004, 2013). In a 2013 interview, Bernstein recalls that she and ‘the Situationists considered the classical form of the novel to be totally obsolete. As we needed money, I decided to write a fake novel – a joke on the popular novels of the time.’ Gavin Everall, ‘The Game’, Frieze, 157 (6 September 2013), frieze.com.

26   Guy Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 1: juin 1957 – août 1960 (8 vols, Paris: Librairie Athème Fayard, 1999), 25.

27   For an aperçu of the crisis in SI-related dissident Marxism, see Stephen Hastings-King, ‘L’Internationale situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary’, Substance, 28:3 (1999): 26–54.

28   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). This hugely influential but also contested book set in motion the philosophical revision of Marxism. For a contemporaneous Marxist critique, see Henri Lefebvre, ‘M. Merleau-Ponty et la philosophie de l’ambiguité’, La Pensée: revue du rationalisme moderne (August 1956): 44–58.

29   Simon develops this theory specifically in relation to the SI: Roland Simon, Fondements critiques d’une théorie de la révolution: au-delà de l’affirmation du prolétariat (Paris: Éditions Senonevero, 2001), Ch. 5.

30   Théorie Communiste, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, trans. Endnotes, Endnotes, 1 (2008): 155.

31   For an outstanding history of the ‘critique of work’, see Alastair Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

32   Ibid., Chs 4–5. For a brilliant anti-work reorientation of the history of surrealism, see Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

33   Hemmens, Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, 123.

34   André Breton, Oeuvres, Vol. 1: Deux Manifestes Dada (1920), 230.

35   Vladimir Lenin, ‘Report on the Work of the Council of People’s Commissars’, in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 513–18.

36   Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 136–7.

37   ‘A History of Separation’, Endnotes, 4 (2015): 142–3.

38   Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die postmoderne Metamorphose (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2011). For a similar argument in English, see Roswitha Scholz, ‘Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body’, in Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. Neil Larsenn et al. (Chicago and Alberta: MCM’ Publishing, 2014), 123–42.

39   Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J. Wolman, ‘Pourquoi le lettrisme’, Potlatch. Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale lettriste, 22 (9 September 1955): 1–5, and ‘Why Lettrism’, trans. Leutha Blisset, unpopular.org.uk.

40   ‘American aid was put on a firmer footing under the plan outlined by Secretary of State Marshall in June 1947. The presence of Communists in the French government since 1944 had long been an obstacle to American generosity, and, as [then foreign minister under the Paul Ramadier government, Georges] Bidault recognised in September 1947, “the exclusion of the Communists from the Italian government, and the formation in France and Belgium of centrists cabinets, were the political conditions of American aid”.’ Robert Gildea, France since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press), 10.

41   For a brief discussion of post-war French Communism in relation to the formation of the SI, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ‘The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics’, Oxford Art Journal, 27:3 (2004), 365–87.

42   Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre, ‘Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview’, October, 79 (Winter 1997): 71.

43   In a strange twist of fate, however, the aging Lefebvre declares himself in agreement with de Gaulle’s own self-understanding at the time as someone who ‘wanted to bring order to the Algerian question. He was the only one who could. We realized that later on.’ Ibid., 72.

44   T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’, October, 79 (1997): 25.

45   Richard Gombin provides a set of useful distinctions in his overview of French gauchisme. See Richard Gombin, Les Origines du gauchisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971). For a history of the ultra-gauche, see Roland Simon, Histoire critique de l’ultragauche (Marseille: Senonevero; Avignon: Les Chemins non tracés, 2015).

46   Gombin, Origines du gauchisme. My historical narrative in this section draws to a large extent on Gombin’s account of the developments that took place after 1956.

47   For a comprehensive collection of essays about the Frankfurt School (including essays on historically marginalized figures such as Pollock, Sohn-Rethel, and others), see Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, eds, The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2018). For a rare history of French Marxism and its peculiarities, see Daniel Lindenberg, Le Marxisme introuvable (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1975).

48   For an account of the surrealists’ complicated relationship to the PCF, see Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme suivie de documents surréalistes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964).

49   Gombin, Origines du gauchisme, 51.

50   See Simon, Histoire critique de l’ultragauche, 201–314.

51   Gombin, Origines du gauchisme, 22.

52   Ibid., 16, emphasis mine.

53   Zvonimir Novak, ‘La Société sans classes a trouvé son artiste: Debord graphiste’, in Guy Debord: un art de la guerre (Paris: BnF/Gallimard, 2013), 86.

54   Ibid.

55   Ibid.

56   Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 4.

57   Ibid., 98.

58   Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 139.

59   Ibid.

60   The term ‘provincializing’ has gained currency in art-theoretical discourse ever since the introduction of the term in the postcolonial thought of Dipesh Chakrabarty. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

61   Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme.

62   Hans T. Siepe, ‘ “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition colonial” – Quelques points de repères pour aborder l’anticolonialisme des surréalistes’, in Surréalisme et politique – politique du surréalisme, ed. Wolfgang Asholt and Hans T. Siepe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 169–80.

63   For a contextualization of this particular appeal, see Henri Béhar, ‘Le Droit à la l’insoumission. Le Surréalisme et la guerre d’Algérie’, in Asholt and Siepe, Surréalisme et politique, 197–214.

64   Novak, ‘La Société sans classes’, 86–7.

65   ‘The appeal of such a world for Debord and his colleagues should be clear: we know well how highly they valued medieval conceptions of chivalry, the myths of the Round Table and even such contemporary mass-cultural versions as the comic-strip hero Prince Valiant; the dérive was a form of quest for a secularized Holy Grail; and all members were placed under the haughty injunction to – as Debord had scrawled on a building in 1953 – “never work!”, labor being a mundane occupation far below their “grand conception of life”.’ Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Post-war France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 153.

66   Charlotte Denoël, ‘Bœuf gras et carnaval au XIXe siècle’, Histoire par l’image, March 2016, histoire-image.org.

67   Ibid.

68   Venita Datta, ‘A Bohemian Festival: La fête de la vache enragée’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28:2 (1993): 195–213.

69   Ibid., 195.

70   Le Coeur à barbe prefigures the 1956 boycott insofar as it was, in Tzara’s own words, ‘a pamphlet attacking the Congress [of Paris]’ that Breton and others were planning at the time, but which (for reasons unknown) never took place. Tzara retrospectively chronicled the specificities of this conflict in 1937, and they were published as an appendix to Robert Motherwell’s landmark anthology from 1951 (this was one of the most important stimuli for the post-war rediscovery of Dada). See Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989 (1951)), 303–6. For a study of Dada afterlives in France, see Cécile Bargues, ‘Les Lendemains de Dada. Contrecoups, imbrications, éclaboussures et répercussions. France 1946–1963’, Luna-Park, 2 (2004): 173–242. For a more developed version, see Cécile Bargues, ‘Dada après Dada (années 1930–1940)’, Phd thesis (Paris, 2012), 27, theses.fr/2012PA010576. Her study demonstrates that Dada never disappeared, but lived on as an avant-garde subcurrent; however, the post-war French art-world establishment almost systematically ignored Dada, in particular the more destructive or revolutionary tendencies of Berlin Dada. Debord and the situationists admired Berlin Dada early on, and the admiration was apparently mutual, as Debord and Raoul Hausmann’s correspondence in the 1960s shows. See also Cécile Bargues, Raoul Hausmann: après Dada (Brussels: Mardaga, 2015).

71   Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, ‘Mode d’emploi du détournement’, Les Lèvres nues, 8 (May 1956).

72   Ibid., 5.

73   Guy Debord, Oeuvres, ed. Jean-Louis Rançon and Alice Becker-Ho (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 233.

74   Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner, ‘The Cybernetic Vision in Post-war Art’, in Post-war: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes (Munich: Haus der Kunst; New York: Prestel, 2016), 697.

75   For a study of the performative implications of cybernetics in relation to cultural dynamics and art, see Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

76   Democratic was a key term in contemporaneous art criticism. See for instance Michel Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant: chronique vécue de l’art contemporain, de l’abstraction au pop art, 1944–1969 (Tournai: Casterman, 1969). As communists, the situationists were naturally sceptical of the inflationary use of the term ‘democracy’ as a form of empty virtue-signalling in and outside of art discourse.

77   For a similar argument, see Edward A. Shanken, ‘Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s’, in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 255–77.

78   Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012), 104.

79   Michel Corvin, Festivals de l’art d’avant-garde, 1956–1960 (Paris: Somogy, 2004), 14.

2. Secret Fascination: Unitary Urbanism

1   For an elaboration of the concept ‘cybernetic vision’ in relation to the post-war moment in art more broadly, see Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner, ‘The Cybernetic Vision in Post-war Art’, in Post-war: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes (Munich: Haus der Kunst; New York: Prestel, 2016).

2   Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: Witte de With and 010 Publishers, 1998), 25.

3   See Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 73.

4   For a celebratory account of the historical development of Schöffer’s sculpture, see Marcel Joray, ed., Nicolas Schöffer: The Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Neuchâtel: Éditions du Griffon, 1963).

5   Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 66.

6   For a presentation of Schöffer’s project, see Carlotta Darò, ‘Nicolas Schöffer and the Cybernetic City’, AA Files, 69 (2014): 3–11.

7   Dominique Trudel, ‘L’Abandon du projet de construction de la Tour Lumière Cybernétique de La Défense’, Le Temps des médias, 28:1 (2017): 235.

8   Ibid.

9   For studies on New Babylon, see for instance: Libero Andreotti, Situacionistas – arte, politica, urbanismo/Situationists – Art, Politics, Urbanism (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 1996); Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon; Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998); M. Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (New York/Cambridge, MA: Drawing Center/MIT Press, 2001); McKenzie Wark, The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2015 [2011]), Ch. 11. On the situationists and urbanism more broadly, see also Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City (London: Verso, 2009).

10   Benjamin Buchloh, ‘A Conversation with Constant’, in de Zegher and Wigley, Activist Drawing, 21.

11   Internationale situationniste, ‘Notes éditoriales. La lutte pour le controle des nouvelles techniques de conditionnement’, internationale situationniste, 1 (June 1958): 8, and ‘The Struggle for the Control of the New Techniques of Conditioning’, trans. Reuben Keehan, internationale situationniste, 1 (June 1958), Situationist International Online, cddc.vt.edu. Translation amended.

12   ‘For an Imaginist Renewal of the World. The Alba Congress: 1956–2019’, announcement, e-flux.com.

13   Internationale lettriste, ‘La Plate-forme d’Alba’, Potlatch. Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale Lettriste, 27 (November 1956): 2–3, and ‘The Alba Platform’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 21–2.

14   Internationale lettriste, ‘Alba Platform’, 22.

15   The text was written in 1953 but first published in the inaugural issue of the Situationist International’s bulletin. Gilles Ivain, ‘Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau’, internationale situationniste, 1 (June 1958): 15–20, and ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, trans. Tom McDonough, in McDonough, Situationists and the City, 35.

16   Ivain, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, 35.

17   Internationale lettriste, ‘Alba Platform’, 22.

18   For a significant discussion of the key notion of a ‘synthesis of the arts’ in relation to the post-war moment, see Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), Ch. 5. I return to the notion of synthesis further on in the present chapter.

19   Internationale lettriste, ‘Alba Platform’, 22.

20   Internationale lettriste, ‘Échec des manifestations de marseille’, Potlatch. Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale Lettriste, 27 (November 1956): 1, and ‘Failure of the Marseille Exhibition’, trans. Gerardo Denis, Situationist International Online, 22 January 2020, cddc.vt.edu. Emphasis mine.

21   Internationale lettriste, ‘Failure of the Marseille Exhibition’.

22   For a contrasting view of how the festival was received, see Michel Corvin, Festivals de l’art d’avant-garde, 1956–1960 (Paris: Somogy, 2004), 114–20.

23   For an analysis of the journal medium in relation to historical avant-garde movements, see Emily Hage, ‘The Magazine as Strategy: Tristan Tzara’s Dada and the Seminal Role of Dada Art Journals in the Dada Movement’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 2:2 (2011): 33–53.

24   Internationale lettriste, Visages de l’avant-Garde: 1953, ed. Jean-Louis Rançon (Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 2010), n.p.

25   Ibid.

26   Letter from Debord to Patrick Straram, 3 October 1958, in Guy Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 1: juin 1957 – août 1960 (8 vols, Paris: Librairie Athème Fayard, 1999), 144.

27   Henri Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1962), and Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2012), 345.

28   Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J. Wolman, ‘Pourquoi le lettrisme’, Potlatch. Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale lettriste, 22 (9 September 1955): 1–5, and ‘Why Lettrism’, trans. Leutha Blisset, unpopular.org.uk.

29   Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’Ordre sauvage: violence, dépense et sacré dans l’art des années, 1950-1960, Art et artistes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 9.

30   The term a ‘cut through time’ is used by art historian Ina Blom to describe the ways in which the avant-garde establishes a relation to itself. Ina Blom, The Cut Through Time. A Version of the Dada/Neo-Dada Repetition (Oslo: Acta Humaniora, 1999), 55.

31   Letter from Asger Jorn to Lettriste Internationale, 1956, n.d., Jorn Archive, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.

32   Internationale lettriste, ‘Liste des participants du Festival de la Cité radieuse’, Potlatch. Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale lettriste, 27 (November 1956): 4.

33   The first English-language book on the topic was Jill Carrick’s Nouveau Réalisme: 1960s France, and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

34   See Edward A. Shanken, ‘Reprogramming Systems Aesthetics//2009–14’, in Systems, ed. Edward A. Shanken (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2015), 127.

35   See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 (Theorie der Avantgarde, 1974).

36   See for instance the seminal essays in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), as well as the equally important essays in Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

37   Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde’, October, 37 (1986): 41–52.

38   Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1.

39   One attempt to place the avant-garde problematic in relation to more present concerns is found in John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2015).

40   Peter Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of “Theory of the Avant-Garde”’, New Literary History, 41:4 (2010): 696.

41   Ibid., 697–8. For a historical contextualization of Bürger’s overinvestment in theory, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ‘The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics’, Oxford Art Journal, 27:3 (2004): 386–7.

42   Internationale lettriste, ‘Failure of the Marseille Exhibition’.

43   Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Papers 2 (New York: G. Braziller, 1978), 189.

44   Ibid., 202–3.

45   To signal only two of the most important sources of inspiration for my argument as a whole, see Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Post-war Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); see also Daniel Spaulding, ‘Value-Form and Avant-Garde’, Mute Magazine, March 2014, metamute.org.

46   See Alastair Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

47   Sadler, Situationist City, 49.

48   Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change: 1878–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 232–53.

49   Ibid., 232.

50   Ibid., 212.

51   McDonough, Situationists and the City, 25. McDonough’s emphasis on Haussman’s sanitization of Paris as part of a ‘push’ in a long-term process of capitalist modernization aligns with David Harvey’s argument that Hausmann’s urbanist scheme provided a sort of template for solving crises of over-accumulation of capital. See David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, 2:53 (2008): 23–40. Even though Harvey’s analysis is primarily oriented towards the structural similarities between Hausmann’s Second Empire Paris and the New York that Robert Moses completely remodelled in the 1940s, the French post-war reconstruction effort fits into the same general pattern of ‘surplus absorption’ through urbanization.

52   The first volume in Lefebvre’s series of three on everyday life – Critique de la vie quotidienne, tome I: introduction (Paris: Grasset, 1947) – was crucial, and it was later republished with a lengthy foreword (Paris: L’Arche Editeur, 1958), the influence of which was clearly felt in the SI at the end of the 1950s. All three volumes of Lefebvre’s critique are published in English as Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2014).

53   Internationale lettriste, ‘Les Gratte-ciels par la racine’, Potlatch. Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale Lettriste, 5 (20 July 1954): 1–2, and ‘Skyscrapers by the Roots’, trans. Tom McDonough, in McDonough, Situationists and the City, 44–6.

54   Ibid., 44.

55   Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Éditions Crès, 1923), and Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 288–9.

56   Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970 [1960]), 245.

57   Between 1945 and 1947, workers’ hours had increased from 40 to 44 per week while real wages were only around half the pre-war level. This led to the major strike waves of 1946–47 that resulted in the May crisis in which the Communist Party was pushed out of government. See Philip Armstrong, Andrew Glyn, and John Harrison, Capitalism since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 56–60.

58   Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 44.

59   Ibid.

60   Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism, 13.

61   Ibid.

62   Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 6.

63   The programme is reproduced in Corvin, Festivals de l’art, 237–52.

64   Letter from Bernard Chochoy, 6 July 1956, included in the official programme for the festival in Marseille, reproduced in Corvin, Festivals de l’art, 239.

65   The fullest (and to my knowledge only) available historical account of all three festivals is found in Corvin, Festivals de l’art.

66   Ibid., 32.

67   Ibid., 32–3.

68   Ibid., 14.

69   Despite the fact that the festival in Marseille brought together some of the most significant figures in post-war French art – most notably the artists Yves Klein (who displayed his famous Proposition Monochrome only shortly after they were first displayed at Galerie Colette Allendy in February–March) and Jean Tinguely (who showcased his famous ‘metamatic’ sculptures), along with almost every single one of the artists who would become known, from 1961 onwards, as the nouveaux réalistes – art-historical scholarship, with the honourable exception of Corvin (in Festivals de l’art), has not accorded this festival any significant attention. One symptom of this neglect is the lack of any discussion of the festival in Marseille even among the many closely related contributions to the historical context of post-war French art found in Catherine Dossin’s recent edited volume, France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Post-war and Contemporary Art (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019). The influential French art critic Michel Ragon, however, returns time and again in his writings to the festivals and particularly to the one in Marseille (though this is unsurprising considering he was one of the co-organizers). See for instance his now canonical history of French art from 1969: Michel Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant: chronique vécue de l’art contemporain, de l’abstraction au pop art, 1944–1969 (Tournai: Casterman, 1969). For an assessment of Ragon’s involvement in the Marseille festival and the impact of this event on his work as a critic, see Hélène Jannière, ‘Michel Ragon: la critique d’architecture, de la Synthèse des arts au GIAP’, Critique d’art, 29 (1 April 2007): 1–7.

70   Letter from Asger Jorn to Lettrist Internationale, 1956.

71   Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics, 3.

72   Ibid.

73   Serge Guilbaut, ‘1955: The Year the Gaulois Fought the Cowboy’, Yale French Studies, 98 (2000): 167–81.

74   Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1983]).

75   Catherine Dossin, ‘Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”: Rewriting France in the Stories of Post-war Western Art’, in France and the Visual Arts since 1945, 18.

76   Ibid., 13.

77   ‘One of the driving motivations behind … Le Corbusier’s capitalizing not simply on the concept of a synthèse des arts plastiques but a synthèse des arts majeurs was, I believe, France’s stiff sense of competition with the United States.’ Golan, Muralnomad, 189.

78   As McDonough notes, this famous housing unit, the first of its kind in France and the centre of much media attention, ‘was completed in 1952, just as the LI was defining itself ‘. See McDonough, Situationists and the City, 6.

79   Le Corbusier, ‘Unité d’habitation, Marseille, France, 1945’, Fondation Le Corbusier, fondationlecorbusier.fr.

80   Ibid.

81   For an overview of Claudius-Petit’s notion of planning and the historical context in which it arose, see Benoît Pouvreau, ‘La politique d’aménagement du territoire d’Eugène Claudius-Petit’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 79 (2003): 43–52.

82   For the expression ‘partial utopia of the plan’, used to describe the historical avant-garde’s ideological anticipations (whether positive, as with Le Corbusier, or negative, as in Dada), see Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 60.

83   Donald D. Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 368.

84   Ibid.

85   Le Corbusier, ‘Unité d’habitation’ (oddly, in the English translation available on the foundation’s website this phrase is left out).

86   For a genealogy of the ‘industrial religion’ and an analysis of its historical ties to Saint-Simonianism, see Pierre Musso, La Religion industrielle: monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l’entreprise (Paris: Fayard; Nantes: Institut d’études avancées, 2017).

87   For the term ‘new working class’, see Serge Mallet, La Nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963).

88   For a comprehensive, retrospective view of the French tradition of a ‘sociology of work’, see the English-language edition of conference proceedings assembled by Claude Durand and the Groupe de sociologie du travail, in Industrial Sociology: Work in the French Tradition, ed. Michael Rose, trans. Alan Raybold (London: Sage Publications, 1987).

89   Michael Rose, ‘Introduction: Retrospection and the Role of a Sociology of Work’, in Industrial Sociology, 6.

90   Le Corbusier, ‘Unité d’habitation’. Translation amended.

91   Ibid.

92   For original Bauhaus theatre, see Elizabeth Otto, ‘Bauhaus Spectacles, Bauhaus Specters’, in Spectacle, ed. Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson (Oxford: Peter Lang AG/Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2015), 41–73. For the aesthetics of theatre and stage art in the Bauhaus, see Walter Gropius and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, eds, Die Bühne im Bauhaus (München: Albert Langen Verlag, 1924).

93   Quoted in Arnold Aronson, ‘Avant-Garde Scenography and the Frames of the Theatre’, in Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage, ed. Alan L. Ackerman and Martin Puchner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 33.

94   Larry D. Busbea, ‘Kineticism-Spectacle-Environment’, October, 144 (2013): 96–7.

95   See Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans.

96   Michel Ragon, ‘Affinités’, Divergences, 7 (July 1957).

97   Emmanuel Guy and Laurence Le Bras, ‘L’Arsenal des pratiques situationnistes: nouveau théâtre d’opérations dans la culture’, in Guy Debord: un art de la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 92.

98   For the aesthetics of extra-terrestrial space, see Stephen Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Post-war European Avant-Garde (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

99   Constant, ‘Unitary Urbanism’, in Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, ed. Mark Wigley, trans. Robyn de Jong-Dalziel (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art: 010 Publishers, 1998), 131.

100   Ibid., 133.

101   Sadler, Situationist City, 123.

102   Constant, ‘Unitary Urbanism’, 132. The lecture was delivered at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, on December 20, 1960.

103   For an examination of the Gypsy imaginary in Constant and in the SI more broadly, see Pedro G. Romero, ‘The New Babylonians’, in New Babylon, ed. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2015), 68–91.

104   Wark, The Beach beneath the Street, 140.

105   Ibid.

106   Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 52.

107   Sadler, Situationist City, 148.

108   Ibid., 132.

109   Constant, ‘New Babylon – Ten Years On’, trans. Robyn de Jong-Dalziel, in Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 233. The text is from a lecture at the University of Technology, Delft, Faculty of Architecture, 23 May 1980.

110   Ibid.

111   Ibid.

112   Busbea, Topologies, 27.

113   The best study available remains Busbea, Topologies.

114   For a noteworthy study on topology in the SI, see Ellef Prestsæter, ‘A New Mess: DIY Topology’, in These Are Situationist Times! An Inventory of Reproductions, Deformations, Modifications, Derivations, and Transformations (Oslo: Torpedo Press, 2019), 108–25.

115   Spaulding, ‘Value-Form and Avant-Garde’, 4.

116   Ibid.

117   See the famous Deleuzean credo of present day ‘accelerationism’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Aanessian, eds, Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic Media, 2017), 162.

3. With and Against: Fin de Copenhague

1   For a meticulous archival study of this book, see Thomas Hvid Kromann, ‘Montages Wrapped in Flong: A Material–Archaeological Investigation of Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague’ (English summary 19 January 2016 (2015), situationnisteblog.files.wordpress.com. For the original Danish version, see ‘Montager svøbt i matricepap. En materialearkæologisk undersøgelse af Asger Jorn og Guy Debords Fin de Copenhague’, Fund og forskning, 54 (2015): 587–625. As Kromann notes, there are noticeable differences between the original 1957 version of Fin de Copenhague and its later ‘facsimile’ reproductions. However, these differences, while important on the level of book history, do not deeply affect my argument. For the purposes of convenience, I reproduce illustrations from Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, Fin de Copenhague (Paris: Allia, 2001); for a reconstruction of the book’s pages as they would have looked before being bound, see Bart Lans, ‘The Making of Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires: The Tactic of Détournement in the Collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’, master’s thesis (Delft University of Technology, 2008).

2   Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

3   Friedrich Pollock, Automation: A Study of Its Economic and Social Consequences, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957).

4   T. J. Clark, ‘The Conditions of Artistic Creation’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1974, 561–2.

5   Asger Jorn, ‘Art and Orders: On Treason, the Mass Action of Reproduction and the Great Artistic Mass Effect’, Situationist Times, 5 (1964): 11.

6   I borrow the term ‘unworking’ from art historian Daniel Spaulding’s brilliant analysis, ‘Unworking Posenenske’, in Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2019), 162–77, esp. 175–7. Although Spaulding specifically employs the term in relation to Posenenske’s art, he also describes the ‘unworked’ as a category that is ‘implicitly that of art as such, at least insofar as art has severed itself from ritual or utility (as it more or less has to in order to be modern)’. I find Spaulding’s idea – a ‘work-without-work … that negates the world of work even as it reveals itself as mortified, marked by the same’ – highly conducive to the analysis in this chapter.

7   The term ‘anti-book’ was used by Debord in relation to Mémoires, the 1959 sequel to Fin de Copenhague. According to Nicolas Thoburn: ‘An anti-book is a work of writing and publishing that critically interrogates its media form … Anti-books test, problematize, and push to the limits their full materiality, or significant aspects thereof, where the materiality of a book comprises the dynamic interplay of textual content and media form, a critical and generative relation operative at scales both concrete and abstract.’ Nicolas Thoburn, Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 1.

8   El Lissitzky, ‘Unser Buch (U.D.S.S.R.)’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 2 (1927), and ‘The Future of the Book’, New Left Review, 41 (February 1967): 39–44.

9   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 43.

10   Ibid., 41.

11   Whereas much of the SI scholarship discussed so far tends to see Fin de Copenhague, alongside its sequel Mémoires, as exemplary (material) approximations to the situationist tactic of détournement, recent art-historical studies place it in line with a then-emerging genre of artists’ books. See the contributions in Thomas Hvid Kromann et al., eds, Danske Kunstnerbøger/Danish Artists’ Books (København: Møller &#x0026; Verlag der Buchhandlung; Köln: Walther König, 2013). To frame the situationist books as artists’ books, however, is to see these as part of an aesthetic renewal of the modernist legacy rather than an attempted break with that tradition from within. For a more developed argument along these lines, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ‘Fall-out, Collapse and Implosion: Four Observations on the Critical Potential of the Artist’s Book’, in Kromann et al., Danish Artists’ Books, 113–21.

12   Apart from the contributions already mentioned, I would like to highlight a few studies that have influenced my own reading, even if I ultimately choose a different approach. For an early study, see Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde: eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1990). For a more recent evaluation by the same author, see Roberto Ohrt, ‘Fin des modifications’, in Asger Jorn: Restless Rebel, ed. Dorthe Aagesen and Helle Brøns (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst; Munich: Prestel, 2014), 176–201. For a study that places the work in relation to other printed matter, notably Jorn’s massive book production, see Klaus Müller-Wille, ‘From World-Pictures to the Wild Architecture of the Book’, in Aagesen and Brøns, Asger Jorn, 94–109. For a comprehensive and art-historically rich, contextualizing reading, see Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). Last but not least, for an excellent study that focuses on the function of sexist imagery in Fin de Copenhague as well as in the SI more generally, see Brøns, ‘Maskulin standhaftighed’.

13   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 40.

14   Another translation for the term ‘traffic’, one more resonant with contemporary concerns, would be ‘communication’. See El Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, Life, Letters, Texts, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).

15   See F. T. Marinetti, ‘Le Futurisme: Manifeste du Futurisme’, Le Figaro, 20 February 1909 (English translation in Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds, Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 49–53).

16   See Petersen, Space-Age Aesthetics.

17   ‘An epoch that has variously been called the Jet Age, the Detergent Decade, or the Second Industrial Revolution.’ Banham added that whichever label one might prefer, it seemed certain that ‘with the current revolution in control mechanisms … we have already entered the Second Machine Age … and can look back at the First … as a period of the past’. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970 [1960]), 9.

18   Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays (New York: Verso, 2018).

19   Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 … (New York: Praeger, 1973).

20   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 40.

21   Susan Compton, Russian Avant-Garde Books 1917–34 (London: British Library, 1992), 130.

22   Ibid., 10.

23   Margit Rowell, ‘Constructivist Book Design: Shaping the Proletarian Conscience’, in The Russian Avant-Garde Book: 1910–1934, ed. Deborah Wye and Margit Rowell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 51.

24   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 41–3.

25   Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1986 [1969]), 217–52.

26   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 43.

27   ‘This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.’ Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, 224. For Benjamin’s thoughts on the interdependence of religion and capitalism, see ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’, trans. as ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in Selected Writings, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press, 1996), 288–91.

28   Benjamin notes, ‘with the secularization of art, authenticity displaces the cult value of the work’. Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, 244.

29   Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, 218.

30   Ibid., 224.

31   Ibid.

32   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 42.

33   Ibid., 40.

34   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016), 42–3.

35   Ibid., 44.

36   Ibid.

37   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 43.

38   Ibid.

39   Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, 30 (1984): 101.

40   Ibid.

41   Lissitzky, ‘Future of the Book’, 43.

42   Ibid.

43   Lissitzky contrasts the national character of the ‘alphabetic book’ with the ‘hieroglyphic book’ that is potentially international by virtue of the fact that ‘if a Russian, a German or an American fixes the sign (picture) of a concept in his mind he can read Chinese or Egyptian (soundlessly), without learning the language, for language and writing are always one creation as far as he is concerned’. Ibid., 40.

44   Ibid.

45   Letter from Jorn to Verner Otto Permild and Bjørn Rosengreen, 14 February 1958, Jorn Archive, Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark; available as Asger Jorn, ‘Dear Friends’, trans. Niels Henriksen, October, 141 (2012): 72.

46   Ibid.

47   Guy Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 1: juin 1957 – août 1960 (8 vols, Paris: Librairie Athème Fayard, 1999), 201.

48   Müller-Wille, ‘From World-Pictures’, 94 n. 6.

49   Kerry Greaves, The Danish Avant-Garde and World War II: The Helhesten Collective (New York: Routledge, 2019), 81.

50   Ibid., 77.

51   Ibid.

52   See Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen, Symboler i abstrakt kunst (Copenhagen: Illums bogafdeling, 1933).

53   Rowell, ‘Constructivist Book Design’, 54.

54   Ibid.

55   Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn: eine Biographie (Köln: König, 2001), 55.

56   Ellef Prestsæter, ‘The Books of Asger Jorn and Rudolf Broby-Johansen’, Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker), 3 (2017): 54.

57   Quoted in ibid., 46; however, in spite of Jorn’s admiration for Broby their relations eventually became strained. See Thomas Hvid Kromann, ‘Broby vs. Jorn – billedernes og tekstens kamp om bogen’, Bogvennen (2019): 130–69, 185–8.

58   Asger Jorn, ‘Kunst og ordrer: Om forræderi, reproduktionens mængdevirkning og den store kunstneriske masseeffekt’, Politiken (21 August 1964), and ‘Art and Orders: On Treason, the Mass Action of Reproduction and the Great Artistic Mass Effect’, Situationist Times, 5, (December 1964): 8–12. See also Prestsæter, ‘Books of Asger Jorn’, 46.

59   Rudolf Broby-Johansen, Sort Og Rødt: 64 Grafiske Glimt (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1982), 90–1.

60   See for instance Buchloh, ‘From Faktura’.

61   Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Post-war Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 11–12; see also Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010).

62   Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism, 11.

63   Varvara Stepanova, quoted in Olga Vainshtein, ‘Designing the Future: Constructivist Laboratory of Fashion’, in Fashion and Modernism, ed. Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 101.

64   Ibid., 112.

65   The book was republished in 2001. Asger Jorn, Pour la forme: ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts (Paris: Allia, 2001 [1957]).

66   For a marvellous analysis of the role of laundry soap (an omnipresent product that was critically remarked on by Lefebvre and Barthes among others) in relation to post-war France’s twin dynamic of decolonization and modernization, see Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Ch. 2. For an intricate analysis of the gimmick, see Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020).

67   For an examination of the imaginary of work in relation to the metaphor of the ‘human motor’, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

68   See Alain Touraine, L’Évolution du travail ouvrier aux usines Renault (Paris: CNRS, 1955).

69   Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 24.

70   See Roland Simon, Fondements critiques d’une théorie de la révolution: au-delà de l’affirmation du prolétariat (Paris: Éditions Senonevero, 2001).

71   Clark, ‘Conditions of Artistic Creation’, 562.

72   Jorn, ‘Dear Friends’, 71.

73   Pia Jarvad, ‘Nye ord i dansk – fra 1955 til i dag’, Dansk Sprognævn, 13 December 2018, dsn.dk/noid/?q=automation.

74   Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 1, 25; Guy Debord, Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960), trans. Stuart Kendall and John McHale (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 46.

75   Ibid. For a discussion of the role of myth in the SI, see Fabien Danesi, Le Mythe brisé de l’Internationale situationniste: l’aventure d’une avant-garde au coeur de la culture de masse (1945–2008) (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2008).

76   Debord, Correspondance. This standard but far from comprehensive collection forms the basis of most SI scholarship. In 2017, additional correspondence, Debord’s letters to Gil J. Wolman from the early 1950s, were made public: Lettres à Gil J Wolman, 1952–1956 (privately published, 2017). Only one volume of Debord’s correspondence has so far been translated into English: Debord, Correspondence: Foundation. Some translated letters are also available online, most notably at Not Bored, ‘Guy Debord’s Letters’, 2020, notbored.org.

77   Letter from Guy Debord to Asger Jorn, 1 September 1957, Fonds Guy Debord, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.

78   Jorn did not personally attend the lecture in London: his friend, ICA curator Lawrence Alloway, sent Jorn a transcript of Maldonado’s lecture. Letter from Lawrence Alloway to Asger Jorn, 17 April 1957, Jorn Archive, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. I would like to thank Thomas Hvid Kromann for making me aware of this particular letter.

79   Asger Jorn, ‘Les Situationnistes et l’automation’, in Pour la forme, 93–5.

80   Asger Jorn, ‘Les Situationnistes et l’automation’, internationale situationniste, 1 (June 1958): 22–5; Asger Jorn, ‘L’Automation’, Cahier pour un paysage à inventer, 1 (May 1960): 58–61. Henceforth I quote from the English version: Asger Jorn, ‘The Situationists and Automation’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 55–8.

81   Louis Salleron, L’Automation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956).

82   Jean Feller, ‘ “Que Sais-Je ?”: une collection qui a réponse à tout’, Communication and Langages, 28:1 (1975): 71–5.

83   Ibid.

84   Ibid.

85   Georges Théodule-Guilbaut, La Cybernétique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954).

86   Salleron, L’Automation, 7.

87   Ibid., 9.

88   Ibid.

89   This journal, crucial to the theoretical orientation of the SI, was published in 40 issues between 1949 and 1965. Full scans are available online, but for a selection of key texts, see J. Amair, ed., Socialisme ou barbarie: anthologie (La Bussière: Acratie, 2007). This anthology has been superbly translated into English: Anonymous, ed., A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology: Autonomy, Critique, and Revolution in the Age of Bureacratic Capitalism, trans. David Ames Curtis (London: Eris, 2018).

90   Pierre Chaulieu, ‘Les Grèves de l’automation en Angleterre’, Socialisme ou Barbarie, 4:19 (September 1956): 101–15, and ‘Automation Strikes in England’, in A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology, 153–68. Asger Jorn kept a copy of this issue, the sole copy of Socalisme ou Barbarie that remains in his personal library (now stored at Museum Jorn, Silkeborg). It is cut open through to page 81, allowing Jorn to read Chaulieu’s article in full. But Jorn most likely only skimmed the article, since (contrary to Jorn’s customary reading habits) there is no underlining in this copy. Debord, however, was an avid reader of the journal and held a complete collection in his library (BnF, France). Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 1, Debord even briefly became part of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie between 1960 and 1961, and envisioned, however briefly, a merging of the political perspective of S. ou B. and the cultural politics of the SI. For Debord’s involvement with S. ou B., see; Daniel Blanchard, Debord, dans le bruit de cataracte du temps (Paris: Sens &#x0026; Tonka, 2005). See also Stephen Hastings-King, ‘L’Internationale situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary’, Substance, 28:3 (1999): 26–54.

91   Chaulieu, ‘Automation Strikes in England’.

92   Ibid., 165.

93   Pierre Chaulieu, ‘Sur le contenu du socialisme’, Socialisme ou Barbarie, 3:17 (September 1955): 1–22, and ‘Sur le contenu du socialisme II’, Socialisme ou Barbarie, 4:22 (September 1957): 1–74. For excerpts in English, see Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘On the Content of Socialism (1955–1957)’, in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 40–9, and also ‘On the Content of Socialism’, in A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology, 249–98.

94   Castoriadis, ‘On the Content of Socialism (1955–1957)’, 97.

95   Ibid., 98.

96   Franco Momigliano, ‘L’Automation et ses idéologies’, Arguments, 2 (1957): 18–28.

97   Ibid., 21.

98   Jorn, ‘Situationists and Automation’, emphasis mine.

99   Ibid., 55.

100   As Karen Kurczynski notes in relation to this aspect of Jorn’s thought, ‘his account is reminiscent of philosopher Georges Bataille’s concept of “expenditure”. Rather than citing Bataille’s theory of expenditure directly, however, Jorn seems to have arrived at his insights through mutual sources.’ Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 215. While it is true that Jorn rarely (if ever) discusses Bataille directly, Bataille’s theory of expenditure was an incontrovertible horizon for the post-war avant-gardes. Anselm Jappe notes, for instance, that Bataille’s theory of expenditure was ‘part of the common currency of French thought and took on the role of a sort of alternative to the idea of an economy founded on exchange’ (Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999], 149). Though I cannot get into the topic here, my suggestion would be that Jorn, like many of his comrades in the French post-surrealist milieu, deliberately avoided referring to Bataille on political grounds. Two of Jorn’s friends, Noël Arnaud and Christian Dotremont, for instance, had attacked Bataille in the tract Nom de Dieu as early as in 1943.

101   Jorn, ‘Situationists and Automation’, 57. Emphasis mine.

102   G. M. Birtwistle, Living Art: Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between Helhesten and Cobra, 1946–1949 (Utrecht: Reflex, 1986), 55.

103   McKenzie Wark, The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2015 [2011]), Ch. 11.

104   For a philosophical defence of this view of history, see Gerald A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For an excellent critique of this idea with a view to contemporary problems, see Jasper Bernes, ‘The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism’, in Materialism and the Critique of Energy, ed. Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti (Chicago and Alberta: MCM’ Publishing, 2018), 331–76.

105   Asger Jorn, Critique de la politique économique – Suivie de la Lutte Finale, Rapports présentés à l’Internationale situationniste, II (Paris: L’Internationale situationniste, 1959), 5. Jorn’s contribution to Marxist value-critical theory, while it falls outside the scope of this thesis, remains to be properly assessed. A more coherent and systematic argument advanced from the same basic premises can be found in Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

106   Jorn, Critique de la politique économique – Suivie de la Lutte Finale, 29.

107   Ruth Baumeister, ‘Introduction’, in Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, 1938–1958, ed. Ruth Baumeister (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), 9.

108   Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism, 3.

109   Kromann, ‘Montages Wrapped in Flong’, 2.

110   Ibid., 9.

111   Ibid., 3.

112   Ibid., 6.

113   Jorn, ‘Dear Friends’, 71–2.

114   Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 16.

115   For the best available analysis of the book’s aesthetic features, see Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn.

116   Kromann, ‘Montages Wrapped in Flong’, 3.

117   Ibid., 7.

118   Anne Latournerie, ‘Petite histoire des batailles du droit d’auteur’, multitudes, 5 (May 2001): 55.

119   The canonical study remains Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1983]).

120   Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock’, Nation (1 February 1947).

121   Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 152.

122   For a vivid account of how the work was produced, see Ove Verner Permild, ‘Nogle erindringer om et grafisk samarbejde med Asger Jorn’, in Erindringer om Asger Jorn, ed. Troels Andersen and Aksel Evin Olesen (Silkeborg: Galerie Moderne, 1982), 173–90.

123   Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 216.

124   Pollock’s ‘great walls of painterly accident were created in the most spectacular fashion on everything that the wall was not – that is, on the floor – in much photographed isolation in the studio’. Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 181.

125   Clement Greenberg, ‘The Situation at the Moment’, Partisan Review (January 1948).

126   Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2011), 5.

127   Andreas Huyssen, ‘In the Shadow of McLuhan: Jean Baudrillard’s Theory of Simulation’, Assemblage, 10 (December 1989): 8.

128   McLuhan, Mechanical Bride, 3.

129   Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero, 2015), 28.

130   Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12.

131   Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (London: I. E. Burghard, 1848), and The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 224.

132   Clark, ‘Conditions of Artistic Creation’, 562.

133   For a representative contemporary example of the imaginary of ‘full automation’, see Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2016).

4. Rage Against the Machine: L’Opé ration robot and May ’68

1   Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, ‘La Faculté de Nanterre de 1964 à 1968. Entretien avec Pierre Grappin’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps. Mai-68: les mouvements étudiants en France et dans le monde, 11–13 (1988): 103.

2   For a chronology of events, see Jean-Pierre Duteuil, Nanterre 1965–66–67 –68: vers le mouvement du 22 mars (La Bussière: Acratie, 2017), 9–12; Rachel Mazuy and Daniel Le Cornu, ‘Chronologie des événements à Nanterre en 1967– 1968’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps. Mai-68: les mouvements étudiants en France et dans le monde, 11–13 (1988): 133–5.

3   Duteuil, Nanterre, 120.

4   Pascal Dumontier, Les Situationnistes et mai 68, théorie et pratique de la révolution (1966–1972) (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1990), 106.

5   René Rémond, ‘Nanterre, vingt ans aprés’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps. Mai-68: Les mouvements étudiants en France et dans le monde, 11–13 (1988): 8.

6   Duteuil, Nanterre, 124.

7   For an account of the situationists’ role in events from a partisan standpoint, see René Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

8   Dumontier, Les Situationnistes, 105. The tract, entitled Le Déshonneur des poètes, was distributed during an interruption in December 1967 of a poetry reading session conceived in the spirit of Jean Jacques-Lebel’s Happenings. A transcription of the tract is available in Duteuil, Nanterre, 110.

9   Raoul Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

10   Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (San Francisco: Communication Company, 1967); the title poem mentions ‘a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony’. Marx famously argues that ‘the silent compulsion [der stumme Zwang] of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases.’ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1976), 899. For a systematic and persuasive conceptualization of Marx’s concept of silent or ‘mute compulsion’, see Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023).

11   Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text, 9/10 (1984): 178–209.

12   The stanza from the socialist anthem, ‘The Internationale’, is translated by Mitchell Abidor, ‘The International’, marxists.org.

13   Duteuil, Nanterre, 124.

14   Ibid.

15   The letter is reproduced in ibid., 125.

16   Ibid.

17   Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre, ‘Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview’, October, 79 (Winter 1997), 82.

18   Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 23.

19   Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes, 27.

20   Ross, May ’68, 24.

21   For one of the rare if cursory studies of the SI’s critique of cybernetics in relation to May ’68, see Martin Nadeau, ‘L’IS et la critique de la cybernétique autour des événements de Mai 1968’, Inter: art actuel, 129 (2018): 44–7.

22   More specifically, I want to contribute to recent scholarship about the post-war avant-garde’s conflicted engagements with an emerging cybernetic or ‘behavioural’ paradigm of science and technology. See for instance Eric C. H. de Bruyn, ‘Constructed Situations, Dynamic Labyrinths, and Learning Mazes: Behavioral Topologies of the Cold War’, Grey Room, 74 (March 2019): 44–85.

23   Internationale situationniste, ‘Le Commencement d’une époque’, internationale situationniste, 12 (September 1969): 25.

24   André Bertrand and André Schneider, Le Scandale de Strasbourg mis a nu par ses célibataires, même (Montreuil: L’Insomniaque, 2018), 188.

25   Ibid., 188–9.

26   Ibid., 188.

27   See for instance Miguel Amorós, ‘Anatomy of a Scandal’, libcom.org; Bertrand and Schneider, Le Scandale de Strasbourg. My account in the following pages relies on these two key works.

28   Bertrand and Schneider, Le Scandale de Strasbourg, 211.

29   Moreover, another 10,000 copies were printed in a ‘second edition’ in March 1967, with the SI now attributed as SI co-editor of the pamphlet. Ibid., 25.

30   One of the few historically detailed accounts of the Moles affair and its relation to the events at Strasbourg can be found in Bertrand and Schneider, Le Scandale de Strasbourg. As the authors note, a state-funded event, Trajectoire situationnisteText, reclaiming the cultural importance of the Strasbourg scandal took place between 21 and 29 November 2016.

31   Guy Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 3: Janvier 1965 – décembre 1968 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 169.

32   Edgar Morin, L’Esprit du temps: essai sur la culture de masse (Paris: Grasset, 1962).

33   Michel Matarasso, ‘Morin Edgar, L’Esprit du temps. Essai sur la culture de masse’, Revue française de sociologie, 4:1 (1963): 80.

34   Founded in 1956 by Colette Audry, Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud, and Edgar Morin, Arguments was published in twenty-eight issues before ceasing publication in 1962. In an echo of the boycott of the avant-garde festival in Marseille 1956, in 1960 the SI called for an unconditional boycott of Arguments and of anyone who collaborated with this ‘most representative’ venue of a ‘conformist and pseudo-leftist intelligentsia’. See Internationale situationniste, ‘Renseignements situationnistes’, internationale situationniste, 5 (December 1960): 13.

35   Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2017 [1944]). Although the book was not translated into French until 1974, Adorno was frequently published in French journals, including Arguments and Communications, during the 1960s.

36   Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 82.

37   Internationale situationniste, ‘Le Commencement d’une époque’, 25.

38   Internationale situationniste, ‘Nos Buts et nos méthodes dans le scandale de Strasbourg’, internationale situationniste, 11 (October 1967): 23–31, and ‘Our Goals and Methods in the Strasbourg Scandal’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 265.

39   Guy Debord, ‘Correspondance avec un cybernéticien’, internationale situationniste, 9 (August 1964): 44–8, and ‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’, trans. Anthony Hayes, Notes from the Sinister Quarter (10 June 2013), thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com.

40   Debord, ‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’. Translation slightly amended here and throughout.

41   Ibid.

42   Ibid.

43   Ibid.

44   Ibid.

45   Ibid.

46   Ibid. Italics in original.

47   Ibid.

48   Internationale situationniste, ‘Notes éditoriales. Avec et contre le cinéma’, internationale situationniste, 1 (June 1958): 8–9, and ‘With and Against Cinema’, trans. Jason E. Smith, Grey Room, 52 (1 July 2013): 19. On Debord as a filmmaker, see also Jason E. Smith, ‘Guy Debord, Filmmaker’, Grey Room, 52 (July 2013): 7–17, along with the other articles in this special issue of Grey Room devoted to Debord as cineaste.

49   G.-E. Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions de l’orgnaisation et de l’action de la tendance situationniste internationale, Rapports présentés à l’Internationale situationniste 1 (Brussels: L’Internationale situationniste, 1957). Reprised in Gérard Berreby, ed., Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale situationniste (Paris: Allia, 1985), 608–20, and ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency’, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. and trans. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 31.

50   Gavin Grindon, ‘Fantasies of Participation: The Situationist Imaginary of New Forms of Labour in Art and Politics’, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 24:49–50 (2015): 68.

51   Debord, ‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’.

52   Ibid.

53   Michel Mathien, ‘L’Approche physique de la communication sociale. L’Itinéraire d’Abraham Moles’, Hermès, 11/12 (1993): 331–43.

54   Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 21.

55   Ibid.

56   Mathien, ‘L’Approche physique’, 335.

57   Stiftung HfG Ulm, ‘Geschichte’, hfg-ulm.de.

58   As reported in Ulm: Quarterly Bulletin of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (October 1958), 44.

59   Ibid., 25.

60   Nicola Pezolet, ‘Bauhaus Ideas: Jorn, Max Bill, and Reconstruction Culture’, October, 141 (2012): 101.

61   Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 105–12. Kurczynski even suggests that Jorn’s Pour la forme (1958) might be considered a more or less direct response to Bill’s 1952 book Form. For an idea of Jorn’s artistic network in central Europe and Italy in the time leading up to the foundation of the SI, see also the exchange between Jorn and Enrico Baj published as: Baj Jorn Lettres 1953–1961 (Saint-Etienne: Musée d’Art Moderne, 1989).

62   Asger Jorn, ‘Sur l’anti-situation d’Amsterdam’, 1960, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, translated by Peter Shield in Asger Jorn, ‘On the Anti-Situation of Amsterdam’, in These Are Situationist Times! An Inventory of Reproductions, Deformations, Modifications, Derivations, and Transformations, ed. Ellef Prestsæter, trans. Peter Shield (Oslo: Torpedo Press, 2019), 45.

63   Ulm: Quarterly Bulletin of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (October 1958), 34.

64   Ibid.

65   See Eden Medina’s extraordinary book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

66   Pezolet, ‘Bauhaus Ideas’, 90.

67   Ibid., 102.

68   See Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Paris: Hermann &#x0026; Cie; Cambridge, MA: Technology Press; New York: Wiley &#x0026; Sons, 1948).

69   Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart, Histoire des théories de la communication (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1995), and Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction, trans. Susan Gruenbeck Taponier and James A. Cohen (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 43.

70   Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 83.

71   Internationale situationniste, ‘Notes éditoriales. Communication prioritaire’, internationale situationniste, 7 (April 1962): 22–4, and ‘Editorial Notes: Priority Communication’, in McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 129.

72   For an estimation of Brecht’s method in relation to the avant-garde, and with a view to the SI specifically, see Jasper Bernes, ‘Art and Revolution’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2018), 1270–82.

73   Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ‘The Spectacle of de Gaulle’s Coup d’État: The Situationists on de Gaulle’s Coming to Power’, French Cultural Studies, 27:1 (2016): 105.

74   As also examined in Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. For a more recent account of the imbrication of French culture and decolonization, see Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

75   Internationale situationniste, ‘Editorial Notes: Priority Communication’, 133. In the article ‘Salvaging Situationism: Race and Space’ (Salvage, November 30, 2015), Andrea Gibbons claimed that the SI ignored the anti-colonial struggles and ‘decided to cling to the safest possible understandings of capitalism, rather than to start from the position and the struggle of the oppressed’. Recent scholarship, however, has convincingly demonstrated the SI’s uncompromising internationalist perspective and their enduring commitment to global revolutionary decolonization. See Sophie Dolto and Nedjib Sidi Moussa, ‘The Situationists’ Anti-colonialism: An Internationalist Perspective’, in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, ed. Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 103–17; Erick Corrêa, ‘The Internationalist Anti-colonialism of the Situationists’, Brooklyn Rail, February 2023, brooklynrail.org.

76   Internationale situationniste, ‘Editorial Notes: Priority Communication’, 133. See also Guy Debord, ‘Conditions du mouvement révolutionnaire congolais’ (1966), in Œuvres, ed. Jean-Louis Rançon and Alice Becker-Ho (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), pp. 692–8.

77   Internationale situationniste, ‘Editorial Notes: Priority Communication’, 133.

78   Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero, 2015), 19.

79   Ibid.

80   Internationale situationniste, ‘Editorial Notes: Priority Communication’, 130.

81   Ibid.

82   Claus Pias and Peter Krapp, ‘ “Hollerith ‘Feathered Crystal’”: Art, Science, and Computing in the Era of Cybernetics’, Grey Room, 29 (2007): 119–20.

83   For an introduction to information aesthetics, see Christoph Klütsch, ‘Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School’, in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, ed. Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 65–89.

84   Max Bense, Aesthetica II: Aesthetische Information (Krefeld: Agis-Verlag, 1956).

85   Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1958).

86   For the original formulation of information theory, see Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 27.

87   Jorn, ‘On the Anti-Situation of Amsterdam’, 145.

88   Mia Lee, ‘The Gruppe Spur: Art as a Revolutionary Medium during the Cold War’, in Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present, ed. Timothy Scott Brown and Lorena Anton (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 11.

89   Jacopo Galimberti, ‘The Spur Group, Détournement and the Politics of Time in the Adenauer Era’, Oxford Art Journal, 39:3 (1 December 2016): 406.

90   Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2005), 70.

91   Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 3, 23–5.

92   Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012).

93   Larry D. Busbea, ‘Kineticism-Spectacle-Environment’, October, 144 (2013), 101.

94   Internationale situationniste, ‘Notes éditoriales: l’avant-garde de la présence’, internationale situationniste, 8 (January 1963): 14–22; ‘Editorial Notes’, in McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 141–2.

95   Internationale situationniste, ‘Editorial Notes’, 142.

96   Ibid.

97   Debord, Correspondance. Vol. 3, 26.

98   See Bertrand and Schneider, Le Scandale de Strasbourg, 105.

99   Internationale situationniste, ‘Sur des publications de l’IS’, internationale situationniste, 10 (March 1966): 83.

100   Catherine Millet, quoted in Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 1.

101   For an overview of the idea of collectivism in relation to the post-war moment in art, see Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, eds, Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

102   Medosch, New Tendencies, 2.

103   Ibid., 6. For a comprehensive sourcebook on NT, which also includes several key texts by Moles, see Margit Rosen, ed., A Little Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

104   Medosch, New Tendencies, 77.

105   Ibid.

106   Peter Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of “Theory of the Avant-Garde” ‘, New Literary History, 41:4 (2010).

107   Jelena Stojanovic, ‘Internationaleries: Collectivism, the Grotesque, and Cold War Functionalism’, in Stimson and Sholette, Collectivism after Modernism, 18.

108   See the early and influential history of surrealism (one of Debord’s favourite accounts of the movement): Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme suivie de documents surréalistes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 100–1.

109   Abraham Moles, ‘Introduction à colloque’, bit international, 3 (August 1968): 6.

Conclusion

1   For a presentation of Trocchi’s project SIGMA and its context, see Kasper Opstrup, The Way Out: Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground 1961–1991 (New York: Minor Compositions, 2017).

2   For an overview of the history of SIGMA, Bordeaux, see Emmanuelle Debur, Sigma 1965–1996: histoire d’un festival d’avant-garde (Biarritz: Atlantica, 2017). For an account of the Bordeaux festival in the context of French cultural politics, see Françoise Taliano-Des Garets, ‘Le Festival Sigma de Bordeaux (1965– 1990)’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 36:1 (1992): 43–52. For a firm link to the precursor in Marseille in 1956, see Franck Ancel, ‘L’Omega de SIGMA’ (Journée d’études SIGMA, École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, 2011), sigma.hypotheses. org/18.

3   Michel Ragon, ‘Vers une démocratisation de l’art’, in Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant: chronique vécue de l’art contemporain, de l’abstraction au pop art, 1944– 1969 (Tournai: Casterman, 1969), 360.

4   Ibid.

5   Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot, ‘Les Vies successives de “La Société du spectacle” de Guy Debord’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 122 (2014): 135–52.

6   Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 82.

7   Tiqqun, ‘L’Hypothèse cybernétique’, in Tiqqun: organe de liaison au sein du Parti Imaginaire, vol. 2 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001), 6. I quote here from the available translation (with pagination corresponding to the PDF version), ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org, 43.

8   Tiqqun, ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis’, 48.

9   Ibid.

10   Endnotes, ‘What Are We to Do?’, in Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Minor Compositions, 2011), 35.

11   Ibid., 35–6.

12   Patrick Marcolini, Le Mouvement situationniste: une histoire intellectuelle (Montreuil: L’Echappée, 2012), esp. the excursus ‘Une Critique de la technologie … inachevée’, 191–202.

13   Ibid., 192.

14   Ibid. Cf. Jacques Ellul, La Technique: ou, l’enjeu du siècle (Paris: Economica, 1990). As previously mentioned, Ellul also reviewed Wiener’s work in 1955; see ‘Wiener (Norbert) – Cybernétique et société’, Revue française de science politique, 5:1 (1955): 171–2.

15   Marcolini, Le Mouvement situationniste, 192–202.

16   See, in particular, the essays that were collected and published in Henri Lefebvre, Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1971).

17   Henri Lefebvre, ‘Marxisme et théorie de l’information’, in Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1971 [1956]), 51–75. The article was originally published in Voies nouvelles, April–May 1958.

18   Ibid., 68, emphasis mine.

19   Henri Lefebvre, ‘Le Romantisme révolutionnaire’, in Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1971 [1957]), 27–50. Originally published in La Nouvelle Revue française, 58 (1957). An abridged translation is available: ‘Revolutionary Romanticism’, trans. Gavin Grindon, Art in Translation, 4:3 (1 September 2012): 287–99.

20   Lefebvre, ‘Le Romantisme révolutionnaire’, 47, 50.

21   Marcolini, Le Mouvement situationniste, 180–7.

22   Guy Debord, ‘La Région parisienne à la fin du siècle: consultation’, in Oeuvres, ed. Jean-Louis Rançon and Alice Becker-Ho (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 598.

23   The survey, as well as Debord’s response, was published posthumously in ibid., 598–605. Oddly, this episode has remained largely unexamined in SI scholarship. An important exception is found in Alastair Hemmens’s brief but excellent discussion of the situationist critique of cybernetics: Alastair Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 156–8.

24   Debord, ‘La Région parisienne’, 602.

25   Jacques Ellul, ‘Remarks on Technology and Art’, trans. Daniel Hofstadter, Social Research, 46:4 (Winter 1979): 805.

26   See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1976), 549; Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 2001), Ch. 21.

27   Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, 205.

28   Ibid., 209.

29   Ibid.

30   Ibid., 210.

31   For Debord’s engagement with French Marxist thought, see Bertrand Cochard, Guy Debord et la philosophie (Paris: Hermann, 2021).

32   The dossier is located at the BnF, Paris. A transcription is available as Guy Debord, Marx Hegel (Paris: Éditions l’échappée, 2021) as part of the beautiful book series La Librairie de Guy Debord, edited by Laurence Le Bras, which also includes two publications on the topics of ‘strategy’ and ‘poetry’, respectively. See Stratégie, La librairie de Guy Debord (Paris: Éditions L’Échappée, 2018); Poésie, etc., La librairie de Guy Debord (Paris: l’Échappée, 2019).

33   Anselm Jappe, ‘Debord, lecteur de Marx, Lukács et Wittfogel’, in Lire Debord: avec des notes inédites de Guy Debord, ed. Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy (Paris: Éditions l’Echappée, 2016), 281–91, and ‘Debord’s Reading of Marx, Lukács and Wittfogel: A Look at the Archives’, trans. Alastair Hemmens, in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, ed. Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 19–26.

34   Ibid., 289.

35   Guy Debord, reading note from the dossier ‘Marxisme’, at BnF, Paris. Photographically reproduced in Jappe, ‘Debord, lecteur de Marx, Lukács et Wittfogel’, 286–7. The term ‘spectacle’ is underlined in the original.

36   Marx develops these insights with an as yet unsurpassed originality and wit in the memorable chapter on ‘Machinery and Large-Scale Industry’. Here, one finds the famous passages about how production technology turns into a ‘lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages’, as well as Marx’s acute observation that workers are increasingly forced to ‘identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of a complex automaton’. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 548–52.

37   Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), para. 24.

38   For an introduction to Hans Dieter-Bahr and Raniero Panzieri, see Monika Reinfelder, ‘Introduction: Breaking the Spell of Technicism’, in Outlines of a Critique of Technology, ed. Phil Slater (London: Ink Links; Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980), 9–39. Raya Dunayevskaya (who was part of the so-called Johnson-Forest Tendency with C. L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs) developed an original critique of automation, see for instance her Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), Ch. 16.

39   On Debord as a filmmaker, see Jason E. Smith, ‘Guy Debord, Filmmaker’, Grey Room, 52 (July 2013): 7–17, and the many excellent contributions to Grey Room, 52.

40   For an examination of anti-ocularcentrism in French thought, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

41   This common criticism levelled against Debord appears to originate from Gilles Dauvé (Jean Barrot) in the late 1970s. It has been perpetuated in numerous newer studies, most notably in Tom Bunyard, Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (Brill, 2018).

42   Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer GmbH, 1913).

43   David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2011), 108–9.

44   Ibid., 109.

45   Ibid., 109–10.

46   Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850– 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

47   Debord, Society of the Spectacle, para. 43.

48   Ibid., 42.

49   See Paul Mattick, ‘The Economics of Cybernation’, New Politics, 1:4 (1962): 19–33.

50   Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 31, emphasis mine.

51   Roger Lafosse, 1997, quoted in Ancel, ‘L’Omega de SIGMA’. As Ancel explains, Roger Lafosse paid tribute to the Marseille precursor by inviting its founder, Jacques Polièri, to be one of the first artists to appear on the programme. Although no direct evidence exists that the choice of the name SIGMA for the Bordeaux festival is related to Trocchi’s SIGMA project, it is possible that Roger Lafosse, then a practising experimental musician living in Paris, had come across Trocchi’s ideas through Parisian avant-garde circles. Personal conversation with Ancel, 16 January 2020.

52   Peter Bürger, ‘Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of “Theory of the Avant-Garde” ‘, New Literary History, 41:4 (2010), 713.

Index

À Nous la liberté (film) 115

abstract expressionism 110, 170, 172–3

abundance 155, 163–4, 165

Académie des Sciences 24

accumulation 241–2

capitalist 101, 175

crisis of 104

cycles of 145–6

actor-network theory 21

actual space 118

Adorno, Theodor 25, 55, 191, 204

advertising 241

aeroplane, the 133

aesthetic autonomy 60

aesthetic categories, subversion of 130

aesthetic experience 224

aesthetics 9

AFGES (Association fédérative générale des étudiants de Strasbourg) 188

Agamben, Giorgio 9

agency 74

agit-tract, the 41–6, 44, 75

Aicher, Otl 198

Algerian War of Independence 52, 62, 63

alienation 160–2, 193

Allende, Salvador 202

Ampère, André-Marie 27

Andersen, Troels 144

Anderson, Benedict 138–9

anti-book, the 130n

anticolonialism 62–4

anti-communism 28

anti-Semitism 184

architects and architecture 85–6

Le Corbusier’s vision 98–103

architecture froide 85

Arguments (journal) 56, 162–3, 190, 229

Arp, Hans 147, 148, 149–50

Arrighi, Giovanni 145

art

and ideology 176–7

information aesthetic reconceptualization of 208

Jorn and 164–9

ontological primacy 164–9

and political engagement 220–2

and politics 9

synthesis of 13

and work 168–9

art critics 17

Art et Action 117

art historians 9

art historical studies 9

art making, transcendental conditions of 46

art ontology, cybernetic 75

Artaud, Antonin 117

Arte Nucleare Movement 84, 200

artistic creation 22

artistic imaginary 15

artistic imagination 165–6, 200

artistic representation, loss of faith in 53

artists’ books 131n

Atomes (journal) 150–3, 151, 152

atomic power 91, 153

audience, and form 140

authenticity 137

authorship 136, 171

automata 1–3, 4, 10–13

automation 4, 6, 6–7, 22, 23, 91, 115, 153

and alienation 160–2

critiques of 160–4

Debord on 243

ideology of full 154–9, 157, 176

Jorn’s critique 167–8

problem of 165

situationist analysis 163–4

social anxiety about 124

word introduced into the French language 24–5

autonomy 57

avant-garde 45, 46, 77

creative legacy 207

definition 96, 106

distinctions within 111–12

failure of 244

historical impasse 91

reconstructing 104–9

reinventing 58–64, 60

relevance 95–6

resurgence of 94

Russian 145

in the service of the state 112

specificity of 146

temporal suspension 92

avant-garde manifesto 38–9

avant-garde project, reconstitution of 91

avant-garde tactics 37–41

avant-garde tropes 41

Bahr, Hans-Dieter 237

Baj, Enrico 200

Bandini, Mirella 35n

Banham, Reyner 103, 133n

Barthes, Roland 204

Bataille, Georges 164n

Baudrillard, Jean 174

Bauhaus, the 117, 140, 143, 199–200, 202

Bauhaus spectacles 117

Baumeister, Ruth 168

behavioural paradigm 186n

behaviouristic perspective 18–19

Béjart, Maurice 2, 93

Bell, Daniel 204

Benjamin, Walter 55, 136–7

‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ 22–4

Bense, Max 207–8, 208–11, 209

Bernard 106

Bernstein, Michèle 45, 215

Bertrand, André 189

Bible, the 136

big data 199–201

Bigelow, Julian 18–19

Bill, Max 198, 199–200, 202

Birgogne, Gérard 181

Birtwistle, Graham 165

Bishop, Claire 30, 76, 213

Bjerke-Petersen, Vilhelm 143

Bloc, André 80

Blom, Ina 91n

boeuf gras festival 65–7, 66

book, future of the

constructivism 134–6, 142–5

Fin de Copenhague 127, 128–34, 140–1, 141–2, 145, 146

goal 135–6

Lissitzky’s ideas 131, 135–6, 137–41, 141

literary communism 137–41

search for a new overall structure 131

boycott, definition 39–40, 62

Brautigan, Richard 182

Breton, André 39, 70, 221

Broby-Johansen, Rudolph 144–5

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts 72

Buchloh, Benjamin 83, 140

Bürger, Peter 94, 95–6, 108

Burnham, Jack 10–11, 12, 12–13

Busbea, Larry 118, 121, 124, 213–14

capital 125, 238–9

accumulative cycle of 146

core paradox of 243

expansion of markets 239–41

internal dynamics of 237–8

social domination of 101

capitalism 159

capitalist accumulation 101, 175

capitalist development 166

capitalist modernity, crisis of 23

capital–labour relations 49–50

car, the 61

Castoriadis, Cornelius 160–2, 163, 177, 229

cercles d’études 29

César 93

Cesarano, Giorgio 227

chance encounters 45

Chaplin, Charlie 91

Chaulieu, Pierre 160

Cheval, Patrick 181

Chile 202

Chocoy, Bernard 106

CIA 29, 110–11, 198

cinema 136

circular causality 19

Cité radieuse 87, 98, 107, 118, 140

city, the 125–6

Clair, René 115

Clark, T. J. 14–15, 53–4, 129, 153, 176

class antagonism 49–50, 237–8

class identity 48

class interests 50

class relations 153, 160–2

class struggle 161, 228

Claudius-Petit, Eugène 113

CNRS 115

COBRA 84, 140–1, 200, 217

Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 184

Cold War 28, 104

cultural propaganda 109–11

colonialism 240

colonization of everyday life 205, 242–3

communication 202, 203–8, 224

Communications (journal) 204, 205

communism 28, 49, 51, 137–41, 165, 167–8, 224

Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 175–6

computer-assisted feedback technologies 22

computing 4, 6

Congo 206

Constant (Nieuwenhuys) 79–84, 91, 120–1, 121–6, 140, 166

constructive goals 89

constructivism 134–6, 142–5, 146–7

Constructivist art 202

constructivist ethos 168

Construisez Vous-Mêmes une petite situation sans avenir (LI) 63–4, 64

consumers 241–2

consumption 240

control 102, 205

‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’ (Debord) 193–7, 212, 215

Corvin, Michel 77, 108

Couffignal, Louis 29, 216

counter-value 168

critical art practices 153

critical theory 9, 186, 235–9

critique, as spectacle 7

cultural politics 77

cultural producers 6

cultural production 30, 106

cultural propaganda 109–11

cultural reconstruction 77

culture war, battlefield of 117–18, 120–1

cybernation 242–3

cybernetic agendas 123

cybernetic art 81–2, 224–5

Cybernetic City (Schöffer) 82

cybernetic hypothesis 5–6, 31, 49, 75, 91, 126

cultural logic 227

Debord’s analysis 232–3, 235–9

ideological pitfalls 231

Lefebvre’s contribution 229–33

situationist response to 225–44

stakes of 232–3

Tiqqun’s analysis 226–8

Vaneigem’s analysis 234–5

cybernetic matrix 31

cybernetic ontology 98

Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition 11

cybernetic style 121–2

cybernetic vision 80

cybernetics 4, 6, 17–22, 25–9, 30, 58, 74, 91

advent of 49–53, 134

Constant’s view of 123–4

‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’ 193–7, 212, 215

critique of 182–3, 186–7, 211

impact 6–7

Marshall Plan of the Spirit 197–202

new horizons 224

as shorthand 182

waiting for 220–2

CYSP 0 (Schöffer) 79–82, 79

CYSP 1 (Schöffer) 2, 10–14, 17, 22, 37, 116, 151–2, 153

Dada 38, 40–1, 42, 48, 69–70, 90–1, 98

Dada Manifesto 43

Dangelo, Sergio 200

Datta, Venita 66–7

Dauvé, Gilles 239n

David, Jacques-Louis, The Death of Marat 14–15

de Gaulle, Charles 52

De la Misère en milieu étudiant, considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier (on the poverty of student life: a consideration of its economic, political, sexual, psychological and notably intellectual aspects and of a few ways to cure it) 188

De Stijl (journal) 144

Debord, Guy 6n, 8, 10, 34, 35n, 37, 85, 160n, 161–2, 211–13, 238–9

analysis of the spectacle 238–43

archive 155

on automation 243

correspondence 45–6

‘Correspondence with a Cybernetician’ 193–7, 212, 215

correspondence with Moles 193–7

critical theory 235–9

critique of communication 204–7

cybernetic hypothesis analysis 232–3, 235–9

denigration of vision 239

détournement 70

District of Paris planning survey response 232–3

Fin de Copenhague 127, 128–34, 140–1, 141–2, 145, 146, 149, 153, 154, 168–9, 169–73, 173–7

impasse of negativity and critique 88

inspirations 235–6

‘L’Avant-garde de la présence’ 214

and Lefebvre 231–3

and ‘Les Situationnistes et l’automation’ 156

letter to Jorn, 1957 154–5

letters to Mustapha Khayati 189–91, 211–13

‘Marxisme’ 235–6

on McLuhan 174

and the Moles affair 191

oeuvre 238

Rapport sur la construction des situations 196

rebranding 90

reinvention of the avant-garde 58–9

relationship with Jorn 168

sees new day 89

The Society of the Spectacle 175–6, 181, 182, 228–9, 237, 241–3

decentralization 57, 58

decolonization 35n, 62–3, 104–5, 205

deindustrialization 23

democratic art 118

Denmark 142–4, 174

Denning, Michael 203–4

dépassement 123

de-Stalinization 28

détournement 59, 70, 71, 153, 172, 174, 206, 211, 238–9

Deutschland über alles (LI) 39–41, 39, 71, 96–7

dialectics 47

District of Paris planning survey 232–3

Dorléac, Laurent Bertrand 90

Dossin, Catherine 108n, 110–11

dream-content 15

Dubarle, Dominique 28

Dubuffet, Jean 172

Ducrocq, Albert 12, 29, 216

Duhamel, Georges 23, 24–5

Dzerzhinsky, Felix 54

economic growth 49–50

Egbert, Donald D. 114

electronic pseudo-organisms 11

Eley, Geoff 240

Ellul, Jacques 161, 229, 233–4

Endnotes collective 50, 227–8

Enigmarelle (automaton) 3, 4, 10

Equipo 57 217

Evenson, Norma 99–100

evolutionary stage-theory 56

expenditure, theory of 164n

experience of objectlessness 97

experimental geography 123

exploitation 242–3

Exposition Coloniale Internationale 63

exteriority 97

extremism, break with 89

fascism 38, 91

feedback mechanisms 22, 159, 191

feedback model 19–20

Feldman, Hannah 62, 104

Festival of Avant-Garde Art in Marseille 31, 33–7, 33, 46, 62, 63, 73, 76, 86–7, 92, 98

declared ambition 105–6

plastic arts section 118

site 106–7

support 107–8

Festival of Avant-Garde Art, Nantes 107

Festival of Avant-Garde Art, Paris 76, 107

Fête de la vache enragée 66–7

fettering thesis, the 90, 166

Fin de Copenhague (Jorn and Debord) 31, 127, 140–1, 145, 146, 149, 153, 154, 168

aesthetic content 170

and capital accumulation 175

cover 169–73

drips 171–3

form 131–4

opening advert 128–9

political aesthetics 129–30

pricing 169

printing instructions 141–2

significance 173–7

Ford Foundation 198

form-experiments 131

Foster, Hal 3, 170

Foucault, Michel 228

Fourastié, Jean 239

Fourier, Charles 48, 114

Fourth Republic 28

France 10

Frankfurt School 25, 55

French cybernetics 26–9

French language 25

French Marxism 32n

French theory 32n

Frey, Édith 215

Frey, Théo 215

Fried, Michael 42n

Friedmann, Georges 24, 55, 204

full automation 176

ideology of 154–9, 157

Fuller, Buckminister 202

Futurism 135

futurist moment 38

Galerie Denise René, Paris 13

Galison, Peter 19–20

Garnault, Jean 215

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius 18, 28–9

geopolitics 104–5

Germany 35

global village, the 174

Gombin, Richard 55, 56, 57

Great Depression, the 99

Greaves, Kerry 143

Greenberg, Clement 110, 172, 173

Gropius, Walter 91, 117

Grossman, Henryk 24

Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) 30, 214–16, 217, 218

Groupe Espace 80

Gruppe Spur 210–11

Guilbaud, George-Théodule 158

Guilbaut, Serge 110, 111, 172

Guy, Emmanuel 36n, 120

Habasque, Guy 11, 13–14

Harvey, David 101n, 239–40

Hausmann, Baron 100–1

Hayek, Friedrich 203

Helhesten (journal) 143

Hemmens, Alastair 8, 48

histoire marseillaise 36n, 58, 76, 86–8

historical avant-garde 37–8, 39

historical circumstances 10

historical context 8–9, 17–29

historical determinism 162–3

historical trajectory 31

Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) 198–202, 207–8, 217

Homo faber 48

Horkheimer, Max 25, 55, 191

housing 103

Hungary, Soviet invasion of 52, 53

Huyssen, Andreas 174

ICA London 156

iconoclasm 53

ideology 176–7

and violence 101

If You Believe You Have Genius (tract) 59–61

images 238–9

immaterial patrimony 189

immigrant workers 205

imperial governance 6

individual creativity, cult of 172

industrial design 202

industrial production 22

industrialization, shock of 3

information aesthetics 208–11, 217

information theory 134, 207, 208–11

insults 35

interactive art 244

interactivity 121

International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus 84

internationale lettrisme 217

internationale lettriste (leaflet) 43–6, 44

internationale situationnistei (journal) 35, 46, 214, 216

internationalist perspective 205n

Ionesco, Eugène 93

Isou, Jean-Isidore 45, 93

Ivain, Gilles 89

‘Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau’ (‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’) 85–6

Jakobsen, Jakob 35n

Jakobson, Roman 29

Jameson, Fredric 121

Jappe, Anselm 8, 191, 226, 235–6

jeunes cadres 50

Jorn, Asger 6n, 34, 84, 153, 160n, 164

archive 155

and art 164–9

‘Art and Orders’ 144

Bauhaus revival plan 199–200

critique of automation 167–8

Debord letter to, 1957 154–5

drips 171–3

Fin de Copenhague 127, 128–34, 140–1, 141–2, 145, 146, 149, 153, 154, 168–9, 169–73, 173–7

and HfG 199–201

ideology of full automation 154–9, 157

and information aesthetics 209–10, 209

‘Les Situationnistes et l’automation’ 156–7

letter, 1956 91–3, 92, 109

ontological inversion 164–9

Pour la forme 147, 148, 149–50

Pour la forme preparatory drafts 155–7, 157

relationship with Debord 168

Keynesianism 240

Khayati, Mustapha 6n, 189–91, 211–13, 215–16

kinetic art 30

Kinkle, Jeff 175, 206

Klein, Yves 1, 93, 94, 96–7, 98, 108n, 111

knowledge, democratized 138

Korsch, Karl 55

Kromann, Thomas Hvid 169–70, 171

Kunst-ism (Lissitzky and Arp) 147, 148, 149–50

Kurczynski, Karen 164n, 172, 200

La Défense 82

la loi du 11 mars 1957 171

La Vache Enragée (journal) 67, 67

labour

abstract 24

composition of 22

reorganization of 160–2

Lacan, Jacques 29

Lafosse, Roger 244

language

of control 13

innovations in 132

revolutionary power 207

L’Art d’aujourd’hui (journal) 80

Latournerie, Anne 171

Le Bras, Laurence 120

Le Coeur à barbe (Tzara) 70, 71

Le Corbusier 36n, 83, 85, 86, 91–2, 104–5, 123

all-redeeming synthesis 111–12

architectural aim 102–3

Cité Radieuse 87, 98, 112, 112–17, 113, 140

grands-ensembles 99

La Ville radieuse 99, 99–100

Plan national d’aménagement du territoire 113

Plan voisin 99

rise to stardom 99–100

as social engineer 102

urban vision 98–103

Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture) 102–3

vision for society 115–16

Le Monde (newspaper) 28

Le Mouvement exhibition 13

Lebel, Jean-Jacques 30

Lee, Mia 210

Lee, Pamela M. 74

Lefebvre, Henri 52, 55, 89, 101, 121, 184–5, 212, 229–33

‘Marxisme et théorie de l’information’ (Information theory and Marxism) 230

Léger, Fernand 92, 143–4, 174

leisure time 166

Lemaître, Maurice 93

Lenin, Vladimir 49, 54

les Enragées 67

‘Les Gratte-ciels par la racine’ (‘Skyscrapers by the Roots’) (LI) 101–2

Les Lèvres nues (journal) 35n, 206–7

‘Les Situationnistes et l’automation’ (Jorn) 156–7

lettrism 88–9, 93, 217

Lettrist International 84, 200

aesthetic profile 63–7, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69–73, 69, 71

critical urban analysis 101–2

distancing from avant-garde 45

engagement with monochromy 96–7

ephemeral output 43

graphic style 59–61, 60

impasse of negativity and critique 88–9

manifesto-art 41

Ordre de boycott 33–7, 33

‘Pourquoi le lettrisme’ (‘Why Lettrism’) 50–1

refusal 73–7

transition to the SI 46

and the USSR 52–3

and violence 39

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 29

liberal hypothesis 6

lifestyle choices 240

lifestyle magazines 129

limits, urge to transgress 121

L’Industrie du pétrole vue par des artistes exhibition 72

Lippard, Lucy 134

Lissitzky, El 128, 129, 131–4, 135–6, 137–41, 141, 143, 147, 148, 149–50

literacy 135

literary communism 70, 137–41

literature, critique of 45

London, Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition 11

London Psychogeographical Association 200

L’Opération robot 190, 192

Lukács, György 55, 56

Luxemburg, Rosa 24, 55, 239–40, 241

luxury commodities 129

Lyon, Janet 43

McDonough, Tom 64, 100–1, 112n

machinic civilization 25

machinic modernism, phantoms of 3

machinisme 24

McLuhan, Marshall 174

Macy Conferences (1946–53) 20–1

Maldonado, Tomás 156, 199, 200–1

Malevich, Kazimir 40–1, 71, 142

Malraux, André 1, 65–6, 77, 108

manifesto-art 41–2

manifestoes

absence of 41

as a genre 49

LI performative critique 43

programmatic features 41

rise and fall of 49

manifesto-form 41–2, 44

Mansoor, Jaleh 104, 145–6

Marcolini, Patrick 229

Marelli, Gianfranco 34, 36n

Mariën, Marcel 36n

Marinetti, F. T. 131, 133, 135

market-planning 201–2

Marseille 1–2, 3, 6–7, 10–11, 14

Marshall Plan 10, 22, 24, 27, 28–9, 46, 49, 51–3, 61, 104, 145–6

Marshall Plan of the Spirit 29, 197–202

Marx, Karl 165, 167, 175–6, 182n, 234, 236, 237n, 243

Marxism 9, 49, 50

crisis of 46, 47, 53, 58, 98

rethinking of 57

‘Marxisme et théorie de l’information’ (Information theory and Marxism) (Lefebvre) 230

Marxism–Leninism 53, 54, 55, 56

masculinist tropes 15

mass enlightenment 138

mass production 136–7, 168, 202

mass travel 133

May ’68 31, 67

buildup to 179–82, 180, 187–93, 189, 220

Mazarinian leaflets 43

mechanical reproduction 136–7

mechanization 22–3, 25, 123–4, 159

Medosch, Armin 217, 218

membership 4n

Mémoires 130n, 131n, 142, 154–5, 170

Ménétrier, Jacques 11, 14

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 47

Meyerhold, Vsevolod 140

middle class 50

Ministry of Cultural Affairs 108

ministry of reconstruction and urbanism 113

Mitterrand, Robert 108

modern art, crisis of 23

modernism 15, 42, 92, 125, 136, 207–8

modernity 77, 126

modernization 10, 30, 35n, 47, 80, 101, 105, 129, 205

Moholy-Nagy, László 12

Moles, Abraham 29, 187–93, 190, 193–8, 207–8, 208, 212, 216, 220, 221–2, 223–4

Molière, Don Juan or the Feast with the Statue 13

Momigliano, Franco 162–3

Mondrian, Piet 125

monochromy 94, 96–7, 98, 111

Montgomery bus boycott 62

Montmartre 66–7

Monument to the Third International (Tatlin) 150

Monument voor de wederopbouw (Constant) 79–82, 79

Morin, Edgar 55–6, 184, 190, 204

moronic optimism 166

Moses, Robert 101n

Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste 200

movements, proliferation of 217

mutation, logic of 125

N and T 217

Nantes 107

Naville, Pierre 221

Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale (tract) 63

neo-artists 214–16, 220

neo-avant-garde, the 94–8, 216, 217–20, 244

neo-Dadaism 30, 91

Néo-vision 80

New Babylon 82–3, 122–3, 140–1, 166

new materialism(s) 21

New Tendencies 217–20

New York 101n, 110–11

Nicholson-Smith, Donald 53–4

Noir et Rouge 56

nouveau réalisme 30, 93

nouveau théâtre 118, 140

Nouveau Théâtre d’operations dans la culture (tract) 118, 119, 120

Novak, Zvonimir 42, 59

object fetishism 61

October (journal) 94

op art 30

Ordre de boycott (Lettrist International) 33–7, 33, 43, 52–3, 73–7

avant-garde manifesto features 38–9

avant-garde tropes 41

break with the manifesto-form 42

comparison to Deutschland über alles 39–41

contemptuous tone 34

graphic style 59

importance 35–6

investment in the cybernetic hypothesis 75

negative character 42

performative idiom 75

political aesthetics 53, 61–4

political objectives 75

proclamation 34

vignette of peasant woman milking a cow 34, 40–1, 64–7, 68, 69–73, 69

Osborne, Peter 133

overaccumulation 239–40

Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels 72

Pan, Martha 93

Panzieri, Raniero 237

paradigm repetition 97

Paris 107

avant-garde scene 90–1

decline narratives 110–11

Galerie Denise René 13

Hausmann’s grand renovation 100–1

Le Corbusier’s vision 99–100

Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt 37

Paris Biennale 77, 108

Parks, Rosa 62

participation 73–7

participatory art 30, 244

party-form, the 56

patriarchal worldview 16–17

patrons and patronage 109

PCF (French Communist Party) 27, 51–3, 63, 220, 221

perception, modes of 130

performative dimension 74–5, 169–73

Perloff, Marjorie 38

Permild, Verner Otto 142, 172

Petersen, Stephen 109–10

Pezolet, Nicola 199–200, 202

phenomenal space 118

philosophical universalism 21

Philosophies 55

photography 136

photomontage 136

Picasso, Pablo 91

Pickering, Andrew 74

pictorial space 125

Pinot-Gallizio, Giuseppe 168–9

police, as metonym for power 185–7

Poliéri, Jacques 93, 117, 140, 244n

political aesthetics 53, 58–64, 60

political avant-garde experience 35n

political engagement, and art 220–2

political praxis 220

political-economic circumstances 10

politics

and art 9

crisis of 161

end of 6

politics of knowledge, influencers 29

Pollock, Friedrich 25–6, 55, 129, 159

Pollock, Griselda 15

Pollock, Jackson 172, 173

Popper, Frank 13, 30

Posenenske, Charlotte 130n

postmodern art criticism 95

post-structuralism 21

post-surrealism, political aesthetics of 58–64, 60

Potlatch (journal) 84–5, 86–8, 93, 101–2

Pour la forme (Jorn) 147, 148, 149–50

Pour la forme (Jorn), preparatory drafts 155–7, 157

Pourquoi le lettrisme’ (‘Why Lettrism’), (Debord and Wolman) 50–1, 90

power

crisis of 182

and technology 237–8

Vaneigem’s analysis 234–5

print revolution 136

production, exigencies of 23

production processes 22

productive forces 24

profits 164

programmatism 47–9, 58, 98, 145, 153

proto-participatory art 30

provincializing 63

purges 76

Que Sais-Je? series 157–8

Quebec 89

R2D2 10

Ragon, Michel 14, 17, 108n, 118, 224

Ramadier, Paul 51

Rancière, Jacques 186

Rapport sur la construction des situations (Debord) 196

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt 35n, 41

realized poetry 206

rebanding 90

reconstruction 98

reconstruction culture 62

reconstruction economy 76

recurrence, patterns of 145–6

refrigerator, the 61

refusal 73–7

Reichardt, Jasia 11

representation

critique of 54

end to 97

representational idiom, performative idiom replaces 74

revolution 30, 49, 220, 221, 244

revolutionary romanticism 231

revolutionary tradition 9, 98

Riesel, René 181

robots 1–2, 115

Rockefeller Foundation 29, 198

Rodchenko, Alexander 147

Rosenblueth, Arturo 18–19

Rosengreen, Bjørn 142

Ross, Kristin 9, 50, 52, 61, 185, 186

Rowell, Margit 135, 143

Royal Dutch-Shell 72

Russia 139, 145

Russian Suprematism 40–1

Sadler, Simon 36n, 122

Saint-Simon, Henri de 114

Salleron, Louis 177

L’Automation 157–9

Sartre, Jean-Paul 51

Scandinavia 35

Schapiro, Meyer 97

Schneider, André 189

Schöffer, Nicolas 10–14, 15–17, 30, 36–7, 77, 93, 112, 121–2, 123, 213–15, 216, 223–4

CYSP 0 79–82, 79

Schöffer, Nicolas (continued)

CYSP 1 2, 10–14, 17, 22, 37, 116, 151–2, 153

Scholl, Inge 198

Scholz, Roswitha 50

Schwitters, Kurt 207

Science et Vie (magazine) 1, 13, 14

science-fiction 123, 133

scientific progress 77

Second Industrial Revolution 17

Second World War 17, 19–20, 38, 49, 142

self-correcting mechanisms 22

self-government 57

sexist imagery 15–17, 16

sexuality 194

Shannon, Claude E. 21n, 198, 203, 208

Shepard, Todd 105

Siepe, Hans T. 63

SIGMA festival, Bordeaux, 1965 223–4, 244

silent compulsion 182n

Simon, Roland 47, 145

situationist agenda 215

situationist city, the 120

Situationist International (journal) 83–4

situationist logic 195

situationist project 5

situationist theory 9, 226

Snow, C. P. 20

social anxiety 124

social conflict 103

social domination 242–3

social identities 186

social participation 240–1

social reform 103

socialism 163–4

Socialisme ou Barbarie (journal) 56, 159–62, 229

Socialist Realism 51

The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 175–6, 181, 182, 228–9, 237, 241–3

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 55

space 118, 122, 125

space-exploration 133

spatial turn 121, 125

Spaulding, Daniel 125, 130n

spectacle 7–8, 9–10, 117, 150, 182, 235, 237, 238–43, 240–1

Spirit of the Age 190–1

spontaneous organization 58

Stalin, Josef 51, 51–2, 54

Stalinism, problem of 53–4

Stepanova, Varvara 147

Stojanovic, Jelena 219

Strasbourg, University of 187–90, 189, 193, 212

street-spectacles 30

structuralism 21, 204

structuralist approaches 29

style 130

Suprematism 144

surplus value 164

surrealism 3, 4, 38, 48, 59, 63, 98, 143, 220–1

surréalisme révolutionnaire 217

synthesis 111–12

Tatlin, Vladimir 147, 150

technical progress 5

technology

imaginary of 17, 17

and power 237–8

tech-optimism 31

teleology 19

theatre 117–18, 119, 120, 139–40, 140

Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, Paris 37

theoretical coordinates 98

Third Worldist perspective 206

Thoburn, Nicolas 130n

Tinguely, Jean 93, 108n Tiqqun (journal) 226–8

topology 124–5

Toscano, Alberto 175, 206

total industrialization 154

Touraine, Alain 150, 153, 166, 184

Toutes ces dames au salon (LI) 72

tracts 42–3, 59, 216

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Vaneigem) 181, 182, 228–9

Trespeuch-Berthelot, Anna 225–6

Trocchi, Alexander 244n

Turner, Fred 74

Tzara, Tristan 43, 69–70, 71, 207

ultra-gauchism 9, 32n, 53–8, 229

uncanny, the 3

unitary revolution 88

unitary urbanism

Unitary Urbanism 31, 77, 83, 85, 86, 89–90, 94, 98, 109, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124–5

United States of America

civil rights movement 62

cultural propaganda 109–11

hegemony 104, 110

Marshall Plan of the Spirit 197–202

world-making 111

Université Paris-Nanterre poster 180, 191–2, 222

background to 180–3

date 184

police image 185–7

text 183–5

Université Paris-Nanterre riot 179–81, 192

police intervention 185–7

unworking 130

urban planning 86

urban warfare 102

urbanism 100–2

urbanization 80, 101

use-value 238–9

USSR 51, 52–3

utopianism 114

value-critical theory 167n

value-form 164n

values, overturning of 167

Vaneigem, Raoul

analysis of power 234–5

cybernetic hypothesis analysis 234–5

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations 181, 182, 228–9

Vanel, Hervé 14

Vaucanson, Jacques de 2–3, 10

verbal traffic 131n

violence 39

and ideology 101

Visages de l’avantgarde (Faces of the avant-garde) (LI) 88–9

vision 239

visual communism 135

visual culture 38

Wagner, Richard 2, 13

Walter, William Grey 12

Wark, McKenzie 122–3, 166

wealth 167

Weaver, Warren 203, 208–10

Wiener, Norbert 17, 27, 28, 198, 202, 203, 229

Wigley, Mark 81

Williams, Raymond 203

Wittfogel, Karl August 55, 236

Wolman, Gil J. 34, 70, 76, 84–5, 89, 206–7

women, contributions to art history 147

work 167n

and art 168–9

critique of 48–9, 168

devalorization/revalorization of 168–9

nature of 22

representation 145–7, 148, 149–53, 151, 152

sociology of 115, 149–50

work clothes 146–7

workers, freeing from the hardships of manual labour 115

workers councils 58

workers’ movement 48, 49

working hours 103n

working class

aesthetic 51

class identity 48, 50

discontent 46

World Congress of Free Artists, First 84–8, 88, 93

worldviews 15–17

Zacarias, Gabriel 8

Zeitgeist 14–15, 123

ZERO 217

Zimmer, Hans-Peter 211