Situationist International Anthology

"Rejecting all morality and legal restraint, making sweeping denunciations of their fellow students, their professors, God, religion, the clergy, and the governments and political and social systems of the entire world, these cynics do not hesitate to advocate theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a permanent worldwide proletarian revolution with 'unrestrained pleasure' as its only goal." -- Judge Llabador, Strasbourg District Court 1966
Literary Nonfiction. Politics. Critical Theory. Art. In 1957 a few experimental European groups stemming from the radical tradition of dadaism and surrealism, but seeking to avoid the cooption to which those movements succumbed, came together to form the Situationist International. The name came from their aim of liberating everyday life through the creation of open-ended, participatory "situations" (as opposed to fixed works of art) — an aim which naturally ran up against the whole range of material and mental obstacles produced by the present social order. The situationists challenged people's passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of detournement. Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its "Communist" and bureaucratic leftist pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then — although the SI itself was dissolved in 1972 — situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world.
The Situationist International Anthology, generally recognized as the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English, presents a rich variety of articles from its French journal and in a variety of leaflets, pamphlets, filmscripts, leaflets, graffiti and internal documents, ranging from early experiments in "psychogeography" and cultural subversion to lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other crises and upheavals of the sixties. For this new edition the translations have all been fine-tuned and over 100 pages of new material have been added.