Expansive and readable reflections on the Situationist International and the individuals and groups in the USA it influenced in the 1970s and 1980s. Written in 1985 by a former member of the post-situationist Point Blank! group.

Submitted by

Fozzie

on August 14, 2026

https://archive.org/details/culturesinconten0000unse/page/n9/mode/2up

Those, in the English-speaking world who know of the Situationist International (henceforth S.I.) generally relegate them to the status of a sixties period piece. Some even admire them as the most fascinating by-product of the international New Left but see them as hopelessly bound to a bygone era.

My own enthusiasm for the S.I, like that of erstwhile collaborators, hit its peak in the early seventies. the more we became aware of these formidable Frenchmen. Their scandalous methods, wicked humor, intriguing graphics—backed up. we learned, with a well stocked theoretical arsenal—rang true in “modem” California and zapped many a jaded veteran of a Movement-gone-stale like piercing light through a dense fog. (St. Paul notwithstanding, this was epiphany.) So the San Franeisco Bay Area then wilnessed a considerable flurry of S.I.-influenced activity

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, including what were by far the most ttenchant post-mortems on the waning New Left and counterculture.

Yet by 1975, largely because of a

seemingly

old-fashioned economic crisis that was so unlike the S.I.’s prognosis (along with subtler reasons I'll examine later), the effusion of our posters, pamphlets, graffiti, etc, had slowed to a trickle. Since then,

faute de mieux

(for lack of anything better) would about sum up anyone’s lingering loyalty to those yellowing texts.

Still, if I may leap abruptly into the present, into the social climate of the Reagan/Thatcher backlash, a menacing new Cold War, and the worst worldwide economic quagmire since the thirties, then I can state the case for the S.I.'s continued pertinence more sharply. For if this grim backdrop roughly resembles former times, it is also, in even more ways, so unprecedented as to confound all our inherited analytical frameworks. Up against such a challenge, the foundering responses of the Democratic Party, the U.K.'s Labour Party, and what's left of the Left appear all the more pitiable. Above all. it is the appalling intellectual bankruptcy of so many who haven't had a fresh idea in fifty years—yet who scurry to regroup even as they refuse to rethink—which makes

faute de mieux

a perfectly excellent reason to start advancing further where the S.I. stopped short, And without delay!

In the essay that follows

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, I address myself to those who want to fight effectively in our nearly paralyzing times. and to those who just as surely do not want what the S.L so dreaded: “a world where the guarantee of not dying of hunger is purchased at the price of dying of boredom.”

Antecedents: Adventures of the Dialectic

To be youthful means being able to forget.

—Benito Mussolini

We Marxists live in traditions, and have not ceased being revolutionists because of it.

—Leon Trotsky

To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past... . The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time'.

—Walter Benjamin

Too bad it didn’t work.

—Ronald Reagan, after a private screening of

Reds

Ms. Susan Sontag, who is to the politics of culture what Gloria Vanderbilt is to jeans, decided, a couple of fashion cycles ago, to

dabble awhile in surrealism, Walter Benjamin, etc. So we got her book

On Photography

(1977), with its chapter “Melancholy Objects,” that pontifically sets us straight:

“Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with (Marxism], the twentieth century's most seductive form of moralism."

From this we are to deduce: (1) that surrealism (along with all of modern irony) and dour old Marxism are the twain that ne'er shall meet: (2) that the entire surrealist project was admirable but silly (thus placing Sontag solidly in Reagan's “too bad it didn’t work" camp—not the only ground they share these days), (3) that Marx was a “moralist." (This last is big news to me—have I read too much Marx?) So many misrepresentations to squeeze into two medium-sized sentences! Prizes should be …