Overview

The Situationist International Anthology is the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English. In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people's passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of dtournement (""rerouting, hijacking""). 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"" pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world. This volume presents a rich variety of articles, leaflets, graffiti, and internal documents, ranging from experiments in ""psychogeography"" 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 all the translations have been fine-tuned and the bibliography has been updated to include comments on dozens of newer books by and about the situationists.

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"""The accused have never denied the charge of misappropriating the funds of the Strasbourg Student Union. Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay some 5000 francs for the printing of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature inspired by the 'Situationist International.' These publications express aims and ideas which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the purposes of a student union. One need only read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking any experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories and bored by the drab monotony of their everyday life, have the pathetic arrogance to make sweeping denunciations of their fellow students, their professors, God, religion, the clergy, and the governments and political and social systems of the entire world. Rejecting all morality and legal restraint, these cynics do not shrink from to advocating 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 (13 December 1966) ""This explosion was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West -- groups, moreover, that do not know what they would put in its place, but that delight in negation, destruction, violence, anarchy, brandishing the black flag."" --Charles de Gaulle, televised speech (7 June 1968) ""In the U.S.A. the Situationist International is mostly known as a small group of dadaist provocateurs that had something to do with the May 1968 uprising in France. The name has been batted around in reference to punk, because Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren supposedly was connected with the situationists. The situationists were, ah, sort of like the Yippies, one hears. Or New York's Motherfuckers. . . . The Situationist International Anthology makes it clear that the Situationist International was something considerably more interesting: perhaps the most lucid and adventurous band of extremists of the last quarter century. It makes almost all present-day political and aesthetic thinking seem cowardly. . . . It is exhilarating to read this book."" --Greil Marcus, Village Voice (1982)"

Author Information

Ken Knabb has translated numerous works by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, including Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (2014; reissued by PM Press in 2024) and Debord's Complete Cinematic Works (2003; to be reissued by PM Press in 2025). Knabb's own writings, published in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb (1997) and posted online at his ""Bureau of Public Secrets"" website, have been translated into more than fifteen languages. He is currently presenting a series of Zoom webinars on The Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist International Anthology. Ken Knabb has translated numerous works by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, including Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (2014; reissued by PM Press in 2024) and Debord's Complete Cinematic Works (2003; to be reissued by PM Press in 2025). Knabb's own writings, published in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb (1997) and posted online at his ""Bureau of Public Secrets"" website, have been translated into more than fifteen languages. He is currently presenting a series of Zoom webinars on The Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist International Anthology.

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