Situationist International

A complete English translation of a book first published in France in 1999, a post-mortem on May ’68, discussing the various ways that the most popular demands voiced in May were recuperated by capitalism in its post-1968 “revolution from the right” (Pasolini) and incorporated into a consumerist lifestyle of selfish hedonism, pseudo-individualism, phony libertarianism and permitted rebellion (the “triumph of situationism”) as part of the restructuring of the global workforce and the creation of a “new man”, concluding with a call for “a new civilizing phenomenon” and “a revolution of the spirit” similar to the movement led by Christianity during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Published clandestinely in Algeria as a pamphlet, December 1965; trans. by Ken Knabb

A brief review of the role played by the situationists, the enragés, and the Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO—composed of “about forty people”) in the movement of May 1968 in France, which the situationists claimed was an aborted “revolution”, but whose “only major victory”, according to Amorós, was “its survival in memory” for, “contrary to the assertions of the SI, the modernization of capitalism and the general proletarianization of the population … did not produce new, broader, and more intransigent forces of denial”, as the spectacle “subjugated its antagonists by manipulating their desires and satisfying false needs”, and its “mercenary thinkers finished the job”.

The Situationist Times was an international, English-language periodical created and edited by Jacqueline de Jong, of which six issues were published between 1962 and 1967. A radical compendium using such Situationist tactics as détournement and a printed form of dérive, the journal included essays, artwork, found images, and quotations concerned with such issues as topology, politics, and spectacle culture.