* Book: The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. McKenzie Wark. Verso, 2011.

A second excerpt from Ken Wark’s new book:

“The Situationist International was founded at a meeting of three women and six men in July 1957. All that remains of this fabled event are a series of stirring documents and some photographs, casual but made with an artist’s eye, by founding member Ralph Rumney.i The Situationist International dissolved itself in 1972. In its fifteen years of existence, only 72 people were ever members. It was born out of the fusion of two and a half existing groups, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Letterist International and the London Psychogeographical Society, (the last was represented by its only member, Rumney). Its founding conference took place in Cosio d’Arosca, a little Ligurian town where founding member Piero Simondo’s family had a small hotel. Or at least that is the official story. Debord writes in a letter to Jorn: “I think it is necessary for us to present the ‘Conference at Cosio’ as a point of departure for our distinct organized activity.”ii From the beginning, Debord has a fine hand for the tactics of appearances.

Debord skillfully positioned himself as the secretary for a new movement, the Situationist International. Of all the roles Debord chose for himself, not to mention those assigned to him by posterity, the one that receives the least attention is that of secretary. Late in life he was to say: “I have been a good professional – but of what?” While the question was meant to be rhetorical, one not entirely implausible answer would be – secretary.

The secretary’s task, as Debord conceived it, involves the organizing of exhibitions, provocations, occasional publications, and above all the journal, Internationale Situationniste. It is, Debord writes, “our ‘official organ’, the ideological coherence of which was made my responsibility.” Debord will act as its secretary with remarkable tenacity and industry. Internationale Situationniste would not be a duplicated flyer like the Letterist International’s Potlatch, but a beautifully edited, illustrated, designed and bound affair. By 1960 the author of “Never work!” would be complaining: “I am overwhelmed with work.”

Debord labored in the service of producing Internationale Situationniste as a collective expression, a document of a provisional micro-society whose practice is to treat all of culture as collective property. “Our editorial committee has a heavy hand (and, as you imagine, no respect for literary propriety.” Détournement was both a signature Situationist practice and a theory of how culture as a totality works. Debord writes to Straram in Canada: “All the material published by the Situationist International is, in principle, usable by everyone, even without acknowledgement, without the preoccupations of literary property. You can make all the détournements that appear useful to you.”

One makes a movement with what one has. The practice of the exclusion of members from the Situationist International began very soon after its founding. As a good secretary, Debord has little tolerance for opportunism or ineptitude. As Debord wrote to Walter Olmo, a founding member: “I reproach you for having accepted, in particular circumstances, several ideas that are stupid.” Olmo would not last long. Ralph Rumney lasted almost a year. Debord writes to him in March 1958: “you still haven’t done any real work with us.” To compound Debord’s annoyance, Rumney boasted of his Situationist connections to art world acquaintances.

Becoming a Situationist required a certain rigor. Debord: “I am still with the Situationist International and, as long as I am in it, I will keep a minimum of discipline that excludes all collaboration with uncontrollable elements…” To today’s middle class sensibility, submission to a discipline for reasons other than getting paid seems like some kind of perversion, and for that reason membership in the Situationist International seems as unintelligible a sacrifice as the mysteries of religion.

A more common model for what remains of the artist in today’s disintegrating spectacle is that of the small business proprietor. Take as an example Jeff Koons (b. 1955), who “staked his budding penchant for expensively fabricated art by working as a commodities broker on Wall Street for six years…. Today he has a factory in Chelsea with ninety regular assistants….” To be an artist, it seems, has become just another kind of middle class ambition, the dream of a franchise with your name on it.

The exclusion of members is sometimes taken to reveal some sinister side to Debord’s character, so it is interesting to read in the Correspondence that “Jorn was the first partisan of the measure of exclusion.” Jorn was one of the few Situationists who had ever been a member of an orthodox Communist party. But while the Situationist International is often compared to such a party, this parallel is usually made by people who were never members of one.

Situationists were expected to know what was expected of them and without being told. Debord’s policy as secretary was “to place a priori confidence, in all cases, and only until the first proof to the contrary, in a certain number of recognized comrades, based upon objective criteria.” The reason for most exclusions is not mysterious. It was a failure to live up to expectations. Members are what they do: “No problem in our collective action can be resolved by good will.” A certain unsentimental understanding of how friendships form and dissolve, of how character becomes different to itself as it struggles in and against time underlie the distinctive quality of Situationist subjectivity, where “neither freedom nor intelligence are given once and for all.”viii

Bataille had thought that what binds community together is the experience of death. Under the guidance of the Surrealist turned Stalinist Louis Aragon (1897-1982), postwar Communist culture created a real cult out of its dead Resistance fighters. The red flag shrouds its martyred dead, whose blood dyes its every fold. The Situationists borrowed at least this much from the Communists – that the exclusion of living members meant social death. Given that Communist culture really did comprise an entire social world, to be excluded from the party really did mean excommunication. The Situationists had no such power. But they wrestled with the problem of how to make collective belonging meaningful, as something requiring some sacrifice. The possibility of exclusion made participation in the Situationist game meaningful.

As secretary, Debord tacks this way and that, trying to keep the International together. Debord’s problems are compounded by the presence of several powerful personalities, all of them his senior. Around the time the Situationist International was founded, Guy Debord was 25, Constant Nieuwenhuys was 37, Asger Jorn was 43, Pinot Gallizio was 55. Debord looks to Constant as a tactical ally, but tries strenuously to keep him from pushing the organization too far too fast. He wants Constant to work on the editorial line for the journal with this in mind: “This will certainly help the really experimental faction in the Situationist International.” But Debord is initially not ready to break with Gallizio or Jorn, both of whom are earning Constant’s stern disapproval as artists. “I don’t have the right – and I do not have the least desire – to try to impose directives on the painters (for instance) in the name of a real movement that is no more advanced than their work.” A shrewd move, since for Debord to attempt to direct the painters would only draw him – and the Situationists – deeper into the obsessions of the art world.

The unraveling of Debord’s relationship with Constant is the great moment in the early life of the Situationist International, and it shapes the whole space of what will be possible for it. Debord is caught between the left and right wings of the movement. And while the artists are, one by one, excluded, Constant is hardly appeased and resigns anyway, and the movement, so to speak, moves on. But this is the moment, like the opening scene in a novel or film, where circumstances are fluid, where many things are possible. One discovers, in the first three years of the Situationist International many possible versions of it, besides the ones of legend or even historical record. This is perhaps why so many keep returning to them, and to these early years in particular, as the scene of a moment in still-living movement, or in other words, a situation.

“Staying friends with Constant was quite difficult. He liked to fight,” says Jacqueline De Jong. At stake are 200 copies of Constant’s book which Debord feels are owed to him. It may sound like just a pretext, but one of the essential components of the existence of the Situationist International was the internal exchange of documents and their donation to external parties. As this incident highlights, it was held together by the gift.

The gift enters Situationist via the writings of the socialist anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), which were taken up and expanded into a theory of the general economy by Georges Bataille. Both drew on anthropological work by Franz Boas (1858-1942) and others among Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, and their concept of potlatch. This version of the gift linked it closely to reputation. The gift is not selfless charity, nor is it a Christmas present. Rather, it is a very special kind of donation, in which the donor gives away time, matter or energy in order to acquire reputation. The journal of the Letterist International was called Potlatch, and despite the meager resources of the group it was given away for free.

The Situationists sold their journal in bookshops, but many were given away and for the same reasons: to exchange their time, energy and materials for reputation. The Situationist International was a provisional micro-society founded on its own quite particular economy of donation and reputation. While various of its activities might be supported by selling art to collectors or other banal forms of compensated labor, there is a sense in which the Situationist International was a grand potlatch, putting to the fire the thought and work of a whole little community, daring the world to match its extravagant consumption of its own time.

Hence the donation of copies was no mere pretext in Debord’s falling out with Constant, for if Constant refused to donate them it would constitute a real break in the economy – if that is what it is – of this micro society. It is a quite paradoxical economy. The philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was Debord’s contemporary, although beyond that they had little in common, except perhaps rather nuanced notions of the gift. Jacques Derrida: “The gift is the gift of giving itself and nothing else.”

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) had thought of a gift economy as driven by an underlying generosity, the very mana of socialism. Debord and in particular Jorn practiced it in much the same spirit, even saw it as the basis for a break beyond socialist thought and action. But Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) took thinking about the gift away from the “shop girl’s philosophy” of everyday life, and in the direction instead of a structural logic of exchange.This line of thought would flourish in the hands of Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Louis Althusser (1918-1990), where gift exchange reappears as the structural logic of symbolic exchange, and becomes the technique by which the superstructures of capitalist society can be decoded. They wanted a parallel competence to the marxisant political economy still thought to explain the workings of the base.

Derrida proposes instead that the gift must interrupt the economy. The gift is not supposed to be returned. It is outside circulation and circular time. Giving suspends all calculation. The gift is canceled by any reciprocation, return, debt, countergift or exchange. Derrida departs from anthropological thinking by thinking the gift in its singularity, outside of exchange, to reveal just how troubling it is to any such structural logic.

If the recipient of a gift recognizes it as a gift, then it ceases to be one. “If it presents itself then it no longer presents itself.” For Derrida this opens up an intriguing realm of paradox and a way to get pay back on his structuralist precursors. For the Situationsts, the very impossibility of the pure gift calls into being a whole terrain of possibility for an art and politics of the impurity of the gift. Every impure gift forces both the giver and receiver into the invention of an attitude to life that can accept the gift but not exchange it. The invention of everyday life could be nothing but the inventive accommodation to gifts, to the subtle art of not returning the gift, of giving again in a way that is not circular, that does not simply pass on the debt.

Exchange affirms the identities of givers and receivers, and the value of the thing exchange. Exchange arises as a way to contain the troubling capacities of the gift. “The subject and the object are arrested effects of the gift.” This might be the last nobility left to life: to give and not receive, receive and not gift, to invent unreturnable acts (another name for which might be situations). Derrida constructs not only a theory of the gift, his writing inserts itself into just such an unreturnable practice, or tries to. The Situationist International composed a whole microsociety on the premise of the art and politics of the gift, or what might more properly be called potlatch.

Potlatch is not really sustainable. It’s a game, a challenge. It isn’t a circular exchange. The early years of the Situationist International are a game of potlatch, of the gift of time, in which the players, in the end, run out of moves. For Debord, in particular, the challenge of the gift of time went, in his terms, unmet. It was time to forget and move on.

The Situationist International exercises a continued fascination because its members made a gift of their time that was not returned in their own time. They did not really take their place in the exchanges of views between the journals and groups of their time. Their beautiful, expensive journal did not so much circulate as spiral off into the void. Until May 68 appeared, and appeared to many to return the gift in spades. But still, something remains of an uncanceled gift.”