Surviving History

A Situationist Archive

The Situationists feared their history as if it were their death. They recognized that their historical survival risked contradicting their critique of late capitalism as a society of the spectacle, according to which social relations have become reduced to their abstract representation. Whereas Lukács had sought to generalize Marx's account of commodity fetishism as characteristic of the reification or petrification of all social relations under capitalism, the Situationists understood this reification to have taken on an imagistic form, in which real social relations are reduced to their image or spectacle. They were keenly aware that conventional forms of historical memorialization risked participating in the society of the spectacle's reification of everyday life, reducing historical social relations to their petrified image. Grand monumentalization, while offering the promise of assured historical survival, was, for the Situationists, an afterlife not worth living. Therefore, in order not to disappear completely from historical memory, they had to develop novel strategies of memorialization. At stake was a more liquid model of the archive, where those commemorated were not reduced to a dead correlate of the present, frozen in perpetuity, but salvaged in a more revitalized form, ideally as a constantly shifting, eruptive force in the present and for the future. Focusing on a particular Situationist book called Mémoires, this chapter will attempt to reconstruct the Situationists' strategies of self-archiving, which tried to counter a spectacular monumentalization of their own history. In the process I hope to elaborate the alternative model of an archive that is indicated in this book and the implications this has for writing the history of the Situationists.

Mémoires, as its title suggests, is a book of remembrance. As such it is not a record of how certain events actually happened, but of how they are recollected by its author or, rather, authors. Mémoires was, in fact, the result of the collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. Although it was first assembled in 1957, during a visit by Debord to Jorn's homeland, Denmark, to celebrate the foundation of the Situationist International that same year, it only appeared in print in December 1958. The book is divided into three chronological sections: 'June 1952' 'December 1952' and 'September 1953'. The dates of these sections and the title Mémoires demonstrate that this was a recollection of key pre-Situationist moments, retrospectively understood as significant to the subsequent identity of the Situationist International (hereafter SI).

In the first section, among the events recorded for posterity is a cartoon-strip reference to Debord's first Lettrist film, called Hurlements en Faveur de Sade from 1952 (Figure 1.1). Part of the film's title appears in the top right-hand corner of the page. And in the bottom right-hand corner is a quotation from Debord concerning the concept of 'situation': 'the arts of the future will be the overturning of situations, or nothing'. This phrase appeared in the first issue of the Lettrist journal Ion (1952), on the occasion of the first publication of a transcript of Hurlements. The cartoon image, with a figure pointing to a blank screen, makes a captioned reference to the film as an example of the first failed or spoilt (raté) cinema. Hurlements was a film without pictures, consisting of a white screen accompanied by seemingly random dialogue, followed by silence and darkness for periods of up to 24 minutes, as the light projector was intermittently turned off. The second section of Mémoires, 'December 1952', records the formation of the Lettrist International and 'the Paris of the young men and girls who haunt the Left Bank' (Figure 1.2). The page is scattered with words speaking of dark passages, asphyxiation, night, no sunshine ('oh! jamais le soleil'), in stark contrast to the backlit burst of saturated orange which spreads out and surrounds the white avenues lined with snippets of ink-black text. The final section, 'September 1953', is filled with textual recollections of key Lettrist terms, such as 'dérive', meaning to drift, which remained important in the lexicon and practices of the SI. What interests me, however, is not just the objects, places and people recollected here, but the insistently fragmented layout of the book (Figure 1.3), in which the boundaries of the splashes of colour, images and texts deliberately collide and blur into each other. It is my contention that the dispersed structure of these morsels of memory serve to commemorate the past in a form that challenges conventional models of the memorial that entomb or freeze the past.

From scrapbook diary to ragged memorial

In its general appearance Mémoires resembles a scrapbook diary, in which references to pre-Situationist moments are intertwined with the material leftovers or symbolic debris of everyday life. Yet, the original sources of its material content seem secondary to their new context. The investment seems to be in the then 'present' moment of this collaged recollection and the effects of the jarring juxtapositions of the imported elements. The title page of Mémoires acknowledged its ready-made facture as 'composed entirely of prefabricated elements', indicating that the form and function of memory is as much about fabrication and fantasy as it is about capturing the past as it actually was. The pages of Mémoires are a composite of contemporary fragments détourned from a variety of high and low cultural sources, such as newspapers, travel literature, building plans, cartoons, adverts (Figure 1.4), old etchings, novels and maps, including a cut-up 'Plan de Paris' (Figure 1.5). Across its pages these discarded and kitsch residues intermingle with the more personally invested photos of friends and allies, some of whom would become members of the SI. The reader is presented with a montage of ideal or romanticized identities: barflies and misfits, snapped drinking and playing in their favourite bars and haunts (Figure 1.6). For example, at the top of the page is a small picture of Debord, and below, to the left and right, are pictures of other drunken regulars who frequented the café Chez Moineau. Yet, true to the Situationists' strategy of calculated plagiarism, even these personal mementos were ready-made, second-hand images appropriated by Debord from the Dutch photographer Ed Van der Elsken's...