The Situationist International as world cultural heritage?

“The Most Dangerous Game”

“The Most Dangerous Game” was the title of an exhibition in 2018 about the Situationist International and it’s “way to May 68” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. It was the latest in a long development in the historicisation of the group. Founded in 1957 it is seen by some as the “Last Avantgarde”, an art movement that abandoned art for revolutionary action and served as inspiration if not instigation of the May 1968 events in Paris and elsewhere.

This seems in stark contrast to the fact that at the time of their self-dissolution in 1972 the group consisted of only three active members. Others again see their heritage picked up and amplified in cultural, social and activist movements from Punk to Reclaim the Streets. Their concrete contribution to the Communist Left, the part of the revolutionary movement the SI was actually part of, often remains obscured. Mystifications abound, and the question must be asked: Is there still danger in this game, or has the SI just turned into fodder for recuperation by the “spectacle”?

What follows is the text of a talk I did at one of the talk events Datacide and Next:Now organised at Vétomat in Berlin in 2018/2019. It took place December 17, 2018 alongside a spoken word performance by Joke Lanz which has been posted both on our YouTube channel and published in print in datacide nineteen and online here.

I can’t remember why we didn’t put the talk online right away back then. Perhaps I wanted to go over the text again to further clarify the contradictions incurred when an establishment institution contributes to the historicisation of a an artistic avant-garde movement that mutated into a revolutionary group. Or I was too busy with my talk about the German Revolution 1919 which I held a few weeks after the one on the SI and which was included in the print edition of datacide eighteen and online here.

Either way, I stumbled across the text again in the process of editing datacide twenty and decided to publish it in the form of the original talk. Whether my stated intent to contribute to a de-recuperation/re-radicalisation was successful in this instance I leave the reader to decide…

Christoph Fringeli, December 2025

The “Way of the Situationist International to May 68” and its representation in an establishment culture context

On a recent [2018] exhibition and the wider topic of historicisation of a revolutionary group of the communist left.

The Situationist International (1957-1972)

The Situationist International was founded in 1957 as a group of artists and absorbed a number of smaller post war Avantgarde groups, such as the Letterist International, the group CoBrA, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Association.

These stood more or less in a tradition of the radical Avantgarde movements of the inter-war years, such as Dada and Surrealism. In particular the Surrealist group led by André Breton was a decisive influence, both in that the Situationists set out to emulate their uncompromising revolutionary attitude, but also in the sense that they sought to distance and emancipate themselves from it.

Where the surrealists went beyond the traditional artistic and political vocabulary with methods such as automatic writing, dream protocols, and violent provocations, the Situationists devised their own strategies that they added to the arsenals in their weaponry. They also sought to set themselves apart from the aging surrealist group which they saw as a assortment of old fogeys dabbling in occultism and mysticism.

Initially the SI was mostly composed of artists who still used brush and canvas as their field of activity. But around 1962 most of them were expelled in an effort to become a purely revolutionary group. Then, so the story goes, it worked towards revolution and managed to inspire if not trigger the famous events of May 68 in Paris and elsewhere. It did this with its journal Internationale Situationniste, books of theory, graffiti, detourned comic strips, flyers, scandals and finally participation in the occupations.

The SI had sections in several countries and convened conferences in cities around Europe. It developed the arsenal of subversion and intervention with techniques such as détournement, dérive, psychogeography, unitary urbanism and the construction of situations.

In 1972 the organisation dissolved itself at a time when due to endless expulsions it had shrunk to only three active members.

2018 exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin

“The Most Dangerous Game” was the title of a recent [2018] exhibition about the Situationist International and it’s “way to May 68” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the Cultures of the World) in Berlin. This establishment institution is situated in immediate vicinity of the Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery), an institution at the very centre of political power in the federal republic.

The Haus was built in 1957, the same year as the SI was founded. It was the US-American contribution to the international building exhibition Interbau in that year. It first served as a congress hall, which included calculated provocations by the West German state against the GDR and the USSR by convening sessions of the Bundestag, the West German parliament. This was provocative because the Eastern states did not recognise West Berlin as a part of the federal republic.

The congress hall became the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 1988/89 after extensive refurbishing and now hosts a number of lecture halls, exhibition spaces, venues, a book shop and a restaurant.

The exhibition took place in the framework of a series of exhibitions called 100 Jahre Gegenwart (100 Years of the Present), sponsored by the Commissioner of the Federal Government for Culture and Media based on a decision of the Bundestag (Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany).

It’s not my agenda to simply denounce such an exhibition as an act of recuperation. This would be banal since it goes with the territory and is unavoidable, even or especially if the curators are specialists in the field, and even if they do their best to take the revolutionary content of their object serious.

Much rather I would like to raise the question if or how we can instigate a process of de-recuperation or re-radicalisation. This can not be a simple attempt to “reclaim” the SI for the current pro-revolutionary movement, and certainly not to indulge in nostalgia.

The “Most Dangerous Game” combined the showing of situationist films, the collection of a situationist library and documents, a juxtaposition of images of the exploding consumer society of the late 60s with press clippings and police photographs of May 1968. Added in this section were documents showing the recuperation of the so called sexual revolution. This section documented the semi-clandestine production of erotic and pornographic material in the 50s up to the point when it became accessible on a mass market. This was also a business sideline and one afterlife of the SI shown in the chapter Detournement vs. Sexploitation.

Finally, a part of the exhibition consisted of paintings, which were presented as “anti-situationist art”, as this way of expression was more or less banned from the SI’s arsenal after 1962. Here the aim was to show a solo painting by each member of the SI who did paint on one wall, and collective works on the opposite. The latter included a piece to which the artist Yves Klein contributed, which the curators were particularly proud to have shown for the first time in public. This section was amended with documents dealing with the very issue – and the rejection – of exhibitions.

A voluminous catalog was published to go along with the exhibit, and in fact without it at least parts of the “The Most Dangerous Game” barely made sense. For example the paintings only had numbers referring to the catalogue rather than credits to the painters. Unfortunately the reverse is true as well, at least to some degree.

The 900 page catalogue only cost 2 euro at the exhibition and contains a staggering amount of detailed information about the 730 exhibited items. But the visual section is more like a collage of items from the exhibition than a traditional catalogue with corresponding images. Fair enough, but whether that is somehow anti-spectacular is to be doubted.

All the different aspects were by themselves highly interesting, but at least some seemed quite unconnected to the promise to show the way of the SI to May 68. It also left out significant portions of the milieu that the SI moved in after it expelled the artists.

Bibliothèque Situationniste de Silkeborg

The starting point of the exhibition and by far the largest section with 453 items was the collection of documents and publications under the title of Bibliothèque Situationniste de Silkeborg. This was based on some notes Guy Debord, one of the driving forces in the SI, wrote down in 1959-61. At the time he suggested to Asger Jorn to include a situationist library in the art museum of Silkeborg. The plan was made to present a library with printed documents leading up to and presenting the SI. Back then this project was not realised although Debord had written a list of items and already sent material to Silkeborg.

The Berlin exhibition makes the claim to be the first complete realisation of this library, although what was presented in Berlin went way past 1961. As we shall see this extension poses some problems.

Debord’s selection is interesting, but in retrospect one could say predictable. It sets the SI as firmly embedded in a tradition that includes revolutionary surrealism, lettrism, and the other groups that came together to found the SI in 1957. These were clearly inheriting ideas from their dadaist and surrealist precursors. The tradition the SI seeks to embed itself at the time is that of the radical artistic Avantgarde. However by 1962 this focus had shifted. “The Most Dangerous Game” however retains the perspective of the Debord of 1961.

Socialisme ou Barbarie and the tradition of the Communist Left

One can assume that the brief double membership of Debord in the SI that he was a co-founder of and in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie played a decisive role. Socialisme ou Barbarie came from a totally different very defined tradition.

The group had been founded in 1948 by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort as a breakaway of the (Trotskyist) Parti Communiste Internationaliste. They started repudiating Leninism and picked up the ideas of the council communists and the communist left of the 1920s and 30s.

To put these developments into historical perspective I will try to sum up the diverse strains of the communist left and argue that in the early 60s Debord and his comrades made a turn away from the artistic Avantgarde tradition to what was at the time the purest revolutionary current.

The history of the communist left can be traced back to the very beginning of the communist movement. At the first two congresses of the Communist International in 1919 and 1920 the Left had a strong presence. While Lenin and Trotsky were rapidly establishing a dictatorship of the party, the Communist Left insisted on the role of the workers councils as decision making bodies and executive organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These would be spontaneously formed by the revolutionary workers and should not be controlled by any party. Some came to reject the idea of a party altogether.

Lenin wrote a nasty pamphlet against what he considered the “infantile disorder” of the movement and the Left was pushed out of the International. It came to a split of the wider communist movement in many countries over questions such as whether it made sense to participate in parliamentary elections and the role of the revolutionary party.

Challenging the hegemony of Bolshevism

Of course the Bolsheviks had immense prestige in the wider movement due to their successful revolution in Russia and hence had a strong influence on the international movement. Nevertheless the (anti-Bolshevik) Left at least initially enjoyed massive support in the revolutionary milieus around the world. But with the defeat of the revolution in Germany, Hungary and other countries where it had looked like it could have been successful in the early 20s, the Communist Left entered a phase of decline, but still continued to develop organisationally as well as theoretically.

This history was little known after the second world war for a number of reasons. Due to the fact that they rejected participation in parliamentary elections this conventional measurement of numerical strength of political groups did not apply. In the Eastern Bloc in the meantime the industry of historical falsification tried to write the whole of the Communist Left out of history. Infighting and splits didn’t help the situation.

Some of the tiny groups that survived the war, fascism and stalinism, hoped that at the end of World War Two a new revolutionary situation would arise. So did the small Bordigist groups, with the International Communist Party publishing Le Prolétaire since 1963 in French and Jacques Camatte publishing Invariance since 1968, as well as the – at the time – more council communist Revolution Internationale starting in the same year, and many others.

In the meantime the Trotskyist Left Opposition, not to be confused with the Communist Left, had formed a Fourth International in 1938, but soon was in disarray about the question how to interpret the developments in Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries. Socialisme ou Barbarie was initially one of these groups.

They were closely following what was happening in the bureaucratic societies of the Eastern bloc and the working class revolts in East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Experiments were being conducted with writing about the proletarian experience in the factory and everyday life. At the same time the group theorised a new type of class society of order-givers and order-takers and the counter measures of the working class: the workers councils, the organs of self-organisation and generalised decision making. They rediscovered the radical critique of the communist left and even made contact with some of its key figures like Anton Pannekoek.

SouB was also part of an international network that included the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the US and the Solidarity group in the UK. As Castoriadis was trying to prove that Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was wrong and that Marxism had to be overcome to retain the revolutionary project, the group split and eventually dissolved itself. However its successor organisations and other left communist groups like Information Correspondence Ouvrières stayed active and others sprung up.

Situating the SI in the revolutionary milieu to the left of Leninism

The exhibition however only showed a tiny number of publications from that current. Amongst them Pour l’Organisation Conseilliste. Bulletin Révolutionaire de liaison, edited by Jean-Louis Rançon. These are portrayed as small circles who picked up situationist ideas, and while this may be the case in some instances, the flow of ideas also worked in the opposite direction. One shouldn’t forget that it was the situationists who picked up many of these ideas from SouB, who picked them up from Anton Pannekoek and other German-Dutch council communists. Parallel to this milieu, but undoubtedly connected to it, were some Anarchist groups who also had some interactions with the SI.

In any case there was a scene in Paris (and elsewhere) at the time that upheld positions to the left of Leninism, meaning both of the mainstream Communist Party and the Trotskyist and Maoist groups, which were all rejected for their fetishisation of the party form and their idea of representing and/or leading the working class. Instead this “Ultra-Left” promoted workers self organisation in the councils.

This is the milieu that the post-1962 SI has to be seen in. There are still characteristics that set them apart from the other groups, which are the creative tools to perform their subversive tasks. Their theory also tried to develop a more up to date version of the capitalist system at the time by analysing it as a “Society of the Spectacle” (the title of Debord’s main theoretical work).

The key point I’m trying to make here is: had the SI just been the group it was from 1962 onwards, no establishment institution would dedicate a major show or retrospective to it.

Maintaining the artistic “merits”…

Those expelled from the SI also continued their activities. What is interesting about the exhibition is that the extrapolation of the Silkeborg library project beyond 1962 continues the path of the original, more art oriented, SI as it manifested itself in the Second Situationist International, the Gruppe Spur and other groups and individuals. Many of these continued to investigate the territory first mapped out by the original SI and its precursor groups. Asger Jorn, who was the commercially most successful of the artists at the time, temporarily even bankrolled both situationist groups, that of Debord and comrades as well as the Second international founded by his brother Jørgen Nash.

I find it nonsensical to take sides in these conflicts from decades ago, many of which were fought with bitter acrimony, but there are acutely problematic aspects of the historicisation process exemplified by “The Most Dangerous Game”. This is by no means the first one. Already in 1989 – most of the former situationists were still alive then – there was a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the London ICA and the Boston ICA under the title “On the Passage of a few People Through a Brief Period of Time”. Later there were exhibitions in Vienna (1998), as well as one that was shown in Utrecht and Basel (2006/07).

The location and financing could with some effort still be sweet-talked as a creation of a subversive situation. But the fact that the exhibits remain under glass and the catalogue doesn’t show them erects an invisible barrier, the archival material is at once presented and obscured. The catalog served as a map for the exhibition, but as we know, the map is not the territory. And with the exhibition closed, it’s a map without territory.

The director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bernd Schwerer, wrote in the introduction of the catalogue: “The past is not past. Archives are the laboratories of new conceptions of time for past, future and present.”

The problem is that the Haus only showed us the collection, but it certainly didn’t let us use it as a laboratory. Shiny objects of desire under glass. Surely to make the content of the exhibits available for new generations, which would necessarily be new generations of revolutionaries could be achieved in a different way, be it by scanning everything and putting it online or by providing reprints.

…or towards an Aufhebung of the SI?

As much as I enjoyed seeing the items, even under glass or on a gallery wall, I think the practical critique of the SI, its actual Aufhebung is a process that is still ongoing. But it’s also a process that has been ongoing ever since the SI was dissolved, if not before.

There have been left communist critiques of the situationist theory by Gilles Dauvé (1979), Henri Simon in 2006 and more recently Chemins non tracés in Histoire Critique de L’Ultragauche, undertitled Trajectory of the Bullet in the Foot.

The SI has also been historicised as an episode in the development of Utopian Currents since the second world war, followed by Auto-Destructive Art, the Provos, Kommune 1, Yippies, Motherfuckers and White Panthers, as well as Mail Art, Punk, Neoism and Class War. This list could be expanded from the 80s into the present, which could include aspects of the underground rave culture, the collective cultural production, anonymity and occupation of space in some aspects of sound system culture, “Reclaim the Streets” as a militant form of party-protest, or harsh electronic dance music as a critique of the culture industry.

All these added their own tools to the arsenals of subversion and were exposed to mechanisms of recuperation in turn.

With art, fashion and academia pillaging the arsenals of revolt and a superficial reading and repeating of situationist slogans making for trendy credibility, we have to remind ourselves of the depth of the antagonistic movement. As one of those slogans went: Those who make half a revolution only dig their own grave. So let’s make a whole one.

Christoph Fringeli

Notes

• The Most Dangerous Game on the HKW website
• Catalogue published by Merve: Wolfgang Scheppe, Roberto Ohrt: The Most Dangerous Game, ISBN 978-3-96273-017-8

• Other articles and reviews by Christoph Fringeli on datacide-magazine.com

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