This is the main English translation of the original French S.I. texts. It includes most of the major papers, journals, pamphlets, and manifestoes. The bulk of the book is drawn from "Internationale Situationniste," the SI journal published from 1958 to 1969. Also included are pre-situ material from 1953-57.
This anthology does not include anything from Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" or Vaneigems "Treatise on Living." It does however include indexes to both these two key SI documents.
(G. Branwyn)
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Situationist International Anthology
Edited by Ken Knabb
Bureau of Public Secrets
PO Box 1044
Berkeley, CA 94701
1981, 406 pgs., PB, $15
Here is the TEXT POPUP for Situationist International Anthology:
Banalities, due to what they conceal, work for the dominant organization of life. One such banality is the statement that language is not dialectical, thereby implying that all use of dialectics should be rejected. But in fact nothing is more clearly subject to dialectics than language, since it is a living reality. Thus, every critique of the old world has been made in the language of that world, yet directed against it and therefore automatically in a "different" language. Every revolutionary theory has had to invent its own terms, to destroy the dominant sense of other terms and establish new meanings in the "world of meanings" corresponding to the new embryonic reality needing to be liberated from the dominant trash heap. The same reasons that prevent our adversaries (the masters of the Dictionary) from definitively fixing language, today enable us to assert other positions which negate existing meanings. But we already know that these same reasons also prevent us from claiming any definitively legislated certitudes: a definition is always open, never definitive - ours have a historical value, they are applicable in a given period, linked to a specific historical practice.
The bad days will end. As the world of the spectacle extends its reign it approaches the climax of its offensive, provoking new resistances everywhere. These resistances are very little known precisely because the goal of the reigning spectacle is the universal hypnotic reflection of submission. But they do exist and are spreading.
