The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern

Art of Revolution

English Section of the Situationist International

2000, unpublished text (1967)

Contents
The Crisis of Modern Art: Dada and Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Transformation of Poverty and the Transformation of the Revolutionary Project . 5
The Realisation of Art and the Permanent Revolution of Everyday Life . . . . . . . . . 6
The Work of Art: A Spectacular Commodity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Phoney Avant-Garde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
The Intelligentsia Split in Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Revolt, the Spectacle and the Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
The Real Avant-Garde: The Game-Revolt of Delinquency, Petty Crime and the New
Lumpen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Revolution as a Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

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The Crisis of Modern Art: Dada and Surrealism
’NEVER BEFORE,’ wrote Artaud, ’has there been so much talk about civilisation and culture
as today, when it is life itself that is disappearing. And there is a strange parallel between the
general collapse of life, which underlies every specific symptom of demoralisation, and this ob-
session with a culture which is designed to domineer over life.’ Modern Art is at a dead end. To be
blind to this fact implies a complete ignorance of the most radical theses of the European avant-
garde during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-1925: that art must cease to be a specialised
and imaginary transformation of the world and become the real transformation of lived experi-
ence itself. Ignorance of this attempt to recreate the nature of creativity itself, and above all its
vicissitudes in Dada and Surrealism, has made the whole development of modern art incoherent,
chaotic and incomprehensible.
With the Industrial Revolution, there began a change in the whole definition of art — slowly,
often unconsciously, it changed from a celebration of society and its ideologies to a project of total
subversion. From being the focus and guarantee of myth, ”great” art became an explosion at the
centre of the mythic constellation. Out of mythic time and space it produced a radical historical
consciousness which released and reassembled the real contradictions of bourgeois ”civilisation.”
Even the antique became subversive — in 50 years, art escaped from the certainties of Augustan
values and created its own revolutionary myth of a primitive society. For David and Ledoux, the
imperative was to capture the forms of life and self-consciousness which had produced the culture
of the ancient world; to recreate rather than to imitate. The 19th century was only to give that
proposal a more demoniac and Dionysian gloss.
The project of art — for Blake, for Nietzsche — became the transvaluation of all values and the
destruction of all that prevents it. Art became negation: in Goya, in Beethoven, or in Gericault,
one can see the change from celebrant to subversive within the space of a lifetime. But a change
in the definition of art demanded a change in its forms and the 19th century was marked by an
accelerating and desperate attempt at improvising new forms of artistic attack. Courbet began
by touting his pictures round the countryside in a marquee and ended in the Commune by super-
intending the destruction of the Vendome column (the century’s most radical artistic art, which
its author immediately disowned).
After the Commune, artists suffered a collective loss of nerve. Mythic time was reborn out of
the womb of historical continuity, but it was the mythic time of an isolated and finally obliterated
individuality. In the novel, Tolstoy or Conrad struggled to retain a sense of nothingness; irony
teetered over into despair; time stopped and insanity took over.
For the Symbolists, the evasion of history became a principle; they gave up the struggle for
new revolutionary forms in favor of a purely mythic cult of the isolated artistic gesture. If it was
impossible to paint the proletariat, it was equally impossible to paint anything else. So art had
to be about nothing; life must exist for art’s sake; the ugly and intolerable truth, said Mallarme
with complete disdain, is the ”popular form of beauty.” The Symbolists lived on in a realm of an
infinitely elegant but stifling tautology. In Mallarme himself, the inescapable subject of poetry
is the death of being and the birth of abstract consciousness: a consciousness at once multiform,
perfect, magnificently anti-dialectical and radically impotent.
In the end, for all its fury (and Symbolists and Anarchists worked side-by-side in the 1890s)
revolutionary art was caught in contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of
bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the world

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but, while art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained
imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with the reality it criticized, it transferred
the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it functioned objectively as a
force consolidating all it wanted to destroy. Revolt against reality became the evasion of reality.
Marx’s original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies word-for-word to
the rebellion of bourgeois art: it too ”is at the same time the expression of real distress and the
protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppresses creature, the heart of a heartless world,
just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people” [Marx, Contribution
to the critique of Hegel’s ”Philosophy of Right”].
The separation and hostility between the ”world” of art and the ”world” of everyday life finally
exploded in Dada. ”Life and art are One,” proclaimed Tzara; ”the modern artist does not paint, he
creates directly.” But this upsurge of real, direct creativity had its own contradictions. All the real
creative possibilities of the time were dependent on the free use of its real productive forces, on
the free use of its technology, from which the Dadaists, like everyone else, were excluded. Only
the possibility of total revolution could have liberated Dada. Without it, Dada was condemned
to vandalism and, ultimately, to nihilism — unable to get past the stage of denouncing an alien-
ated culture and the self-sacrificial forms of expression which it imposed on its artists and their
audience alike. It painted pictures on the Mona Lisa, instead of raising the Louvre. Dada flared
up and burnt out as an art sabotaging art in the name of reality and reality in the name of art.
A tour de force of nihilistic gaiety. The variety, exuberance and audacity of the ludic creativity
it liberated, vital enough to transmute the most banal object or event into something vivid and
unforeseen, only discovered its real orientation in the revolutionary turmoil of Germany at the
end of the First World War. In Berlin, where its expression was most coherent, Dada offered a
brief glimpse of a new praxis beyond both art and politics: the revolution of everyday life.
Surrealism was initially an attempt to forge a positive movement out of the devastation left
in the wake of Dada. The original Surrealist group understood clearly enough, at least during
its heyday, that social repression is coherent and is repeated on every level of experience and
that the essential meaning of revolution could only be the liberation and immediate gratification
of everyone’s repressed will to live — the liberation of a subjectivity seething with revolt and
spontaneous creativity, with sovereign re-inventions of the world in terms of subjective desire,
whose existence Freud had revealed to them (but whose repression and sublimation Freud, as
a specialist accepting the permanence of bourgeois society as a whole, could only believe to be
irrevocable). They saw quite rightly that the most vital role a revolutionary avant-garde could
play was to create a coherent group experimenting with a new lifestyle, drawing on new techniques,
which were simultaneously self-expressive and socially disruptive, of extending the perimeters
of lived experience. Art was a series of free experiments in the construction of a new libertarian
order.
But their gradual lapse into traditional forms of expression — the self-same forms whose pre-
tensions to immortality the Dadaists had already sent up, mercilessly, once and for all — proved
to be their downfall: their acceptance of a fundamentally reformist position and their integra-
tion within the spectacle. They tried to introduce the subjective dimension of revolution into
the communist movement at the very moment when its Stalinist hierarchy had been perfected.
They tried to use conventional artistic forms at the very moment when the disintegration of the
spectacle, for which they themselves were partly responsible, had turned the most scandalous
gestures of spectacular revolt into eminently marketable commodities. As all the real revolution-

4
ary possibilities of the period were wiped out, suffocated by bureaucratic reformism or murdered
by the firing squad, the Surrealist attempt to supersede art and politics in a completely new type
of revolutionary self-expression steadily degenerated into a travesty of its original elements: the
mostly celestial art and the most abject communism.

The Transformation of Poverty and the Transformation of the

Revolutionary Project
FROM THEN till now . . . nothing. For nearly half a century, art has repeated itself, each repe-
tition feebler, more inane than the last. Only today, with the first signs of a more highly evolved
revolt within a more highly developed capitalism, can the radical project of modern art be taken
up again and taken up more coherently. It is not enough for art to seek its realisation in practice;
practice must also seek its art. The bourgeois artists, rebelling against the mediocrity of mere sur-
vival, which was all their class could guarantee, were always tragically at cross-purposes with
the traditional revolutionary movement. While the artists — from Keats to the Marx Brothers —
were trying to invent the richest possible experience of an absent life, the working class — at
least on the level of their official theory and organisation — were struggling for the very survival
the artists rejected. Only now, with the Welfare State, with the gradual accession of the whole
proletariat to hitherto ’bourgeois’ standards of comfort and leisure, can the two movements con-
verge and lose their traditional animosity. As, in mechanical succession, the problems of material
survival are solved and as life, in an equally mechanical succession, becomes more and more dis-
gusting, all revolt becomes essentially a revolt against the quality of experience. One knows very
few people dying of hunger. But everyone one knows is dying of boredom.
By now it has become painfully evident to everyone — apart from a gag radical left — that
it is not one or another isolated aspect of contemporary civilisation that is horrifying, but our
own lives as a whole, as they are lived on an everyday level. The utter debacle of the left today
lies in its failure to notice, let alone understand, the transformation of poverty which is the basic
characteristic of life in the highly industrialised countries. Poverty is still conceived in terms of
the 19th century proletariat — its brutal struggle to survive in the teeth of exposure, starvation
and disease — rather than in terms of the inability to live, the lethargy, the boredom, the iso-
lation, the anguish and the sense of complete meaninglessness which are eating like a cancer
through its 20th century counterpart. The left blithely accepts all the mystifications of spectac-
ular consumption. They cannot see that consumption is no more than the corollary of modern
production — functioning as both its economic stabilisation and its ideological justification — and
that the one sector is just as alienated as the other. They cannot see that all the pseudo variety of
leisure masks a single experience: the reduction of everyone to the role of passive and isolated
spectators, forced to surrender their own individual desires and to accept a purely fictitious and
mass-produced surrogate. Within this perspective, the left has become no more than the avant-
garde of the permanent reformism to which neo-capitalism is condemned. Revolution, on the
contrary, demands a total change, and today this can only mean to supersede the present system
of work and leisure en bloc.
The revolutionary project, as dreamed among the dark satanic mills of consumer society, can
only be the creation of a new lease of life as a whole and the subordination of the productive
forces to this end. Life must become the game desire plays with itself. But the rediscovery and

5
the realisation of human desires is impossible without a critique of the phantastic form in which
these desires have always found the illusory realisation which allowed their real repression to
continue. Today this means that ’art’ — phantasy erected into a systematic culture — has become
Public Enemy Number One. It also means that the traditional philistinism of the left is no longer
just an incidental embarrassment. It has become deadly. From now on, the possibility of a new
revolutionary critique of society depends on the possibility of a sex revolutionary critique of culture
and vice versa. There is no question of subordinating art to politics or politics to art. The question
is of superseding both of them insofar as they are separated forms.
No project, however phantastic, can any longer be dismissed as ’Utopian.’ The power of indus-
trial productivity has grown immeasurably faster than any of the 19th century revolutionaries
foresaw. The speed at which automation is being developed and applied heralds the possibility
of the complete abolition of forced labor — the absolute pre-condition of real human emancipa-
tion — and, at the same time, the creation of a new, purely ludic type of free activity, whose
achievement demands a critique of the alienation of ’free’ creativity in the work of art. Art must
be short-circuited. The whole accumulated power of the productive forces must be put directly
at the service of man’s imagination and will to live. At the service of the countless dreams, de-
sires and half-formed projects which are our common obsession and our essence, and which we
all mutely surrender in exchange for one or another worthless substitute. Our wildest fantasies
are the richest elements of our reality. They must be given real, not abstract powers. Dynamite,
feudal castles, jungles, liquor, helicopters, laboratories . . . everything and more must pass into
their service. ”The world has long haboured the dream of something. Today if it merely becomes
conscious of it, it can possess it really.” (Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843)

The Realisation of Art and the Permanent Revolution of Everyday Life

The goal of the Situationists is immediate participation in a varied and passionate life,
through moments which are both transient and consciously controlled. The value of
these moments can only lie in their real effect. The Situationists see cultural activity,
from the point of view of the totality, as a method of experimental construction
of everyday life, which can be developed indefinitely with the extension of leisure
and the disappearance of the division of labour (and, first and foremost, the artistic
division of labour). Art can stop being an interpretation of sensations and become
an immediate creation of more highly evolved sensations. The problem is how to
produce ourselves, and not the things which enslave us.

’Theses on Cultural Revolution,’ Internationale Situationniste No. 1, 1958

IT IS NOT enough to burn the museums. They must also be sacked. Past creativity must be
freed from the forms into which it has been ossified and brought back to life. Everything of value
in art has always cried aloud to be made real and to be lived. This ’subversion’ of traditional art
is, obviously, merely part of the whole art of subversion we must master (cf. Ten Days That Shook
the University). Creativity, since Dada, has not been a matter of producing anything more but of
learning to use what has already been produced.
Contemporary research into the factors ’conditioning’ human life poses implicitly the ques-
tion of man’s integral determination of his own nature. If the results of this research are brought

6
together and synthesized under the aegis of the cyberneticians, then man will be condemned
to a New Ice Age. A recent ’Commission on the Year 2000’ is already gleefully discussing the
possibilities of ’programmed dreams and human liberation for medical purposes.’ (Newsweek, 16/
10/67) If, on the contrary, these ’means of conditioning’ are seized by the revolutionary masses,
then creativity will have found its real tools: the possibilities of everyone freely shaping their
own experience will become literally demiurgic. From now on, Utopia is not only an eminently
practical project, it is a vitally necessary one.
The construction of situations is the creation of real time and space, and the widest integrated
field before it lies in the form of the city. The city expresses, concretely, the prevailing organi-
sation of everyday life. The nightmare of the contemporary megalopolis — space and time en-
gineered to isolate, exhaust and abstract us — has driven the lesson home to everybody, and
its very pitilessness has begun to engender a new utopian consciousness. ”If man is formed by
circumstances, then these circumstances must be formed by man.” (Marx, The Holy Family) If all
the factors conditioning us are co-ordinated and unified by the structure of the city, then the
question of mastering our own experience becomes one of mastering the conditioning inherent
in the city and revolutionising its use. This is the context within which man can begin, experimen-
tally, to create the circumstances that create him: to create his own immediate experience. These
”fields of lived experience” will supersede the antagonism between town and country which has
dominated human life up to now. They will be environments which transform individual and
group experience, and are themselves transformed as a result; they will be cities whose structure
affords, concretely, the means of access to every possible experience, and, simultaneously, every
possible experience of these means of access. Dynamically inter-related and evolving wholes.
Game-cities. In this context, Fourier’s dictum that ”the equilibrium of the passions depends upon
the constant confrontation of opposites” should be understood as an architectural principle. (The
subversion of past culture as a whole finds its focus in the cities. So many neglected themes —
the labyrinth, for example — remain to be explored.) What does Utopia mean today? To create
the real time and space within which all our desires can be realised and all of our reality desired.
To create the total work of art.
Unitary urbanism is a critique, not a doctrine, of cities. It is the living critique of cities by
their inhabitants: the permanent qualitative transformation, made by everyone, of social space
and time. Thus, rather than say that Utopia is the total work of art, it would be more accurate to
say that Utopia is the richest and most complex domain serving total creativity. This also means
that any specific propositions we can make today are of purely critical value. On an immedi-
ate practical level, experimentation with a new positive distribution of space and time cannot
be dissociated from the general problems of organisation and tactics confronting us. Clearly a
whole urban guerilla will have to be invented. We must learn to subvert existing cities, to grasp
all the possible and the least expected uses of time and space they contain. Conditioning must be
thrown in reverse. It can only be out of these experiments, out of the whole development of the
revolutionary movement, that a real revolutionary urbanism can grow. On a rudimentary level,
the blazing ghettoes of the USA already convey something of the primitive splendor, hazardous-
ness and poetry of the environments demanded by the new proletariat. Detroit in flames was a
purely Utopian affirmation. A city burnt to make a negro holiday . . . shadows of most terrible,
yet great and glorious things to come. . . .

7
The Work of Art: A Spectacular Commodity
Unfortunately, it is not only the avant-garde of revolutionary art and politics which has a
different conception of the role to be played by artistic creativity. ”The problem is to get the
artist onto the workshop floor among other research workers, rather than outside industry pro-
ducing sculptures,” remarks the Committee of the Art Placement Group, which is sponsored by,
amongst others, the Tate Gallery, the Institute of Directors, and the Institute of Contemporary
Arts (Evening Standard, 1/2/67). In fact, industrialisation of ’art’ is already a fait accompli. The
irreversible expansion of the modern economy has been forcing it to accord an increasingly im-
portant position for a long time now. Already the substance of the tertiary sector of the economy
— the one expanding the most rapidly — is almost exclusively ’cultural.’ Alienated society, by re-
vealing its perfect compatibility with the work of art and its growing dependence upon it, has
betrayed the alienation of art in the harshest and least flattering light possible. Art, like the rest
of the spectacle, is no more than the organisation of everyday life in a form where its true nature
can at most be dismissed and turned into the appearance of its opposite: where exclusion can be
made to seem participation, where one-way transmission can be made to seem communication,
where loss of reality can be made to seem realisation.
Most of the crap passed off as culture today is no more than dismembered fragments — repro-
duced mechanically without the slightest concern for their original significance — of the debris
left by the collapse of every world culture. This rubbish can be marketed simply as historico-
aesthetic bric-a-brac or, alternatively, various past styles and attitudes can be amalgamated, up-
dated and plastered indiscriminately over an increasingly wide range of products as haphazard
and auto-destructive fashions. But the importance of art in the spectacle today cannot be reduced
to the mere fact that it offers a relatively unexploited accumulation of commodities. Marshall
McLuhan remarks: ”Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by the ability to
recognise it for what it is. To prevent undue wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move
from the ivory tower to the control tower of society. Just as higher education is no longer a frill
or a luxury, but a stark need for production in the shaping and structure created by electric tech-
nology.” And Galbraith, even more clearly, speaks about the great need ”to subordinate economic
to aesthetic goals.” (Guardian, 22/2/67)
Art has a specific role to play in the spectacle. Production, once it is no longer answering any
real needs at all, can only justify itself in purely aesthetic terms. The work of art — the completely
gratuitous product with a purely formal coherence — provides the strongest ideology of pure
contemplation possible today. As such it is the model commodity. A life which has no sense
apart from contemplation of its own suspension in a void finds its expression in the gadget: a
permanently superannuated product whose only interest lies in its abstract technico-aesthetic
ingenuity and whose only use lies in the status it confers on those consuming its latest remake.
Production as a whole will become increasingly ’artistic’ insofar as it loses any other raison d’etre.
Rated slightly above the run-of-the-mill consumers of traditional culture is a sort of mass avant-
garde of consumers who wouldn’t miss a single episode of the latest ’revolt’ churned out by the
spectacle: the latest solemn 80 minute flick of 360 variegated bare arses, the latest manual of how
to freak out without tears, the latest napalm-twisted monsters air-expressed to the local Theatre
of Fact. One builds up resistance to the spectacle, and, like any other drug, its continued effec-
tiveness demands increasingly suicidal doses. Today, with everyone all but dead from boredom,
the spectacle is essentially a spectacle of revolt. Its function is quite simply to distract attention

8
from the only real revolt: revolt against the spectacle. And, apart from this one point, the more
extreme the scandal the better. Any revolt within the spectacular forms, however sincere subjec-
tively — from The Who to Marat/Sade — is absorbed and made to function in exactly the opposite
perspective to the one that was intended. A baffled ’protest vote’ becomes more and more overtly
nihilistic. Censorship. Hash. Vietnam. The same old careerism in the same old rackets. Today the
standard way of maintaining conformity is by means of illusory revolts against it. The final form
taken by the Provos — Saturday night riots protected by the police, put in quarantine, function-
ing as Europe’s premier avant-garde tourist attraction — illustrates very clearly how resilient the
spectacle can be.
Beyond this, there are a number of recent cultural movements which are billed as a coherent
development from the bases of modern art — as a contemporary avant-garde — and which are
in fact no more than the falsification of the high points of modern art and their integration. Two
forms seem to be particularly representative: reformism and nihilism.

The Phoney Avant-Garde

ATTEMPTS TO reform the artistic spectacle, to make it more coherent and, inseparably, to
resurrect the illusion of participation in it, are ten a penny. For a time, separated forms — sound,
light, jazz, dance, painting, film, poetry, politics, theatre sculpture, architecture, etc — have been
brought together, in various juxtapositions, in the mixed and multi-media shows. In kinetic art
we are promised the apotheosis of the process. A current Russian group declares: ”We propose to
exploit all possibilities, all aesthetic and technical means, all physical and chemical phenomena,
even all kinds of art as our methods of artistic expression.” (Form, No. 4) The specialist always
dreams of ’broadening his field.’ Likewise the obsessive attempts to make the ’audience’ ’partic-
ipate.’ No one cares to point out that these two concepts are blatantly contradictory, that every
artistic form, like every other prevailing social form, is explicitly designed to prohibit even the
intervention, let alone the control, of the vast majority of people. Endless examples could be cited.
Last winter saw ”Vietnamese Free Elections” billed as an experiment in creating ”total involve-
ment” in the Vietnamese situation through a fusion of political and dramatic form, etc. ”Actors
are not wanted,” it was stated. ”This is a new exercise in audience participation” that came with
the ticket. ”If you want to speak, hold up your hand. When you are recognised by the chairman,
you must give your real name and the fictional occupation entered on your background sheet. . . .
During the course of the meeting, you are operating as a fictional character and not as a spokesman
for your personally held beliefs” (emphasis in original). The Happening is the general matrix of
participation art — and the Happening is where it becomes obvious that nothing ever happens.
Everyone has lost themselves as totally as they have lost everyone else. Without the drugs, it
could be explosive.
Cop art, cop artists. The whole lot moves towards a fusion of forms in a total environmental
spectacle complete with various forms of prefabricated and controlled participation. It is just an
integral part of the all-encompassing reforming of modern capitalism. Behind it looms the whole
weight of a society trying to obscure the increasingly transparent exclusion and repression it
imposes on everyone, to restore some semblance of colour, variety and meaning to leisure and
work, to ”organise participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.” As such,

9
these artists should be treated the same way as police-state psychiatrists, cyberneticians, and
contemporary architects. Small wonder their avant-garde cultural ’events’ are so heavily policed.
Anything art can do, life can do better. A journalist describes the sense of complete reality of
driving a static racing car in an ambiance consisting solely of a colour film, which responded to
every touch of the steering and acceleration as though he were really speeding round a race track.
Even the sensations of a 120 mph smash could be simulated (Daily Express, 18/1/66) Expo ’67, the
Holy City of science fiction, boasts a three-million-buck ’Gyrotron’ designed ”to lift its passen-
gers into a facsimile of outer space and then dunk them in a fiery volcano. . . . We orbit up an
invisible track. Glowing around us are spinning planets, comets, galaxies . . . man-made satellites,
Telstars, moon rockets . . . vooming in our cars are electronic undulations, deep beeps and astral
snores.” Finally, the ’participants’ are plunged down a ”red incinerator, surrounded by simulated
lava, steam and demonic shrieks” (Life, 15/5/67) Reinforced by the sort of conditioning made
possible by the discoveries of the kinetic artists, such techniques could ensure an unprecedented
measure of control. Sutavision, an abstract form of colour TV, already mass-marketed, offers to
provide ”wonderful relaxation possibilities” giving ”a wide series of phantasies” and function-
ing as ”part of a normal home or business office.” ”Radiant colours moving in an almost hypnotic
rhythm across the screen . . . wherein one can see any number of intriguing spectacles.” Box three,
a further refinement of TV, can manipulate basic mood changes through the rhythms and the
frequency of the light patterns employed (Observer Magazine, 23/10/66) Still more sinister is the
combination of total kinetic environments and a stiff dose of acid. ”We try to vaporise the mind,”
says a psychedelic artist, ”by bombing the senses.” The Us Company [a commune of painters, po-
ets, film-makers, teachers and weavers that lived and worked together in an abandoned church in
Garneville, New York] artists call their congenial wrap-around a ”be-in” because the spectator is
to exist in the show, rather than look at it. The audience becomes disorientated from their normal
time sense and preoccupations. . . . The spectator feels he is being transported to mystical heights.”
And this ”is invading not only museums and colleges, but cultural festivals, discotheques, movie
houses and fashion shows” (Life, 3/10/66) To date, Leary is the only person to have attempted to
pull all this together. Having reduced everyone to a state of hyper-impressionable plasticity, he
incorporated a backwoods myth of the modern-scientific-truth-underlying-all-world-religions, a
cretin’s catechism broadcast persuasively at the same time as it was expressed by the integral ma-
nipulation of sense data. Leary’s personal vulgarity should not blind anyone to the possibilities
implicit in this. A crass manipulation of subjective experience accepted ecstatically as a mystical
revelation.
”All this art is finished. . . . Squares on the wall. Shapes on the floor. Emptiness. Empty rooms”
(Warhol to a reporter from Vogue). Nihilism is the second most widespread form of contemporary
’avant-garde’ culture; the morass stretches from playwrights like Ionesco and film-makers like
Antonioni, through novelists like Robbe-Grillet and Burroughs, to the paintings and sculpture of
the pop, destructive and auto-destructive artists. All re-enact a Dadaist revulsion from contempo-
rary life — but their revolt, such as it is, is purely passive., theatrical and aesthetic, shorn of any of
the passionate fury, horror or desperation which would lead to a really destructive praxis. Neo-
Dada, whatever its formal similarities to Dada, is re-animated by a spirit diametrically opposed
to that of the original Dadaist groups. ”The only truly disgusting things,” said Picabia, ”are Art
and Anti-Art. Wherever Art rears its head, life disappears.” Neo-Dada, far from being a terrified
outcry at the almost complete disappearance of life, is, on the contrary, an attempt to confer a
purely aesthetic value on its absence and on the schizophrenic incoherence of its surrogates. It

10
invites us to contemplate the wreckage, ruin and confusion surrounding us, and not to take up
arms in the gaiety of the world’s subversion, pillage and total overthrow. Their culture of the
absurd reveals only the absurdity of their culture.
Purely contemplative nihilism is no more the special province of artists than is modern re-
formism. In fact, neo-Dada lags way behind the misadventures of the commodity-economy itself
— every aspect of life today could pass as its own parody. The Naked Lunch pales before any of the
mass media. Its real significance is quite different. For pop art is not only, as Black Mask remarks,
the apotheosis of capitalist reality: it is the last ditch attempt to shore up the decomposition of
the spectacle. Decay has reached the point where it must be made attractive in its own right.
If nothing has any value, then nothing must become valuable. The bluff may be desperate but
no one dares to call it, here or anywhere else. And so Marvel comics become as venerable as
Pope. The function of neo-Dada is to provide an aesthetic and ideological alibi for the coming period,
to which modern commerce is condemned, of increasingly pointless and self-destructive products:
the consumption/anti-consumption of the life/anti-life. Galbraith’s subordination of economic to
aesthetic goals is perfectly summed up in the Mystic Box. ”Throw switch ’on.’ Box rumbles and
quivers. Lid slowly rises, a hand emerges and pushes switch off. Hand disappears as lid slams shut.
Does absolutely nothing but switch off!” The nihilism of modern art is merely an introduction to
the art of modern nihilism.

The Intelligentsia Split in Two

THESE TWO movements — the attempt to reform the spectacle and the attempt to arrest its
crisis as purely contemplative nihilism — are distinct but in no way contradictory manoeuvres.
In both cases, the function of the artist is merely to give aesthetic consecration to what has already
taken place. His job is purely ideological. The role played today by the work of art has dissoci-
ated everything in art which awoke real creativity and revolt from everything which imposed
passivity and conformism. Its revolutionary and its alienated elements have sprung apart and
become the living denial of one another. Art as commodity has become the arch-enemy of all
real creativity.
The resolution of the ambiguity of culture is also the resolution of the ambiguity of the intel-
ligentsia. The present cultural set-up is potentially split into two bitterly opposed factions. The
majority of the intelligentsia has, quite crudely, sold out. At the same time, its truly dissident
and imaginative elements have refused all collaboration, all productivity, within the forms tol-
erated by social power and are tending more and more to become indistinguishable from the
rest of the new lumpenproletariat in their open contempt and derision for the ’values’ of con-
sumer society. While the way of life of the servile intelligentsia is the living denial of anything
remotely resembling either creativity or intelligence, the rebel intelligentsia is becoming caught
up in the reality of disaffection and revolt, refusing to work and inevitably faced, point blank,
with a radical reappraisal of the relationship between creativity and everyday life. Frequenting
the lumpen, they will learn to use other weapons than their imagination. One of our first moves
must be to envenom the latent hostility between these two factions. It shouldn’t be too difficult.
The demoralisation of the servile intelligentsia is already proverbial. The contradictions between
fake glamour and the reality of their mental celebrity are too flagrant to pass unperceived, even
by those who are, indisputably, the most stupid people in contemporary society.

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Revolt, the Spectacle and the Game
THE REAL creativity of the times is at the antipodes of anything officially acknowledged to
be ’art.’ Art has become an integral part of contemporary society and a ’new’ art can only exist
as a supersession of contemporary society as a whole. It can only exist as the creation of new
forms of activity. As such, [’new’ art] has formed an integral part of every eruption of real revolt
over the last decade. All have expressed the same furious and baffled will to live, to live every
possible experience to the full — which, in the context of a society which suppresses life in all
its forms, can only mean to construct experience and to construct it against the given order. To
create immediate experience as purely hedonistic and experimental enjoyment of itself can be
expressed by only one social form — the game — and it is the desire to play that all real revolt
has asserted against the uniform passivity of this society of survival and the spectacle. The game
is the spontaneous way everyday life enriches and develops itself; the game is the conscious
form of the supersession of spectacular art and politics. It is participation, communication and
self-realisation resurrected in their adequate form. It is the means and the end of total revolution.
The reduction of all lived experience to the production and consumption of commodities is
the hidden system by which all revolt is engendered, and the tide rising in all the highly indus-
trialised countries can only throw itself more and more violently against the commodity-form.
Moreover, this confirmation can only become increasingly embittered as the integration effected
by power is revealed as more and more clearly to be the re-conversion of revolt into a spectacu-
lar commodity (q.v., the transparence of the conforming non-conformity dished up for modern
youth). Life is revealed as a war between the commodity and the ludic. As a pitiless game. And
there are only two ways to subordinate the commodity to the desire to play: either by destroying
it, or by subverting it.

The Real Avant-Garde: The Game-Revolt of Delinquency, Petty Crime

and the New Lumpen
THE JUVENILE delinquents — not the pop artists — are the true inheritors of Dada. Instinc-
tively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social life, they have denounced its products,
ridiculed, degraded and destroyed them. A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple
are the living denial of the ’values’ in the name of which life is eliminated. Delinquent violence
is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the
delinquents’ inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces
them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic. They can neither understand nor find a co-
herent form for the direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the intoxication
and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary values they embody. The Stockholm riots,
the Hell’s Angels, the riots of Mods and Rockers — all are the assertion of the desire to play in a
situation where it is totally impossible. All reveal quite clearly the relationship between pure de-
structivity and the desire to play: the destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction.
Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything that remains irremedi-
ably separated. It is the only game the nihilist can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodom
proletarianised along with the rest.

12
 The vast escalation of petty crime — spontaneous, everyday crime on a mass level — marks a
qualitatively new stage in contemporary class conflict: the turning point between pure destruction
of the commodity and the stage of its subversion. Shoplifting, for example, beyond being a grass-
roots refusal of hierarchically organised distribution, is also a spontaneous rebuttal of the use of
both product and productive force. The sociologists and floorwalkers concerned — neither group
being noted for a particularly ludic attitude towards life — have failed to spot either that people
enjoy the act of stealing, or, through an even darker piece of dialectical foul-play, that people
are beginning to steal because they enjoy it. Theft is, in fact, a summary overthrow of the whole
structure of the spectacle; it is the subordination of the inanimate object, from whose free use
we are withheld, to the living sensations it can awake when played with imaginatively within a
specific situation. And the modesty of something as small as shoplifting is deceptive. A teenage
girl interviewed recently remarked: ”I often get this fancy that the world stands still for an hour
and I go into a shop and get rigged” (Evening Standard, 16/8/66). Alive, in embryo, is our whole
concept of subversion: the bestowal of a whole new use value on this useless world and against
this useless world, subordinated to the sovereign pleasure of subjective creativity.
The formation of the new lumpen prefigures several features of an all-encompassing subver-
sion. On the one hand, the lumpen is the sphere of complete social breakdown of apathy, neg-
ativity and nihilism — but, at the same time, in so far as it defines itself by its refusal to work
and its attempt to use its clandestine leisure in the invention of new types of free activity, [the
lumpen] is fumbling, however clumsily, with the quick of the revolutionary supersession now
possible. As such it could quickly become social dynamite. It only needs to realise the possibil-
ity of everyday life being transformed, objectively, for its last illusions to lose their power, e.g.,
the futile attempt to revitalize immediate experience subjectively, by heightening its perception
with drugs, etc. The Provo movement in 1966 was the first groping attempt of this new, and still
partly heterogeneous, social force to organise itself into a mass movement aimed at the qualita-
tive transformation of everyday life. At its highest moment, [the Provo movement]’s upsurge of
disruptive self-expression superseded both traditional art and traditional politics. It collapsed not
through any essential irrelevance of the social forces it represented, but through their complete
lack of any real political consciousness: through their blindness to their own hierarchical organi-
sation and through their failure to grasp the full extent of the crisis of contemporary society and
the staggering libertarian possibilities it conceals.
Initially, the new lumpen will probably be our most important theatre of operations. We must
enter it as a power against it and precipitate its crisis. Ultimately, this can only mean to start a real
movement between the lumpen and the rest of the proletariat: their conjunction will define the
revolution. In terms of the lumpen itself, the first thing to do is to dissociate the rank-and-file from
the incredible crock of shit raised up, like a monstrance, by their leaders and ideologists. The false
intelligentsia — from the CIA-subsidised torpor of the latest New Left, to the sanctimonious little
bits of International Times — are a New Establishment whose tenure depends on the success with
which they can confront the most way-out point of social and intellectual revolt. The parody
they stage can only arouse a growing radicalism and fury on the part of those they claim to
represent. The Los Angeles Free Press, distilling their experience of revolt in an article aptly entitled
To Survive in the Streets, could in all seriousness conclude: ”Summing up: Dress warm, keep clean
and healthy, eat a balanced diet, live indoors and avoid crime. Living in the streets can be fun if
you conscientiously study the rules of the game.” (Reprinted in The East Village Other, 15/6/67).

13
Hippie racketeers should certainly steer clear of public places, come the day. The poesie faite par
tous has been known to be somewhat trigger-happy in the past.

Revolution as a Game
THE NEW revolutionary movement can be no more than the organisation of popular revolt
into its most coherent, its richest form. And there is no organisation to date which would not
completely betray it. All previous political critiques of the repressive hierarchy engendered by
the past revolutionary argument — that of Solidarity, for example — have completely missed
the point: they were not focused on precisely what it was that this hierarchy repressed and
perverted in the form of passive militancy. In the context of the radical ’ethics’ still bogged down
in singularly distasteful forms of sub-Christian masochism, the ludic aspects of the revolution
cannot be over-emphasised. Revolution is essentially a game and one plays it for the pleasure
involved. Its dynamic is a subjective fury to live, not altruism. It is totally opposed to any form
of self-sacrificial subordination of oneself to a cause — to Progress, to the Proletariat, to Other
People. Any such attitude is diametrically opposed to the revolutionary appreciation of reality: it
is no more than an ideological extension of religion for the use by the ’revolutionary’ leaderships
in justifying their own power and in repressing every sign of popular creativity.
The game is the destruction of the sacred — whether it be the sanctity of Jesus or the santity
of the electric mixer and the Wonderloaf. Tragedy, said Lukacs, is a game played in the sight of
godlessness. The true form of godlessness will be the final achievement of revolution — the end
of the illusory and all its forms, the beginning of real life and its direct self-consciousness.
The revolutionary movement must be a game as much as the society it prefigures. Ends and
means cannot be disassociated. We are concerned first and foremost with the construction of our
own lives. Today, this can only mean the total destruction of power. Thus the crucial revolutionary
problem is the creation of a praxis in which self-expression and social disruption are one and
the same thing: of creating a style of self-realisation which can only spell the destruction of
everything which blocks total realisation. From another point of view, this is the problem of
creating the coherent social form of what is initially and remains essentially an individual and
subjective revolt. Only Marx’s original project, the creation of the total man, of an individual
reappropriating the entire experience of the species, can supersede the individual vs. Society
dualism by which hierarchical power holds itself together while it holds us apart. If it fails in
this, then the new revolutionary movement will merely build an even more labyrinthine illusory
community; or, alternatively, it will shatter into an isolated and ultimately self-destructive search
for kicks. If it succeeds, then it will permeate society as a game that everyone can play. There is
nothing left today that can withstand a coherent opposition once it has established itself as such.
Life and revolution will be invented together or not at all.
All the creativity of the time will grow from this movement and it is in this perspective that
our own experiments will be made and should be understood. The end of this process will not
merely be the long overdue end of this mad, disintegrating civilisation. It will be the end of pre-
history itself. Man stands on the verge of the greatest breakthrough ever made in the human
appropriation of nature. Man is the world of man and a new civilisation can only be based on
man’s free and experimental creation of his own world and his own creation. This creation will
no longer accept any internal division or separation. Life will be the creation of life itself. The

14
total man will be confronted only with his ever-increasing appropriation of nature, of his own
nature, finally elaborated, in all of its beauty and terror, as our ’worthy opponent’ in a ludic
conflict where everything is possible.

15
 The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

English Section of the Situationist International

The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution
2000, unpublished text (1967)

Retrieved on September 12, 2019 from https://www.cddc.vt.edu

Original text was written in 1967. It remained unpublished for many years due to the English
Section’s expulsion from the SI in 1967.

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