opuscoli 16

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Jørgen Nash

Who are the

Situationists?

Gli opuscoli di Omar Wisyam

Volume n. 16



Who are the Situationists?

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Jørgen Nash


The first manifestation made by thesecond Situationist International afterit broke away from the IS was aleaflet signed by Jaqueline de Jong,Ansger Elde and myself. Shortly afterthe group Seven Rebels was formedat Bauhaus Situationiste Drakabygget,founded in 1960 in southern Sweden.It is a situationistic centre for




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experiments in film, painting,décoliage, urbanism, poetry,archaeology and music.

The Franco-Belgian situationists base

themselves on the same principles asPascal, Descartes, Croce and Gide.Action precedes emotion. You onlybegin to feel religious after you havemuttered your prayers. According toScandinavian situationist philosophyaction is the result of emotion andarises out of emotion. Emotion is aprimary, non-reflective intelligence;passionate thought/thinking passion.We are not saying that the French

method is wrong or that it cannot beused successfully. We merely say thatour two outlooks are incompatible,




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but they can be made to supplementone another.

The second Situationist Internationalis a freely organized movement. It is a

voluntary association of autonomouswork groups. At the moment thereexist four such groups on theHallandsåsen in the southern part of Sweden, and two more in Denmark and Finland. It also works togetherwith the German avant-garde groupSPUR in Munich, whose books havepartly been published at Drakabygget... A periodical against popes,politicians and atomic bombs called

Drakabygett has been edited since1962, with the journalist and painterKatarina Lindell as editor. The




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following declaration is a quotationfrom this magazine:

1) I promise that I shall never,personally, under any circumstances

set foot in an atomic shelter. It isbetter to die standing with all thecultural heritage of humanity, theperpetual modification of which mustbe our task. The labour movementwas once considered to be the salt of the earth. Today it is more like a milk cow, whose udders are being pumpedin an effort to get more and morematerial benefits - at the expense of the mind.

2) I refuse to have anythingwhatsoever to do with the aristocracyof the caves, and never to drink in the




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company of an owner or a builder of an atomic shelter; for thissubterranean aristocracy, even if itman-ages to survive the disaster, willbe of the quality of sewer rats, and

could in no case be considered acontinuation of the human race.

3) At this point in our presentsituation it is not so much thethermonuclear war, but rather thethreat of this war, which shows theabsolute bankruptcy of all thepoliticians in the world. The capitalistor bureaucratic leaders of both eastand west already make use of their

bombs every day, in order to securepower for them-selves. Only if onerealizes that they have placedthemselves beyond the law can one




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establish a new legality. I thereforepledge myself not to expect thenecessary upheavals of society by anyof the existing formations of specialized politics.

This is part of the Mutant-manifesto,signed by all the members of themovement. But as we are nomissionaries, and our movement isabsolutely anti-authoritarian, we don'trun around forcing people to sign ourmanifesto. The Bauhaus production of books, booklets, lithographs andperiodicals is thoroughly non-commercial. Our job is to produce

then our public has to act to get holdof our publications! ...




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In the manifesto of the SecondSituationist International we wrote the'Modern industrial society has so farbeen organized along classical linesas developed in Greece and in Rome.

During the industrial period followingthe French revolution there have beencycles in which all the different formsof such a method of government havebeen explored. This has been avaluable experience. It has shown thatthe enlightened autocracy of Plato andthe more or less aristocratic militarydictatorship which replaced legalgovernment, as well as the variousforms of democracy (including the

latest edition, the so-called 'people's'democracy) - that none of these havebeen capable of creating a form of government to meet and satisfy




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human needs, still less to allow life toflourish and prosper. The newphenomenon which has dominatedindustrial society from the beginning,despite some pioneer romanticism, is

a growing socialization of all themeans of life - which is itself theineluctable consequence of machinetechniques. By socialism weunderstand the inclusive principlewhich makes society the centre,meaning and purpose of all humanactivity. It is all the same whether onetakes this evolution to mean progressor whether one interprets it as agrowing threat to human freedom.

Both attitudes amount to the samething. Socialization will spread in oneway or another. Man can onlydominate his future environment if we




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face this fact. We must use thisknowledge to evolve the means of liberation. In order to win it isessential for us to extricate ourselvesfrom the principle of fatalistic

necessity and to regain a newpotential of choice and self-determination.

The social structure which fulfils thenew conditions for freedom we havetermed the situcratic order. The pointof departure is the dechristianizationof Kierkegaard's philosophy of situations. This must be combinedwith British economic doctrine,

German dialectic and French socialaction programs. It involves aprofound revision of Marx's doctrineand a complete revolution whose




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have individual freedom of action.Greco-Roman thinking is rooted inpolitical and social theory. It isopposed to our own way of thinkingbecause we believe that man as a

human being, an individual stands atthe centre of all worthwhile activity.Sartre's scolasticism has been calledhumanistic, but in fact his humanbeing is a socio-centric creature.

There are some people who will failto grasp the significance of theSituationist struggle. The head-oncollision in which we are involvedwill strike them as inexplicable. But

we are convinced that one day thisphase will be seen as an event of primary importance for Europe: themoment before a decisive




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