Book Description

The Situationist International Anthology is the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English. In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people’s passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of détournement (“rerouting, hijacking”). Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its “Communist” pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world. This volume presents a rich variety of articles, leaflets, graffiti, and internal documents, ranging from experiments in “psychogeography” to lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other crises and upheavals of the sixties. For this new edition all the translations have been fine-tuned and the bibliography has been updated to include comments on dozens of newer books by and about the situationists.