The Situationist International - Sam Cooper

The Situationist International in Britain
This book tells, for the first time, the story of the Situationist International’s
influence and afterlives in Britain, where its radical ideas have been rapturously
welcomed and fiercely resisted. The Situationist International presented
itself as the culmination of the twentieth century avant-garde tradition—
as the true successor of Dada and Surrealism. Its grand ambition was not
unfounded. Though it dissolved in 1972, generations of artists and writers,
theorists and provocateurs, punks and psychogeographers have continued
its effort to confront and contest the ‘society of the spectacle’. This book
constructs a long cultural history, beginning in the interwar period with the
arrival of Surrealism to Britain, moving through the countercultures of the
1950s and 1960s, and finally surveying the directions in which Situationist
theory and practice are being taken today. It combines agile historicism with
close readings of a vast range of archival and newly excavated materials,
including newspaper reports, underground pamphlets, psychogeographical
films, and experimental novels. It brings to light an overlooked but fero-
ciously productive period of British avant-garde practice, and demonstrates
how this subterranean activity helps us to understand postwar culture,
late modernism, and the complex internationalization of the avant-garde.
As popular and academic interest in the Situationists grows, this book offers
an important contribution to the international history of the avant-garde
and Surrealism. It will prove a valuable resource for researchers and students
of English and Comparative Literature, Modernism and the Avant-Gardes,
Twentieth Century and Contemporary History, Cultural Studies, Art History,
and Political Aesthetics.
Sam Cooper was awarded his DPhil by the University of Sussex in 2012. He
lives and works in London.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
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39 The Situationist International in Britain

Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Gardes
Sam Cooper
The Situationist International
in Britain
Modernism, Surrealism, and
the Avant-Gardes
Sam Cooper
First published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooper, Sam, 1983– author.

Title: The Situationist International in Britain: modernism, surrealism,
and the avant-gardes / by Sam Cooper.
Description: New York; London: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge
studies in twentieth-century literature; 39 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013500
Subjects: LCSH: Internationale situationniste. English Section—History. |
Arts, Modern—20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Classification: LCC NX456.I58 C66 2016 | DDC 700/.411—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013500
ISBN: 978-1-138-68045-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-56385-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction1
1 Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism16
2 Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde47
3 The English Section of the Situationist International78
4 Long Live King Mob109
5 British Situationism Today143
Index 181
This page intentionally left blank
List of Figures
1.1 Diagram of the dialectic of modern poetry, from Rob

Jackaman, The Course of English Surrealist Poetry
Since the 1930s (Lampeter: The Mellen Press 1989), 2.
Courtesy of The Mellen Press. 23
1.2 Illustration of attendees of the International Surrealist
Exhibition (1936) by James Boswell. Originally in Left
Review 2:10 (July 1936): 509. Courtesy of Sal Shuel. 28
1.3 Photograph of Sheila Legge as the Surrealist Phantom
(1936) by Claude Cahun. Originally published, uncredited,
on the cover of International Surrealist Bulletin 4
(September 1936), published by A. Zwemmer. Courtesy
of the Jersey Heritage Collections. 33
2.1 Photograph of ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’ graffiti, Left Bank,
Paris. Originally published in Internationale
Situationniste 8 (1963): 42. 57
2.2 ‘Resolution of the fourth conference of the Situationist
International concerning the imprisonment of Alexander
Trocchi’, Internationale Situationniste 5 (1960): 14. 68
3.1 Heatwave logo, from Heatwave 1 (1966). 81
4.1 Cover of King Mob Echo 1 (1968). 113
4.2 King Mob poster (c.1968). 117
4.3 Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker poster. Reproduced
by King Mob as the cover to the pamphlet ‘Art Schools
Are Dead’ (1968). 119
4.4 Photograph of King Mob graffiti by Roger Perry.
Courtesy of Kate Bindloss. 124
4.5 Photograph of King Mob graffiti. Originally published
in Roger Perry, The Writing on the Wall (London: Elm
Tree Books 1976), 50. Courtesy of Kate Bindloss. 134
5.1 Cover of Vague 16–17 (1985). Courtesy of Tom Vague. 147
viii List of Figures
5.2 ‘Dirty Old Blighty …’ Image from Patrick Keiller (dir.),
London DVD (London: bfi Video 2005). 164
5.3 Still of lichen in Robinson in Ruins. Image from Patrick
Keiller (dir.), Robinson in Ruins DVD
(London: bfi Video 2011). 169
5.4 Savage Messiah poster (c.2009). Courtesy
of Laura Oldfield Ford. 172
Acknowledgements
This book began as an effort to connect certain cultural and political

formations to which I have been drawn in my personal life with deeper his-
torical currents. The project became a PhD thesis, supervised by my friend
John David Rhodes. Without his enthusiasm and patient guidance, the project
would not have made it as far as this book. That said, this book is the product
of many conversations, discussions, and critiques, and should really have
many more names than my own attached to it. These names might include
Malcolm Hopkins and the Housmans crowd; Tom Vague; Laura Oldfield
Ford; Charles Radcliffe; David and Stuart Wise; McKenzie Wark; the par-
ticipants of the ‘Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now’ conference in 2012, as
well as subsequent MSA, BAMS, and World Picture conferences; librarians
and archivists at the Mass Observation Archive, the British Library, and the
Tate; the editors and reviewers at Cambridge Quarterly and The Sixties; and
Liz Levine and the anonymous reviewers for Routledge. Most of all, I am
indebted to Julia and to my parents for their warmth and encouragement.
Earlier versions of sections that appear in Chapters 3 and 4 were
previously published as ‘The Style of Negation and the Negation of Style:
The Anglicization of the Situationist International’ in The Sixties 6:1 (2013)
and ‘The Peculiar Romanticism of the English Situationists’ in Cambridge
Quarterly 42:1 (2013).
Introduction
‘Seen from over here’, postulated a British ex-member of the Situationist

International in 1974,
the SI has a lot to answer for: it has spawned a whole stew of

“revolutionary organisations”, usually composed of half a dozen
moralists of the transparent relationship; these have inevitably f oundered
after a few months—though not without bequeathing weighty self-
criticisms to a breathless posterity. Idiots. Worse: cures. Yet their traits
are undoubtedly linked organically, genetically, to the original SI in its
negative effects: the SI is responsible for its negative offspring.1
This anonymous verdict was made two years after the Situationist
International (SI) had been disbanded, and seven years after its English
Section had been expelled. The ignominy and frustration of that expulsion
are evident in the writer’s vituperative tone and oedipal account of the SI’s
influence in Britain. With more distance from the events, this book tells a
different story. It does not take sides, nor attempt to weigh up the relative
merits of the Continental original and the British offspring; rather, this book
recognises that Anglo-Franco antagonisms spurred both to sharpen their
theory and practice for the better. This book contends that the Situationist
project remains of critical importance to our interrogation of the relation-
ship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary society. More specifi-
cally, this book contends that the SI’s British interlocutors help us to uncover
what is alive and what is dead, what might be taken forward as well as what
must be left behind, from the Situationist project.
The SI was founded in 1957 through the unification of a handful of
European avant-garde groups of varying obscurity. Britain was represented
by the London Psychogeographical Association, which consisted of just one
member. Over the next fifteen years, the SI would develop one of the most
capacious and incisive programmes of cultural critique of the second half
of the twentieth century. The scope of its interests and activities is reflected
in the vast range of thinkers and practitioners who have since drawn on
its work: from artists to architects; philosophers to protestors; marketing
executives to insurrectionary anarchists.
2 Introduction
Less is known, however, about the Anglicised strains of Situationist
a ctivity, and what is known is known cloudily. This book charts a history of
British engagements with the SI and its Surrealist precursors, and in so doing
it offers a context for a wide range of contemporary cultural activity, and
a new perspective on the international avant-garde tradition. It places the
more familiar manifestations of British Situationist practice—punk rock, for
example, and psychogeography—alongside more subterranean practices, all
of which it historicises into what is increasingly recognised to be a crucial
dynamic of Anglophone modernism: the long-standing tension between the
institutions of British culture and Continental avant-garde excesses.
Britain versus the Avant-Garde

McKenzie Wark has called for attention to ‘the supposedly minor figures’
at the SI’s margins. Their ‘borrowing and correcting’ from the SI, Wark sug-
gests, might have more resonance today than do the group’s ‘great men’ and
its now canonical texts.2 Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen have
recently illuminated the Scandinavian versions of the Situationist project,
which dared to challenge the SI’s ambivalence about the role of artistic pro-
duction in the critique of capitalism.3
In this book are the British corollaries, whose different cultural conditions
throw forth other implications and possibilities for Situationist practice. The
internationalism expounded by many avant-garde movements has proven
to be a complex thing for practitioners and critics to negotiate. S urrealism,
for example, has been practiced and critiqued as a ‘message from nowhere’
and the work of ‘the avant-garde at large’, but what was called Surrealism in
Paris in 1924 was very different to what was called Surrealism in London in
1936. As such, avant-garde internationalism must be considered alongside
its dialectical counterpart—that is, the movements’ origins in and responses
to specific places, cultures, and histories.4 The reception of Situationist
theory by British practitioners has been more than an exercise in cultural
translation; it has also been a mode of production of an identifiable British
Situationist practice. The SI’s conceptual product is pliant, and the process of
its Anglicisation has revealed new applications as well as unforeseen aporia.
In fact, the perceived incompatibility of ‘Britishness’ with ‘avant-gardism’
serves paradoxically to privilege this particular version of the Situationist
project in the re-examination of the whole. The notion that the two are
incompatible has been discursively reproduced by a great many critics.
One word that recurs in this book is ‘peculiar’. Different aspects of British
life are always being described as peculiar: its reserve, its provincialism, its
much-caricatured empiricism. In the New Left Review in the 1960s, Perry
Anderson and Tom Nairn attributed such peculiarities to the precocity of
capitalism on these islands, to the absense of a completed bourgeois revo-
lution of the type experienced in France, and to the subsequent preserva-
tion of the aristocracy and its values in unhappy harmony with those of
Introduction 3
industrial capitalism. E.P. Thompson took issue with the Franco-centrism of
their analysis, with its implication that Britain would be less peculiar if only
it was more like France. Thompson agreed ‘as to the mediocrity, sloth, and
parochialism of much contemporary British thought’, but he did not agree
that British empiricism would be overcome by dismissing the idiosyncratic
character and vernacular idiom of British working-class resistance in favour
of ‘some tarted-up Sartrean neologisms.’5
More recently, Martin Puchner has offered another account of how British
peculiarity has precluded a productive relationship with the transformative
aspirations of social movements from the Continent. From Wyndham Lewis
onwards, Puchner argues, British artists have ‘reacted to and against the
various avant-gardes’ that constitute what Peter Bürger has described as
the historical avant-garde tradition, based around the Futurist—Dadaist—
Surrealist axis.6 While this ‘to and against’ relation is prescient, the history
told in this book challenges Puchner’s broader context of the ‘rear-guardism
of British modernism’. British modernism’s rear-guard position, he writes,
is a defensive formation that places itself within the field of advance-

ment but is sceptical of its most extreme practitioners; it seeks to cor-
rect and contain the avant-garde’s excesses without falling behind and
losing touch with it entirely.7
Meanwhile, in Romantic Moderns (2010), Alexandra Harris documents

what she describes as ‘a modern English renaissance’ that took place in the
late 1930s, when British artists, writers, and architects turned back towards
‘the local’ and ‘the particular’, which had supposedly been so derogated
by the abstractions and the internationalism of high modernism and the
historical avant-garde. Harris quotes the painter Paul Nash, who asked in
1932 ‘Whether it is possible to “go modern” and still “be British” […] The
battle lines have been drawn up: internationalism versus an indigenous cul-
ture; renovation versus conservatism; the industrial versus the pastoral; the
functional versus the futile.’8 Harris chooses to focus on figures like John
Piper, Graham Sutherland, and John Betjeman. As the Second World War
approached, Harris argues, these ‘Artists who had previously felt compelled
to disguise themselves as avant-garde Frenchmen were now to be found on
English beaches sheltering their watercolours from the drizzle.’9
The British Situationists documented in this book certainly did not con-
sider the SI too extreme, as in Puchner’s account; for them, the SI was often
not extreme enough. Likewise, those British Situationists followed in the
footsteps of British Surrealists of the 1930s, who themselves were not simply
waiting to drop the avant-garde façade and return to their rain-soaked
watercolours, as in Harris’s account. The various efforts to develop a British
Situationist practice provide an opportunity to reassess the relation between
Britishness and avant-gardism—to move away from Nash’s dichotomies, or
at least towards an understanding of their dialectic relation. To revisit these
4 Introduction
moments of British negotiations with an avant-garde tradition characterised
as quintessential European, if not French, is to reconsider the discursive
reproduction of ‘Britishness’ and the international character of the latter.
The point is not to defend Britishness in a parochial, anti-cosmopolitan,
or otherwise nationalist manner. Rather, the point is to demonstrate what
avant-garde internationalism has gained from translations and exchanges
across different geocultural contexts.10
Late and Belated Modernisms

We must think historically. We cannot fully understand the Situationist
project if we look only at its manifestations in and around Paris, nor if we
divorce it from the historical avant-garde tradition of the earlier twentieth
century. For those reasons, this book constructs a long history. It begins
with the arrival of Surrealism to Britain in the 1930s, twenty years before
the SI was founded, but it looks to make much deeper historical connec-
tions. Resistance to the enclosure of common land for private interests in
the eighteenth century, for example, was as much of an influence on British
Situationists in the 1960s as were contemporary events across the Channel.
Nonetheless, the Situationist project remained distinctly modernist in its
concerns and methods, even though its modernism was not the modern-
ism of its prewar antecedents. The ‘enabling conditions’ of modernism—
for Perry Anderson, these include the existence of a bourgeois industrial
order alongside the socioeconomic institutions that it failed to entirely sur-
pass, the incomplete arrival of mechanisation, and the possibility, real or
imagined, of revolution—had changed into something different by the time
the Situationists appeared.11 They would describe the new conditions as
the ‘spectacle’, and they recognised that this spectacle required a new set
of responses from a revolutionary avant-garde movement. Revolutionary
organisations, wrote the SI’s Guy Debord, ‘can no longer combat alienation
by means of alienated forms of struggle.’12
As the conditions of early twentieth century modernity developed into
the conditions of spectacle, the historical avant-garde and its tactics became
increasingly remote. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, the Situationists knew more
than the Surrealists did: the Surrealists’ fate was that which the Situationists
knew.13 The Situationists studied and critiqued the shortcomings of
Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. With a programme that corrected its pre-
cursors’ errors, the SI presented itself as the culmination of the historical
avant-garde tradition, that is, as the fullest realisation of a radical modern-
ism whose end goal was, following Arthur Rimbaud, to change life.
Many critics have come to agree that the SI stood at the cusp of an epis-
temological shift. Some have described that shift as one from modernism to
postmodernism, but this book joins with others who argue that modernism
never really went away, it just entered a different cycle: ‘late modernism’,
understood as both period and aesthetic category.14 The Situationist project,
Introduction 5
and the ways that it continues to be adopted and adapted by practitioners
with congruent ambitions but wildly different tactics, demonstrates how
vital, radical, and open modernism remains.
In contrast to the commentator who began this introduction, the art his-
torian T.J. Clark has continued to defend the SI even though he too was
expelled as part of its English Section in 1967. He and fellow expellee
Donald Nicholson-Smith have written that, back in the 1960s, Left organi-
sations in Britain attempted to ‘discredit’ the philosophy of the Situationists
by labelling it as a mere infantile disorder.15 Such organisations, not least
the New Left, refused ‘to entertain the idea that the ground and form of
the “political” was shifting, maybe terminally, in ways that put the Left’s
most basic assumptions in doubt.’16 What the SI offered, unpalatable to the
New Left, was a holistic perspective ‘intended to keep the habit of total-
ization alive’—a habit inherited from radical modernism and its outlier
avant-garde movements. But the SI also made clear ‘what a labor of redis-
covery and revoicing (indeed, of restating the obvious) that project would
now involve’.17
Late modernism is predicated on precisely that effort to continue the mod-
ernist project even, or particularly, when it appears to have been defeated.
Late, in this case, has the association of both ‘belated’ (which is why avant-
garde activity in perennially late Britain illustrates late modernism so well)
and ‘late style’, as in the mature style that comes after much practice. For
earlier cycles of modernism, with their emphasis on novelty and rupture,
the problems of predecessors were less pressing. As André Breton wrote,
‘When it comes to revolt, none of us have any need of ancestors.’18 But
what happens when Breton is your ancestor? How can you maintain the
‘anti-tradition’ of the avant-garde? Joshua Clover has recently written about
the ‘genealogical avant-garde’ in contemporary Anglophone poetry, which
makes its claims ‘largely by reference to previous avant-gardes’. The gene-
alogical avant-garde, he continues, is defined by a contradiction: ‘it has no
choice but to affirm the very cultural continuity which it must also claim
to oppose.’19
One example of the shift from a modernist paradigm to a late modernist
one comes by way of what this book calls ‘the dissolution of the avant-
garde’, that is, the continuation of avant-garde practice in the absence of
self-identifying avant-garde groups or ‘isms’. One of the realisations of the
British practitioners who observed the SI was that they could not mimic
the militaristic group organisation that it had inherited from the historical
avant-garde tradition. The form was dated, alienated. Its familiarity and
comprehensibility contradicted Situationist theory that elsewhere celebrated
clandestinity. British Situationists sought new forms of social presence, and
explored what type of activity might correspond with a more clandestine,
invisible, or spectral avant-garde. In such instances, this book questions
whether ‘rear-guard’ and ‘belated’ are historiographically useful accounts of
British modernism. Perhaps the essentially patrilinear model of avant-garde
6 Introduction
succession is itself a problem. Certainly, processes of Anglicisation that
divert the Situationist project into other historical currents have amplified
rather than contained the resonances of avant-garde praxis.
The Problem of Récupération

As it moves through its historical narrative, this book introduces key con-
cepts, texts, and moments from the SI’s existence. Those concepts include
spectacle and situation, and dérive and détournement, though particular
attention is given to the concept of récupération (hereafter recuperation).
This concept has come to dominate and debilitate discourse about the
avant-garde tradition as a whole. The Situationists used the term to discuss
how critical practices become co-opted by the institutions and regimes that
those practices once opposed. It is a key mechanism of the spectacle, which
uses recuperation where other regimes use censorship, coercion, or vio-
lence against their opponents. It is also a central concept of late modernism,
because it provides one account of what happened to earlier cycles of
modernism. But the recuperation of the avant-garde has become a trope
within critical discourse, taken as an historiographical fact.
The SI was tactically hyperbolic about the extent of recuperation. As a
result, the post-SI discourse of recuperation has tended to lack nuance. It has
become a truism to declare the SI as well as the whole avant-garde tradi-
tion to be recuperated. This truism appeared to be vindicated by the desig
nation of Guy Debord as a French ‘National Treasure’ when his archive
was acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2011. The Dadaist
Hans Richter had already argued that the avant-gardes of the second half of
the twentieth century had replaced the ‘uncompromising revolt’ of the histo
rical avant-garde with ‘unconditional adjustment.’20 Drawing a clear distinc-
tion between the historical avant-gardes and hollowed-out, recuperated ‘neo’
avant-gardes, Peter Bürger’s landmark Theory of the Avant-Garde (1972) also
constructed an historiography based on what Benjamin Buchloh later called a
‘fiction of the origin as a moment of irretrievable plenitude and truth.’21
Taking recuperation as an inevitable and unavoidable mechanism of
spectacular society, recent schools of critical theory have retreated to an
untenable position that at times dismisses the very possibility of critical
art today—that is, the possibility of aesthetic experiences that are antago
nistic to or profoundly irreconcilable with the ‘lifeless bright sameness’
of the market and bourgeois ideology.22 Such experiences are dismissed
either as always-already recuperated, or as replacements or even obstruc-
tions to effective and authentic political action. This position is untenable
because it allows only a ‘consolatory role for the aesthetic’, and ignores the
irreducibility, specificity, and variety of aesthetic experience.23 This position
has taken the SI’s tactical hyperbole literally; a different response, under-
taken by this book, is to put pressure on the SI’s discourse of recuperation,
while also exploring other possible responses to what is nonetheless a very
real phenomenon.
Introduction 7
This book thus seeks to develop a more sophisticated theory of recuperation,
which might be able to destabilise its assumed inevitability in the same
manner as the SI sought to destabilise the reified status of the spectacle.
Because the SI had observed Surrealism’s fate, it was deeply conscious of its
own recuperation in the future. In the very first article of the first issue of
its journal, it lamented the transformation of Surrealist automatic writing
into ‘brainstorming’, as just one example of a once-revolutionary practice
becoming yet more fodder for advertising.24 Even in its inaugural texts,
the SI anticipated the time when it would become as recuperated as the
movements that preceded it. Frances Stracey has observed that ‘this self-
consciousness of the condition of failure was fundamental to the SI’s sense
of their past’; we might add that it was also a particular late modernist
anxiety.25 The SI’s 1961 conference in Gothenburg, which we’ll revisit fre-
quently in the coming chapters, was an important moment because in that
conference’s debates a paradox of Situationist aesthetic theory became clear:
the SI did not trust aesthetic representation in an age of spectacle, but it had
only aesthetic representation to articulate that distrust. However, the SI’s
anxiety about recuperation was not necessarily pessimistic or defeatist, but
tactical, a type of hyperconsciousness used as a guard against reification.
Not only did British Situationists need to negotiate the SI’s complex
anxieties about recuperation, but they also needed to establish their own
relationship to the concept. Some of their responses included invisibility to
avoid the spectacle, vulgarity to repel it, and intense formal reflexivity to
sabotage it. These will be explored in due course.
But beyond its effort to document and to catalogue, this book seeks to
challenge the hegemonic account of recuperation. After all, in the SI’s ana
lysis, the spectacle, the mediation of lived experience by representations, is
not infallible. Capital’s colonisation of social life is not irreversible. Stracey
puts a lot of stock in a wonderful phrase used by the SI on this same point:
‘the reversible coherence of the world.’26 The SI’s immanent critique of the
spectacle involved appropriating already-existing materials and rearranging
them to reveal the contingency of their present arrangement and thus the
possibility of interrupting the reproduction of spectacular ideology and,
even more, the possibility of a different organisation of social life. The SI
gave the name détournement to this tactic, which ‘reradicalises previous
critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus
transformed into lies.’27 However, all of the SI’s most vital tactics work on
the same principle: the constructed situation, from which the group took
its name, is a transitory moment in which social relations beyond the spec-
tacle’s reach might be experienced. As was often the case, the idea wasn’t
entirely original. Many avant-gardes had used similar tactics, described by
Viktor Shklosky as ostranenie, or defamiliarisation. That Surrealism had its
own versions of détournement, revived and revised by the SI, is evidence in
itself that recuperation is never final or complete.
In particular, this book intervenes into what have become reified and
dead-end debates about recuperation to propose that it might not be
8 Introduction
teleological, but rather ontological. Recuperation might not occur in time
and once and for all, but instead it might be a condition discursively repro-
duced by the avant-gardes and their commentators. The afterlives of any
given aesthetic object cannot be foretold, nor can its recuperation be mea-
sured in any objective way.28 As Paul Mann, whose Theory-Death of the
Avant-Garde (1991) is also wary of the hegemonic discourse of recupera-
tion, has observed: ‘The avant-garde’s historical agony is grounded in the
brutal paradox of an opposition that sustains what it opposes precisely
by opposing it.’29 The common ground, the source of the paradox, is for
Mann that both bourgeois society and the avant-garde are both discursive
economies. So, as the avant-garde continues to generate discourse about the
overcoming of bourgeois society, it also—paradoxically—contributes to the
maintenance of the latter’s own discursive economy. Mann does note, how-
ever, that Russian avant-gardes have not yet been recuperated into ‘official
culture’. Recuperation, therefore, appears to be somehow specific to Western,
late capitalism, and therefore contingent.30
To demystify recuperation would allow us to rethink avant-garde his-
toriography without recuperation as its propulsive mechanism, and to
reconsider the assumed inevitability of recuperation. It would also allow
us to reconsider what might be the concerns of a radical aesthetic practice
today—that is, in today’s conditions, but also in relation to a reconceptu-
alised history of the avant-garde that recognises its later twentieth century
manifestations not as degraded repetitions but as late modernist revisions.
The form of this book contributes to that reassessment. A narrative method
is not adequate to account for a model of avant-garde influence that is not
linear but is diffuse, recurrent, and radically revisionist. The book’s final
chapter abandons a narrative method, and foregoes a decisive conclusion.
The story is not yet over.
Towards a Heretical Method

To complement its intervention into avant-garde historiography, and its sug-
gestion that maybe, just maybe, the SI was not entirely correct about recu-
peration, the book undertakes a heretical reading of the Situationist project.
It explores new archives that suggest patterns of influence beyond the o edipal
rebellion that so troubles the British ex-Situationist above; more than that,
the book submits those archives to what another of the book’s subjects calls,
in a different context, a ‘relentless though appreciative critique’.31
The SI professed disdain for aesthetic or political specialisation, which
it took to be a sign of one’s failure to grasp the totality of relations within
the spectacle. Nonetheless, its work has usefully been submitted to a range
of specialised discourses and disciplines: artistic, architectural, urbanis-
tic, philosophical, etc.32 One of the ways in which this book’s approach
is heretical, other than not taking the SI or its followers at their word, is
that it places emphasis on the discursive, rhetorical, and irreducibly literary
Introduction 9
character of the Situationist project. Specifically, it was a late modernist
literary project, focussed on the expository work of form rather than the
affective or argumentative work of content.
To be ‘literary’, for the SI, was an insult. At the end of the 1950s, the
Situationists directed that insult at the British novelists and playwrights
known as the Angry Young Men, who were ‘tepidly literary’. In fact, the
Angry Young Men were
particularly reactionary in attributing a privileged, redemptive value

to the practice of literature, thereby defending a mystification that was
denounced in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater
counterrevolutionary significance than that of the British Crown.33
So many of this book’s themes addressed in one quotation: the separation

of Britain from Europe; the accusation of a supposedly countercultural ele-
ment actually being recuperative; the suspicion of specialised aesthetic prac-
tice; the problem of modernism’s belated arrival to monarchical Britain. But
the SI’s acknowledgement of the rupture that happened ‘around 1920’—
‘in Europe’ but they presume not in Britain—is key.
The practices of the SI and of British Situationists are intrinsically lite
rary, not merely because their critiques of capitalism are informed by a
wealth of literary sources, but because they acknowledge and play on their
own textuality. They mobilise modes of textual representation that resist,
or infer a different ontology to the spectacular phase of capitalism and
its appropriation of other forms of representation. This is another lesson
learned, or revised, from modernism: the Situationists use intense formal
reflexivity—Clark’s preferred phrase, from Adorno: ‘Teach the petrified
forms how to dance by singing them their own song’—to exacerbate not an
aesthetic dilemma but a social one: how to overcome the misrepresentations
of the spectacle?34
Another Situationist dictum that this book approaches with a healthy
dose of heresy is the claim that ‘There is no such thing as Situationism.’35
There was to be no such thing because the emergence of the term would sig-
nal the ossification and recuperation of the group’s work. But the SI was so
proprietorial about its practice that, in effect, a Situationism authorised by
the Paris group did emerge—and because the English Section didn’t adhere
to that precise Situationism, it was expelled. It might now be more use-
ful to speak of Situationisms, as suggested by Rasmussen and Jakobsen, to
account for the multiple negotiations and adaptations of the project across
different contexts. Though the SI used ‘International’ in its title as an ironic
call-back to the days of worker and communist internationals, we might
take that word seriously. And at the same time, the influence of other criti-
cal approaches on Situationist theory may serve to correct some of the SI’s
shortcomings: the SI and many of its successors, for example, had alarm-
ingly little to say on gender and race.
10 Introduction
These heresies will surely invite the accusation, tryingly predictable within
Situationist discourse, of being recuperative. Indeed, within the logic of that
discourse, it is very difficult not to be recuperative. In the first instance, as
mentioned above, I want to challenge that logic, that dogma. Better to be a
heretic than a disciple. But more importantly, the function of this history of
British engagements with the SI is not to conclusively fill out an overlooked
area of enquiry and consign it to the past, but to provide a long historical
context for what is currently known and, I hope, to prompt further explo-
ration into what is as yet unknown. This is just one history of British Situa-
tionist practice; there could easily be others.
In his book on Ralph Rumney, the sole member of the London Psycho-
geographical Association at the SI’s founding, Alan Woods explains why he
had no desire to be comprehensive. It would
—whether or not one automatically denounces all academic interest

as recuperation, the kiss of death—push the life and work backwards
into history […] This, perhaps, is the saddest aspect of the academic/
curatorial climate to which we are so accustomed: that it writes his-
tory so instantly, is so ready to limit artists to “important” work which
“defined” a particular “period”.36
There are no ‘important’ works in this book, nor many famous names.
Rather, the book’s subject is the evolution of a discourse over the past fifty
years and the manner in which that discourse has been conducted. The dis-
course is traced through pamphlets, broadsides, zines, posters, graffiti, as
well as the occasional novel, poem, and film. The ephemeral, obscure, and
outlier phenomena that constitute a British Situationist tradition demons
trate how modernist techniques continue to inform contemporary critical
practice and where radical modernism might now be located—that is, at
the margins. These phenomena have yet to be incorporated into what Clark
calls ‘organized knowledge’.37 It is not the intention of this book to organise
the phenomena, but to help to dissolve the boundary that contains modern-
ism as an historical period and thus renders its experiments safe, over. This
book is thus a belated response to a project outlined by Raymond Williams:
If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism,

then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition
taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century,
a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable
because quite inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a
modern future in which community may be imagined again.38
The first chapter, ‘Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism’, offers a

prehistory and prolepsis to the eventual arrival of the Situationist project
to Britain. The chapter focuses, first, on the period from 1929 to 1937
Introduction 11
that saw the formation and dissolution of the Surrealist Group in England
and, second, on the early years of the Mass-Observation project, founded
in 1937. It uses newspaper articles, pamphlets, and modernist ‘little maga-
zines’ to illuminate the arguments for and against the British involvement
in the avant-garde tradition by then firmly established on the Continent.
Mass-Observation’s Surrealistic methodology for social research, the chapter
argues, was based on an effort to reconcile those old antagonists, French
abstraction and British empiricism, and reveals an early effort to continue
avant-garde practices in the absence of self-identifying avant-garde groups.
Like a musical overture the first chapter introduces phrases, themes, and
motifs that will be articulated more fully later.
The second chapter, ‘Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-
Garde’, argues that this overlooked Scottish novelist and countercultural
entrepreneur sat at the fulcrum of organised (that is, with organs, embodied)
and more ephemeral forms of avant-garde practice. Trocchi was a member
in absentia of the SI when it was founded, and the group remained unchar-
acteristically supportive of his projects after his expulsion. The chapter
introduces Trocchi’s novels Young Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960),
and shows how he developed an ‘aesthetic of appropriation’ that combined
elements of American Beat culture, European avant-gardism, and early Situ
ationist theory. The chapter argues that Trocchi’s increasing commitment
to a Situationist conception of ‘anti-aesthetic’ practice led him to disavow
novel writing and turn instead to cultural organisation. His elusive ‘project
sigma’, part of his plan for an ‘Invisible Insurrection’, connected key writers,
thinkers, and activists of the British and North American countercultures
of the 1960s, and is remarkable as both a cognitive map from which new
genealogies of late modernism might be constructed, and as a precedent of
many contemporary forms of digital activist media.
The SI maintained an English Section for less than a year, between 1966
and 1967. The book’s third chapter places the English Section in the con-
text of the New Left, the cultural turn, and the British counterculture of
the late 1960s. It makes a twofold argument about style. First, it compares
the English Section with Birmingham School cultural studies to explore
how both identified contemporary youth subcultures as a continuation of
avant-garde practices in everyday life. Second, it offers close readings of
Debord’s prose style—in French and in translation—to elucidate Debord’s
own conception of a ‘style of negation’. I suggest that Debord’s earliest
English translators misunderstood the role of difficulty in his poetics, but
from that misprision evolved an identifiably British Situationist style. This
style chiasmatically inverted Debord’s style of negation, but nonetheless
pointed towards a different approach to avant-garde practice, one that I
characterise as ‘hyper-spectacular’. Where the French Situationists identified
our age as one of spectacle and sought to create anti-spectacular experi-
ences, the British Situationists proposed that antagonism might arise from
within the spectacle, within the conditions of modern capitalism. This tactic
12 Introduction
would determine the future direction of much avant-garde practice, and can
be traced in recent developments in critical theory (for example, in relation
to ongoing debates about ‘accelerationism’).
The fourth chapter, ‘Long Live King Mob’, provides the first critical
study of the group that was formed from the expelled English Section of
the SI, and whose presence haunts British radical culture. Contemporary
writers, artists, and activists continue to adopt the King Mob persona.
As an example of the ‘hyper-spectacular’ aesthetic described previously,
King Mob simultaneously appropriated Situationist principles and
rejected what it perceived to be the SI’s bourgeois intellectualism. ‘From
the Situationist Salon,’ King Mob declared, ‘to Skid Row.’39 Across a
variety of texts and interventions into the counterculture, the King Mob
persona was constructed as a thuggish anti-hero, a modernised rework-
ing of the Captain Swings and General Ludds that populate the history
of British working-class resistance. The chapter argues that King Mob’s
project was another effort to evade recuperation, this time to produce
an aesthetic too vulgar and negative to be co-opted. As Ralph Rumney
wrote, ‘One should try to make things that are only recuperated with
difficulty.’40
At the same time, seemingly at odds with its emphasis on hyper-spectacular
vulgarity, chapter four provides an extended digression into the relationship
between the Situationist project and English Romanticism. Romanticism
informed the British Situationists’ negotiation of the SI directly and indi-
rectly, providing vernacular idioms and moments of anti-capitalist rebel-
lion that were closer to home. It also reflects the importance of historical
recurrences, radical revisions, and non-linear patterns of influence in the late
modernist practice that the British Situationists exemplify.
The final chapter, breaking from the selective though linear historical
narrative, surveys contemporary spheres of British cultural and politi-
cal activity that have responded to Situationist theory and the history of
its Anglicisation. The chapter organises these activities by way of their
engagement with two key Situationist practices, détournement and psycho
geography. In relation to the former, the chapter considers the work of
Stewart Home and related novelists whose work is based on the belief
that literature is dead, wholly recuperated. Home, in particular, assesses
what remains vital of the avant-garde project, what has collapsed into par-
ody, and what is at stake in claiming the Situationist mantle today. The
filmmaker Patrick Keiller and the visual artist Laura Oldfield Ford repre-
sent contemporary versions of psychogeography, though its deep roots in
English literature are also explored. The chapter culminates in an argument
about the role of insistent self-reflexivity as a buttress against the abso-
lute recuperation of critical art by a mainstream culture that otherwise
seems capable of absorbing all forms of antagonism. ‘The point’, as Raoul
Vaneigem once proposed, ‘is not to elaborate the spectacle of refusal, but
to refuse the spectacle.’41
Introduction 13
Notes
1. Quoted in Christopher Gray, ‘“Those who make half a revolution only dig their
own graves”: The Situationists since 1969’, in Leaving the Twentieth Century:
The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press
1998), 135.
2. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street; The Everyday Life and Glorious
Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso 2011), 3–5.
3. See Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen (eds), Expect Anything Fear
Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen:
Nebula 2011).
4. These accounts are, respectively, from James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Trans-
lation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press 1997) and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996). Martin Puchner
discusses them both in Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the
Avant-Gardes (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2006), 188–189.
5. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register 2 (1965):
337.
6. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 1984).
7. Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 107–108.
8. Paul Nash, ‘Going Modern and Being British’, Weekend Review, 12 March
1932: 322–323.
9. Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists, and the Imagina-
tion from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson 2010), 10.
10. I can only apologise for the book’s bias towards activities that centred on
London. Such activities have simply been documented more thoroughly than
elsewhere. It should come as no surprise, though, that this book comes as
another tale of those two cities, London and Paris.
11. See T.J. Clark, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 2 (March–April
2000): 87.
12. Guy Debord La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet Chastel 1967), thesis 121.
Translations are based on Ken Knabb’s version (London: Rebel Press 2004),
which I consider the truest to Debord’s inimitable style, but with some adjust-
ments of my own. I cite the thesis rather than the page number to allow for easier
cross-referencing between the original and its many translations. Quotations
from the SI’s journal, Internationale Situationniste, similarly, draw on Knabb’s
Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets 2002),
though I cite the original article.
13. ‘“The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than
they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’ T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent (1919)’, Perspecta 19 (1982): 36–42.
14. See, for example, Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to
Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2005) or Gabriel Josipovici,
What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press 2010).
15. Donald Nicholson-Smith and T.J. Clark, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist
International’ (1997), in Tom McDonough (ed.) Guy Debord and the Situationist
International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2004), 468.
14 Introduction
16. Clark, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, 89.
17. Nicholson-Smith and Clark, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’, 479.
18. André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, in Manifestos of Surrealism,
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: University of Michigan
Press 1972), 127.
19. Joshua Clover, ‘The Genealogical Avant-Garde’, Lana Turner Journal 7
(2015), available at http://lanaturnerjournal.com/7/the-genealogical-avant-
garde (Accessed 16 February 2016).
20. Hans Richter, dada: art and anti-art, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and
Hudson 2007), 203.
21. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘The Primary Colours for the Second Time: A P aradigm
Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde’, October 37 (Summer 1986): 41–52. See also
Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2000).
22. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London:
Verso 2005), 19.
23. See Benjamin Noys, ‘“Avant-gardes have only one time”: The SI, Communisa-
tion, and Aesthetics’ (2012), available at http://www.metamute.org/community/
your-posts/avant-gardes-have-only-one-time-si-communisation-and-aesthetics
(Accessed 15 February 2016).
24. Situationist International, ‘Amère victoire du surréalisme’, Internationale Situa-
tionniste 1 (1958): 3.
25. Frances Stracey, Constructed Situations: A New History of the Situationist
International (London: Pluto 2015), 15.
26. Ibid., 48.
27. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, thesis 206.
28. I have discussed the ontological status of recuperation and its relation to Marxist
debates about the subsumption of labour in ‘Enemies of Utopia for the Sake of
Its Realisation: Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism, and the Problem of Utopia’,
in David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen, and Harri Veivo (eds),
Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism, and (Im)possible Life (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter 2015), 17–32.
29. Paul Mann, Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press 1991), 11.
30. Ibid., 15.
31. David Wise, Stuart Wise, and Nick Brandt, King Mob: A Critical Hidden H istory
(Devon: Bread and Circuses 2015), 52.
32. ‘Artistic’ readings of the SI, for example, include Tom McDonough’s The
Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation
in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2007) and S tracey’s
Constructed Situations; ‘philosophical’ ones include Sadie Plant’s The Most
Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London:
Routledge 1992) and Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy
Debord & the Practice of Radical Philosophy (London: Minor Compositions
2011).
33. Situationist International, ‘Le Bruit et la fureur’, Internationale Situationniste 1
(1958): 5.
34. The phrase is frequently quoted by Clark, including ‘Origins of the Present
Crisis’, 91.
35. Situationist International, ‘Le Cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg’,
Internationale Situationniste 7 (1962): 26–27.
Introduction 15
36. Alan Woods and Ralph Rumney, The Map Is Not the Territory (Manchester:
Manchester University Press 2000), 11.
37. Nicholson-Smith and Clark, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’, 468.
38. Raymond Williams, ‘When was modernism?’, in Politics of Modernism: Against
the New Conformists (London: Verso 1989), 35.
39. King Mob, King Mob Echo 3 (1969), in Tom Vague (ed.) King Mob Echo:
English Section of the Situationist International (London: Dark Star 2000), 105.
40. Ralph Rumney, ‘Pourvu que ça dure: sur le passage de quelques idées à travers
le temps’, in Woods and Rumney, The Map Is Not the Territory, 26.
41. Situationist International, ‘Le Cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg’, 27.
1 Surrealism in England, or English
Surrealism
‘A starting point is a point that one leaves behind.’

—Edouard Roditi, ‘A New Reality’ (1929)1
In 1924, André Breton published his first manifesto of Surrealism. Alongside the
opening of the Bureau for Surrealist Research in Paris in the same year, Breton’s
manifesto served to inaugurate the principle manifestation of the French Sur-
realist movement. Breton neither coined the term Surréalisme (Guillaume
Apollinaire, 1917) nor wrote the first text titled ‘Manifeste du Surréalisme’
(Yvan Goll, earlier in 1924), but he soon emerged as the movement’s spokes-
person. Groups following Breton’s model rapidly appeared across Europe, but
it was over a decade before Surrealism made its first public appearance in
England. In that lag, fierce debates arose in literary and artistic publications
about how, if at all, Surrealism could be anglicised. English supporters of the
movement needed to establish how they could balance Breton’s ostentatious
and world-historical rhetoric with a more vernacular idiom. Such an adap-
tation was felt necessary to assuage the many critics who dismissed Surreal-
ism as incommensurable with English culture: in the 1920s and early 1930s,
Surréalisme was deemed, variously, too absurdist, too silly, too anti-clerical
(the problem wasn’t the danger of offence, but rather the lack of C atholic
fervour in England), too cosmopolitan, too foreign, or simply too French.2
We will encounter the latter complaint many times as this book progresses.
This chapter will trace the contours of these debates over Surrealism’s
Anglicisation, and will put forward a narrative that will act as a prolepsis or
model for subsequent instances of Franco-Anglo avant-garde influence. The
chapter will focus on the historical and political character of first-wave English
Surrealism, and on the different ways that its participants undertook its histo-
riography. In the broadest sense, this chapter documents efforts to reconcile
modernist internationalism with varying articulations of Englishness.
The Vexed Question of the Proper Englishing of the Movement

The effort to bring Surrealism to England began across a range of journals
that included Experiment, transition, New Verse, and Left Review, as well
as the writings of Paul Nash’s Unit One group.3 The editorials, opinion, and
Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism 17
correspondence pieces in these little magazines were the discursive spaces
in which a handful of acquaintances engaged in a brief war of position.
The earliest questions that Surrealism’s English supporters discussed were
as follows. First, why had Surrealism had not become manifest in England
already? Second, could—or, more precisely, how could—Surrealism be
introduced to ‘the English’?
By the mid-1930s, the modicum of coverage of Surrealism in the English
press had expressed confusion about this neologism. There was even
doubt about whether to use ‘Surréalisme’, ‘Surrealism’, or a translation
like ‘Superrealism’—the debate was described as ‘the vexed question of the
proper Englishing’ of the movement.4 Because English Surrealism did not
arrive with its own manifesto, we must turn to Breton’s for provisional defi-
nitions. His first manifesto offers a parodic encyclopaedia entry:
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the

superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations,
in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to
substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.5
The catalysis of English Surrealism as such is usually located at the meet-

ing in Paris in July 1935 of the painter Roland Penrose and the poet David
Gascoyne, when they decided that ‘Something’s got to be done.’6 In 1933, the
seventeen-year-old Gascoyne had published what is generally considered the
first Surrealist poem in English, ‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’,
in the fifth issue of New Verse. In Paris, Gascoyne was researching the book
that would become A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935, published with cover
artwork by Max Ernst), which offered a crash course in Surrealism for an
English audience underexposed to the movement. The book offers an uncriti
cal history of the movement, and mostly repeats Breton’s various accounts.
In his first manifesto, Breton emphasises that Surrealism’s genesis is dialecti-
cal, a synthesis of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxian historical materialism:
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality,
which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a
surreality, if one may so speak.7
Twelve years later, Gascoyne also asserted Surrealism’s dialectical consti-

tution, though his account is more historical, and roots Surrealism in the
earlier Dada movement. The French Surrealists, he writes,
were perhaps the least Dada elements of the movement (which wasn’t
a movement), the non-conforming Dadaists, who became Surrealists.
So I think we can say that the development from Dadaism to Surreal-
ism was dialectical. Dada: negation. Surrealism: negation of negation;
a new affirmation, that is.8
18 Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism
Other critics in England had recognised that Surrealism was borne from Dada,
though they had not considered that the relationship between the two might
be anything other than a linear continuation. In essays in The Criterion in the
1920s, for example, F. S. Flint had treated Surrealism as a straightforward
extension of Dada—and because he had lost patience with Dadaist nihilism,
he was unwilling to engage with Surrealism. Wyndham Lewis, too, thought
of Surrealism as ‘post-Dada’, and therefore as a form of pseudo-radicalism
not worth much attention.9 Contrary to the more recent assumption that ‘the
English’ were unaware of the cultural and intellectual sources from which
French Surrealism sprang, these examples suggest that established modern-
ists in England felt that Surrealism was passé even before it began. We might
remember that the Bloomsbury group had introduced Freud to literary circles
in England a decade prior to Breton’s claims on him in the first manifesto.
Nonetheless, English supporters of Surrealism were keen to establish its sin-
gularity. They agreed that it was a dialectical response to something, but that
something varied. The dialectical method was important to French and English
Surrealists as a means of historicising their practice and of justifying their
authenticity to Marxist-Leninist authorities. English Surrealism had emerged
with a heightened awareness of its political character because Breton’s French
movement by the mid-1930s had experienced a long-running yet fraught
relationship with the Third International and the French Communist Party.10
By 1935, Surréalisme had moved—or had been pushed—away from orthodox
Marxism after the Third International had proven unreceptive towards an aes-
thetic practice so distanced from its own conception of proletarian art.
While English Surrealism never engaged political affiliations so directly,
not least because the British Communist Party was never as prominent as
its French comrades, it still negotiated the French movement’s difficult rela-
tionship with doctrinaire Socialist Realism, which had become Soviet state
policy in 1932.11 Because of their geopolitical distance from actually existing
socialism, the English Surrealists generally paid more attention to Marxist
philosophy, particularly its philosophy of history, than to the type of tactical
manoeuvring that came to preoccupy Breton. Abstract dialectical material-
ism was more of a driving force to Surrealist activity in England than was
the development of proletarian art or the maintenance of Party allegiances.
A review of Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism by Cyril Connolly,
titled ‘It’s got here at last!’ and published on 14 December 1935, recognises a
more immediate reason for bringing Surrealism to England. Connolly declares
himself uninterested in the movement’s literary productions, ‘for much of Sur-
realist literature is fatuous and pretentious nonsense.’12 Instead, he celebrates,
the pugnacious side of the movement. You sign manifestos and send
indecent postcards to people you don’t like, tease writers, frighten par-
ents, attend meetings, expel heretics (and there are always plenty), play
practical jokes, table-turn, and generally tweak the tail of that old circus
lion, the British Bourgeoisie.13
Connolly recognises the ludic ethos of Surrealism, its wilfully juvenile
desire to provoke and be mischievous, which preserves what he identi-
fies as an instinctive but easily forgotten ‘hatred of stupidity, injustice, and
stagnation.’14 These were accurate observations, and might be applied to
many of the figures who will be addressed in this book. At the very least,
in Connolly’s analysis, Surrealism promised moments of resistance to what
Breton called the ‘lusterless fate’ of bourgeois life.15
The negative identity of English Surrealism—the social conditions that it
opposed—is easier to discern than any unified, coherent programme. Most
would-be English Surrealists agreed that their movement needed to oppose
the prevailing images of conservative English nationalism. A selection of
examples will demonstrate this consensus (I shall discuss the contexts of
these sources shortly). Edouard Roditi, one of the earliest commentators on
Surrealism in England, complains that ‘the Surrealist Muse’
does not often descend upon English soil; for she is terrified of the poet
laureate, the censor, the conservative association, buy British goods,
empire day, do your Christmas shopping early, the Queen’s doll’s
house, sales on now, why not wear the Boston garter.16
Gascoyne also voiced his distaste for nationalism, which found a concen-
trated image in King George V’s Silver Jubilee. ‘When a country is invited by
its government to such a parody of rejoicing in the name of patriotism and
imperialism,’ wrote Gascoyne, ‘despair is the first reaction of the poet.’17
English conservatism, as represented by its enduring monarchy in contrast
to republican France, was evidence of England’s tardiness in revolution-
ary matters, and of the need for something as irrational and irreverent as
Surrealism. The British monarchy provided a powerful image of a society
pervaded by class antagonism, conspicuous privilege, and the rule of the
old world, and was invoked at later, decisive, moments in the British avant-
garde tradition: Mass-Observation was prompted by the abdication of King
Edward VIII in 1936; and punk’s earliest infamy came by way of its sar-
donic response to the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977.
Another early commentator, Herbert Read, extends the accusation of
conservatism to England’s aesthetic sensibility:
I do not say that the English have bad taste—that, perhaps, might
be said of other nations—but simply that they do not exercise those
faculties of sensibility and selection which make for good taste. Our
condition is neutral—an immense indifference to questions of art.18
Read argues that the conflux of Puritanism and Capitalism has inflicted
upon England a national character that is artless and mediocre, which is
manifest in English humour and common sense, both of which acquiesce
to staid notions of what is and isn’t ‘normal.’19 In a subsequent text, Read
relents slightly, and attributes some of this conservatism to the geopolitical
anxieties of the interwar period:
Bull-necked demagogues inject a poisonous propaganda into our

minds and then the storm of steel breaks above us; our bodies become
so much manure for an acid soil, and our aspirations, the whole struc-
ture of our civilisation, becomes a history which the future may not
even record.20
The aforementioned text by Roditi, titled ‘The New Reality’, appeared in

The Oxford Outlook, an undergraduate magazine, as early as June 1929.
It appears to have commanded little attention, and Roditi subsequently
disappeared from the scene of English Surrealism. Nonetheless, Roditi’s
article makes clear the double ancestry of English Surrealism. On the one
hand, it has French forebears, who include Breton as well as the Marquis
Sade, the Comte de Lautréamont, and Arthur Rimbaud. On the other
hand, English Surrealism relates to Anglophone literary modernists like
‘Eliot, Miss Stein, James Joyce, Cummings, [and] Ezra Pound.’21 Unlike
the aggressive demands to overcome history of earlier avant-gardes, exem-
plified by M arinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (1909), English Surrealism
arrived hesitantly, with a quiet respect for its literary inheritance. Roditi
does suggest, though, that Anglo-American literary modernism had lost
its vitality: ‘the Sitwells and Harold Acton are beginning to be rather
vieux jeu.’22 When Roditi proposes that Surrealism might replace literary
high modernism, he offers a model of linear succession, which demons
trates first that dialectical materialism was not yet a concern, and second
that this student of literature in the 1920s did not consider the relation
between Anglophone high modernism and Continental avant-gardism to
be an antagonistic one.
Just as Roditi’s text sank without trace, Gascoyne wrote a manifesto of
English Surrealism that was only ever published as an incomplete extract,
and only in French, in Cahiers d’art (June 1935). Like his book A Short
Survey that followed, Gascoyne’s ‘Premier Manifeste Anglais du Surréal-
isme’ mostly declares adherence to Breton’s principles. Gascoyne insists
on the world-historical character of Surrealism, which is not a ‘school of
literature’ but ‘an international system of ideas determined by the par-
ticular conditions of our epoch.’23 To anglicise Surrealism was futile
because, as the potter Sam Haile put it in his diaries, ‘Surrealism was, and
is, inevitable’.24
Because he did not root Surrealism to the particular conditions of post-
war France (and neighbouring countries), Gascoyne saw no problem in sim-
ply transplanting Surréalisme to England. His effort towards a Surrealist
dialectic—the negation of Dada’s negation—was inconsistent and not obvi-
ously materialist. If not discounted as an empty signifier of Marxist authen-
ticity, his mention of dialectics might be read as another instance of simply
parroting Breton. Rob Jackaman explains that through his friendship with
and translation of the original French Surrealists, Gascoyne was ‘closer to
the orthodox continental model than was any other English Surrealist in
the decade […] and his own poetry sometimes reflects a “purer” Surrealism
than is usual in England.’25 We will return to ‘And the Seventh Dream is the
Dream of Isis’ later in this chapter.
On the Inevitability of Surrealism

Other answers to the questions of ‘why now?’ and ‘why here?’ were pro-
posed by Herbert Read, a figure central to early English Surrealism, older
and more institutionalised than Roditi and Gascoyne. Read had been
Professor of Fine Arts at Edinburgh University and editor of the presti-
gious Burlington Magazine. One of Read’s articles was the provocatively
titled ‘Why the English have no taste’, which appeared in Minotaure, a
Surrealist journal edited by Breton; another was his lengthy introduc-
tion to his edited collection Surrealism (1936, published with cover art-
work by fellow English Surrealist Roland Penrose), which proved to be
something of a companion piece to Gascoyne’s A Short Survey. Read
agrees with Gascoyne that ‘from the moment of its birth Surrealism was
an international phenomenon’ and ‘it would therefore be contrary to the
nature of the movement at present, as some have suggested, a specifically
English edition of Surrealism.’26 ‘Nonetheless,’ Read concedes, ‘there is
an English contribution to be made to this effort, and its strength and
validity can only be shown by tracing its sources in the native tradition
of our art and literature.’27 Thus, Read catalogues disparate moments
in English literary history in which embryonic forms of Surrealism have
existed. His attention is directed at the canon: he includes early ballad
writers, Shakespeare, metaphysical poets, and Byron. Though Read main-
tains that Surrealism ‘has no respect for any academic tradition, least of
all for the classical-capitalist tradition of the last four hundred years’, he
presents Surrealism as the filter through which received cultural forms
might be re-energised.28
Read, like Gascoyne, repeats much of Breton’s rhetoric (‘Reality trans-
formed by the imagination – that is the definition of art and the aim of
Surrealism’29) but transplants it into a different cultural heritage. In contrast
to the more common understanding of modernism’s classicist leanings, Read
presents Surrealism as the rejuvenation of English Romanticism, which he
understands to be all that is imaginative, creative, and emancipatory, against
classicism which represents order, control, and repression.30 Eventually, he
rejects a dialectical model of Surrealism’s genealogy:
In dialectics the thesis and the antithesis are both objective facts, and
the necessity for a resolution or synthesis is due to the real existence
of a contradiction. But ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ do not represent such
a contradiction. They correspond rather to the husk and the seed, the
shell and the kernel.31
Surrealism for Read is neither dialectically composed nor incommensurable

with English culture. Instead, it is a return to the essence of a transhistori-
cal, though still antagonistic, cultural impulse. Like Roditi and Gascoyne,
though through different means, Read locates Surrealism in pre-existing his-
torical currents. Nonetheless, for all three critics, English Surrealism is the
continuation and renewal of something already existent.
In his first manifesto, Breton appears to make a similar claim regarding
Surrealism’s prehistory. He includes a list of proto-Surrealist, mostly French,
writers:
Swift is Surrealist in malice,

Sade is Surrealist in sadism.
Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.
Hugo is Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.
Desborders-Valmore is Surrealist in love.
Bertrand is Surrealist in the past
[…]
Roussel is Surrealist as a storyteller.
Etc.32
Martin Puchner explains that Breton’s Surrealist prehistories construct

‘a history of Surrealism avant la lettre […] as in the case of the Com-
munist Manifesto and most manifestos since, the foundational present
and the envisioned future are grounded in a history that prefigures them
both.’33 However, it seems that Roditi, Gascoyne, and Read might have
misread Breton’s Surrealist historiography. They each maintain models of
linear succession, in which each manifestation of a long tradition becomes
exhausted, only to be replaced by a new iteration, a new ‘-ism’. Breton,
conversely, uses his historical co-ordinates to plot a constellation, a dis-
parate and multi-layered arrangement of influences made up of many iso-
lated individuals who are synthesised in Surrealism to form a new and
distinct entity. Antitheses are established and dialectic relations are main-
tained, in a more complex form than binary thesis-antithesis opposition.
This pluralistic version of dialectical genesis resolves a problem apparent
with Rob Jackaman’s effort towards diagrammatising the Surrealist dialec-
tic (Figure 1.1), in which the binary structure appears reductive: the anti-
tradition of Surrealism is co-opted into a familiar literary tradition. In his
second manifesto, Breton writes that ‘when it comes to revolt, none of us
must have any need of ancestors.’34 His first manifesto does not provide
ancestors, but catalysts; not lineages, but co-ordinates. We can recognise an
effort towards not just a historiography of Surrealism, but also a properly
Surrealist historiography.
ROMANTICISM
A
N ENGLISH-SPEAKING
C FRENCH SURRÉALISME
MODERNISM
E
S
T
R
ENGLISH SURREALISM
Y
30s 30s SURREALIST SOCIAL REALIST GROUP

GROUP (Thesis) (Antithesis) D
I
A
L
40s NEW APOCALYPSE GROUP E
as Synthesis C
T
I
NEW APOCALYPTIC “THE MOVEMENT” C
POETRY (Thesis) (Antithesis)
50s
&
60s “MAVERICKS” / “THE GROUP”
as Synthesis
70s Ted Hughes. Adrian Henri

&
80s Seamus Heaney
Figure 1.1 Diagram of the dialectic of modern poetry,35 from Rob Jackaman, The
Course of English Surrealist Poetry Since the 1930s (Lampeter: The
Mellen Press 1989), 2. Courtesy of The Mellen Press.
My reading of Breton’s understanding of Surrealism’s genealogy as a

c onstellation—in contrast to Jackaman’s model of a family tree—is informed
by Walter Benjamin’s historical method. Although Benjamin was ultimately
critical of Surrealism, which he believed had failed to distance itself from ‘the
phantasmagoria of modernity’, he recognised the value in its effort to realise
dream-images as a means of superseding the slumber and stasis of capitalist
temporality.36 ‘Aragon persistently remains in the realm of dreams,’ B enjamin
complained, when he should have sought ‘the constellation of awakening.’37
In ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth C entury’, the ‘exposé’ of 1935 that
prefigured his Arcades Project, Benjamin argues that society dreams the
image of its own succession, and that ‘the realization of dream elements,
in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking.’38
Conversely, Theodor Adorno’s criticism of early Surrealism was that it was
too instrumental. He accused Surrealist symbolism of being ‘much too ratio-
nalistic’ and of representing ‘what is strange and surprising in terms of what
is already familiar.’39 He described Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat (1918) as
‘the only convincing surrealist manifesto’ for its expression of a ‘convulsive,
dreamlike compulsion imparting to music an inkling of negative truth.’40
Nonetheless, Adorno reformulated Benjamin’s constellation so that it could
involve the conscious ordering of historical objects in such a way that invites
the appearance of a dream-image. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno explains:
The cognition of the object in its constellation is that of the process that
it has stored up within itself. As a constellation, the theoretical thought
circles around the concept, which it would like to open, hoping, that it
springs ajar like the lock of a heavily guarded safe: only not by means
of a single key or a single number, but by a number-combination.41
Breton’s Surrealist prehistories are the equivalent of this ‘combination

of numbers’ which releases Surrealism from history. In contrast, Roditi,
Gascoyne, and Read construct timelines which do not promise to divert
the course of history but propel it: theirs remain gestures of interpellation,
retroactive interpretations of older aesthetics to be dusted off, re-identified,
and incorporated into new ideological schema. Jackaman suggests that,
the English, perennial late arrivals when anything avant-garde is con-

cerned, were presumably more influenced by the latter, reasoning
period [of French Surrealism] than by the earlier, intuitive period when
they became interested in Surrealism in the early thirties. By this time,
virtually all the Dada extremities had been worn off Surréalisme, and
the English practitioners consequently inherited a much more moder-
ate kind of philosophy from the French.42
Why the English Have No Taste

The poet Charles Madge and the artist and, later, filmmaker Humphrey
Jennings offered an altogether different response to the question of English
Surrealism’s historical identity. They had participated in the debates in the
little magazines, but by the mid-1930s they had come to recognise that
their interpretation of English Surrealism was significantly different than
that of the group that included Gascoyne, Penrose, and Read, and so they
split off to found Mass-Observation. This project, which applied Surrealist
principles to an empirical field of study and thus negotiated the perceived
incompatibility between French abstraction and English empiricism, will be
analysed later in this chapter.
In December 1936, however, Madge published in New Verse an article
titled ‘Surrealism for the English.’ The article worries about the limitations
of simply importing a foreign cultural movement, and warns,
before exposing ourselves to a ten-years-belated imitation of Paris, there

is need of perspective and a remedying of our own ignorance [… English
Surrealism’s] aims are not best served if English writers imitate the work
of French ones, nor if they simply adopt the name ‘Surrealist’.43
If Surrealism is a dialectical response to specific cultural and social conditions,

Madge argues, then English Surrealism must necessarily be different to
French Surrealism, because it is coming from a different time and place.
English Surrealism must therefore mediate Surréalisme and Anglophonic
literary culture. The English content must be played against the French form:
Close study of the philosophical position of the French surrealists is

needed to extract the essential purpose from the formal appearance of
their work. But English writers will need something more: namely, a
knowledge of their own language and literature.44
Madge’s insistence on the vernacular character of English Surrealism was

corroborated by Jennings in a December 1936 review of Read’s Surrealism.
Jennings’s review was published in the recently (May 1936) founded journal
Contemporary Poetry and Prose, one of the little magazines more receptive to
English Surrealists, whose poems it published alongside more famous mod-
ernist figures like Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings. In his review, Jennings states
his ‘really grave doubts already existent about the use of Surrealism in this
country.’45 He accuses Read and the other contributors to the collection of
using Surrealism as they would any other literary movement, so that writing
about Surrealism becomes ‘an excuse for another affirmation of their favou-
rite theses […] Mr Read’s [article becomes] a defence of Romanticism.’46
The debated role of Romanticism in British radical modernism would not be
resolved by Surrealism, and will be revisited as this book continues.
Jennings, echoing Madge, emphasised the necessary but complicated
Englishness of English Surrealism. It needed to reject existing traditions and
forget ‘all “beliefs” preceding the picture, which would deny the promise
of the unknown’.47 Anticipating what the Situationist International would
later call récupération, Jennings warns that the development of a Surrealism
that is just another literary movement would be to allow its co-optation by
what he calls the ‘classical-military-capitalist-ecclesiastical racket.’48
The International Surrealist Exhibition

Jennings’s objections were published in the immediate aftermath of what was
early English Surrealism’s finest moment and first properly public appear-
ance: the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries
in London, held between June and July 1936. The exhibition was an enor-
mous success—or, at least, was very popular. It attracted 23,000 visitors, and
included the work of 69 artists of 14 nationalities, of whom 27 were British.
Although Surrealism featured heavily in the Parisian art scene of the day, this
was the first British exhibition dedicated to the movement.49 The organising
committee had included Gascoyne, Read, Penrose, Madge, and Jennings, as
well as Hugh Sykes Davies, Kathleen Raine, Sheila Legge, Rupert Lee, Diana
Brinton Lee, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, and a small European contingent.
To coincide with the exhibition, the organising committee—who assumed
the label of ‘the Surrealist Group in England’—acted as guest editors of the
fourth issue of the International Surrealist Bulletin. This slim volume serves
as the closest thing to a de facto manifesto of English Surrealism, though it
openly accepts the group’s difficulties to legitimise English Surrealism’s histor-
ical and political identities. This simultaneous announcement of English Sur-
realism and declaration of the impossibility of doing just that anticipates what
I shall describe in the next chapter as ‘the dissolution of the avant-garde’: the
historical obsolescence, in England at least, of vanguardist group organisation.
The fourth International Surrealist Bulletin was mostly a long essay by
the organisers, printed in French and English and accompanied with photo-
graphs of artworks by Penrose (‘The Freedom of the Sea, 1936’), Jennings
(‘A Woman, 1934’), Nash (‘Encounter in the Afternoon’), Henry Moore
(simply ‘Sculpture’), Eileen Agar (‘David and Jonathan’), and others. It begins
by introducing the Surrealist Group in England under the heading, ‘The
Situation in England, the Intellectual Position with Regard to Surrealism;
the Formation of an English Group; Immediate Activities.’50 On the problem
of tradition, the bulletin acknowledges historical manifestations of proto-
Surrealism, which it sees not as solutions to but symptoms of a problem:
the general character of the English imagination has been very much
in the direction of Surrealism, and there have been many individuals in
the post-war period who have not allowed themselves to be diverted
from the problems handed down to us historically by the nineteenth
century: problems the solution of which inevitably takes us very near
Surrealism.51
The bulletin proposed a series of explanations as to why Surrealism had

not already become manifest in England. It lists a ‘pathological individual-
ism’ inherent to English culture; the deep-rootedness of capitalism, and the
shipping away of class struggle that is afforded by Empire; and the ‘moral,
ideological and political irresponsibility’ of most English art.52 This first
section of the bulletin ends by asserting the necessity of forcing ‘a dialectical
solution [to] a series of existing conflicts’, which reflects back onto the con-
flicted identity of English Surrealism: the English Surrealists had decided to
act anyway, in spite of their lack of theoretical consensus.53
The bulletin later includes a transcription of a speech that Read gave
at the exhibition. Read justifies Surrealism’s association with the Commu-
nist movement by speaking of the necessity of revolutionary art. He picks
up on what was by 1936 the most contentious issue in French Surrealism:
the antagonism between the Third International and Breton’s group. The
latter had tried desperately to appease the Communists. In 1925, in the
fifth issue of La Révolution surréaliste, the French Surrealists had declared
their adherence to the principles of Marxism-Leninism in an article titled
‘La Révolution d’abord et toujours’. Breton’s concession of artistic freedom
and radical vanguardism was demonstrated in the shift from the first jour-
nal, La Révolution surréaliste (1924–1929), to the second, La Surréalisme
au service de la révolution (1930–1933). Within five years, the Surrealist
revolution had retreated to a rearguard position, behind the revolutionary
movement led by the Third International.
Breton had joined the Communist Party in 1927 and had left it in 1935.
The announcements and denouncements during this period are followed in
great detail in Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism. Breton’s attempted
defence of Surrealism to the Communists was twofold. First, he insisted
on the contribution that Surrealism could make to the revolutionary strug-
gle in terms of the subjective liberation that must precede collective action.
Second, he tried to expose the limitations and fallacies of Socialist Realism
as a form of bourgeois realism whose time was out of joint with dialectical
materialism.54 In Dada Turns Red (1990), Helena Lewis explains the Third
International’s rejection of Surrealism as a result of the latter’s unwillingness
to make any sacrifices to the aesthetic ideology of the Popular Front:
In reality, the Surrealists were expelled not primarily because of politi-

cal differences, but because of their stubborn, and public opposition to
socialist realism, and to any constraints whatsoever upon their artis-
tic freedom. They had even dared to propound the view that their
‘research’ had great revolutionary value, and that their poetry was a
real contribution to the Revolution.55
Read’s speech in the International Surrealist Bulletin is uncharacteristically

militant, and picks up on the themes of Breton’s address to the Congress
of Writers. Read warns that Surrealism is something that the bourgeoisie
should fear, that it will destroy before it creates because in capitalist society
the conditions do not exist for a ‘satisfactory basis’56 for a fully realised art.
The creation of those conditions was the task of Surrealism, which needed
to confront all aspects of social life. Read’s sudden shift from gentle Roman-
tic to rousing revolutionary did not go unnoticed, with one reviewer of the
bulletin calling him a ‘politico-esthetic chameleon.’57
Objections to English Surrealism from the Marxist and Communist press
were reproduced at the end of the bulletin, with retorts from the Surrealists.
The Surrealists were accused of using inaccessible jargon, of being individual-
istic, and of refusing to tackle serious matters. The Daily Worker, for example,
reported that, ‘The general impression one gets is that here is a group of young
people who just haven’t got the guts to tackle anything seriously.’58 Elsewhere,
in Left Review’s January 1936 issue, Lord Hastings claimed to recognise that
Surrealism was ‘a revolt against the smug ineffectualness of bourgeois art’, but
contended that ‘there seems to be no evidence for its claims of being proletar-
ian, Marxist, or more revolutionary than the communist party.’59 Left Review’s
July 1936 issue included a supplement on Surrealism. An essay by Read was
followed by an attack by Anthony Blunt (later revealed to be one of the Cam-
bridge Soviet spies), who dismisses Surrealism as rather more rational than it
pretends to be, and another by Alick West, an orthodox Marxist like Blunt,
who decides that ‘Surréalisme is too concerned with words.’60 These essays
were followed by an illustration by James Boswell that satirised snooty art
critics surveying the International Surrealist Exhibition in horror (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Illustration of attendees of the International Surrealist Exhibition

(1936) by James Boswell.61 Originally in Left Review 2:10 (July 1936):
509. Courtesy of Sal Shuel.
A more prescient objection to Read’s speech came from Roger Roughton,

Surrealist poet, editor of Contemporary Poetry and Prose, and dedicated
member of the Communist Party. In his speech, Read declares that ‘the Sur-
realist is naturally a Marxian Socialist, and generally claims to be a more
consistent Communist than many who submit to all manner of compromise
with the aesthetic culture and moral conventions of capitalism.’62 Social-
ist Realism, for Read, reflected a politics of lowest common denomina-
tors that erodes the necessary complexities of Marxist thought. The Party
member Roughton objected, and reiterated the accusation of individualism
against Read. In his editorial for the fourth Contemporary Poetry and Prose
(August–September 1936), a themed issue on ‘Surrealism and Communism’,
Roughton warns that Read’s ‘Trotskyist “more communist than the commu-
nists” attitude must be carefully guarded against’ and states his own dedica-
tion to the Communist Party as ‘the most democratic organisation today’.63
This orthodox-versus-dissident dynamic had already been played out in
the French Surrealist movement, when Louis Aragon renounced Breton and
Surrealism in order to devote himself to the dictates of the Party. Aragon
went from writing Surrealist poetry to producing pallid Socialist Realism.
His defection became known as ‘the Aragon Affair’ and sparked a debate on
revolutionary art that penetrated many of France’s intellectual and artistic
circles. The incident attracted so much attention largely because of a peti-
tion authorised by Breton prior to Aragon’s defection, which called for the
police to drop charges against Aragon after arresting him for incitement to
murder with his poem, ‘Le Front rouge’; the irony is that this was one of
Aragon’s Socialist Realist works.
Gascoyne’s A Short Survey would later contend that the Aragon Affair
was centred on one question: ‘Is a militant Communist poet justified in
writing any but propaganda poems or poems bearing directly on the
working-class struggle? Yes, say the Surrealists; and no, say Aragon, Sadoul,
Alexandre and a few others.’64 Roughton would most certainly have sided
with Aragon and the Party. He was forced to clarify his position in a rejoin-
der to an attack from Ezra Pound. The latter’s ‘The Coward Surrealists’
and Roughton’s ‘Eyewash, Do You? A reply to Mr Pound’ were published
together in the seventh Contemporary Poetry and Prose (November 1936).
Pound repeats the accusation that the Surrealists use jargon and rhetoric to
hide the fact they have little to say on empirical matters of political economy
and history. Surprisingly, his objections echo those of the orthodox Marxist
press. Moreover, his accusation that difficulty had replaced integrity was the
same accusation that his generation of modernists had faced from the liter-
ary establishment in the 1920s.65 Pound ends his article with the sarcastic
remark that ‘the intellectual timidity of the pseudolutionists gives me a pain
in the neck.’66
A more theatrical or combative Surrealist than Roughton might have
dismissed these accusations, and perhaps replied that Pound had missed the
fundamental Surrealist point that matters of the imagination are of equal
revolutionary value to matters of production and economy; besides, the Sur-
realists were at this time more keen on approval from the left than from
someone like Pound, whom Roughton introduces in a footnote as the ‘great
uncle of modern English poetry’ and ‘admirer of Mussolini.’67 Nonetheless,
Roughton defends himself, not by strenuously advocating Surrealism’s
contribution to political discourse, but by downplaying the importance of
Surrealism. Roughton concedes that, yes, some Surrealists wrap bad politics
in confusing rhetoric. He reasserts his unhappiness with Read’s ‘individual-
istic, anarchic Trotskyism.’68 He even criticises Breton for daring to question
the Soviet Union and the Moscow Trials ‘now when democracy and social-
ism are fighting for their life against international fascism’. For Roughton,
the revolutionary role of Surrealism is ‘of limited but certain importance’:
Too much is often made of the directly revolutionary significance of

present-day Surrealism: the part it has to play in helping to bring over
a small section of that small section of the bourgeoisie which in times
of capitalist crisis joins the class-conscious militant workers, that part
in comparison with the direct impact of economic circumstances is
very minute; but the role exists and the revolutionary sincerity of its
players is usually genuine.69
Roughton’s diminishment of English Surrealism’s political agency echoes

Breton’s experience in France, from Surrealist vanguard to Surrealist rear-
guard. In England, Surrealist discourse once concerned with consolidating
the movement’s revolutionary character had switched to downplaying and
backpedalling by the end of 1936 when faced with heavy contradictions
generated internally and externally. The movement no longer needed to be
introduced to England, but rather defended from it.
The Dissolution of the First Wave of English Surrealism

By the late 1930s, Breton was looking for other ways to justify Surreal-
ism’s political commitment beyond compromise with the Popular Front, and
began an allegiance with Trotsky, whose Literature and Revolution (1924)
had already warned of the fallacies of a manufactured proletarian culture.
The Surrealist Group in England was still meeting into 1937, although
most of its members had moved on to other projects. Gascoyne’s diary, on
8 April 1937, records that he ‘had been wondering how to get out of’ the
group, which he had ‘long since had no truck with.’70 That day, Roughton
and Jennings had called a meeting to disband the group. Read and o thers
objected, so Roughton and Jennings quit, before the whole party ‘went
downstairs to drink beer and whiskey.’71
Jennings and Madge would soon found Mass-Observation. Roughton
would conclude Contemporary Poetry and Prose after its tenth issue
(Autumn 1937), and soon drifted away from the Surrealists. Read would
also move in a different ideological direction, and soon published Poetry
and Anarchism (1938), which began his long-standing association with
the British anarchist movement. The ‘politico-aesthetic chameleon’ was
knighted by Winston Churchill in 1953 for services to literature.
Met with an inhospitable cultural climate, and unable to reach consensus
over its historical and political identities, the members of the English Sur-
realist group began to direct their attentions elsewhere after 1937. This is
not to say that English Surrealism vanished. Rather, it was recognised that
what was incommensurable with ‘the English’ was the idea of an organised
avant-garde group modelled on the French example. Surrealism as an aes-
thetic form had not been exhausted or invalidated, but it had become clear
that the social presence of English Surrealism could not simply replicate the
form it had taken in France.
The very layout of Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose reflects
the conditions that stalled the first wave of English Surrealism. At the begin-
ning and end of each issue, in the editorial and the final comments, exists
the overtly political matter (with, on occasion, a centrefold political dec-
laration); the content, the eponymous poetry and prose, remains separate.
Samuel Hynes argues that ‘Surrealism and politics co-exist in Contemporary
Poetry and Prose, but without touching’, and ‘the harmony that Roughton
imagined between the two terms was to be achieved simply by submerging
the art-term into the political-term.’72 The intransigence between the aes-
thetic movement and the political sphere was twofold: English Surrealism
would not engage with ‘regular’ politics, and political groups would not
entertain Surrealism. Hynes continues, ‘One might argue that the Marxists
had won, and by refusing to accept Surrealism as a potential ally had
defeated its claim to be taken seriously.’73
However, despite its unconsolidated and chaotically multifarious identity,
first-wave English Surrealism became more than the pale cousin of Surréal-
isme. For all of Breton’s insistence that the movement was not m anoeuvred
by an individual, his identity is stamped all over its manifestos, and the
French group was clearly embodied by a specific group of people acting,
purportedly, in accordance with prescribed principles. The Surréalistes
were ambassadors of their various manifestos, enlisted disciples rather than
autonomous seers. English Surrealism lacked a leader, a manifesto, and a
locus of authority. As Jackaman explains, ‘there was not in England a highly
organised group orthodoxy protected like a pseudo-political “cell”’74.
Michel Remy adds:
In its own workings, the British Surrealist group unwittingly showed

how impossible it was for any such body to have a definitive presence.
A locus of forces, a forum of spectral voices, it represented in the very
fallibility and resistance of its members the difficulty of repeatedly
confronting visions that were thought-defeating in their constitutive
evanescence and their uniqueness.75
We might pay particular attention to Remy’s suggestion that the social pres-
ence of English Surrealism around 1936 took the form of a ‘forum of spec-
tral voices’, or to return to Gascoyne’s introductory remarks, ‘a movement
(which was not a movement)’. English Surrealism was always about to
arrive. It never reached political maturity. Even its chief ideologues never
claimed to represent Surrealism in the same manner that Breton did, as
reflected in Read’s insistent use of ‘superrealism’ rather than Surrealism until
such a distinction became meaninglessly contrarian.
English Surrealism likewise had no clearly delimited boundaries like
those produced through Breton’s conflicts with defectors like Aragon. The
Surrealist Group in England coalesced only briefly, and primarily in an
administrative capacity as signatories and organisers. However, precisely
because it lacked a representative figure or group, English Surrealism serves
to offer a different model for avant-gardist socio-political engagement.
English Surrealism was experienced as a phantom of opposition that was to
linger beyond the presence of a specific group of Surrealists. This shadowy,
negative, and liminal presence harks back to the eponymous antihero of
Lautréamont’s novel Maldoror: an incarnation of pure evil, who appears
randomly to wreak havoc, then recedes back into the shadows. The only
English Surrealist novel of this period, Sykes-Davies’s Petron (1935), owes a
great debt to Maldoror.76
Hynes associates Surrealism, generally, with a modernist tradition of
‘history as nightmare’. Surrealism, he writes, was ‘a means of expressing
not political ideas, but the emotions behind ‘thirties politics […] of possi-
ble violence and outrage beyond the projections of reason.’77 The poetry
of the English Surrealists, though sidelined in this chapter in favour of the
movement’s political and aesthetic debates, reflects similar feelings of con-
sternation, dissonance, and barely concealed violence. Gascoyne’s ‘And the
Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’, for example, piles nightmarish images
on top of each other to the extent that the grammatical and contextual dis-
location becomes as unsettling as the images themselves. It opens,
white curtains of infinite fatigue

dominating the starborn heritage of the colonies of St Francis
but by the seventh line the poet has begun to issue threatening commands:
teach children to sin at the age of five

to cut out the eyes of their sisters with nail scissors78
The Surrealist familiarity of Gascoyne’s images—of eyeballs and vanity

products—confirms Jackaman’s description of his as a ‘purer’ interpretation
of Surrealism than was found elsewhere. An untitled poem by Hugh Sykes
Davies, published in E.L.T. Mesens’s London Bulletin in 1938, offers more
nightmarish images but, at the same time, shows signs of the poet’s reluc-
tance to simply present those images in a straightforward Surrealist manner.
The poem consists of two stanzas of anaphoric lines, each of which contrasts
an object with the poet’s Surrealist reinterpretation of that object: ‘It doesn’t
look like a finger it looks like a feather of broken glass’, ‘It doesn’t look like
an eye it looks like a bowl of rotten fruit’, ‘It doesn’t look like my mother
in the garden it looks like my father when he came up from the sea covered
with shells and tangle’, and so on.79 The images, again, remain within the
remit of familiar Surrealist imagery, but the poet is unwilling to console him-
self with the Surrealist reinterpretation: he cannot fully contest the appearance
of an object as, for example, could Magritte. The finger may not look like
a finger, it may look like a feather of broken glass, but it remains a finger.
At the end of each stanza he cracks. He turns to a ‘YOU’ and begins to
hurl out paranoid and violent threats:
KEEP YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF MY FRIENDS USE THEM ON

YOUR BITCHES OR
YOURSELVES BUT KEEP THEM OFF MY FRIENDS80
These are both nightmare poems, but the violence summoned by Sykes
Davies cannot be contained—or he will not allow it to be contained—by
familiar Surrealist methods. Surrealism both appears and retreats from view.
Figure 1.3 Photograph of Sheila Legge as the Surrealist Phantom (1936) by

Claude Cahun.81 Originally published, uncredited, on the cover of
International Surrealist Bulletin 4 (September 1936), published by
A. Zwemmer. Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections.
The English Surrealist attraction to the threatening non-presence of the

spectre is vividly represented in one of the many stunts of the International
Surrealist Exhibition. Alongside various absurdist moments, such as Dalí
giving a lecture in a deep-sea diving costume (which not only made him
inaudible, but began to suffocate him) and Dylan Thomas offering teacups
of boiled string to visitors, the English Surrealist Sheila Legge stalked the
crowd dressed as ‘the Surrealist Phantom’. She wore a ‘long white satin
dress with coral-coloured belt and shoes, her face completely covered with
roses.’82 A photograph of the Surrealist Phantom, uncredited but taken by
Claude Cahun, was chosen for the cover of the fourth International Sur
realist Bulletin (Figure 1.3). Among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, Legge
looks incongruous, a statue from another world transposed into this one.
She calls to mind the cryptic ending of Breton’s second manifesto: ‘existence
is elsewhere.’83 Indeed, the otherworldliness claimed by Breton’s early ver-
sion of Surrealism might be more accurately represented by the spectrality
of English Surrealism than by the recognisable social presence of the French
Surrealist group. English Surrealist spectrality acts as aesthetic gesture and
political praxis: the English Surrealists may not have been, as Read under-
stood them, more Communist than the Communists, but they almost proved
themselves more Surrealist than the Surréalistes.
Surrealism Put to Work: Mass-Observation

The Mass-Observation project was first announced in the correspondence
pages of the New Statesman and Nation. A letter from Geoffrey Pyke on
12 December 1936 had called for ‘an anthropological study of our own
civilisation’ after the abdication crisis of King Edward VIII.84 Charles Madge
replied to say that a group with precisely that intention had already begun
to formulate means to collect and analyse public reaction to events such as
‘the Crystal Palace-Abdication symbolic situations’. The Crystal Palace—
London’s monument to Victorian industry, empire, and leisure—had burnt
down on 30 December 1936. Titled ‘Anthropology at Home’ and dated
2 January 1937, Madge’s letter introduces Surrealist imagery to a discus-
sion of domestic anthropology. Madge writes that his group will collect ‘evi-
dence of mass wish-situations.’85 The Surrealist coincidence—derived from
Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) which speaks of repressed
desire as the underlying cause of every error or seemingly inconsequential
event—is taken as object and means of anthropological study, recast as ‘the
hidden wish’ of society.86 Madge’s letter establishes the basic programme of
Mass-Observation at its inception: the application of a Surrealist methodo
logy to an empirical field of study.
A third letter in the New Statesman and Nation, dated 30 January
1937, announced the formation of Mass-Observation itself, signed now by
Madge, Humphrey Jennings, and Tom Harrisson. Harrisson was a young
and well-published ornithologist, who had recently returned from an expe-
dition to the New Hebrides in order to begin a study of the English working
class in Bolton. As a prescient coincidence, one of Harrisson’s poems about
his New Hebridean experiences had been published alongside Madge’s first
letter, so he contacted the Blackheath group to combine projects. Mass-
Observation was, therefore, a combination of different projects and disci-
plinary methodologies. It introduced itself in this third letter as developing
‘out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man’.87
Early Mass-Observation was chaotically heterogeneous in its operations.
Its practices included sending out day-surveys to volunteers to record their
thoughts and actions as they went about a typical day, as well as embed-
ding observers (volunteers and employees) in everyday situations to report
on what they saw. Mass-Observation’s trans-disciplinary appeal is reflected
by the various contexts into which it has been historicised. It plays a role
in the documentary movement of the Thirties and Forties; in anthropol
ogy’s reverse-focus from the colonial to the domestic Other (particularly
the Northern working class); and in the broad social-democratic cultural
movement that encompasses the Left Book Club, the Picture Post, and
Penguin books. Mass-Observation also figures prominently in the biogra-
phies of its illustrious founders: it was the social-anthropological justifi-
cation for Harrisson’s undercover self-immersion in Bolton working-class
life, a project analogous to George Orwell’s time in Wigan; and it reflects
Madge and Jennings’ interests in devising a post-Surrealist ‘popular poetry’
through their experiences working for the Daily Mirror and the GPO film
unit, respectively.88
Ben Highmore and Nick Hubble have both demonstrated how Mass-
Observation approached ‘the everyday’ as the site of oppositional poli-
tics, and in particular, that it sought to counter the misrepresentations of
the mainstream media. Highmore plots a similar trajectory to my present
study and understands Mass-Observation as a synthesis of Surrealism
(though not specifically English) and Benjamin’s historical materialism. The
Benjamin-Adorno connection is actually indicated by Mass-Observation
itself, whose introductory pamphlet, titled simply Mass-Observation (January–
April 1937), lists the Institute of Social Research (the Frankfurt School) as
an organisation ‘with similar aims’ to its own.89
Mass-Observation’s first phase, from January to September 1937,
saw two publications: the aforementioned introductory pamphlet and
May the Twelfth (hereafter May 12th), the latter being the results of an
intensive study of the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937, under-
taken through press cuttings, day-surveys, and roaming observer reports.
After May 12th, Jennings left Mass-Observation and the project slowly
shook off its Surrealist inheritance to move towards institutionalised
market research. What remains of this chapter will focus on Madge and
Jennings’ contributions to Mass-Observation’s earliest publications, and
will propose that Mass-Observation can be understood as their effort
to negotiate the perceived incompatibility between English culture and
‘French’ Surrealism.
However, while Madge and Jennings brought a Surrealist influence to
Mass-Observation, Harrisson brought his more empirical experiences, and
it was precisely the antagonism between these two arms of operation that
made Mass-Observation so fascinating and pioneering. That antagonism
would also facilitate Mass-Observation’s co-option by market forces and
the re-direction of its energies. Early Mass-Observation’s productive internal
tensions can be summarised as the disjuncture between its Surrealist will-
ingness to embrace contradiction and fragmentation, and its anthropologi-
cal effort to categorise social inconsequentialities into a meaningful system.
This internal dialectic has divided critical attention to Mass-Observation.
Highmore argues that Mass-Observation’s identity was ‘necessarily unsta-
ble’.90 Samuel Hynes reduces the project to ‘a complex example of the con-
fusions of young intellectuals of the time’.91 As early as the first pamphlet,
Madge and Harrisson recognise that,
Already, differences within the group have been a fruitful source of

new ideas and new methods of approach. Provided they do not lead
to the formation of factions, such differences will continue to be our
life-blood, and the guarantee that we do not become incapable of
development.92
Similarly, one of Harrisson’s anthropologist friends, the Australian Jock

Marshall, records in his diary on 14 February 1937: ‘Catchword at the
moment: “esoteric synthesis”’.93
The Mass-Observation pamphlet introduces the project differently
according to Madge and Harrisson’s personal interpretations (Jennings
was not involved with this pamphlet): ‘Tom Harrisson believes that Mass-
Observation, by laying open to doubt all existing philosophies of life as pos-
sibly incomplete, yet by refusing to neglect the significance of any of them,
may make a new synthesis’; while, ‘In the other author’s opinion [Madge],
Mass-Observation is an instrument for collecting facts, not a means for pro-
ducing a synthetic philosophy, a super-science or super-politics.’94 Curiously,
Madge as the empiricist and Harrisson as the dialectician is the reverse of
what one would have expected from the communist poet and the anthro-
pologist who prided himself on non-interventionist observation. May 12th
(September 1937) establishes Mass-Observation’s ‘tripartite division of
labour’95, with Jennings’s contribution as the aesthetic ‘business of present-
ing results’.96
Esoteric Syntheses, Constellations, and Dream-Images

How did Mass-Observation put to work the lessons of Surrealist political
aesthetics (or, indeed, Frankfurt School historical materialism), and to what
English conditions were those lessons applied? The Surrealist influence is
most evident in the lists of social phenomenon that Madge, Jennings, and
Harrisson propose to be Mass-Observation’s objects of study. One such list
is offered in the third New Statesman and Nation letter, which presents
Mass-Observation’s interests:
Behaviour of people at war memorials.

Shouts and gestures of motorists.
The aspidistra cult.
Anthropology of football pools.
Bathroom behaviour.
Beards, armpits, eyebrows.
Anti-semitism.
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.
Funerals and undertakers.
Female taboos about eating.
The private lives of midwives.97
Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto used the same technique of juxtaposing

moments of heightened emotional significance with arbitrary, banal, and
everyday phenomena. The Mass-Observation list enacts a radical compres-
sion of the hierarchy of social forms, in which anti-Semitism is sandwiched
between body hair and dirty jokes.98 Mass-Observation remaps ‘the political’
to include everyday experiences and desires, and to diminish that which
constitutes politics in the mainstream media.
Mass-Observation’s list serves as a synecdoche of its broader project of
constructing constellations of what it called ‘mass wish-situations’. In this
way, Mass-Observation adopts ‘the constellation’ as the appropriate aes-
thetic representation of socio-historical processes—this is to adopt Benjamin
and Adorno’s historical method, rather than the diagrammatic and crude-
dialectical family tree model offered by Jackaman. Indeed, astrological and
meteorological metaphors recur in Mass-Observation’s founding docu-
ments. The third letter to the newspaper promises that Mass-Observation’s
‘observers will also provide the points from which can be plotted weather-maps
of public feeling in a crisis.’99 The pamphlet describes participants as ‘the
meteorological stations from whose reports a weather-map of popular feel-
ing can be compiled’.100
Mass-Observation sought a radically democratic and participatory means
of writing history. The May 12th project collected 43 observer reports,
77 questionnaire replies, and 12 reports from Mass-Observation operatives
(including Jennings himself) into sections minimally arranged according
to location and chronology. The text reflects something of Madge’s inter-
est in a popular poetry and—like the constellations and dream-images of
Benjamin and Adorno—inserts itself into a modernist tradition of collage
and Shklovskian defamiliarisation. As the Mass-Observation pamphlet
explains, ‘The image, in our sense, is something between an idea and a sen-
sation. It is more vivid than an abstract idea; it is more intangible than
a concrete sensation’.101 The pamphlet also quotes Rimbaud: ‘J’ai seul la
clé de cette parade sauvage’.102 This phrase clearly anticipates Adorno’s
account of the constellation as the ‘number-combination’ that will unlock
the ‘heavily guarded safe’ of history.
Its quasi-Surrealist concept of ‘the image’ was carried into Mass-
Observation largely by Jennings. His absence from later Mass-Observation
publications, especially First Year’s Work (1938) and Britain (1939), is evi-
dent in how they mediate and systematically arrange their data, which indi-
cates a greater authorial presence than May 12th, which constellates but
does not interpret its raw data, in order to produce an image that is faithful
to the diversity and discrepancies of the social. Jeremy MacClancy explains
Jennings’s faith in the Surrealist image:
While basing his ideas of the image on Breton’s conception of “the

Surrealist object” (i.e. of a person’s unconscious thought made con-
crete), Jennings held that the image, to be valid, had to be discovered,
not invented.103
For Jennings, this elusive image was to be found through constellated raw
data, and could only be struck upon through coincidence. In his review of
Read’s Surrealism in Contemporary Poetry and Prose (in which Jennings
had previously published proto-Mass-Observation ‘Reports’), Jennings had
refuted the role of intentionality in Surrealism:
“Coincidences” have the infinite freedom of appearing anywhere, any-

time, to anyone: in broad daylight to those whom we most despise in
places we must have loathed: not even to us at all: probably least to
petty seekers after mystery and poetry on deserted sea-shores and in
misty junk shops.104
In advance of the International Surrealist Exhibition, the Architectural

Review had run a competition that called for a similar attentiveness to
moments of coincidental Surrealism. The journal invited readers to submit
photographs of what it called ‘spontaneous examples of surrealism dis-
cerned in English holiday resorts’.105 This competition was a response to
what Paul Nash had called ‘Seaside Surrealism’. Nash believed that English
seaside towns had become crowded with incongruous buildings and monu-
ments, which revealed only their wealthy patrons’ vanity. The juxtaposition
of the architectural ugliness and the natural beauty of the English seaside
produced, for Nash, a kind of embedded Surrealism.106 Nash’s sense of an
embedded Surrealism received its most poignant representation in his paint-
ing ‘Totes Meer’ (1940–1941) in which a dump of wrecked German aircraft
morph into the ‘Dead Sea’ of the painting’s title.
Jennings’s belief in the coincidence, in radical chance, positions him on the
side of Benjamin in the latter’s debate with Adorno. Benjamin’s dream-image
methodology, for Adorno, ‘lacks one thing: mediation’. Adorno continued,
the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to turn into
a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wished to put it very
drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads
of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched.107
Jennings’ Surrealism was strikingly similar to Benjamin’s. Formally, the

Arcades Project and May 12th are similar, but Jennings’ own P andæmonium:
Coming of the Machine as seen by Contemporary Observers (posthumously
arranged and published in 1985) bears even greater similarities to the
project that occupied the last decade of Benjamin’s life. Jennings intended
Pandæmonium to be a sprawling collection of quotes from disparate texts
that charted the arrival of the industrial age in Britain just as Benjamin
sought to capture the rise of consumer capitalism and its emblem of the
shopping arcade by way of literary collage. In his introduction, Jennings
promises to ‘present an imaginative history’ of the Industrial Revolution
via ‘what I call Images’; he emphasises that he writes ‘present, not describe
or analyse’.108 An introduction by Mary-Lou Jennings compares the book
with the propaganda films her father made during the Second World War,
especially ‘Listen to Britain’ (1941), as ‘series of images carefully placed to
illuminate not just themselves in isolation but each other’.109 Another intro-
duction, from Madge, is more explicit about the affinities between this proj-
ect and Benjamin’s. Pulling together Rimbaud and Thomas Hardy, Madge
writes that the passages in Jennings’s book
are what later poets have called “illuminations”, “Moments of

Vision”—some obviously clearer than others—some intentional,
others unintentional—but all in some degree with this window-
opening quality—it is this which differentiates these pieces of writing
from purely economic or political, or social analyses.110
Mass-Observation was also able to answer the pair of questions that had
dogged English Surrealism: why now, and why here? Mass-Observation rec-
ognised and exacerbated a moment of historical rupture that might allow
for the interruption of the continuum of history and a moment of dialec-
tical, profane, illumination. This rupture was the abdication crisis that had
prompted the foundation of Mass-Observation. The image of English con-
servative anachrony had faltered, the King was no longer the king, and the
time was out of joint.
The Mass-Observation pamphlet recognised the shock of the moment:
‘At last England had to face a situation to which there was no stock
response’.111 The historical disjuncture, though, was rapidly glazed over.
The dominant image was replaced, and modernised, through the spectacular
coronation of the new king. May 12th investigated how English people expe-
rienced that return of the monarchical icon, and attempted to contest how
the event was constructed by the mass media in thrall to power. The collage
form of May 12th was Jennings’s doing, and emphasises the disjuncture
of the moment, as opposed to the narrativising impulse of the mainstream
media. Highmore describes Jennings’ dialectical image ‘as a dynamic
moment capable of interrupting historical narratives of progress’.112 In his
own introduction to the formal arrangement of May 12th, Jennings registers
his debt to avant-garde aesthetics in the technical language of ‘close-up and
long shot, detail and ensemble.’113
Early Mass-Observation managed to adopt Surrealist tactics without
attracting the accusations of obscurantism and intellectualism that normally
dogged Surrealism, French and English. Mass-Observation put Surrealism
to work with vigorously populist intentions. The pamphlet emphasises the
importance of verbal clarity: ‘The facts must be made accessible in plain
English which everyone can understand.’114 The democratic though naive
charm of May 12th is evident in the array of topics to which it pays atten-
tion, from the Vegetarian Society to Haile Selassie to dog behaviour. Despite
its oppositional politics, the text conveys the atmosphere of enthusiasm and
revelry of coronation day, through indiscriminate, demotic, reportage. The
pages of semi-anonymous reports quite literally produce a form of collective
authorship that preserves what Hubble calls ‘the necessity for simultaneous
multiple personalities’ that Mass-Observation inherited from Lautréamont
via Surrealism.115 Unfortunately, the text was too bulky and expensive. It did
not sell well, and it damaged Mass-Observation’s reputation because many of
its contributors, its compendium of authors, could not actually afford it.116
The Facts Simply Multiply Like Maggots

Mass-Observation’s inheritance from English Surrealism included the latter’s
uncertain sense of its own political agency. The problems of party allegiance
faced by the Surrealist movements became in Mass-Observation problems
of class perspective. Mass-Observation claimed to be anti-specialist and dis-
interestedly democratic, which Tom Jeffrey describes as Mass-Observation’s
faith in the truthfulness of unmediated forms of representation, the ‘popu-
list demand that democracy should mean what it says, rule by the people,
appraised of the facts.’117 However, Mass-Observation’s adoption of a host
of ideological abstractions—not least ‘the facts’ and ‘the people’—indicates
a discrepancy between its rhetoric and its practice.
In the pamphlet, Madge and Harrisson introduce Mass-Observation as
politically uncommitted and aiming simply to contribute to ‘the social con-
sciousness of the time’.118 They recognise the political polyvalence of unme-
diated data, and write that the information generated by Mass-Observation
would be of equal use to ‘the pacifist who wishes to prevent recruiting and
to the War Office which wants to stimulate it.’119 A review reprinted in
First Year’s Work from the Daily Worker (16 June 1937), written by Madge
and Jennings’ old Surrealist colleague and committed Communist Roger
Roughton, approves of this non-partisan position: ‘A means to widening
our social consciousness. This is the merit of the movement’.120 However,
Mass-Observation’s objectivity is compromised by the gaze of its embedded
observers: the Mass-Observer is, necessarily, an outsider to working-class
communities; Mass-Observation’s founders were middle class and Oxbridge
educated. Like the ambiguity of Orwell’s attention to the miners’ bodies in
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Mass-Observation tends to treat the work-
ing class as something unfamiliar, foreign, even primal. In its description
of precisely what Mass-Observers will do, the pamphlet makes the bestial
metaphor explicit: ‘His squalid boarding-house will become for the observer
what the entrails of the dog-fish are to the zoologist—the material of science
and the source of its divina voluptas’.121
Further press reactions to May 12th are recorded in the post-Jennings
text, First Year’s Work. The reprinted reviews serve as a reflexive reversal
of Mass-Observation’s gaze, from social phenomena to Mass-Observation
itself, Mass-Observation as a social phenomenon. Mass-Observation’s poli
tical ambiguity is reflected in the range of criticism, which admonishes its
excessively polemical perspective (The Spectator: ‘Aggressively leftish’122)
on the one hand, and also faults its lack of ideological mediation (Listener:
‘The facts simply multiply like maggots’123) on the other.
Madge and Harrisson were surprised that the left should be so wary of
Mass-Observation: ‘The left, in dailies as well as non-, are the more ready to
be hostile. This is the reverse of what we expected when we inaugurated Mass-
Observation’.124 Tom Jeffrey suggests that not only were Mass-Observation’s
organisers politically biased, but so were its volunteers: ‘Of the very small
number of lower middle-class diarists who were members of political parties,
most were members of the Communist Party.’125 To have claimed absolute
political impartiality was a naive gesture, especially in light of the found-
ers’ political connections. Madge, for example, was himself a member of the
Communist Party. Early Mass-Observation maintained a fundamentally anti-
authoritarian impulse: the desire to counteract mass-media representations.
But Jennings’s early departure cut short this initial trajectory. He left
because, according to Madge, he shied away from what he felt to be a banal
streak in Harrisson’s ‘expressionist quasi-anthropology’.126 He felt that
the original dialectic of Mass-Observation had been undermined. Madge
remained in a generally losing power battle with Harrisson (who had not
been involved with May 12th) ‘and so the Surrealist potential of Mass-
Observation was totally neglected for the sake of more mundane and nar-
rowly empirical work.’127 Madge left Mass-Observation in 1940. During
the war, Mass-Observation was commissioned to research public morale for
the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information. After the
war, and after Harrisson’s departure, Mass-Observation was registered as a
limited company and turned to market research. Highmore has speculated
that, ‘If Mass-Observation is an example of an avant-garde “going public”,
then perhaps the tendency towards bureaucracy was an inevitable condition
of its continuation (Mass-Observation as an arm of government or commer-
cial research).’128
After leaving Mass-Observation, Jennings continued to make films for the
GPO Film Unit, later the Crown Film Unit, including ‘London Can Take
It’ (1940), ‘Listen to Britain’ (1942), and ‘Fires Were Started’ (1943). These
propaganda films not only contain iconic constructions of ‘Englishness’—
resilient, sensible, stoic—but in their depiction of the bombed-out landscapes
of Blitz London, they also reflect Jennings’s enduring interest in an embedded
Surrealism, in seeking moments when the familiar is made strange and excep-
tional. Madge would conduct research for the National Council for Social
and Economic Research under J.M. Keynes. As the English Surrealist Group
disintegrated, and Mass-Observation’s founders went their separate ways,
Julian Trevelyan (involved in both groups) captured the mood in his diary:
Surrealism lost much of its impetus during the war. It became absurd
to compose Surrealist confections when high explosives could do it so
much better, and when German soldiers with Tommy-guns descended
from the clouds on parachutes dressed as nuns. Life had caught up
with Surrealism or Surrealism with life, and for a giddy moment we in
England lived the irrational movement to its death.129
Mass-Observation’s potential for change—even if social-democratic rather

than revolutionary—was slowly eliminated as it diverged from its Surrealist
origins. Jeffrey positions Mass-Observation in relation to a broader shift in
social organisation across the Second World War:
It is not so much that Mass-Observation moved away from its original

power base and closer to the centre of power, but that power moved
to that centre ground of which Mass-Observation was, in a complex
and sometimes marginal way, a part.130
Thus, Mass-Observation’s fate is marked as an instance of co-optation. The

mechanisms of modern capitalism (marketing, consumer research) engulfed
the practice that originally sought to undo them.
Notes
1. Edouard Roditi, ‘A New Reality’, The Oxford Outlook 10:49 (Summer 1929):
296.
2. Alan Young’s Dada and After: Extremist Modernism and English Literature
(Manchester: Manchester University Press 1983) offers an overview of the
English literary establishment’s various reactions to Surrealism.
3. Other accounts of the movement are offered in Michel Remy, Surrealism in
Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate 1999), Rob Jackaman, The Course of English Sur-
realist Poetry Since the 1930s (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press 1989), S amuel
Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s
(London: Bodley Head 1979), and P.C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in
England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1971).
4. Herbert Read, ‘Superrealism’, Times Literary Supplement (11 January 1936): 35.
5. André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, in Manifestos of Surrealism,
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: University of Michigan
Press 1972), 26.
6. Remy, Surrealism in Britain, 63; David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism
(London: Enitharmon Press 2000), 13.
7. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 14.
8. Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 48.
9. Young, Dada and After, 134.
10. See Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press 1990).
11. See Maxim Gorky et al., Soviet Writer’s Congress 1934 (London: Lawrence and
Wishart 1977).
12. Cyril Connolly, ‘It’s got here at last!’, New Statesman and Nation (14 December
1935). The New Statesman and Nation was a left-wing weekly notably
receptive to Surrealism. Its correspondence pages later saw the birth of
Mass-Observation.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
16. Roditi, ‘A New Reality’, 295. While these images of middle-class society reflect
something of the historical moment, they might also suggest something of the
class background and cultural capital of the would-be English Surrealists.
17. David Gascoyne, ‘Premier manifeste Anglais du surréalisme (fragment)’, Cahiers
d’art 10 (June 1935): 106. My translation.
18. Herbert Read, ‘Why the English have no taste’, Minotaure 7 (June 1935): 67.
19. Ibid.
20. Herbert Read, Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber Ltd. 1936), 35.
21. Roditi, ‘A New Reality’, 295.
22. Ibid.
23. Gascoyne, ‘Premier manifeste Anglais du surréalisme’, 106.
24. Sam Haile, quoted in Michel Remy (ed), On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight:
Surrealist Poetry in Britain (Manchester: Carcarnet 2013), 45.
25. Jackaman, The Course of English Surrealist Poetry Since the 1930s, 77.
26. Read, Surrealism, 20.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 45.
29. Herbert Read, ‘Surrealism – the dialectic of art’, Left Review (July 1936, Supple-
ment): iii.
30. Read, Surrealism, 26.
31. Ibid.
32. Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 26–27.
33. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-
Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006), 185.
34. Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, 127.
36. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (Oxford: Routledge 2002), 83.
37. Walter Benjamin, ‘Konvolut N1, 9’, in The Arcades Project trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Belknap Press 2002), 458.
38. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Arcades
Project, 13.
39. Theodor Adorno, ‘Looking Back on Surrealism’, in Notes to Literature Vol. 1,
trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Colombia University Press 1991),
86–87.
40. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso
2002), 50.
41. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (2001), avail-
able at http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html (accessed 19 January
2016).
43. Charles Madge, ‘Surrealism for the English’, New Verse 6 (December 1933): 14.
44. Ibid.
45. Humphrey Jennings, ‘Review of Surrealism by Herbert Read’, in Contemporary
Poetry and Prose May 1936–August 1967: Ten Numbers in One Volume, ed.
Roger Roughton (London: Frank Cass and Company Ltd. 1968), 167.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 168.
48. Ibid., 167.
49. Remy, Surrealism in Britain, 77–78.
50. Surrealist Group in England, International Surrealist Bulletin 4 (September
1936): 2.
51. Ibid., 3.
52. Ibid., 4–6.
53. Ibid.
54. See André Breton, ‘Speech to the Congress of Writers (1935)’, in Manifestos of
Surrealism, 234–242.
55. Lewis, Dada Turns Red, 153.
56. Surrealist Group in England, International Surrealist Bulletin, 12.
57. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Letter from England’, Poetry (Chicago) 49 (November 1936):
101–102.
59. Lord Hastings, ‘The Surrealists’, Left Review 2:4 (January 1936): 186.
60. Alick West, ‘Surréalisme in Literature’, Left Review 2:10 Supplement
(July 1936): vii.
61. Left Review 2:10 (July 1936): 509.
63. Roger Roughton, ‘Surrealism and Communism’, in Contemporary Poetry and
Prose, 74.
64. Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 87.
65. See Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (London: Routledge
2003), especially its first chapter, ‘Difficulty as Fashion’.
66. Ezra Pound, ‘The Coward Surrealists’, in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, 136.
67. Ibid.
68. Roger Roughton, ‘Eyewash, Do You?: A Reply to Mr Pound’, in Contemporary
Poetry and Prose, 137.
69. Ibid., 137–138.
70. David Gascoyne, Collected Journals: 1936–1942 (London: Skoob Books 1991), 73.
71. Ibid., 74.
72. Hynes, The Auden Generation, 222.
73. Ibid., 227.
75. Remy, Surrealism in Britain, 21.
76. Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works, trans. Alexis
Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change 1994).
78. David Gascoyne, ‘And the Seventh Dream Is the Dream of Isis’, in Selected
Poems (London: Enitharmon Press 1994), 23, lines 1–2, 7–8.
79. Edward B. Germain (ed.), Surrealist Poetry in English (London: Penguin 1978),
104–105, lines 1, 12–13.
80. Ibid., lines 9–10.
81. International Surrealist Bulletin 4 (September 1936): 1.
82. Remy, Surrealism in Britain, 76.
84. Geoffrey Pyke, ‘King and Country’, New Statesman and Nation (12 December
1936).
85. Charles Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’, New Statesman and Nation
(2 January 1937).
86. Ibid.
87. Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings, and Charles Madge, ‘Anthropology at
Home’, New Statesman and Nation (30 January 1937).
88. Histories of Mass-Observation include the following: in relation to everyday
life, Nick Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History,
Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and Highmore, Everyday
Life and Cultural Theory; and in relation to British Cultural Studies, Tom
Jeffrey, Mass-Observation: A Short History (Mass Observation Occasional
Paper No. 10, University of Sussex Library 1999) and Jeremy MacClancy,
‘Brief Encounter: The Meeting, in Mass-Observation, of British Surrealism and
Popular Anthropology’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute 1:3
(September 1995): 495–512.
89. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Mass-Observation (London: Frederick
Muller Ltd. 1937), 60.
90. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 77.
92. Madge and Harrisson, Mass-Observation, 33.
93. Quoted in Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life, 116.
95. Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life, 116.
96. Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation
Day-Surveys 1937 by over Two Hundred Observers (London: Faber and Faber
Ltd. 1937), x.
97. Harrisson, Jennings, and Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’.
98. Gascoyne’s diaries record the Surrealists’ involvement in demonstrations
against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the East End in late 1936. Gascoyne,
Collected Journals: 1936–1942, 20.
99. Harrisson, Jennings, and Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’.
101. Ibid., 38.
102. Ibid., 26.
103. MacClancy, ‘Brief Encounter’, 497.
104. Jennings, ‘Review of Surrealism by Herbert Read,’ 168.
105. Architectural Review (July 1936), 42.
106. Paul Nash, ‘Swanage or Seaside Surrealism’, Architectural Review (April 1936),
151–154. Nash’s seaside surrealism is discussed in Ben Highmore, ‘Itinerant
Surrealism: British Surrealism either side of the Second World War’, in A Com-
panion to British Art: 1600 to the Present, eds Dana Arnold and David Peters
Corbett (Oxford: Blackwell 2013).
107. Theodor Adorno, ‘Letter to Walter Benjamin (10th November 1938)’ in
Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso 1980), 129.
108. Humphrey Jennings, Pandæmonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine
as Seen by Contemporary Observers (London: André Deutsch 1985), xxxv.
109. Ibid., xi.
110. Ibid., xxxvi.
113. Jennings and Madge, May the Twelfth, 90.
115. Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory, 87.
116. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 95–96.
117. Jeffrey, Mass-Observation: A Short History, 3.
119. Ibid., 46.
120. Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work 1937–1938 ed. Charles Madge and Tom
Harrisson (London: Lindsay Drummond 1938), 61.
122. Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work 1937–1938, 56.
123. Ibid., 58.
126. Charles Madge, ‘The Birth of Mass Observation’, Times Literary Supplement
(5 November 1976), quoted in Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 76.
127. MacClancy, ‘Brief Encounter’, 503.
129. Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days (London: MacGibbon and Kee 1957), 80.
2 Alexander Trocchi and the
Dissolution of the Avant-Garde
‘I’m all the time aware that it’s reality and not literature I’m engaged in.’
—Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book (1960)1
The gradual transformation of early English Surrealism into Mass Obser-

vation Ltd. is but one instance of the co-optation of avant-garde practice—
that is, of the process through which avant-garde practice is put to work for
the same conditions and institutions that it originally sought to challenge.
The Situationist International (SI) would later name this process récupéra-
tion (hereafter ‘recuperation’). The SI recognised that recuperation was the
self-defence mechanism of the phase of capitalist society that it also named
the society of the spectacle; recuperation was a subtler and therefore more
insidious equivalent to censorship or physical coercion in more overtly
authoritarian societies. Recuperation reduces political antagonisms to com-
modified images. The SI’s central impresario Guy Debord claimed that spec-
tacular societies use ‘culture to bury all historical memory.’2 Recuperation
submerges criticisms and antagonisms into the amorphous flow of images
that regulates the desires of spectacular society’s subjects.
Debord’s exposition of the spectacle and its mechanisms corresponds with
other critiques of the increasing aestheticisation of politics in the twentieth
century. Walter Benjamin, famously, called for a politicisation of aesthet-
ics in retaliation.3 Debord located the origins of the society of the specta-
cle at roughly the same historical moment from which arose the historical
avant-garde tradition—the first two decades of the twentieth c entury—yet
the spectacle was to develop far beyond and far faster than the avant-garde
critique. The spectacle affected bloodless conquests over each successive
manifestation of the avant-garde tradition by hypostatising and canonising
those movements—that is, by recuperating them.
The SI was conscious of its inheritance from the historical avant-garde
tradition, and was painfully aware of the inevitability of its own recupera-
tion. Nonetheless, its rhetoric maintained a millenarian self-confidence: as
one of its declarations prophesied, ‘The situationists, of whom you believe
yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you.’4 So instead of
abandoning the project of the historical avant-garde, the SI sought to refine it.
48 Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde
In Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord asserts what was vital about the
SI in relation to its predecessors:
Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it; surrealism sought

to realize art without abolishing it. The critical position since devel-
oped by the situationists has shown that the abolition and realization
of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.5
Debord’s articulation of the SI’s project anticipates Peter Bürger’s famous

account of the historical avant-garde’s mission as ‘the destruction of art as
an institution set off from the praxis of life.’6 However, Debord had a more
expansive and abstract conception of art: he was concerned with its general
character within capitalist society, rather than its solely institutional pres-
ence. In its correction of the historical avant-garde’s dialectic of negation,
the SI posited itself as the culmination and conclusion of the avant-garde
project.
The SI’s self-identification as the last avant-garde might seem arrogant, or
at least blindly optimistic, but it is a seductive proposal on two counts. First,
the SI stood at a historical juncture when it could, like Benjamin’s angel of
history, look backwards and recognise its own genealogy. This historicis-
ing perspective allowed for Debord’s re-evaluation of the Dada–Surrealist
project. ‘For the first time in history’, Debord wrote,
the arts of all ages and civilizations can be known and accepted
together, and the fact that it has become possible to collect and recol-
lect all these art-historical memories marks the end of the world of art.
In this age of museums in which artistic communication is no longer
possible, all the previous expressions of art can be accepted equally,
because whatever particular communication problems they may have
had are eclipsed by all the present-day obstacles to communication in
general.7
The second reason why the SI’s self-identification as the culmination of a cer-
tain avant-garde lineage might be worth entertaining is also an epistemolog-
ical one. As the twentieth century progressed, the principle entities against
which the historical avant-garde tradition defined itself—the nation-state,
industrial production, religion, commerce—were transformed. The histori-
cal conditions to which French Surrealists responded with internationalism,
or Italian Futurists with nationalism, changed. The SI stood on the cusp
between the historical avant-garde tradition and a transformed, amorphous,
and less identitarian version of avant-garde practice, more suited to an age
of post-statist politics and post-national identities.
For the SI, this transformation of avant-garde practice was also a tactical
move, a going-underground to evade the threat of recuperation, a response
to the rise of the spectacle, which had transformed the terrain on which
Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde 49
aesthetics and politics meet. This shift, from the political cell formations
common to Bürger’s historical avant-garde groups through to more diffuse
forms of avant-garde praxis that do not necessarily insist on any particular
‘-ism’, I shall call ‘the dissolution of the avant-garde’. A unique contribution
to that dissolution was made by Alexander Trocchi, and this chapter will use
his work to begin to theorise how avant-gardist impulses operate in culture
after the dissolution of the historical avant-garde tradition.
It would not be unreasonable to assume that, when I propose a ‘dis-
solution of the avant-garde’ as an historical marker, I might use Trocchi
as a representative of a postmodernist approach that succeeded the out-
lier or radical modernism of the historical avant-garde tradition. For Sadie
Plant, for example, the SI represented the movement from modernism into
postmodernism.8 While Trocchi’s novels do brush against what has been
described as a postmodern aesthetic, his work—and indeed the work of
most of the British Situationists from this point in the book onwards—is
more productively considered late modernist. It does not completely break
from the historical avant-garde tradition, but nor does it straightforwardly
continue that tradition. Rather, it contemplates and corrects the work of
Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. ‘The dissolution of the avant-garde’ thus
serves also as an historiographical concept to mark the movement from one
phase of modernism into a later one—a late modernism that acts in full
knowledge of the tradition into which it has placed itself. As T.S. Eliot wrote
in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1921), ‘Some one said: “The dead
writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.”
Precisely, and they are that which we know.’9
While the so-called ‘belatedness’ of modernism in Britain emphasises
the temporal gap between these two phases, I do not mean to suggest that
any such phases are historically determined. Rather, ‘the dissolution of the
avant-garde’ emphasises that modernism was and is a project—and, more
than that, an incomplete project.
Trocchi and the Situationist International

The SI was founded in Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, in 1957.10 Though it was a
conglomeration of avant-garde groupings of varying levels of obscurity, the
SI was primarily a continuation of the project of the Lettrist International,
which had itself broken from Isidore Isou’s Lettrism movement in 1952
with the declaration that ‘we believe that the most urgent expression of
freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent
freedom.’11
At the SI’s founding conference there was one Brit, the artist Ralph
Rumney, whose involvement with the fledgling organisation was soon cur-
tailed when he was expelled for the heinous crime of failing to submit on
time a psychogeographical report on Venice. Rumney had been invited to
the conference after finding himself a part of the same ‘cult of drinking and
thinking’ as Debord in Paris, to which Rumney had fled to avoid National
Service.12 For the founding, Rumney asked to be recorded as the represen-
tative of the London Psychogeographical Committee, ‘to make our move-
ment sound international’, even though he was its only member.13 Though
Rumney’s career as a Situationist was brief—‘I was only in the thing for 6 or
8 months […] it’s really not my profession or vocation in life to be a sort of
professional ex-situationist’14—his experience demonstrates the direct link
between Surrealism and Situationism in Britain. He first learned of modern
art through Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1936); later married Pegeen Gug-
genheim, daughter of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who had once
been the lover of the British Surrealist Roland Penrose, who had helped to
found London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). In 1960 Rumney
managed to screen Debord’s controversial Hurlements en faveur de Sade at
the ICA; he would later marry Michèle Bernstein, another founding member
of the SI, previously married to Debord.
There was another British member at the time of the SI’s founding, though
not present at Cosio d’Arroscia: the Scot Alexander Trocchi. Born in Glasgow
in 1925, Trocchi lived an international life. After university, and after a brief
stint in the Royal Navy, he lived in France, Mexico, and the United States.
He edited an influential literary review, and wrote novels of varying levels
of seditiousness, of which the most famous (and least seditious) are Young
Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960). After his involvement in its counter-
culture of the 1960s, Trocchi remained in London, running an antiquarian
bookstall. For most of his adult life, Trocchi was also addicted to heroin. He
was associated with the SI for roughly a decade, from his first encounters
with the Lettrist International around 1955, to his expulsion from the SI in
1964.15 Membership of the SI was always precarious, so Trocchi’s was a
long innings, though he was mostly a Situationist in absentia.
Trocchi’s voyage took him from novelist to ‘cosmonaut of inner space’,
the leader of project sigma, an effort to radically reorganise cultural pro-
duction that was as ambitious as it was elusive. (Trocchi asked that sigma
never be capitalised: like the SI’s refusal of the term ‘Situationism’, this was
an effort to resist recuperation.16) When looking back at Trocchi’s work, we
must temporarily put aside our reservations about biographical readings,
primarily because Trocchi insisted on the mutual identity of his work and
his life. His fiction is directly informed by his experiences in the Parisian
literary scene of the early 1950s, the New York and San Francisco beatnik
and junkie scenes of the late 1950s, and the hip circles of West London in
the early 1960s. Trocchi’s individual progression parallels the shift from the
artistic provocations of the Lettrist International to the unified theoretical
program developed by the SI. Trocchi represents the earliest British interpre-
tation of Situationist practice, and he stands at the boundary between the
historical avant-garde and its dissolution. Trocchi never attempted to estab-
lish a British section of the SI—though this happened without him in 1967,
more on that later in this book—and was recorded as being of ‘no section’.17
In his literary practice and his experiments with radical organisation, Trocchi
began the Anglicisation of Situationist theory that would form the basis of
a distinctly British movement.
From Young Adam to Cain’s Book

Trocchi first met Debord around 1955 in Paris, where Trocchi was living
and working as a founding editor of the literary review Merlin.18 Andrew
Murray Scott locates the meeting with Debord—then a Lettrist—as a turn-
ing point for Trocchi, though Merlin had ended in 1954 and Trocchi would
leave for New York in 1956. Trocchi’s letters from the time adopt a fiery
political tone that had been absent from his Merlin editorials, which is
something that Scott attributes to Trocchi’s encounter with the Lettrists’
revolutionary ideas.
Under the Romanian Isidore Isou, the Lettrist movement believed that it
could reinvent language from the letter up. The Lettrist International had
split from Isou’s group with the demand that any aesthetic experiments
must have a political character. Soon after his meeting with Debord, Trocchi
wrote, ‘I reject the entire system […] the answer is revolution. Not in the
objective, idealistic sense, but there in the heart of everyman […] the Revolution
has already taken place in me.’19 The guardedly autobiographical Cain’s
Book suggests that Trocchi gravitated towards the Lettrists because he had
exhausted the options open to him as editor of a literary journal. The novel’s
pseudonymous narrator Joe Necchi confesses, ‘During my last year in Paris
I had drifted away from my former acquaintances. I could no longer share a
common purpose with them.’20
The Lettrists were active, though lesser-known, participants in the post-
war literary scene of Paris’s Left Bank, patrons of down-and-out cafés
around Saint-Germain-des-Près rather than the Existentialist haunts of Les
Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. As early as October 1950 Trocchi rec-
ognised that the world of Les Deux Magots was in intellectual decline. ‘It is
all the long hair, the talk, the obvious tourist traps,’ he wrote, ‘that lead me
to think (I may change my mind) that the creative centre is in the process of
moving on.’21
Trocchi had previously celebrated Existentialism. In a 1953 ‘Letter from
Paris’ for the journal NIMBUS, he wrote that ‘Sartre and Existentialism
replaced Breton and Surrealism as the most powerful single force in French
letters’. This supersession, as Trocchi saw it, was because Surrealism was ‘a
largely negative attitude’ while Existentialism was ‘vibrant and a philosophy
of action.’22 Nonetheless, in his editorial for the second issue of Merlin,
Trocchi had decided that his journal would not take sides, but must ‘hit at
all clots of rigid categories in criticism and life, and all that is unintelligently
partisan.’23
Merlin was first published in spring 1952 with a print run of 1,000. The
first issue contained articles and short stories, including one by Trocchi, and
translations from Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. Merlin and its imprint Col-
lection Merlin were financed by the notorious publisher Maurice Girodias
in exchange for pornographic ‘dirty books’ written by the Merlin editors for
Girodias’s Olympia Press.24 Collection Merlin went on to publish Samuel
Beckett (Watt [1953] and the first English translation of Molloy [1955]),
Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal (1954), Austryn Wainhouse’s translation of
Sade’s Justine (1953), and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959).25
Like his contemporaries Beckett and Richard Wright, Trocchi found in
Paris a literary culture not subject to the cultural restraints and repressions
of his homeland. Trocchi’s first novel, Young Adam, adopts a Francophile
register even though its setting is the canal between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The first-person narrator, Joe, lives and works on a barge with a married
couple. When a woman’s dead body is found in the canal, it becomes appar-
ent that Joe is responsible in some way for her death. The novel concludes
with Joe watching the trial of a falsely accused man, Goon, who is con-
demned to hang.
The story draws on Trocchi’s seafaring experience, but its sparse style
owes more to trends in French literature than to what Trocchi felt to be the
parochial nationalism of contemporary Scottish writers around Hugh
MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance. Most obviously, in story and style,
Young Adam initiates a dialogue with Albert Camus’s The Outsider (1942).
The two novels are most proximate when they arrive at their respective
murder trials, when their protagonists ruminate on the authority of the court
and the gulf between its rigid formality and their own unstructured lives.
Neither protagonist, Trocchi’s Joe nor Camus’s Meursault, can identify with
the well-rehearsed routines of the courtroom and the symbolic operations
of the law. The juridical proceedings serve to exclude the subject from both
the event, the murder, and its representation, the trial. Meursault observes,
‘Things were happening without me even intervening. My fate was being
decided without anyone asking my opinion.’26 Meursault’s lawyer speaks
for his client without consultation, so ventriloquism becomes ‘another way
of excluding me from the proceedings, reducing me to insignificance.’27
These sentiments are echoed in Young Adam, but here we know that
Goon, the man on trial, is innocent, because Joe has confessed obliquely to
the crime in his narration. Goon’s very name, of course, tells of his victim-
hood. Joe’s first person narration even begins to occupy Goon’s perspective,
which constitutes another degree of misrepresentation:
Throughout the trial, it was quite clear they were not talking about
Goon at all. The victim created in the speeches of the procurator to
fit the sea of evidence had nothing to do with any self Goon was con-
scious of.28
In both of these episodes, the subject becomes alienated from the version of
himself that is made public. In Young Adam, we even observe the narrator’s
complicity in an act of misrepresentation. As he reworks Camus’s existential
tale, Trocchi clearly anticipates Debord’s account of the spectacle as a ‘social
relation between people that is mediated by images.’29 Within the spectacu-
lar relation, Debord argued, the individual subject is made powerless:
The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the

fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the
gestures of someone else who represents them to him.30
However, in The Outsider, society (even though Meursault rejects ‘so vague
an entity’31) fulfils its own criteria. It punishes the man who committed
the crime. Camus expresses the absurdity of the human condition, but the
social structures are ultimately effective; Meursault has failed to adjust. In
contrast, Trocchi’s protagonist maintains an internal clarity that, however
hypocritically, saves his life. The spectacle of the trial in Young Adam is
doubly rotten because the wrong man is convicted. Though Joe knows that
he could confess and save Goon’s life, his victory over the spectacle would
be fleeting, not only because he would be hanged himself, but because the
spectacle would still claim its symbolic sacrifice and prove its own efficacy.
Joe considers his options:
Confess? In practice I knew it would prove fatal to me. In principle it

would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the
validity of the particular social structure I wished to deny.32
The crises of social representation experienced by Joe and Meursault lead to

feelings of dehumanisation. Both men, as they are refused satisfactory rep-
resentation in the courtroom, find themselves associating with the inhuman,
material things that surround them. Meursault says that he would,
remember every piece of furniture, and on every piece of furniture,

every object and, on every object, every detail, every mark, crack
or chip, and then even the colour or the grain of the wood. At the
same time, I’d try not to lose track of my inventory, to enumerate
everything.33
Young Adam’s narrator repeats the gesture:
In a way, I was bored, I hadn’t realized how utterly dependent on

things I had become, even if only to catalogue them, saying over and
over again, the door, the seat, the boots, the mirror, the thing to wash
in; if I had had a big ledger I could have drawn up an inventory of
things, neatly arranging the columns of the names of microscopic
objects, which, with the courtroom about me, formed so large a part
of my experience.34
In both novels, the protagonists are willingly distracted by inert physi-
cal objects, which they regard to hold the same level of agency that they
command over their own fates. Meursault and Joe obsess over increas-
ingly microscopic details in the objects that surround them, and both (like
Robinson Crusoe on his desert island) begin to create comprehensive yet
redundant inventories. And while both narrators allude to these inventories,
neither represents that inventorying itself. They both report that they would
do such-and-such, yet neither demonstrates such-and-such being done.
These occlusions undermine the implied immediacy between the narration
and the protagonist’s subjectivity, which allows the texts to perform, as well
as comment on, this modernist crisis of representation.
Of Robert Antelme’s account of life in a concentration camp in The
Human Race (1947), Jacques Rancière writes,
This is commonly regarded as a form of writing that corresponds to

a significant experience—the experience of a life reduced to its most
basic aspects, stripped of any horizon of expectations, and merely con-
necting simple actions and perceptions one after the other. Correspond-
ing to this experience is the paratactic linking of simple perceptions.
And the writing evinces the specific form of resistance that Robert
Antelme wants to highlight: the one that transforms the concentra-
tion camp’s reduction of life to naked existence into the affirmation
of fundamental membership of the human race, even in its most basic
gestures. Yet it is clear that this paratactic writing is not born out of the
camp experience. It is also the style of writing of Camus’s L’Étranger
and the American behaviourist novel. To go back further, it is the Flau-
bertian writing style of small perceptions placed side by side.35
Ranciѐre recognises that those experiences which are supposed to surpass

artistic representation, most notably the horrors of the concentration camp,
are commonly articulated through a style of writing that seems at once inap-
propriate in its lack of affective register yet also appropriately evocative in
its silences and gaps.36 This is the paratactic style of The Outsider, imitated
in Young Adam, which serves as an expression of and mode of resistance to
the alienating effects of modern society.
Trocchi’s imitation of Camus betrays nothing of what Harold Bloom
describes as the ‘anxiety of influence.’ In a different context, one in which
authorial originality is sovereign, we might even accuse Trocchi of barefaced
plagiarism. But by the time of Cain’s Book, Trocchi’s stylistic imitations
were more ambitious. The narrative style of Cain’s Book shifts through a
heterogeneous array of sources, making the book a properly Barthesian
‘tissue of quotations.’37 Its parataxis is not diegetic, as in Young Adam, but
stylistic: a style of small plagiarisms placed side by side.
A common verdict on Trocchi as a novelist is that he deferred writing
‘proper’ fiction for so long after Cain’s Book that it became his greatest
novel by default.38 It is difficult to imagine what might have followed,
though, because Cain’s Book exhausts much of Trocchi’s biographic and
bibliographic experience. Joe Necchi returns, this time a heroin-addicted
scowman working in New York, though his first-person narration jumps
back to his childhood in Glasgow and later life in Paris and London.
Although Cain’s Book is not expressly an autobiography, it contains many
autobiographical elements, not least the narrator’s polemics about the hyp-
ocritical and ill-informed treatment of heroin users. The novel is more of a
literary autobiography, full of allusions and imitations that signpost Trocchi’s
own reading and publishing. Chapter epigraphs draw on the Marquis de Sade,
Jean Cocteau, and Miguel de Unamuno. Beckett reappears throughout. His
characters stalk Joe, who remembers ‘an old man called Molloy or Malone’,
and eventually decides that, ‘the most I can do is die like Malone with a last dot
of lead pinched between forefinger and thumb.’39 Other Merlin figures haunt
the story, such as Genet, whose presence is felt in the uncharacteristically effu-
sive language with which Joe recounts his nocturnal sexual encounters with
exotic men in shadowy backstreets: ‘I had simply to be and feel the workings
of the nameless passion in me, to grant, permissively to meet with, sensation
unobstructed, rocked gently out of nightmare at him’.40 Another influential
novel in Trocchi’s literary education is namedropped, Pauline Réage’s Histoire
d’O, which Trocchi admiringly called ‘one of the most obscene and obsti-
nately seditious pieces of writing since the Marquis de Sade.’41
Cain’s Book adds to its Continental inflections an American influence, the
result of Trocchi’s travels to New York and San Francisco. Michael Gardiner
notes that Cain’s Book is ‘extraordinary, like Trocchi’s journal Merlin, in
its ability to soak up foreign literary cultures; in this case, despite frequent
Scottish clues, the prose and the themes are close to the William S. Bur-
roughs of Naked Lunch.’42 Trocchi would befriend Burroughs in 1962, and
clear parallels exist between the two, especially in relation to their autofic-
tional accounts of junky life and their affiliation with the Olympia Press.
Both Junkie (1953) and Young Adam (1954) adopt a relatively straightfor-
ward paratactic narration. By the time of Naked Lunch (1959) and Cain’s
Book (1960), temporal continuity and narratorial authority have both been
subsumed by the addict’s fractured sense of reality, and both narrations take
on a more collage-like quality.
The formal and thematic switches that constantly interrupt Cain’s Book
are anything but seamless. They are jarring and unexpected, as demon-
strated by a brief moment in Cain’s Book when Joe’s usually lethargic nar-
ration suddenly adopts an altogether different tone:
The Way of the Black One is crooked and full of a curse! Ayeeh!
Ayeeh! Og, escaped from the Bitter Waters, and come through Thun-
der and Lightening to Sheridan Square, took shelter under a Traffic
Light, under lancing Blue Rain which washed away the left leg of his
Abominable Trousers, leaving him exposed.43
New York explodes into life as a crazed heterotopia where language and
primal sounds spew forth uncontrollably. The passage reads as homage to
the doyen of Beat literature, Allen Ginsberg. As in Howl (1956), Trocchi con-
jures a paranoid mysticism from the detritus of urban life—he later throws
into the scene a prayer wheel as if to drive home the allusion. The New York
that Trocchi inhabits is Ginsberg’s New York, just as he had previously
occupied Sartre’s Paris.
Cain’s Book consists only of such interruptions. There is no master
narrative as in Young Adam; Cain’s Book is entirely composite. There is
only discontinuity, polyphony, and non-sequiturs. Joe writes that his is a
‘little voyage in the art of digression’.44 Cain’s Book fits well into Fredric
Jameson’s characterisation of the postmodern aesthetic, in which ‘the very
possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private
languages and idiosyncratic styles [has] vanish[ed], and we [have] nothing
but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity.’45 The stylistic mimicry of Cain’s
Book is pastiche, as described by Jameson as ‘a neutral practice of such
mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse,
without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something
normal.’46 To go further: where the narration of Cain’s Book is without
a normative strand against which the interruptions become interruptions,
its philosophical outlook is equally as schizophrenic, reminiscent of Jean-
François Lyotard’s famous definition of postmodernism as the collapse of
grand narratives.47
Or, to return to my suggestion that late modernism might offer a more
accurate paradigm for this type of activity, we might notice the Surrealism of
Trocchi’s dissolving authorial presence. In the Surrealist journal M inotaure
in 1935, Roger Caillois introduced the notion of ‘legendary psychasthenia’.
He rebuked the assumption that animals and insects who mimic other
forms, such as butterflies who can disguise themselves against flowers,
do so purely out of self-defence. Instead, Caillois proposed, there exists
a psychological drive, which extends to humans, to imitate the terrain in
which one exists. Caillois described this psychasthenia as ‘depersonaliza-
tion by assimilation to space’, or the pathological drive to imitate the forms
around oneself.48 McKenzie Wark identifies a similar dissolution of the
Self in Trocchi’s ‘dirty book’ Helen and Desire, presented as a diary, which
‘ends when there is no longer a subject to be writing it.’49 Whether or not
Cain’s Book is lumbered with the problematic label of postmodern, or of
psychasthenic, here we see the slip away from the affirmative, identitarian
historical avant-garde tradition, and towards a more fluid, groundless, and
uncharted place.
The Strike Against Uncreative Work

Trocchi was a Scot with an Italian heritage whose literary sensibilities were
formed in Paris. He wrote what is often regarded as the principle novel of
British Beat literature, though its protagonist spends most of his time in a
boat adrift off New York, struggling to forget Scotland. Like the Joes of
Young Adam and Cain’s Book, Trocchi lived as a drifter. His life was itself
a dérive, theorised by his friends in the Lettrist International as, ‘A mode of
experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a tech-
nique of passing through varied ambiences.’50 With their restless drifting
through Paris, the Lettrists developed the complementary practice of psy-
chogeography, ‘The study of the specific effects of the geographical environ-
ment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour
of individuals.’51
Although many of Trocchi’s international departures were prompted by
the demands of his heroin addiction, his drifting also informed his nov-
els. Trocchi dérived from Beat to Existentialism to De Quincey-esque drug
writing and eventually to the Situationist International.52 Among its myr-
iad allusions, Cain’s Book privileges Trocchi’s Situationist association. Joe
quotes what Trocchi presumably imagined was the central mantra of the SI
in its original French: ‘Il vous faut construire les situations.’53 We will return
to this curious phrase later in this chapter.
An oblique reference to Trocchi’s Situationist acquaintances continues
to blur the author-narrator distinction: ‘My friends will know what I mean
when I say that I deplore our contemporary industrial writers.’54 One mem-
ber of the SI, the Algerian Mohammed Dahou, even makes a cameo appear-
ance as the character Midhou (Dahou’s nickname). In correspondence from
the late 1950s, while Trocchi was in America, he used Debord in France
as a proxy for sending friendly greetings to Midhou in Algeria.55 Debord
(notoriously fickle in choosing his acquaintances) would write to Trocchi
to declare that he ‘would be very pleased’ to see him again, and hopes that
‘the last remnants of freedom will linger in France’ until Trocchi’s return.56
Figure 2.1 Photograph of ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’ graffiti, Left Bank, Paris.
Originally published in Internationale Situationniste 8 (1963): 42.57
Trocchi’s strongest affinity with the Situationists relates to their shared

effort to refuse wage-labour. In Cain’s Book, Joe remembers,
Before I ever went there I heard that Paris was dead, and later I heard
that Greenwich Village was dead […] but I never found any place dead
where a number of men and women for whatever reason tried to strike
permanently against uncreative work. In those places I found dissent,
sedition, personal risk. And there I learned to explore and modify my
great contempt.58
The theme of ‘uncreative work’ and its rejection pervaded the SI’s writing.
Raoul Vaneigem articulated the problem most provocatively: ‘Who wants a
world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the
risk of dying of boredom?’59 Some Lettrist graffiti on the Left Bank, which
Trocchi would likely have seen, put it more succinctly: ‘Ne travaillez jamais’
(Figure 2.1). Never work.
Like many of his literary precursors, including Rimbaud, Henry Miller,
and Burroughs, the refusal of bourgeois norms—steady employment, career
progression, pride in work—is replicated in Trocchi’s creative productions
as in his life praxis. Cain’s Book is loaded with denunciations of wage-
labour. Joe’s estrangement from his father, for example, is based on their dif-
ferent attitudes to their shared unemployability. Joe antagonises his father:
Now why don’t you just admit it? You haven’t worked for a quarter
of a century. Now I’m not working either, so I’m following in your
footsteps. You ought to be proud of me.60
Elsewhere, Joe explains his attraction to the life of a scowman: there was
‘no other gig that paid so well for so little work.’61 The laziness that his
profession affords him—on his scow smoking, drinking, and writing—is
conducive to both his literary pursuits and his heroin addiction, but it also
attracts resentment from those whose jobs demand harder labour. This ani-
mosity, Joe concedes, ‘makes the job unpleasant from time to time, finding
oneself having suddenly to deal with the animosity of a man who makes a
virtue of his work. It is difficult to explain to the underprivileged that play
is more serious than work.62
The Joe of Young Adam also differentiates himself from those who take
pride in their wage-labour: ‘As a representative of the industrious working
classes he [Goon] was in a sense my enemy. I dislike people who make a
virtue of work.’63 Even Trocchi’s ‘dirty books’ sneak in similar sentiments.
The titular narrator of Helen and Desire, for example, among recollec-
tions of her many sexual adventures, digresses to comment on the differ-
ences between work in the West and in the Orientalised Middle East of
the novel:
In the West everybody is busy because his neighbour is. Mountains

of industry, seas of commerce come into being, and, once in being,
exert their damning influence on the sons and grandsons of those who
created them. Art, the aesthetic of the flesh, the cultivation of leisure,
are despised, tolerated, perhaps, but basically thought of as not quite
respectable.64
The revolutionary potential of play, as a corrective to wage-labour and

to what Trocchi would later call ‘the problem of “leisure”’, was a theme
that Trocchi inherited from the historical avant-garde by way of the SI.65
In Cain’s Book, Trocchi makes reference to ‘Homo Ludens’.66 From this
term we can map out an avant-garde genealogy that precedes Trocchi:
Homo Ludens was the title of a 1938 text by Johan Huizinga, which had
been studied by the Independent Group at the ICA, which had been founded
by ex-English Surrealists; via the Independent Group, Ralph Rumney had
learnt of the text and introduced it to Debord.67
The problem that Trocchi faced, he realised towards the end of Cain’s
Book, was that his effort to reject uncreative work through creative w
riting—
through literature—ultimately served to preserve and sustain literature as a
practice separate from the praxis of life. Joe recalls a conversation:
I told her that the great urgency for literature was that it should
for once and for all accomplish its dying, that it wasn’t that writing
shouldn’t be written, but that a man should annihilate prescriptions of
all past form in his soul, refuse to consider what he wrote in terms of
literature, judge it solely in terms of his living.68
Trocchi was forced to confront headfirst the central problem to historical

avant-garde’s project of overcoming the distinction between artistic practice
and lived experience. It can’t be done—or at least not through creating more
art. Even ‘anti-literature’, Joe writes, ‘is rendered innocuous by granting it
place in conventional histories of literature.’69 This is the Situationist prob-
lem of recuperation, and it is difficult to escape.
In his account of the transition from historical avant-garde groups to neo-
avant-garde practice, Bürger argues that ‘The historical avant-garde move-
ments were unable to destroy art as an institution, but they did destroy the
possibility that a given school can present itself with the claim to universal
validity.’70 The aesthetic of appropriation and collage that Trocchi develops
in his novels contributed to this historical loss of faith in single-authored or
programmatic avant-garde practice—a loss of faith that led to what I am
calling the dissolution of the avant-garde tradition.
Trocchi found himself unable to continue to write as he had written
before. Literature occluded, rather than facilitated, the Rimbaudian effort
to change life. Cain’s Book was his final proper novel, though certainly not
the end of his writing career, or his celebrity. Just as Debord wrote that the
true revolutionary ‘can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated
forms’, Trocchi rejected literature and continued his pursuits by way of rad-
ical cultural organisation.71
The Invisible Insurrection
The narrative of the first half of this chapter, about the dead-end of Trocchi’s
novel-writing career, can be summarised as follows. His novels began with
imitation and moved to collage, though they expressed a growing frustra-
tion at being unable to enact the categorical disidentification that Trocchi
sought. Eventually—where we are now—Trocchi decided that only in mov-
ing beyond literature as such could he realise anything of the emancipatory
programme indicated in his novels.
He thus began to formulate project sigma, his expansive effort to forge
a network of cultural practitioners that did not rely on capitalist means of
production and distribution. Project sigma occupied Trocchi from the early
1960s through to 1967. Though he did not retire from writing fiction during
this period, his sigma pursuits and his social, entrepreneurial presence in the
London counterculture came to eclipse his status as a novelist.
The rest of this chapter is concerned with Trocchi’s transition from
novelist to cultural organiser—or, in his terminology, sigmatist. sigma was
Trocchi’s attempt to respond to the Situationist problem of recuperation
that had become evident in Cain’s Book. Unfortunately, sigma has received
even less critical attention than Trocchi’s novels, not least because elusive-
ness and immateriality were central to its formulation. Trocchi moved from
the aesthetic to the anti-aesthetic, but his tactics remained consistent: the
novels used a form of collage, an aesthetic of appropriation; project sigma,
too, pulled together disparate voices into a whole that was more meaningful
than the sum of its parts.
First published in 1962 in the New Saltire Review and republished in
1963 in the SI’s journal, Internationale Situationniste, Trocchi’s essay
‘A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ out-
lines the motivations behind sigma.72 Trocchi imagined a cultural revolt
that would bypass orthodox political formations, such as political parties
and cellular avant-garde groups, and would instead unite sympathetic and
progressive individuals into a loosely affiliated vanguard that would attempt
to ‘seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind.’73 Trocchi
contrasts the ‘coup-du-monde’ of the invisible insurrection with ‘the coup
d’état of Trotsky and Lenin’, the former a ‘transition of necessity more com-
plex, more diffuse than the other, and so more gradual, less spectacular.’74
Though Trocchi writes that ‘what is to be changed is “ourselves”’, sigma
was ultimately an organisational project, the construction of a social net-
work separate to the existing industry of cultural production.75 Much of
the essay has aged poorly, overladen with hippie platitudes, but its enduring
appeal lies in its programme to re-conceive creative sociability and unite
the million minds who, Trocchi assures us, were already working towards
similar goals.
A second article, ‘Project Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ (1962), elaborates
some of the practical implications and ambitions of the newly named proj-
ect, though this article was not reprinted in Internationale Situationniste.76
The name sigma was chosen ‘to designate all, the sum, the whole’ while
being ‘free from bothersome semantic accretions.’77 Both articles utilise a
proto-Deleuzian rhetoric of revolutionary ‘becoming’ and nomadic, bor-
derless organisation.78 Essentially, sigma was to produce an international
index or inventory of individuals with similar counter-cultural ambitions.
(It was, in a sense, a continuation from art into life: in Cain’s Book, Joe
Necchi writes, ‘Everything I have written is a kind of inventorizing. I don’t
expect ever to be able to do much more, and the inventories will always
be unfinished.’79) Trocchi did allow himself some flights of fancy: sigma
might include a ‘spontaneous university’, he writes, and a ‘limited liability
company (International Cultural Enterprises Ltd.)’; it might even acquire ‘a
vacant country house (mill, abbey, church or castle), not too far from the
City of London [in which to hold a] cultural jam session.’80
The proposals for sigma pull together discourses of critical theory, radi-
cal psychoanalysis, and countercultural community initiatives. Though the
emphasis was on universal participation, Trocchi’s role was facilitator and
fundraiser. As in his fiction, Trocchi celebrates praxis over product, lived
experience over the creation of an aesthetic object.
Trocchi was trying to produce a workable project from the ambitions
signalled way back in his Merlin editorial that asked for a ‘suspension of
all categories [in order to arrive at the] immediacy of experience.’81 He had
decided to pursue reality rather than art; life rather than literature. The
Invisible Insurrection essay states that ‘we have already rejected any idea
of a frontal attack’82—an unacknowledged allusion to Joe Necchi’s state-
ment in Cain’s Book that ‘it’s a dead cert the frontal attack is obsolete.’83
Instead, the sigmatic revolt ‘must be in the broad sense cultural.’84 It needed
to operate obliquely, beneath the radar, via new social forms that would be
radically incommensurable with the spectacle.
Trocchi had already recognised the pervasive and placatory effects of
recuperation. The promise of sigma was to carry cultural revolt beyond the
veneration of aesthetic objects, to truly place lived experience before artistic
production. Trocchi’s abandonment of his novelistic career was a tactical
necessity, and has analogous moments in the trajectory of the Lettrist-
Situationist Internationals. The Lettrist International had been formed after
a scission in Isidore Isou’s Lettrisme Movement, when a group of iconoclasts
no longer wished to be associated with Isou’s artists. After the Lettrist Inter-
national became the Situationist International, it too experienced a moment
of self-purging when in 1962 a faction of Situationists deemed more con-
cerned with art than with revolution were expelled.
At the SI’s fourth conference, in London from 24 to 28 September 1960,
a disagreement surfaced between the Parisian core of the SI and its German
section, the artists of Gruppe Spur. The question under discussion was,
‘To what extent is the SI a political organisation?’ The Germans argued
that the SI held too much faith in a revolutionary proletariat, and should
instead align itself with avant-garde artists. While Debord dismissed these
proposals, Asger Jorn mediated, and suggested that it was instead necessary
‘for the world to become artistic in the sense defined by the SI.’85
The debate was not resolved by the time of the SI’s fifth conference, in
Gothenburg from 28 to 30 August 1961. Raoul Vaneigem’s opening address
pushed a hard anti-art line, to argue, ‘The point is not to elaborate the spec-
tacle of refusal, but to refuse the spectacle’. Now Attila Kotányi mediated, to
suggest that Situationists could still produce art, but it should be recognised
as ‘antisituationist art’, produced in the knowledge that it will inevitably ‘be
coopted [recuperated] by society and used against us’.86
The result was the expulsion of the German artists in February 1962, and
in March the expulsion of the Scandinavian artists centred on Jørgen Nash.
The latter were derogatorily labelled Nashists, which became a Situationist
byword for those who were accused of using their SI connection to fur-
ther their own artistic careers.87 In recent years, critics and historians have
celebrated the ‘Second Situationist International’ that Nash subsequently
regrouped, and Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen’s collection
Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia
and Elsewhere (2011) attempts to wrest the Situationist legacy away from
Parisian proprietary as, indeed, this current book attempts in relation to a
distinctly British Situationist tradition.
Debord’s Paris-based SI described its political position at the time—in a
statement that encapsulates the dialectic of cultural revolt—as an ‘ambigu-
ous and risky policy of consenting to act within culture while being against
the entire present organisation of this culture and even against all culture as
a separate sphere.’88 sigma occupied a similar position within and against
culture, though it did not entirely renounce artistic production as did the SI.
Instead, sigma sought to reorganise the production and distribution of art
in society. Unlike the Situationists, who spoke of the decomposition of aes-
thetic innovation in spectacular society, Trocchi maintained faith in artistic
creativity. He wrote,
Art can have no existential significance for a civilisation which draws

a line between art and life and collects artifacts like ancestral bones for
reverence. Art must inform the living; we envision a situation in which
life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and pas-
sionately constructed to inspire each individual to respond creatively,
to bring to whatever act a creative comportment.89
‘A line between art and life’, recuperated ancestral bones, situations that
are ‘passionately constructed’: Trocchi’s vocabulary and rhetoric reveal his
increasing interest in Situationist theory, even while sigma continued to col-
lect and collage different bodies of avant-garde work. Lettrist and Situation-
ist theory offered Trocchi not an aesthetic framework as Existentialist and
Beat literature had informed his novels, but a paradigm for rethinking how
cultural production relates to political processes. Michael Gardiner suggests
that Trocchi turned to the SI to find answers to the increasingly eschato-
logical visions of his Merlin editorials: ‘Faced with nuclear destruction and
totalitarianism, a non-binaristic, non-“political” way of thinking politics
had become necessary.’90
Trocchi had already been trying to develop a non-political way of thinking
politics, evident in Young Adam’s early formulation of the spectacle and Cain’s
Book’s valorisation of play as resistance. The Invisible Insurrection essay reaf-
firms the latter. As a result of the infiltration of free time by logics of produc-
tion and consumption, ‘Man has forgotten how to play.’91 However, Trocchi’s
critique of wage-labour and of reified consciousness (though he used neither of
these terms) did not recognise its discursive origins beyond the SI. He repeat-
edly denounced Marxism, for instance. His introduction to the 1963 Writers
in Revolt anthology associates Marxism with religion, as false consciousness:
one must ask what is the principle force to which our own culture is
dedicated, the mainspring source from which we attempt to draw our
own ethics and our sense of values? Certainly it is not Marxism, any
more than it is Christianity.92
Tom McGrath describes the political ambitions of project sigma as ‘total

change, but Trocchi had no patience for Marxism or any other political
approaches, which he regarded as outmoded.’93 Nonetheless, Trocchi’s
Invisible Insurrection essay unwittingly espouses a Marxist critique of cul-
tural production. Trocchi commends a quotation from Raymond Williams,
though he declares himself to be ‘unfortunately ignorant’ of Williams’
work.94 Trocchi writes that project sigma accords with Williams’s ideal that
‘artists will have control of their own means of expression.’95 Trocchi was
seemingly unaware of his political debt to Williams and the New Left; a debt
made evident when sigma is articulated in those Marxian terms. Trocchi’s
Marxism, though underdeveloped and even self-denying, and certainly more
concerned with culture than economics, was likely absorbed osmotically
from Sartre, the more politicised sections of the hippie and beatnik milieus,
the British New Left, and the SI. From the SI, Trocchi acquired a language
and a set of concepts that formed the basis of his ‘non-political’ politics. The
most important of these concepts, as quoted in Cain’s Book, was the Situa-
tionists’ command, ‘Il vous faut construire les situations.’96
The imperative to construct situations was the SI’s founding principle
when it emerged from the Lettrist International. The constructed situation
itself is discussed in Debord’s essay, ‘Report on the Construction of Situa-
tions and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Orga-
nization and Action.’ He presented this document to members of the Lettrist
International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and
the London Psychogeography Committee (i.e., Ralph Rumney) in June
1957, prior to the founding of the SI that July. That Trocchi had read this
essay is certain: he quotes it in ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’
when justifying sigma’s attention to the urban environment (‘l’art integral
ne pouvait se realise qu’an niveau de l’urbanisme’97); and the references in
Cain’s Book to play and leisure were likely sourced from this text, which
calls for ‘the invention of games of an essentially new type’ in response to
the ‘battle of leisure.’98
Debord writes,
Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the

concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their trans-
formation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systemic
intervention based on the complex factors of two components in per-
petual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviours
which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it.99
Situations were to be constructed through materialist interventions into every-

day urban life. These interventions took the umbrella term ‘unitary urban-
ism’ and, in turn, unitary urbanism demonstrated the principles of ‘integral
art’: a form of life praxis rather than artistic production; the total project of
creating an atmosphere conducive to experimental behaviour; ‘the use of all
arts and techniques as means contributing to the composition of a unified
milieu.’ Another description must have caught Trocchi’s eye: integral art ‘can
no longer correspond to any of the traditional aesthetic categories.’100
The situations, milieus, and ambiences that the Situationists wished to
construct were intended, however momentarily, to shatter the reified appear-
ances of the spectacle. The Situationists’ negotiation of the avant-garde’s
life-art dialectic emphasised impermanence:
‘Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our
only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of
anything else.’101
Though Debord’s early theorisation of the situation is concerned with
how to intervene into physical places, he concedes that ‘Situationist tech-
niques have yet to be invented.’102 It was to this challenge that Trocchi’s
project sigma responded. Trocchi’s constructed situations were to be new
and non-reified modes of interpersonal communication. sigma was to be a
social network that operated according to the interventionist logic of the
situation and against the passive logic of the spectacle.
In its introductory articles at least, sigma emerged from a Situationist
critique even if it lacked the theoretical rigour of later SI projects. sigma’s
correspondence with the SI is most obvious in the first essay, ‘Invisible Insur-
rection of a Million Minds’. The invisible insurrection, Trocchi writes,
will come on the mass of men, if it comes at all, not as something they
have voted for, struck for, fought for, but like the changing seasons;
they will find themselves in and stimulated by the situation consciously
at last to recreate it within and without as their own.103
The essay’s publication in Internationale Situationniste (January 1963) pre-
dates the publication of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967 in France),
but the term ‘spectacle’ had already entered Situationist parlance, albeit
constrained to a more cinematic meaning than the relational, non-visual,
attributes that Debord later allowed the term (e.g., ‘The spectacle is not
a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is medi-
ated by images’104). Trocchi uses the term, and quotes the SI in French, to
describe how, in modern society, ‘art anaesthetises the living’105:
The zombies remain; the spectacle grows more spectacular. To adapt

an epigram of a friend of mine: Si nous ne voulons pas assister au
spectacle de la fin du monde, il nous faut travailler à la fin du monde
du spectacle.106
To counter the spectacle, sigma promoted participation and communica-

tion across specialisms and disciplinary boundaries. It sought to recon-
nect individuals atomised by the spectacle through a network that the
spectacle had neither pre-established nor recuperated. Trocchi envisioned
an underground network of radical cultural producers, a dissolute and
meta-avant-garde that would not require ‘anyone to sink his identity in
anything noxiously metaphysical.’107 Like the polyvocality of Cain’s Book,
sigma attempted to facilitate collaboration between any number of distinct
avant-garde groups without reproducing an identity politics of its own.
Those groups, Trocchi writes, ‘are already called X and Y and Z’ and ‘may
be somewhat reluctant to subsume their public identities under any other
name.’ He concedes, ‘If these groups could be persuaded of the significance
of linking themselves “adjectivally” to sigma, it would for the present be
enough.’108
Trocchi wanted groups X, Y, and Z to come together in a unified but not
necessarily synthetic movement whose cumulative weight was to be greater
than the sum of its parts. In one of the few critical articles that mention
project sigma, Howard Slater clarifies Trocchi’s intentions: ‘sigma was to
have been active in the relocation of creativity as multi-disciplinary and
non-privileged [,] removing the mystification of genius that is the denial of
imaginative potential in all people.’109
Trocchi’s insurrectionary project corresponds with the account of Situ-
ationist culture in the manifesto that the SI presented at London’s ICA in
September 1960. The manifesto states:
Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an

art of interaction. Today artists—with all culture visible—have been
completely separated from society, just as they are separated from each
other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art
has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of
primitivism must be superseded by complete communication.110
The Invisible Insurrection and Project Sigma essays address these calls for
dialogue, interaction, and ‘total participation’ with a much more literal
understanding of ‘complete communication’ than the SI had perhaps envis-
aged.111 Trocchi’s project sigma accelerated and updated Futurist, Dada,
and Surrealist calls for new forms of culture, but it also grounded them, with
practical measures and tangible activities, ambitious but achievable goals.
The Sigma Folio

Trocchi presented sigma, most importantly, as a social network, but it was a
social network that was to generate new aesthetic forms. Perhaps by neces-
sity, sigma’s theorisations and manifestations were to remain obscure. Trocchi
seems to have spent as much time theorising sigma as he spent attempting
to realise sigmatic principles. As well as ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million
Minds’ and ‘Project Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’, an introduction to project
sigma was included in an early issue of the countercultural newspaper Inter-
national Times, which briefly labelled itself as ‘a sigmatic newspaper.’112
Trocchi never managed to create the numerous sigma centres that the
early essays had envisioned, and the project’s inherently ephemeral and
immaterial nature leaves us with a difficult task in measuring its successes
and failures. Most interesting, though, was the Sigma Folio. This remains
the primary material trace of the sigma project. It was a collection of docu
ments (essays, fiction, critiques) submitted by sigma participants, which
were then distributed to the network of other participants. The project required
Trocchi to act as the administrative middle-man in receiving, reproducing,
and forwarding these documents—which suggests that for all of its rhetori-
cal grandeur, project sigma was essentially Trocchi in an office.
Each document, mimeographed on coloured sugar paper, was posted to
each subscription-paying participant. In a ‘Notice to Contributors’, Trocchi
emphasised that there was no maximum or minimum fee, and certainly no
legal contracts involved. This was ‘an entirely new dimension in publishing.’
Assuming salesman duties, Trocchi tries the gambit, ‘In a sense, you might
be said to be subscribing to an encyclopaedia in the making: in another
sense you will be participating in a tactical historigem, to coin a word.’113
The Folio reflects Trocchi’s impulse to inventorise, to categorise, to produce
indexes of progressive writings and sympathetic individuals. As McKenzie
Wark has recently pointed out, the Sigma Folio also anticipates blogging:
‘Trocchi invented a web of logs before there even was an internet.’114
The first Sigma Folio paper was a poster intended to be displayed in sta-
tions of the London Underground rail system. It was called ‘Moving Times’
and took the form of a large newsletter that combined information about
sigma with excerpts of creative writing from Trocchi, Burroughs, and Kenneth
White. Publicly displayed newspapers were an important part of both the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, where big-character posters (dazibao) where
used to denounce supposedly bourgeois activities, and the strikes and
protests of May 1968 in France. Unfortunately, ‘Moving Times’ never made
it to public display.
The second Sigma Folio paper was a reprint of ‘Invisible Insurrection of a
Million Minds’; the third of ‘Project Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’. Sigma #17
was a ‘list of people interested’, which included Anthony B urgess, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Philip Green, R.D. Laing, Joan Littlewood, Timothy
Leary, Ann Quin, and Felix Topolski. Trocchi was certainly well connected
in countercultural society. On 11 June 1965, he had organised and com-
pѐred the International Poetry Incarnation held at the Royal Albert Hall.
Peter Whitehead’s film Wholly Communion (1965) documents the event,
which included poets like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Adrian
Mitchell. This gathering of luminaries not only demonstrated Trocchi’s
extensive social network, but placed him at a point of transition between
cultural movements. Stewart Home locates the event as ‘the last and greatest
hurrah of the London beatnik scene, its fabulous death rattle’ and ‘the birth
cry of psychedelia.’115 Another point of transition, that is, actively facili-
tated by Trocchi.
Sigma #4 had been an essay by Trocchi that introduced the Sigma Folio.
The essay is titled ‘Potlatch’, a term borrowed from the Lettrist Interna-
tional’s newsletter, which had already been borrowed from Marcel Mauss
and Georges Bataille’s studies of gift-giving in Native American cultures,
The Gift (1923) and The Accursed Share (1949), respectively. The Lettrists’
Potlatch was clearly a model for Trocchi’s Sigma Folio, particularly in terms
of their respective forms of circulation. Debord described the Lettrists’ Pot-
latch in similar terms to those used by Trocchi about Sigma Folio:
Potlatch was sent for free to addresses chosen by the editor, and to
some people who asked to receive it. It was never sold […] The strate-
gic intention of Potlatch was to create links to form a new movement,
which should be an immediate reunification of avant-garde cultural
creation and a revolutionary critique of society.116
The means of distribution of both Potlatch and the Sigma Folio constituted
efforts to function outside networks of capitalist distribution networks,
beyond the logic of the commodity. Both were comparable to gift-giving
or samizdat activity. Trocchi emphasised the importance of the means of
distribution (as opposed to production) as early as the Invisible Insurrection
essay: ‘Clearly, there is no problem of production in the modern world. The
urgent problem of the future is that of distribution which is presently (dis)
organised in terms of the economic system prevailing in this or that area.’117
Nonetheless, he also recognised the inevitability of compromise, ‘the fact
that in a capitalist society any successful organisation must be able to sus-
tain itself in capitalist terms.’118 sigma’s compromises are evident in the way
that the ‘Notice to Contributors’ attempted to market the Folio as ‘what we
call a “futique” (what will be prized as an antique tomorrow).’119
Sigma #18 offered a ‘sigma edition’ of the aforementioned Situationist
manifesto. The original Situationist text had been published in the fourth
Internationale Situationniste (June 1960) and read by Maurice Wyckaert
in an address to the ICA after the SI’s fourth conference in 1960. This was
the SI’s only proper visit to London, and the ICA event had been arranged
by Rumney even though he was no longer a member. Among the SI’s points
for discussion at its conference had been Trocchi’s imprisonment on drugs
charges in the United States. In the following Internationale Situationniste,
the SI published a defence of Trocchi, in English, which asserted that his
arrest was based on a ‘police provocation’ and that, anyway, ‘drug taking
is without importance’ (Figure 2.2). Soon after, Debord, Asger Jorn, and
Jacqueline de Jong published another appeal, titled ‘Hands off Alexander
Trocchi!’ that denounced the ‘menacing lack of culture on the part of
the American police’ and affirmed that Trocchi was ‘an artist of the first
order’, moreover, ‘a new type of artist; pioneer of a new culture and a new
Figure 2.2 ‘Resolution of the fourth conference of the Situationist International

concerning the imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi’, Internationale
Situationniste 5 (1960): 14.121
comportment (the question of drugs being in his own eyes minor and negli-
gible)’. The appeal’s title was an echo of the French Surrealists’ 1927 defence
of Charlie Chaplin, ‘Hands Off Love’.120
The manifesto that the Situationists delivered in London—which,
unlike the manifestos of the historical avant-gardes, appeared a few years
after the group’s founding—states certain facts held to be true in the Sit-
uationist camp, especially the need for new forms of cultural action: new
games, new art, as well as new forms of economic production and distri-
bution. The text clearly influenced Trocchi. It discusses an anti-hierarchical
reorganisation of culture, so that ‘Everyone will be a situationist so to speak,
with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically
different “schools.”’122
The sigma version of the manifesto was slightly adapted. It begins with a
quotation from ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, followed by an
editorial note explaining that what follows is not the original Situationist
text, but a version edited by Trocchi and Philip Green. ‘For many years
now,’ they write, ‘we have been to some extent involved in the theoreti-
cal evolution of that dialectic which goes under the name situationiste.’123
They justify their intervention into the text by noting that ‘all situationist
documents have been at all times provisional in the sense that they are to be
understood as tactical manoeuvres or “happenings.”’124 Trocchi and Green
even mobilise the SI’s original text in support of their own project: ‘the fact
that we are able to do this without perverting the original, bears out our
contention that the invisible insurrection is happening in many places simul-
taneously … NOW.’125
The sigma edition reproduced the majority of the original text, with
elaborations on certain theses and some minor digressions. The additions
mostly serve to ground the abstractions of the original text within an
Anglo-American context, with allusions to Burroughs, to poetry readings
in New York, and to the seizure of Cain’s Book as an obscene work in
England. A direct comparison of passages from the SI’s original and the
Anglicised variation will reveal precisely how Trocchi and Green adapted
the Situationist text to sigma’s aims. The original manifesto asks,
Qu’est-ce, en effet, que la situation? C’est la réalisation d’un jeu

supérieur, plus exactement la provocation à ce jeu qu’est la pres-
ence humaine. Les jouers révolutionnaires de tous les pays peuvent
s’unir dans l’I.S. pour commencer à sortir de la préhistoire de la vie
quotidienne.126
Trocchi and Green’s corresponding passage reads thus:
What do we mean by the word “situation”? Within an experi-

mentally constructed context, due attention paid to what we call
“psycho-geographic” factors, the situation is the gradual and spon-
taneous realisation (articulation: happening) of a superior game in
which each participating individual is vitally involved. Revolutionary
players of all countries must evolve the technique of acting together to
raise the whole tenor of daily living beyond the level of stock response:
we must break out of the stifling conventional doldrums which future
historians will undoubtedly regard as evidence that present-day man
is sunk in what they (the future historians) will regard as a kind of
“pre-history”, a period of human history during which man is still
without techniques to control his own destiny.127
Aside from its verbosity, the sigma edition makes a number of important
changes. It adds more Situationist terminology (‘psycho-geographic’) to its
definition of ‘situation’, and roots the notion of the situation in another
tradition, the countercultural ‘happening’. The SI never made this analogy.
The Situationists’ manifesto did stress the importance of the SI in providing
an identity for the ‘revolutionary players’, and acting as the vanguard to begin
the movement out of mundane everyday life. The sigma edition dismisses the
necessity of a unified vanguard group: it is enough to be involved in and con-
scious of the struggle. Trocchi would later satirise the SI’s form of organisation
in a poem titled ‘ADVT’, recalling of course the word ‘advert’. After a series of
definitions of ‘SITUATIONS’ which read like sales pitches (‘We will provide
the situation/without which what you desire/will remain a phantom …’), the
poem ends with the mail order instruction, ‘S.A.E. for CONDITIONS—’.128
The humdrum familiarity of the request for a self-addressed envelope pro-
vides a stark contrast to the esoteric promise of a revelatory situation.
Nonetheless, Trocchi’s hijacking of the Situationist text pays a twofold
homage to the SI. Not only does he borrow its theses, he also practices
its tactic of détournement, which the Situationists defined as ‘the integra-
tion of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction
of a milieu’.129 Détournement was the SI’s theorisation of the historical
avant-garde’s logic of plagiarism, which had its roots in Lautréamont’s dec-
laration that,
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author’s

sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the
right one.130
The détourned manifesto serves as a synecdoche of the broader function

of the Sigma Folio. An original text was produced and circulated among
affiliated individuals. In this process of circulation, the original text was
rewritten and adapted to different cultural milieus. The authority of the
original text was undermined through this process of reproduction; indi-
vidual authorship was replaced by collective anonymity; and hierarchical
channels of communication were replaced by informal gift giving.
Détournement is the paradigm of Trocchi’s engagement with the SI, yet
his détournement of the SI also forestalled that relationship. His efforts to
unite people and to overlook programmatic disagreements in favour of
broader similarities and sympathies conflicted with the SI’s efforts to model
itself on the vanguard parties of the Communist and Marxist traditions.
Trocchi’s formal expulsion from the SI was published in the tenth Interna-
tionale Situationniste (1966):
UPON THE APPEARANCE in London in fall 1964 of the first publi-

cations by Alexander Trocchi’s “Project Sigma,” it was mutually agreed
that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture, in
spite of the interest we have in dialogue with certain of the individuals
who may be drawn to it, notably in the United States and England. It
is therefore no longer as a member of the SI that our friend Alexander
Trocchi has since developed this activity, several aspects of which meet
our complete approval.131
The expulsion was atypically cordial. It even credited Trocchi, a ‘friend’, with
having developed a project that was, at least, interesting. The SI was clearly
resistant to sigma’s lack of organisational discipline: ‘loose cultural venture’
is used by the SI as a derogatory epithet, even though it echoes the language
with which Trocchi had proudly announced sigma. Trocchi’s expulsion, one
suspects, was a tactical decision on the part of the SI. Trocchi was too willing
to allow sigma to develop beyond the confines of the SI, beyond the author-
ity of its Parisian core and, particularly, beyond Debord’s control.
Within and Against Culture

After Trocchi’s expulsion from the SI, project sigma attracted less and less
attention, and eventually vanished. Why did sigma disappear into its own
obscurity without managing to tactically utilise its obscurity as it had origi-
nally intended? sigma’s disappearance has meant that it has attracted minimal
critical attention, despite its embeddedness in a very fertile period of coun-
tercultural activity and its proleptic relation to a number of post-Situationist
groups who have since proposed similar forms of invisible activity.132
The significance of sigma’s willed obscurity—part of Trocchi’s notion of
an invisible insurrection—relates to the SI’s discussion of spectacle. Debord
declares, in the first thesis of Society of the Spectacle, ‘In societies dominated
by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accu-
mulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into
a representation.’133 The spectacle, he adds, is not itself the proliferation of
images in everyday life, but it is the ‘social relation between people that is
mediated by images.’134 sigma was Trocchi’s effort to evade that realm of
spectacular representation. Early in the Invisible Insurrection essay, Trocchi
voices his wariness of revolt which ‘As soon as it is defined it has provoked
the means for its containment. The prudent man will avoid this definition
which is in effect his death-sentence.’135 sigma was an attempt to refuse
identification, to refuse social presence as determined by the spectacle, and
to represent a logic of communication that operated counter to the hege-
monic logic of the spectacle.
On avant-garde formalism and its limits, Rancière writes the following,
in which he, too, adopts some Situationist terminology:
The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of

disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the
thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle.
It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of
a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. As a matter of
fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spec-
tacle that would lead to an “awareness” of the state of the world.136
Rancière’s reformulation of the relationship between aesthetics and politics

is far less radical than that of the SI—his is a much less damning account
of representation. Politics, he contends, is the process of becoming visible in
and to society; it is when subjects who had previously been denied represen-
tation achieve political agency. Rancière thus neither damns nor valorises
the visible in relation to projects of emancipation. Rancière’s politics relate
to what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (as in, sense matter): when
the newly visible subjects arrive at, or force their way to, the plane of the
visible, then the whole social organisation is readjusted to allow for their
presence. Art’s relation to this process of becoming-visible is to prefigure
that redistribution of the sensible, to demonstrate, aesthetically, what can
and can’t be recognised and understood in a given political order. Art can-
not illuminate something otherwise unimaginable or unrepresentable; it can
only illuminate what could already exist but is obscured.
To apply Rancière’s observations to Trocchi’s project, sigma promised
something completely external to the spectacle, and in so doing refused to
comply with the spectacle’s regime of visibility, its own ‘distribution of the
sensible’. As such, sigma’s externality left it unrepresented and unintelligible,
fundamentally incompatible with the spectacle. Rancière continues,
The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation

what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what
they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements,
functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible.
Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or the subversion they can
claim credit for rest on the same foundation.137
Perhaps Rancière’s account—as unsympathetic as he elsewhere is to the Sit-

uationist project—helps to explain why sigma is so little known. Perhaps its
invisibility condemned it to incomprehensibility; its refusal of the spectacle
condemned it to obscurity.
Trocchi’s sigmatic experiments, at the very least, reveal the importance
of the Situationists’ dialectic of cultural revolt—that is, their desire to act
within and against spectacular culture, ‘within culture while being against
the entire present organisation of this culture.’ One method that the SI used
to remain within culture was to produce an image of itself as a program-
matic, revolutionary organisation, with an identity, a publication, confer-
ences, and cutthroat internal discipline. The dissolution of the avant-garde
as engineered by Trocchi meant, in this instance, a forfeiting of whatever
stake the avant-garde once had in the political order. Subsequent British
Situationists undertook other measures to maintain the within and against
dialectic.
Notes
1. Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book (New York: Grove Press 1961), 232.
3. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico 1999).
4. Situationist International, ‘Manifeste’, Internationale Situationniste 4 (1960): 38.
6. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 83.
8. See Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a
Postmodern Age (London: Routledge 1992).
9. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood (London:
Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1972), 52.
10. Accounts of the founding of the Situationist International can be found in
Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to
Class War (Stirling: AK Press 1991); Andrew Hussey, The Game of War:
The Life and Death of Guy Debord (London: Pimlico 2002); and Greil Marcus,
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and
Faber 2001).
11. Serge Berna, Jean-L. Brau, Guy-Ernest Debord, Gil J. Wolman, ‘Position de
l’International Lettriste’, Internationale Lettriste 1 (November 1952), in Guy
Debord, Œuvres (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 2006), 86.
12. Ralph Rumney, The Consul, trans. Malcolm Imrie (San Francisco: City Lights
Books 2002), 19.
13. Ibid., 37.
14. Tom Vague, ‘On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment in Time:
Ralph Rumney: The Vague Interview’, Vague 22 (1989–1990): 29–31. This
post-punk fanzine published the first complete version of Rumney’s ‘Psychogeo-
graphical Report on Venice.’
15. Trocchi’s expulsion was announced in 1966 in ‘Sur des publications de l’I.S.’,
Internationale Situationniste 10 (March 1966): 83.
16. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ (1962), in Andrew Murray Scott
(ed.), Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader (Edinburgh:
Polygon 1991), 193.
17. Christopher Gray, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the
Situationist International (London: Rebel Press 1998), 132.
18. A history of Merlin and its contexts can be found in James Campbell, Paris
Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank
1946–1964 (London: Secker & Warburg 1994).
19. Quoted in Andrew Murray Scott, Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the
Monster (Edinburgh: Polygon 1991), 64.
20. Trocchi, Cain’s Book, 195.
21. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Letter to Jack’, in Scott (ed.), Invisible Insurrection of a
Million Minds, 72.
22. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Letter from Paris’, NIMBUS 2:1 (June–August 1953): 48.
23. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Editorial’, Merlin 2 (Autumn 1952): 57.
24. See John de St. Jorre, The Good Ship Venus: The Erotic Voyage of Maurice
Girodias and the Olympia Press (London: Faber & Faber 2009). Trocchi’s ‘dirty
books’ include Helen and Desire (1954), White Thighs (1955), School for Wives
(1955), Thongs (1955), and Sappho of Lesbos (1960).
25. See Christopher Logue, ‘Alexander Trocchi and the Beginning of Merlin’, in
Allan Campbell and Tim Niel (eds), A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander
Trocchi (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc. 1997), 45.
26. Albert Camus, The Outsider, trans. Joseph Laredo (London: Penguin Classics
2000), 95.
27. Ibid., 100.
28. Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam (London: John Calder 1983), 152.
30. Ibid., thesis 30.
31. Camus, The Outsider, 105.
32. Trocchi, Young Adam, 156.
33. Camus, The Outsider, 77.
35. Jacques Ranciѐre, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London:
Verso 2009), 124–125.
36. Under Trocchi’s editorship, Merlin published an early account of Auschwitz,
‘The journal of a doctor deported to the Auschwitz crematorium (conclusion)’.
See Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, ‘SS. Obersturmfuhrer Doktor Mengele (Conclusion)’,
Merlin 2:1 (Spring–Summer 1953): 48–72.
37. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text trans. Stephen
Heath (London: Fontana 1977), 146.
38. John Calder, Trocchi’s publisher, pessimistically argues that Trocchi’s later proj-
ect sigma was ‘unclear to all except a few devotees, but it gave Trocchi an excuse
to avoid getting on with a sequel to Cain’s Book’ (John Calder, ‘Alexander
Trocchi’, Edinburgh Review 70 [1985]: 34). Irvine Welsh has also labelled Troc-
chi as the ‘George Best of Scottish literature’. Quoted in Stewart Home, ‘Intro-
duction’, in Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam (London: One World Classics
2008), 7.
39. Ibid., 232–233.
40. Ibid., 53.
41. Scott, Alexander Trocchi, 54.
42. Michael Gardiner, From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Critical Theory since
1960 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2006), 90.
44. Ibid., 232.
45. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Cultural Turn:
Selected Writings on the Postmodern (London: Verso 1998), 5.
46. Ibid.
47. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl-
edge, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1984).
48. Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, trans. John Shepley,
October 31 (1984): 30.
49. Wark, Beach Beneath the Street, 127.
50. Situationist International, ‘Définitions’, Internationale Situationniste 1 (1958): 13.
51. Ibid. For more on the Lettrists’ drifting, see Jean-Michel Mension, The Tribe,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Verso 2002).
52. The parallels between de Quincey and Trocchi extend beyond their shared taste
in opiates: de Quincey is often cited as a proto-psychogeographer. In an inter-
view with Greil Marcus, Trocchi recounted that Guy Debord would regularly
quote de Quincey. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 388.
54. Ibid., 60.
55. The Trocchi-Debord-Midhou connection is made in Debord’s letters of
23 August and 19 September 1957 (to Dahou), and 21 September 1957 and
12 July 1958 (to Trocchi). See Guy Debord, Correspondence: The Foundation
of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960), trans. Stuart Kendall
and John McHale (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2009), 44–45, 50–51, 141–142.
56. Ibid., 142.
57. Internationale Situationniste 8 (1963): 42.
59. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald N icholson-
Smith (London: Rebel Press 2006), 18.
60. Ibid., 95.
61. Ibid., 106.
62. Ibid., 183.
64. Alexander Trocchi, Helen and Desire (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc. 1997), 117.
65. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, in Scott (ed.),
Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds, 180.
67. See Hussey, The Game of War, 73.
68. Ibid., 131.
69. Ibid., 59–60.
70. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 87.
72. The essay was retitled ‘Technique du coup du monde’, in Internationale Situ-
ationniste 8 (1963): 48–56. It was also published in 1962 in the London peri-
odical Anarchy, and in 1963 in New York’s Evergreen Review and in the Los
Angeles Free Press.
73. Trocchi, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, 178.
74. Ibid., 177.
75. Ibid., 178.
76. First published in the New Saltire Review (1962), and subsequently in the
Evergreen Review (1963) and City Lights Journal (1964).
77. Trocchi, ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’, in Scott (ed.), Invisible Insurrection of a
Million Minds, 193, 196.
80. Trocchi, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, 186, 190.
81. Trocchi, ‘Editorial’, 56.
85. Situationist International, ‘Le Quatrième conférence de l’I.S. à Londres’, Inter-
nationale Situationniste 5 (1960): 21.
86. Situationist International, ‘Le Cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg’,
Internationale Situationniste 7 (1962): 27.
87. Situationist International, ‘Le Operation contre-situationniste dans divers
pays’, Internationale Situationniste 8 (1963): 23–29.
90. Gardiner, From Trocchi to Trainspotting, 79.
92. Richard Seaver, Terry Southern and Alexander Trocchi (eds), Writers in Revolt:
An Anthology (New York: Frederick Fell Inc. 1963), xiii.
93. Tom McGrath, ‘Remembering Alex Trocchi’, Edinburgh Review 70 (1985), 37.
95. Ibid.
98. Guy Debord, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Interna-
tional Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action’ (1957),
in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of
Public Secrets 2002), 38.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., 41.
102. Ibid.
106. Ibid., 182. ‘If we don’t wish to assist in the spectacle of the end of the world,
we must work towards the end of the world of the spectacle.’ My translation.
107. Trocchi, ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’, 193.
108. Ibid.
109. Howard Slater, ‘Alexander Trocchi and Project Sigma’, Variant 7 (1989): 36.
110. Situationist International, ‘Manifeste’, 36–38.
111. Ibid., 37.
112. International Times 4 (28 November–11 December 1966), 2.
113. Alexander Trocchi, ‘Notice to Contributors’, in Iwona Blazwick (ed.), An End-
less Banquet, An Endless Passion, An Endless Adventure: A Situationist Scrap-
book (London: ICA 1989), 58.
114. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and
Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso 2011): 130.
115. Stewart Home, ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters: In Memorandum to Memory 13
April 1969, Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt at the Arts Lab in London’, in Iain
Sinclair (ed.), London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton
2006): 398.
116. Guy Debord, ‘Introduction’, in Guy Debord présente Potlatch 1954–1957
(Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1996), 8. My translation.
118. Ibid., 188.
119. Trocchi, ‘Notice to Contributors’, 58.
120. Guy Debord, Jacqueline de Jong, and Asger Jorn, ‘Hands off Alexander
Trocchi’ (October 1960), in Debord, Œuvres, 535.
121. Situationist International, ‘Resolution of the fourth conference of the Sit-
uationist International concerning the imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi’,
Internationale Situationniste 5 (1960): 14.
122. Situationist International, ‘Manifeste’, 37.
123. Alexander Trocchi and Philip Green, ‘Manifesto Situationiste, 1960, sigma edi-
tion’, in Campbell and Niel (eds), A Life in Pieces, 190.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid.
126. Situationist International, ‘Manifeste’, 36.
127. Trocchi and Green, ‘Manifesto Situationiste, 1960, sigma edition’, 191–192.
128. Alexander Trocchi, Man at Leisure (London: Oneworld Classics 2009), 72.
129. Situationist International, ‘Définitions’, Internationale Situationnise 1 (1958),
13.
130. Comte de Lautréamont, ‘Poésies’, in Maldoror and the Complete Works, trans.
Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change 1994), 240.
131. Internationale Situationniste, ‘Sur les publications de l’I.S.,’ Internationale
Situationniste 10 (1966): 83.
132. The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2009), authored by the
anonymous Invisible Committee, espouses a similar tactics of subterranean,
formless organisation as a means of operating under the radar of the hege-
monic order.
136. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Continuum 2008), 63.
137. Ibid., 19.
3 The English Section of the
Situationist International
‘Once there had just been Trocchi drawing on the group’s ideas […] Now
they were seeping into the consciousness of people within a milieu which,
rejecting straight left politics, was searching for a route out of a hippy
enclave at a time when the political temperature was rising.’
Nigel Fountain, Underground: The London
Alternative Press 1966–1974 (1988)1
Alex Trocchi identified the cultural and historical obstacles faced by avant-
garde practitioners in Britain in the early 1960s with remarkable clarity.
He recognised the problems of naming and defending an ‘ism’ in an age
when, first, there were already quite enough ‘isms’ and, second, to name
any such practice was to make it comprehensible, delimited, and recupera-
ble. Trocchi saw that avant-garde practice must be put to ends other than
novel-writing or filmmaking. His own efforts to construct new channels
of countercultural communication as a means of facilitating new forms of
avant-garde practice were too grand to be realised, but his work anticipated
a broader ‘cultural turn’ in the 1960s and 1970s, when different schools
of critical theory took the baton from an exhausted avant-garde tradition.
‘The oppositional energies of the avant-garde’, suggest Jonathan Eburne
and Rita Felski,
find their continuation and completion elsewhere—not in the bad-faith

gestures of a newly commodified neo-avant-garde, but in the practice
of radical critique itself. Theory, in other words, shoulders the anti-
nomian and anti-institutional role previously assigned to radical art.2
At the same time, the British political landscape was changing. Second-wave
feminism, student radicalism, and increasing levels of affluence meant that
the urban proletariat, as it appeared in Marx’s writing, no longer seemed a
viable figure for revolutionary subjectivity. The Soviet Union’s suppression
of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 had left many British communists
searching for a non-aligned leftist politics. One response came by way of
the New Left and its efforts to rethink solidarity, contestation, and class
identity.3
The English Section of the Situationist International 79
Between 1966 and 1967, keen to expand its operations into the
English-speaking world, the Situationist International briefly maintained
an English Section. This chapter locates that group at the centre of these
paradigm shifts in aesthetic and political thought, and attempts to shine a
light on its shady presence in the 1960s British counterculture. The English
Section sought to develop an avant-garde practice that might extend beyond
self-identifying avant-garde groups, that might circumvent the problems of
aesthetic production and recuperation, and that might offer new forms of
revolutionary subjectivity. As such, it took Situationist theory beyond the
remit of the SI, which meant that it was soon expelled from the organisation.
The chapter makes a twofold argument about the role of style in the
Anglicisation of Situationist practice in the 1960s. First, fascinated by
contemporary youth subcultures, the English Section and its precursors
understood style—and particularly vernacular style—as a direct application
of avant-garde sensibilities to everyday life. Unlike its contemporaries in
Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, who made simi-
lar assessments, the English Section further explored how it might actively
involve itself in the ‘youth revolt’.
The SI, however, had no such interest in the minutiae of countercultural
style. Instead, it sought to develop a textual style, named by Debord as a ‘style
of negation’, that was inseparable from its critique of modern c apitalism. The
second argument of this chapter, continued in the next, is that the English
Section and subsequent British Situationists offered a counter-reading of the
SI’s style of negation. In short, where the SI sought anti-spectacular forms,
the British Situationists sought hyper-spectacular forms. In their attention
to youth revolt, and in their cultural translations of SI texts, the British Sit-
uationists explored how antagonism might arise from within the spectacle,
within the conditions of modern capitalism. Their tactic would determine
the future direction of much avant-garde practice in Britain. Their story
also teaches us about the emergence of cultural studies, changes in postwar
Marxist theory, and the aesthetic ideology of the late modernism whose his-
toriography we began to explore in the previous chapter.
The Seeds of Social Destruction

Towards the end of summer 1965, a young English activist named Charles
Radcliffe made contact with the publishers of a Chicago-based magazine
titled Rebel Worker. Radcliffe was a part of the anarchist tendency within
the UK’s anti-nuclear movement. He had participated in direct action along-
side Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100, and wrote about anarchism for
a variety of underground periodicals. Radcliffe was also an enthusiast of
‘Black American’ music: jazz, blues, and soul. Rebel Worker shared Radcliffe’s
political and musical interests. It ran articles on Black and teenage counter-
cultures, appraised through an idiosyncratic strain of libertarian anarchism
drawn from Marx’s early writings, French Surrealism, and the editorial
80 The English Section of the Situationist International
group’s efforts to resurrect the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
union, a major presence in North American labour activism in the early
twentieth century but which had suffered from a dwindling membership
since World War II. A correspondence developed between Radcliffe and
the Rebel Worker editors, and the latter had soon introduced Radcliffe to
the range of thinkers claimed by the Surrealists as their precursors, includ-
ing the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, and the Comte de Lautréamont.4
At the centre of the Rebel Worker group were Penelope and Franklin
Rosemont, who came to London to visit Radcliffe in April 1966. Earlier
in the same trip, the Rosemonts had been to France to meet André Breton
and their Surrealist heroes. While in Paris, Penelope and Franklin were
introduced to Guy Debord, though they would not remember the meeting
fondly. Although Debord had been ‘comradely in the best sense’, they found
him to be unwaveringly critical of all Surrealism after the movement’s dal-
liance with Soviet Russia in the 1930s.5 For Debord, Surrealism was dead;
for the Rosemonts, it was still very much a going concern. Nonetheless,
Debord gave the Rosemonts 300 copies of a pamphlet to distribute in Britain
and the United States. The pamphlet was the SI’s ‘Decline and Fall of the
Spectacle-Commodity Economy’, which had been translated by a young
Englishman then living in Paris, Donald Nicholson-Smith. The SI’s essay
remains one of the most bracing in its oeuvre, the most comprehensive appli-
cation of its theoretical work to an empirical event. The text declares that
the 1965 uprisings in the Watts district of Los Angeles were not race riots as
the media portrayed them, nor were they class riots as might be the conclu-
sion of an orthodox Marxist perspective, but they were a ‘rebellion against
the commodity.’6 That the Situationists had widened their analysis to events
outside of France was no doubt an important factor in the subsequent pop-
ularity of this text in Britain and the United States after the Rosemonts began
its distribution through their bookshop, Solidarity.
While they were in London, the Rosemonts and Radcliffe jointly pro-
duced the sixth edition of Rebel Worker. Its collection of texts reflects their
shared orientation at that time: writings from Marx sit alongside those
from the jazz musician Archie Shepp and the Surrealist Pierre Mabille;
and an article on the IWW accompanies a treatise on black humour. An
article by Franklin Rosemont introduces Marx, Fourier, and Lautréamont
as ‘Souvenirs of the Future: Precursors of the Theory & Practice of Total
Liberation’. The importance of revisiting the figures, Rosemont argues, is
that ‘The most relevant voices of the past are not the ones sanctified in the
bourgeois mausoleum of heroes’. Instead, ‘The revolutionary movement,
presently rebuilding itself from scratch, will have to re-envision its history
from scratch as well.’7
When the Rosemonts returned to Chicago, Radcliffe began his own
magazine, Heatwave, which lasted only two issues, July and October
1966 (Figure 3.1). Around this time, Radcliffe had befriended Christopher
Gray, who had also met Debord on a visit to Paris, and who had recently
translated Raoul Vaneigem’s article ‘Banalités de Base’ into the widely-read
pamphlet ‘The Totality for Kids’. Radcliffe’s first Heatwave had emulated
Rebel Worker; with Gray on board, the second adopted a much more
‘Situationist’ tone.
Figure 3.1 Heatwave logo, from Heatwave 1 (1966).8
Across the three magazines that Radcliffe and friends produced, much
attention was paid to what they call the youth revolt. Radcliffe introduced
this agenda in an article titled ‘A Very Nice Very Respectable Very Use-
less Campaign’. He voiced his dissatisfaction with the British anti-nuclear
movement with which he had previously been involved. The Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament, Radcliffe argued, had come to replicate the authori-
tarian structures of power that it had once opposed. ‘It is time’ he proposes,
for a young movement which addresses the contemporary reality, a

movement which will challenge every tiny aspect of our war-sustained
society, even unto the last public utility, which will militarise the dis-
satisfaction of almost every young person in this country.9
Such a movement would address the disenfranchisement of modern youth

and harness their frustrated energies, their ‘emotional eruptions’ and ‘out-
rages’.10 Young people, Radcliffe speculates, could become the subjects
of an ‘obscene and blasphemous’ movement which ‘is symbolised by the
bomb-thrower, the deserter, the delinquent, the hitch-hiker, the mad lover,
the school drop-out, the wildcat striker, the rioter and the saboteur.’11
The first Heatwave sought evidence of revolutionary stirrings in youth
culture, for which Radcliffe looked towards the Provo movement in Holland.
In 1966, Provo was causing major disruption, particularly in Amsterdam,
through non-violent interventions into city life that provoked a violent
response from the authorities, which Provos welcomed as an exposition of
the coercion that underlies capitalist society, and as a catalyst of further
unrest.12 As an early manifestation of hippie culture, Provo also identified
itself with disaffected youth. An article by Provo, reprinted in Heatwave,
contains a list of youth subcultures similar to the symbolic figures of youth
revolt conjured by Radcliffe:
What is the Provotariat? Provos, beatniks, pleiners, nozems, teddy-boys,

rockers, blousons noir, hooligans, mangupi, students, artists, misfits,
anarchists, ban-the-bombers […] Those who don’t want a career and
who lead irregular lives.13
Such lists became an important part of the aesthetic and rhetorical practices
of the 1960s counterculture. They reflect the counterculture’s self-identity as
a diversity of types. The class photo on the sleeve of the Beatles’ 1967 album
‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ provides another example, and the
founding of the Notting Hill Carnival in 1964 (Notting Hill being the centre
of countercultural activity in London) reflects a similar celebration of coun-
tercultural diversity. More specifically, the countercultural role-calls offered
by Radcliffe and Provo both define these types through their negative rela-
tion to mainstream society.
Radcliffe was keen to locate similar expressions of youthful discontent
in Britain. In the longest article in the first Heatwave, titled ‘The Seeds of
Social Destruction’, Radcliffe restates his interest in ‘the emergence, one after
the other, of groupings of disaffected youth’ which ‘exist wherever mod-
ern, highly bureaucratised consumer societies exist; in the USSR (stilyagi),
France (blousons noir), Britain (mods and rockers), in Holland (provos)’.
Radcliffe asserts that such groupings ‘have little immediately in common
but their implicit rejection of the positions allocated to them in society’,
and catalogues the defining characteristics of seven post-war British youth
movements: the Teddy-Boys, Ton-Up Kids, Beats, Ban the Bombers, Ravers,
Mods, and Rockers. Although he alludes to their class backgrounds and
maps a basic genealogy of such movements, of primary interest to Radcliffe
are the different groups’ fashions and idiosyncrasies, such as the Ton-Up
Kids’ identification with motorbikes, their name taken from their hobby of
doing the ton (100 mph).14
The tone of Radcliffe’s article is hyperbolic and subjectivist, such that
each of these groups comes to represent roughly the same strain of existen-
tial angst. The Teddy Boys, for example,
were socially unacceptable precisely because […] they were unable

to accept the living death to which they had been so casually con-
signed or the non-sequiturs of a society which demanded of its citi-
zens an uncomprehending acceptance of dumb non-violence towards
internal authority and ferocity towards officially-designated external
enemies.15
Radcliffe obscures the origin of these damning verdicts on society: is he

focalising the Ton-Up Kids, or are these his own views?
Though Radcliffe was not yet in contact with the SI, it too had main-
tained a longstanding interest in youth revolt and juvenile delinquency.
When it first appeared, the SI had dismissed all the talk of ‘angry, raging
youth’. ‘These youth outbursts’, the Situationists wrote in the first issue of
their journal Internationale Situationniste (1958), ‘are somewhat reminis-
cent of the surrealist state of mind’, but they lacked surrealism’s ‘leverage
in culture and its revolutionary hope.’16 By the mid-1960s, however, the
Situationists’ position had changed, and though they did not focus like
Radcliffe on specific manifestations of youth revolt in all their identitarian
minutiae, they did recognise the symbolic potency of youth revolt. In 1966,
thanks to Gray’s translation, Vaneigem’s ‘Banalités de Base’ was one of the
few texts from Internationale Situationniste that had been circulated in Britain.
It speculated on youth’s role as the proletariat of spectacular society, the
subject and object of its history. The following year, Vaneigem published his
magnum opus, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations. Nor-
mally translated to The Revolution of Everyday Life, the English title misses
the original’s direct address to ‘the young generations’ whom the book will
advise about their role in anticapitalist struggle.
When the SI’s internal dynamics are mapped, Vaneigem’s passionate,
subjective, and insurrectionary writing is usually distinguished from Debord’s
colder Hegelian logic. The latter has since received more critical attention,
but Vaneigem was more frequently translated in the early days, perhaps
because of the difficulties of Debord’s textual style, which I shall discuss
later in this chapter. Either way, Debord offers the most succinct account of
the SI’s collective attitude towards the anti-spectacular potential of youth
revolt. Thesis 115 of Society of the Spectacle (1967) is worth quoting in full:
New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically

advanced countries. Although these signs are misunderstood and fal-
sified by the spectacle, they are sufficient proof that a new period has
begun. We have already seen the failure of the first proletarian assault
against capitalism; now we are witnessing the failure of capitalist
abundance. On one hand, anti-union struggles of Western workers are
being repressed first of all by the unions; on the other, rebellious youth
are raising new protests, protests which are still vague and confused
but which clearly imply a rejection of art, of everyday life, and of
the old specialized politics. These are two sides of a new spontaneous
struggle that is at first taking on a criminal appearance. They fore-
shadow a second proletarian assault against class society. As the lost
children of this as yet immobile army reappear on this battleground—a
battleground which has changed and yet remains the same—they are
following a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to attack
the machinery of permitted consumption.17
Debord recognised in youth revolt a dialectic of negation and affirmation:

the youth revolt would find its true identity through its rejection of the old
forms of life, art, and politics. The disenfranchisement of orthodox Marxist
and traditional industrial conceptions of class struggle, ‘the first proletar-
ian assault against capitalism’, would give weight to the type of protest
emerging from the youth revolt, the ‘second proletarian assault’. The youth
revolt would free its objectives from ‘the old specialized politics’ to become
spontaneous, autonomous, and iconoclastic. Youth revolt might therefore
represent a real antagonism within spectacular society, to replace and abol-
ish the traditional proletariat, which has been recuperated into the internal
dynamics of capitalism.
In Society of the Spectacle, Debord is interested only in youth revolt’s
position in the totality of social relations, never its fashions or its music.
It remains an abstraction. Perhaps the difference between these Anglo and
Franco approaches to youth revolt relates to France’s lack of the type of
rock ’n’ roll revolution that was experienced in Britain and the United States
in the 1960s, and to Britain’s lack of a mass revolutionary movement at the
order of those experienced in France. Radcliffe would much later reflect,
‘By a nice irony Debord simply wasn’t hip enough to colonise the Anglo-
American left on his own terms.’18
New Leftisms
Debord would dismiss youth and subcultural fashions as always already
spectacular, produced by and for the spectacle. Radcliffe made no such dis-
tinction; if anything, his framework for understanding youth revolt seems to
be drawn directly from its spectacular representations. He treats the Ton-Up
Kids, the most Americanised of all the youth movements, like something
straight out of a Hollywood film:
[These Coffee Bar] Cowboys are not interested in converting any-

one to their way of life; they vary so much anyway that the only
real points of contact between them lie in their leather clothes, their
bikes and the attitudes forced on them by society’s reaction to their
enthusiasms.19
Is Radcliffe describing suburban British youth, or any number of

Hollywood’s rebels without causes? His untroubled adoption of the
mythology of the coffee bar cowboys contrasts, for example, with Richard
Hoggart’s famous observations of a similar demographic in his study of
English ‘juke box boys’ in The Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart gauges
the changes brought about by post-war mass culture, and of the juke box
boys he writes,
Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly
thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid
the odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers—their clothes, their
hair-styles, their facial expressions all indicate—are living to a large
extent in a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which
they take to be those of American life.20
Hoggart’s languid and cynical tone scarcely conceals his nostalgia for what he
remembers as a more authentic—or, more authentically English—age, prior
to the top-down imposition of American mass culture in the post-war period.
He absolutely refuses to engage with the ‘myth world’ of mass culture.
Nonetheless, Hoggart’s work was central to the cultural turn, itself pro-
pelled by the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
that he founded in Birmingham in 1964. As Stuart Hall explains, Hoggart
reconceptualised the role of culture. Hoggart’s understanding of culture as
‘the practices of making sense’ was ‘very far removed indeed from “cul-
ture” as the ideal court of judgement, whose touchstone was “the best that
has been thought and said”, which animated the tradition from Arnold to
Eliot and Leavis’.21 Jon Savage, meanwhile, emphasises Radcliffe’s almost
entirely overlooked contribution to the British cultural turn: ‘In “The Seeds
of Social Destruction”, Charles Radcliffe laid the foundations for the next
20 years of sub-cultural theory.’22
Certainly, British cultural studies and Radcliffe’s Heatwave shared
interests in the identities and commodities engendered by mass culture,
which were largely dismissed by the SI and the Frankfurt School of critical
theory—a division that bears the trace of the long-standing distinction
between British empiricism and Continental abstraction. More specifically,
British cultural studies and Radcliffe, in their attention to young people’s
adoption of the commodified signifiers of countercultural identity, both
made connections between the history of Continental avant-garde practice
and the contemporary British counterculture. Perhaps, both Radcliffe and
the CCCS suggested, the British legacy of the Continental avant-garde was
to be found in the counterculture.
The CCCS’s reading of Mod serves as a good example. Hall and his col-
leagues recognised a crisis of affluence in postwar Britain: in the 1950s, the
working class had become increasingly involved in consumption, which—
combined with the emergence of the welfare state—had destabilised tradi-
tional working-class identities, aspirations, and forms of socialisation. The
CCCS was interested in how youth subcultures had responded to this shift
from traditional British working-class values to those of a newly American-
ised mass culture. Mods, John Clarke and Tony Jefferson suggested, repre-
sented this split by way of their embrace of commodities from the Continent
(Italian suits and scooters, French new-wave films) alongside their retention
of the ‘parental argot’.23 Mods were indeed modernist, but also indissolubly
English: Continental avant-garde culture wrapped in a Union flag. (That
said, we shouldn’t ignore the influence of London’s West Indian migrant
communities on Mod culture, and we’ll consider the role of race later in
this chapter.)
Mods’ negotiation of British working-class identity and Continental
modernity is articulated more clearly by Dick Hebdige in a 1974 occasional
paper titled ‘The Style of the Mods’, which would inform his famous 1979
text Subculture: the Meaning of Style. For Hebdige, Mod culture anglicised
avant-garde practice. He argues that Mod at its peak was ‘pure, unadulter-
ated style’ inasmuch as it appropriated the commodities of mass culture and
performed a ‘semantic rearrangement’ of them. Mod style was a parody of
the dominant, consumerist culture—superficially similar, but also incompre-
hensible, to the adult world:
Like the Surrealists and Dadaists, the mods relied principally on the
dissonance between object and context to evince the desired disturbed
response from the dominant parent culture, and learned to make their
criticisms obliquely, having learned by experience (at school and work)
to avoid direct confrontation where age, experience, and civil power
would, inevitably, have told against them.24
Hebdige’s reading of Mod was actually pre-empted by the English Section

of the Situationist International, which included Radcliffe. It had already
argued that ‘The juvenile delinquents—not the pop artists—are the true
inheritors of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole
of social life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and
destroyed them’.25
However, neither the English Section nor Hebdige saw Mod as a viable
model for future avant-garde practice or revolutionary subjectivity. For
Hebdige, Mod became addicted to the consumption that it once parodied.
For the English Section, Mod remained, like Dada, ‘purely nihilistic’.26 None-
theless, they both celebrated youth revolt, however much it was doomed to
failure. Mod, wrote Hebdige, did ‘at least beat against the bars of its own
prison.’27 Radcliffe agreed, ‘What is important about the youth revolt at this
stage is not what it is but that it is’.28
A crucial difference between British cultural studies and Situationist
theory in the 1960s relates to their respective critiques of the mechanisms
of social control. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the mechanism
of control against which cultural revolt positions itself is hegemony, as
theorised by Gramsci. Hebdige refused the notion that hegemony is ever
absolutely consolidated. Instead, it is always to be won. He used Valentin
Volosinov’s claim that signification is itself ideological, and that class
struggle occurs even at the level of the sign, to argue that subcultures
struggle through style: ‘the challenge to hegemony which subcultures rep-
resent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in
style.’29 If class is something performed and signified, then the radical
rearrangement of cultural signs performed by youth subcultures must con-
stitute a form of class struggle. Real antagonism is possible, therefore,
within mass culture.
This logic was refuted by Situationist theory, in which the dominant
mechanism of social control is not hegemony but recuperation. Unlike
hegemony, recuperation does not construct a battlefield of competing sign
systems but instead absorbs all signs and all cultural phenomena into one
order: the spectacle. In the spectacle-commodity economy, argued the SI,
recuperation is an inevitable and unavoidable process. It nullifies all rebel-
lion that operates solely on the level of culture or of the sign—hence the
SI’s efforts to distance itself from the artistic milieu from which it emerged.
The revolutionary potential of youth lay not in its style or its subversions,
but instead in its structural freedom, its economic liminality, and its Dadaist
nihilism regarding the maintenance of bourgeois society. Ultimately, how-
ever, the freedoms of youth were illusory, as was the revolutionary potential
of any affirmative subjectivity.
Years later, Radcliffe would renounce ‘The Seeds of Social Destruction’
as ‘pop-sociology’ and speculate that a closer affiliation with the SI may
have led to greater theoretical coherence on his part.30 ‘As a Sit, French or
English,’ he wrote, ‘I’d always been out on my own un-theoretical limb.’31
His self-deprecation is unjust. In the online zine Not Bored, Bill Brown
defends Radcliffe’s attention to cultural struggle at the expense of political
or workplace struggle:
The reasons for the inclusion of these articles into Heatwave are clear:
pop culture, consumerism and subcultural “style” are phenomena that
modern workers have directly experienced, have questioned deeply,
and have understood at a profound level. It isn’t at all relevant, import-
ant or even interesting that classical Marxism and its contemporary
adherents disapprove of these phenomena as distracting, degenerate
or “superficial”. What is truly relevant, important and interesting is
the question, Toward what end will modern workers put their under-
standing of these phenomena?32
Brown recognises the quotidian and vernacular emphasis of Radcliffe’s proj-

ect, its own immersion in the mass cultural forms that it reappraises, and its
insistence that class consciousness will come about through the very stuff of
mass culture. Brown recognises the immanence of Radcliffe’s project, which
was to establish a programme for later developments in anglicised Situation-
ist practice: a critique of the spectacle from within.
The English Section of the Situationist International

In October 1966, soon after the second Heatwave, Radcliffe, his partner
Diana Shelley, and Gray set off to Holland to observe first-hand the Provo’s
activities, and then headed to Brussels to meet Vaneigem, and to Paris to
meet Debord. They stayed at Debord’s flat where, Radcliffe recalls, Debord
would give audiences to attendant Situationists.33 Andrew Hussey, in his
biography, reports that Debord was keen to extend the SI’s ‘theatre of oper-
ations into the English-speaking world’ and particularly into America, home
of the Watts uprising.34 Yet Debord’s English was poor, and he had expelled
the SI’s earliest British members, Rumney and Trocchi. After many hours
of drinking, smoking, and walking, and with Debord having approved of
Heatwave and of Gray’s translation of ‘Banalités de Base’, Radcliffe and
Gray were admitted into the SI. Donald Nicholson-Smith had already
become a member; soon after, Timothy (T.J.) Clark also became an official
Situationist. Although Radcliffe, Gray, Nicholson-Smith, and Clark are now
recognised as having constituted the SI’s English Section, it is likely that at
the time they were simply absorbed into the French Section.35
For the moment, the possibility that ‘English Section’ was simply a label
added posthumously is less important than the fact that Radcliffe, Gray,
Nicholson-Smith, and Clark collectively issued two texts from which can be
traced the contours of an anglicised Situationist practice. The first of these
texts was a translation of the infamous 1966 pamphlet ‘De la misère en
milieu étudiant’, which had caused a scandal at Strasbourg University and,
at least according to the SI, was one of the catalysts of the events of May
and June 1968.36 The English Section retitled the pamphlet ‘Ten Days that
Shook the University’—an ironic allusion to John Reed’s celebration of the
October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)—and added
a postscript titled ‘If you want to make a social revolution, do it for fun’. In
1967, the English Section wrote an original text, ‘The Revolution of Modern
Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’, intended for an English Situationist
journal. The group’s rapid exclusion from the SI meant that although the
text circulated in mimeographed and later photocopied editions, it remained
unpublished until 1994.37
The English Section’s translation of the Strasbourg pamphlet is both lit-
eral and cultural, which can be demonstrated through their rendering of its
final sentence. After it contends that proletarian revolutions must be festi-
vals, the original text ends:
Le jeu est la rationalité ultime de cette fête, vivre sans temps mort et

jouir sans entraves sont les seules règles qu’il pourra reconnoitre.38
The emphasis on play (‘the game is the ultimate principle of this festival’)
was derived from the SI’s reading of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938).
The commands ‘vivre sans temps mort’ and ‘jouir sans entraves’, both of
which would become famous slogans during May 1968, demonstrate the
SI’s delight in wordplay. The former is simple enough, ‘Live without dead
time’, but the latter plays on the double meaning of ‘jouir’ to mean both
‘enjoy without restraint’ and, in a sexual sense, ‘come without restraint’.
The English Section’s translation differs, first, by adding immediately prior
to this final sentence a reference to English literature: ‘in revolution the road
of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’; the part I have italicized is an
aphorism from Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (c.1790–1793).
Second, the English Section does not replicate the double-entendre, but ends
the text on an impassioned and affective address: ‘The rules are simple:
to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammelled
desire.’39 The manifold work of translation will be investigated later in this
chapter.
For the most part, ‘Ten Days that Shook the University’ is a vitriolic
attack on the false freedoms of student life. Student bohemianism, the text
claims, is nothing more than an initiation into the passivity of spectacu-
lar society.40 Nonetheless, the text maintains that youthful revolt, however
co-opted it might be at the present, does contain a kernel of revolutionary
feeling. The violence of young delinquents, specifically of the blousons noirs,
is read as a rejection of everyday life that has been made boring under the
spectacle, even though the young delinquents remain unable to conceive
that ‘this society can be superseded’.41
The text addresses the Provos, Berkeley’s student protestors, New York’s
Resurgence Youth Movement, Japan’s Zengakuren, and the British Commit-
tee of 100. All of these movements are critiqued for having failed to accom-
pany their insurrectionary practices with a theory of total revolution. For the
Situationists, a total revolution necessitates autogestion (self-management)
and workers’ councils. The text becomes increasingly messianic when her-
alding the latter:
The task of the Workers’ Councils will not be the autogestion of the
world which exists, but its continual qualitative transformation. The
commodity and its laws (that vast detour in the history of man’s pro-
duction of himself) will be superseded by a new social form […] The
democracy of Workers’ Councils is the resolution of all previous con-
tradictions. It makes “everything which exists apart from individuals
impossible”.42
Council communism was, by 1967, the SI’s stated political position, drawn
mostly from Cornelius Castoriadis’s Socialisme ou Barbarie group, of which
Debord was a sometime member. Socialisme ou Barbarie had an English
sister organisation, Solidarity, which published its own and translations of
Castoriadis’s texts. Solidarity was one of the few English organisations to be
praised by the SI, for its critique of the ‘empty leisure’ provided by modern
capitalism.43 Solidarity had also leant Radcliffe the mimeograph machines
to print Heatwave.44
In the fourth chapter of Society of the Spectacle, ‘The Proletariat as Sub-
ject and Representation’, Debord argues that the failures of twentieth cen-
tury revolutionary movements were the failure of the proletariat to become
the subject of history, its agency always co-opted by Party representation
and the ensuing development, in Soviet Russia, of a new ruling class of
bureaucrats.45 Workers’ councils, for the SI, were the promise of direct
social and industrial participation, the refusal of hierarchy, and the refusal
of the spectacle. The workers’ council, Debord writes, is,
the terrain where the objective preconditions of historical conscious-

ness are brought together—the terrain where active direct communi-
cation is realized, marking the end of specialization, hierarchy and
separation, and the transformation of existing conditions into “condi-
tions of unity”.46
However, the SI never elaborated precisely what it understood to be a

workers’ council, nor how one would operate in practice. ‘Workers’ council’
signified anti-spectacular authenticity, but actually masked an absence or an
anti-presence. The concept implies discipline, procedure, and compromise,
all of which are undermined by the SI’s simultaneous celebration of the
spontaneity and individualism of youth revolt. As a term, ‘workers’ council’
was used in SI rhetoric alongside equally vague and esoteric terminology,
such as the ‘real experience’ and ‘life directly lived’, both of which said to be
obscured by the spectacle.
These rhetorical devices demonstrate the importance of empty signifiers
in Situationist poetics. In this case, the empty signifiers reflect the SI’s subli-
mated conception of authenticity—but, following Laclau, they still m atter
politically. The empty signifier serves, in Situationist critique, to gesture
toward forms of anti-spectacular truth without circumscribing or prescrib-
ing those forms. Because the SI’s sense of recuperation was so absolute and
pervasive, to articulate a different organisation of social life would be to
orchestrate its co-optation by capitalism. As such, the SI’s project was based
on the negation of what exists, and used empty signifiers to the preserve the
possibility, even just discursively, of something else—of an anti-spectacular
ontology or practice.
In their postscript to ‘Ten Days that Shook the University’, titled ‘If you
want to make a social revolution, do it for fun’, the English Section nei-
ther adopted nor challenged the councilist conclusions of the SI’s pamphlet.
Instead, they considered what of the text’s critique of recuperated student
revolt remained relevant in a British context. The French text commends
the British Spies for Peace, a radical offshoot of the Committee of 100,
who caused outrage in spring 1963 by publishing secret government plans
that anticipated nuclear war. The English Section argued that the Strasbourg
pamphlet, published using Student Union funds, had created an equivalent
situation, in which ‘society was forced to finance, publicise and broadcast
a revolutionary critique of itself, and furthermore to confirm this critique
through its reactions to it.’47
Situationist thought, the English Section argued, had developed beyond
its context, beyond France’s relative lack of economic development. They
reflect,
Strasbourg marks the beginning of a new period of situationist activ-
ity. The social position of situationist thought has been determined up
to now by the following contradiction: the most highly developed cri-
tique of modern life has been made in one of the least highly developed
modern countries—in a country which has not yet reached the point
where the complete disintegration of all values becomes patently obvi-
ous and engenders the corresponding forces of radical rejection. In the
French context, situationist theory has anticipated the social forces by
which it will be realised.48
England, on the other hand, was ‘the temporary capital of the spectacular
world’. Leftist politics, the English Section argued, had failed to recognise
the real conditions of modern capitalism. The British labour movement
maintained ‘bone-hard hierarchies’, ‘school-teacher notions of technology
and social justice’, and all the ‘spectacular antagonisms’ of Party politics.49
The English Section accused the British left of having failed to recognise
that struggle occurs ‘in the supermarket and the beatclub as well as on the
shopfloor.’50
The English Section’s self-appointed task, therefore, was to apply the Sit-
uationist critique to Britain, which would involve ‘a quasi-terroristic denun-
ciation of the official world [which] is the only possible planned action on
the part of a revolutionary group’.51 They sought no allies or allegiances in
this task: ‘The enemy is entryism, cultural or political. Art and the Labour
Movement are dead! Long live the Situationist International!’52
Despite the forthrightness of the postscript’s rhetoric, the English S ection’s
‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ is an
altogether more ambitious text in the Anglicisation of Situationist practice.
The text reflects a widening division between the English Section’s inter-
pretation of Situationist theory and what was happening on the Continent.
Indeed, as Bill Brown notes, the only quotation from the SI that the English
Section use in this text, as an epigraph, is from the first issue of Internationale
Situationniste, published in 1958. It includes: ‘The goal of the Situationists
is immediate participation in a varied and passionate life, through moments
which are both transient and consciously controlled’. It also includes the SI’s
definition of cultural activity as ‘a method of experimental construction of
everyday life’.53
The English Section’s text was written in 1967, so it was looking back to
a period in which the SI had been much more hopeful about the role of art
and cultural activity than it was in 1967. The time lag, Brown suggests, was
not due to the unavailability of translations of Situationist texts, nor to ‘the
relative “immaturity” of the English Situationists’ theoretical development’.
Instead, the English Section produced ‘an intentional distancing’ between
itself and the SI as it then existed, ‘because they weren’t ever really commit-
ted to being members of any type of official organization.’54
‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’
moves through four stages. It begins with an introduction to the central
tenets of Situationist theory—or, at least, Situationist theory at the turn of
the 1960s. The main concerns of Situationist theory, according to the English
Section, are play and urban intervention. ‘Life’, the English Section writes, ‘is
revealed as a war between the commodity and the ludic’.55 The proceeding
three stages reiterate themes common to each of the texts that Radcliffe
and Gray had previously issued: first, a denunciation of the contemporary
left, particularly of the British New Left for its lack of experimentation in
practices of living; second, an argument that revolutionary movements must
be focussed on everyday life; and third, a gesture towards youth revolt as
symbol of this new project.
The most significant contribution of ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and
the Modern Art of Revolution’ to the continuing Anglicisation of Situa-
tionist practice came in a section of the text titled, ‘The Real Avant-Garde:
The Game-Revolt of Delinquency, Petty Crime and the New Lumpen.’ The
English Section argue that the apparently growing ranks of juvenile delin-
quents constitute both the ‘real avant-garde’ and a ‘new lumpen’. The ges-
ture is significant in two ways. First, it continues the project of attempting
to identify a revolutionary subject to fill the role previously occupied in
orthodox Marxist theory by the urban proletariat. Second, it makes explicit
the connection between delinquency and revitalised avant-garde practice.
About this ‘new lumpen’, the English Section writes,
The formation of the new lumpen prefigures several features of an

all-encompassing subversion. On the one hand, the lumpen is the
sphere of complete social breakdown [,] of apathy, negativism and
nihilism—but, at the same time, in so far as it defines itself by its refusal
to work and its attempts to use its clandestine leisure in the invention
of new types of free activity, it is fumbling, however clumsily, with the
quick of the revolutionary supersession now possible.56
The lumpenproletariat has a long history in Marxist and anarchist theory.

Marx and Engels introduced the term in The German Ideology (1845),
though Marx elaborated its historical role in The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte (1852). For Marx, the lumpenproletariat represented the
refuse of class society, beneath the labouring classes. The lumpenproletari-
at’s absolute dispossession from social life meant that this sub-stratum could
never achieve class-consciousness. In fact, the lumpenproletariat was sus-
ceptible to reactionary ideology and could be mobilised against the inter-
ests of the true revolutionary agent, the proletariat. Marx recounted Louis
Bonaparte’s efforts to corral a mass movement of the lumpen, and though
Marx was clearly disparaging, his description prefigured the lists that Pro-
vos and Heatwave would later offer of the social types that constitute the
youth revolt:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of
dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the
bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds,
escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpock-
ets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati,
organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short,
the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither,
which the French call la bohème.57
Later radical traditions postulated that the lumpen’s dispossession might

be harnessed for more revolutionary purposes. Contemporary with the SI,
for example, Frantz Fanon argued that the rural poor of colonised nations
were a lumpen class, and a revolutionary one. Where the urban proletariat
tend towards conservatism, nationalism, and traditionalism, the rural poor
remained revolutionary because ‘they won’t become reformed characters to
please colonial society’.58 Just as Marx’s urban proletariat are the vessel of
communism, Fanon’s lumpenproletariat are the subject-objects of a differ-
ent teleology, that of decolonisation.
Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party offered another concep-
tualisation of the lumpen’s revolutionary potential, in roughly the same
period. Newton developed tangentially from a Maoist perspective to argue
that automation would render increasing numbers of the proletariat unemp
loyed and unemployable. Anger at its dispossession would instil this new
lumpen with revolutionary energy.59 The SI, however, were more optimis-
tic about automation and its potential to free people from the drudgery
of work. Vaneigem foresaw a lumpen similarly constituted to Newton’s—
though Vaneigem’s lumpen was not a raced category—but Vaneigem imagi
ned instead ‘a transitional period during which full automation and the
will of the new proletariat leave work solely to the specialists, reducing
managers and bureaucrats to the rank of temporary slaves’.60 This quotation,
Vaneigem at his most Nietzschean, is taken from the text that Gray had
translated, ‘Banalités de Base’. Vaneigem’s mention of a ‘new proletariat’
clearly informed the English Section’s search for a ‘new lumpen’.
Fanon and the Black Panthers, and Third World and Black struggles
more generally, had not gone unnoticed by the SI. We have already encoun-
tered its pamphlet ‘Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’,
translated by Nicholson-Smith and passed to the Rosemonts then Radcliffe,
with its account of the LA Watts riots as a ‘potlatch of destruction’ and a
‘rebellion against the commodity’.61 There’s a more suspect analysis con-
tained in the text, though, one that was not uncommon among similar—and
similarly White—revolutionary groups of the period. The SI recognised that
Black people in America faced oppression for which full redress would not
come by way of new legislation. As such, it proposed that ‘What American
blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final
analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society.’
The problem is that the specific histories of racism and colonialism that
inform Third World and Black struggles are elided by the SI’s totalising ana
lysis: ‘The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condi-
tion of America, which merely finds its first expression among the blacks.’62
In its ‘Address to the Revolutionaries of Algeria and of All Countries’, dis-
tributed in Algiers in 1965 and then published alongside ‘Decline and Fall’
in the tenth Internationale Situationniste, the SI voiced both solidarity with
Algerian and American revolutionaries and wariness of their actual ideo
logies: ‘The freedom movement of the American blacks, if it can assert itself
incisively, will call into question all the contradictions of modern capitalism;
it must not be sidetracked by the “black nationalism” and “black capital-
ism” of the Black Muslims.’63
Third World and Black revolutionaries were treated as only metonyms
of the new lumpen, the new revolutionary subjectivity; essentially, they
became yet more empty signifiers, and their specific demands and issues
were as ignored by the SI as they were by the societies they rose against.
Over in New York, the anarchist Black Mask group—whose story will soon
intertwine with the SI’s—offered a similarly well-meaning but problematic
assessment. In the tenth issue of its newsletter, in an article titled ‘The New
Proletariat: Nigger as Class’, the Black Mask group wrote:
The “Negro” revolution (civil rights) gave way to the “Black” revo-
lution (nationalism) which must finally give way to the “Nigger” rev-
olution, the total expression of a new emerging class of dispossessed
[…] We must expand the possibilities of this class and spread its social
view: the question of “Nigger” transcends race and becomes one of
class.64
The histories of racial oppression in North America and North Africa are
indeed tied up with the histories of capitalism and colonialism, but an
expression of solidarity that renders one revolutionary programme into a
subset of another, especially when relatively privileged White revolution-
aries see Black struggles primarily as the confirmation of their own, is surely
a limited form of solidarity. The messianism of the SI and of Black Mask, in
these instances, stripped actual Black and Third World revolutionaries of the
precise qualities that made them such privileged representatives of the need
for revolution in the first place. The English Section’s investment in a ‘new
lumpen’, meanwhile, was not so much part of a socio-economic analysis,
but was instead part of its increasingly performative textual style. The point
was not simply to identify the new lumpen elsewhere, sociologically, as in
Heatwave, but to act out this new revolutionary subjectivity: a lumpenpro-
letarianisation of style. ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art
of Revolution’ thus comes to resemble that most familiar genre of avant-
garde writing, the manifesto, particularly in its turn to the theatricality that
Marjorie Perloff identifies in Marinetti’s manifestoing. It bombastically
declares its truths to be self-evident but obfuscated in the present moment.
It issues demands and threats: conjuring both Lautréamont and a Western
gunslinger, it warns, ‘The poésie faite par tous has known to be somewhat
trigger-happy in the past’. Like the intermediality that Perloff attributes to
Marinetti, the English Section’s text is analysis and performance, polemic
and aesthetic. Whereas Heatwave’s political programme extended no fur-
ther than ‘I wish’, the English Section adopts a more imperative ‘we must’.
Indeed, the collective ‘we’ that begins Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ of
1909 creeps—slowly, unannounced, with trepidation—into the English Sec-
tion’s text.65 The ‘new lumpen will probably be our most important theatre
of operations’, the text argues, ‘We must enter it as a power against it and
precipitate its crisis.’66
The crucial difference between the English Section’s text and an avant-
garde manifesto that proudly declares itself to be one is that the English
Section refuse to name the ‘ism’ that they bring into being. ‘Situationist’ only
appears in the aforementioned epigraph from Internationale Situationniste
in which the SI, using the third person, speaks of its desire for the ‘experi-
mental construction of everyday life’. Otherwise, the English Section’s ‘we’
goes unnamed, even when it affirms the same desire. For all its bluster, then,
the text remains hesitant, still in the shadow of its parent. It isn’t so much a
manifesto, as a manifesting; as yet, it is unsure of the identity that it brings
into being, and unsure of the form that it adopts to do so. It knows they’re
not quite right, not quite ready. The construction of a new revolutionary
subjectivity, the new lumpen, was still underway: ‘We are concerned first
and foremost with the construction of our own lives.’67
The Negation of Style and the Style of Negation

My suggestion that the Anglicisation of Situationist practice at these crucial
moments in the late 1960s was primarily concerned with style, and with the
development of a particular poetics, is provocative but not without prece-
dent. English-speaking critics and translators have long noted—and been
troubled by—Debord’s stylishness as a writer, by which I mean the evident
pleasure that he took from sophisticated rhetorical tropes, and his mastery
in using them. This stylishness would seem to be at odds with his analy-
sis of the repressive and ideological functions of stylisation in the society
of the spectacle, and with the SI’s effort to continue the historical avant-
garde’s project of sublating art and life as separate categories of experience.
In March 1968, for example, the Times Literary Supplement published a
review of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The review leans heavily on
English stereotypes of the French as surly and haughty. It patronises the
Situationists, ‘who poke fun at everyone else, [but] take themselves very seri-
ously indeed.’ Published before the momentous events of May and June that
year, the review speculates that ‘The situationists’ political influence appears
to be nil,’ though it notes ‘a tiny British neo-surrealist group, best known for
its defence of juvenile delinquency in an apparently defunct journal called
Heatwave’ and for issuing ‘poor’ translations of Situationist texts.68
Nearly twenty years later in 1987—again, just before another important
moment in the popularisation of the SI, a 1989 exhibition at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris and the ICAs of London and Boston—and British crit-
ics were still resistant to the style of Debord’s prose. The conceptual art
group Art & Language wrote, ‘Situationist texts are very difficult to read,
very difficult to concentrate on […] The texts are effectively incorrigible and
self-insulating and then some!”69
French critics have often levelled the same accusations. Claude Lefort, in
a review of Society of the Spectacle in the literary magazine La Quinzaine
littéraire in February 1968, is seduced by but sceptical of Debord’s style:
One would have expected this book to be a violent attack against its
adversaries, but in fact this ostentatious discourse has no other aim
than showing off. Admittedly it has a certain beauty. The style is flaw-
less. Since any question that does not have an automatic response has
been banished from the very first lines, one would search in vain for
any fault.70
For Lefort, the style of Debord’s text serves to distract from, or even replace,
its political content. Lefort’s backhanded compliment complains of an excess
of style, of the text being stylised at the expense of critical rigour.
Many years after his involvement in the English Section and now an emi-
nent art historian, T.J. Clark summarised the ‘problem’ of Debord’s style.
‘How are we to understand,’ he asks,
the obvious (but scandalous) fact that in Debord’s case politics was
largely writing – that it turned on the building of an inimitable polem-
ical and expository style, assembled over decades, born from a series
of engagements with, on and against the French language?71
Clark’s rhetorical question pertains to the categorisation of different criti-

cal practices and, more specifically, to distinctions made between practices
of writing and practices of more immediate political consequence, though
he doesn’t identify the latter. Clark recognises that for Debord writing was
itself a mode of political intervention, and his writing intervened into poli-
tics by way of its a priori intervention into language.
In the final theses of Society of the Spectacle’s chapter ‘Negation and Con-
sumption in Culture’, Debord is clear about the relation between form and
content in political critique. ‘The language of contradiction,’ which is the nec-
essary language of critical theory, he writes, ‘must be dialectical in its form as it
is in its content.’72 The ‘mode of exposition of dialectical theory,’ Debord con-
tinues, occurs through a style that simultaneously ‘contains its own critique’
and ‘is a scandal and abomination to the rules of the dominant language.’73
The interplay between form and content in Debord’s prose is not rec-
ognised by Lefort, for whom the form eclipses the content, nor by TLS and
Art & Language, for whom Debord fails to adopt the style proper to politi-
cal discourse as they understand it, and as such he is not taken seriously as a
discursive political subject. In addition, TLS and Art & Language flippantly
dismiss Debord’s idiosyncratic style as inherently French, and exaggerate
their British bafflement at such curiously French texts.
Yet the role of style in Debord’s writing—which here stands metonym-
ically for the SI’s aesthetic practice more generally—is subtler than these
critics believed; subtler, too, than the English Section and many of their suc-
cessors recognised. This is not to say that Debord’s writings all demonstrate
a single, consistent style. His pre- and early Situationist texts are zealous and
pugnacious; Society of the Spectacle is controlled and aphoristic; later auto-
biographical writings like Panegyric (1989) are melancholic and Roman-
tic. What all these texts share, however, is what Clark calls elsewhere their
‘chiliastic serenity’.74 As Debord wrote at the dissolution of SI: ‘The calm
assertion of the most sweeping extremism, like the numerous expulsions of
ineffectual or forbearing situationists, were the SI’s weapons [in its] particu-
lar combat, and not in order to become an authority or power.’75
Style, as Debord used the term, relates to what he called the ‘mode of
exposition’ of a critique. For Debord, prose style must perform a particular
labour: it must demonstrate, not simply speak of, the thinking behind it.
This is why Clark calls Debord’s consolidated style ‘polemic and exposi-
tory’. What, for Debord, did critical thought entail? He describes his con-
ception of dialectical thought as the inverse of affirmation: it should not
valorise but negate. In the SI’s logic of recuperation, any form of positivism
will be appropriated and nullified by power. To evade the recuperation of
one’s texts and write in a manner as incommensurate as possible with the
spectacle, Debord sees the task of the critical theorist as the antithetical
one of portraying the negative images of the false-positives of the spectacle.
Debord describes the spectacle as the ‘affirmation of appearance’ and the
‘negation of life.’76 The critical theorist must negate that negation. The chal-
lenge is not to affirm a different mode of being but to negate the dominant
one, with the Benjaminian promise that a more authentic something else
will be illuminated in the process. Indeed, in this account, Debord’s treat-
ment of style is similar to the concept of darstellung with which Adorno
wrangled, and the SI’s efforts towards a textual representation of dialectical
thinking which resists recuperation and all forms of positivism frequently
converge with those of the Frankfurt School.77
Debord’s particular conception of a negative-dialectical mode of cri-
tique is exemplified by the practice of détournement, which the SI had
already defined as the appropriation, rearrangement, and subversion of
already-existing expressions. Debord describes détournement as, ‘the fluid
language of anti-ideology,’ and the restoration ‘to subversion of previous
critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths.’78
Debord’s description, above, of his own style as a ‘scandal and abomination
to the rules of the dominant language’ was itself a détournement of Marx’s
description of Capital’s dialectical method as ‘a scandal and an abomination
to the bourgeoisie.’79
To obtain a sense of how Debord’s English translators understood the
role of style in Society of the Spectacle, we can compare two early transla-
tions of a relevant thesis. The original thesis 204 reads:
La théorie critique doit se communiquer dans son propre langage. C’est

le langage de la contradiction, qui doit être dialectique dans sa forme
comme il l’est dans son contenu. Il est critique de la totalité et critique
historique. Il n’est pas un «degré zéro de l’écriture» mais son renverse-
ment. Il n’est pas une négation du style, mais le style de la négation.80
The first translation into English—published in 1970 by the American Fredy

Perlman, in which Debord, not fluent in English, recognised some ‘obvious’
‘weaknesses’81—reads:
Critical theory must be communicated in its own language. It is the

language of contradiction, which must be dialectical in form as it is in
content. It is critique of the totality and historical critique. It is not ‘the
nadir of writing’ but its inversion. It is not a negation of style, but the
style of negation.82
A translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith of the English Section, eventually

published in 1994 but dating much earlier, adapts Debord’s style into the
British Situationist style that we’re watching evolve:
Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language—the lan-

guage of contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: the
language of the critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Not
some ‘writing degree zero’—just the opposite. Not a negation of style,
but the style of negation.83
The variations between the translated texts are evidence of the different but
mutually determinative levels at which translation operates. The translator’s
recognition or ignorance of particular nuances or allusions, mostly at the
level of content, affects the translation, which in turn affects the reproduc-
tion of the ethos represented by the original text. The clearest evidence of an
Anglophonic unfamiliarity with Debord’s Francophone context is that Perl-
man does not recognise the dig at Roland Barthes’s Le Degré zéro de l’écri-
ture (1953). Barthes’s text responded to the problem of alienated language
by proposing a fresh start, a degree zero of writing. In contrast, Debord pro-
poses to take what already exists and to exacerbate whatever possibilities
for play remain therein.
Meanwhile, the most obvious Anglophonic projections onto Debord’s
text are Nicholson-Smith’s colloquialisms, ‘Not some’ and ‘just the oppo-
site.’ His translation jettisons the classical rhetoric and grammatical ele-
gance of Debord’s prose. For example, after its first sentence, Debord’s thesis
is structured through a series of parallels: Positive and positive. Positive and
positive. Negative, but positive. Negative, but positive. Nicholson-Smith
drops the subjects from sentences, which become grammatically incorrect,
and adds discrepant punctuation. The regimented organisation and internal
dynamics of Debord’s text are lost, and the style becomes less polished, less
refined.
A more fundamental misprision is that Perlman and Nicholson-Smith
both render ‘critical theory’ as the object rather than the subject of the
first sentence. For Debord, critical theory must communicate itself (his
italics): it is not to be communicated, but it must do its own work; it
must be dialectical in its form as in its content. However, Perlman and
Nicholson-Smith both recognise one instance of how Debord’s text allies
its form with its content—or, more precisely, its mode of exposition with
its mode of critique. Both include the chiasmus with which Debord’s thesis
culminates.
Chiasmatic phrasings are integral to the consolidated style explained
and attempted in Society of the Spectacle. Debord borrowed the trope
from Marx’s early writings and, indeed, thesis 206 makes reference to
Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy (1847), whose own title is a chiasmatic
reversal of Proudhon’s ‘philosophy of poverty.’84 Marx often used chi-
asma to differentiate his project from his predecessors. In this instance,
Marx implies that though Proudhon considers the right things, he does
so the wrong way round. Proudhon, like Hegel, is standing on his head.
Debord, too, used chiasma and détournement, including those of Marx,
to mark his corrections of existing philosophies.85 Debord’s chiasma also
act to expose the processes of falsification and mystification performed
by the spectacle, as in the following examples from just the text’s first
chapter:
[The spectacle says,] What appears is good, what is good appears;

It does not realise philosophy, it philosophises reality;
As long as necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary;
The spectacle reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their
separation.86
Similarly, the chapter includes a number of statements whose structure may

not be chiasmatic, but whose logic is, such as:
[The spectacle is] a concrete inversion of life;

In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the
false.87
The chiasmatic ABBA form rearranges the elements of its first half in its
second, consistent with the SI’s description of détournement as ‘the reuse of
preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble.’88 The chiasmatic structure
neatly demonstrates the repetition and reversal that is the process of détour-
nement and the basis of Debord’s style of negation. Repetition and reversal
occur in chiasmus in a particularly visual manner: we can see, actually see,
the elements being rearranged into a new ensemble. Chiasmus thus repli-
cates the process of détournement, not just the end result—such is the mean-
ing of Clark’s description of Debord’s style as ‘expository’ and Debord’s
own insistence on the interrelation of form and content.
The paradox indicated by Lefort, that Debord offers a critique of spectac-
ular inauthenticity by way of an extreme formalism in his text, is anticipated
by the chiasmus of thesis 204. ‘Il n’est pas une négation du style,’ Debord
parries, ‘mais le style de la negation.’ The style of negation does not offer
an image alternative to spectacular inauthenticity, but it does offer itself as
a process that can undo that inauthenticity. Four theses later, Debord states
that détournement—we might also read ‘chiasmus’ or any other figure of
this negative-dialectical process of repetition and reversal—‘founds its cause
on nothing other than its own truth as present critique.’89
The English Section enthusiastically incorporated chiasma into its own
style. In ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’,
the group employs the following further examples:
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.
It is not enough for art to seek its realisation in practice, practice must
also seek its art.
[Neo-Dada’s] culture of the absurd reveals only the absurdity of their
culture.
The nihilism of modern art is merely an introduction to the modern
art of nihilism.
The Situationist, English and French, use of chiasmus remains a curious

paradox. Is it not contradictory that the Situationist critique of spectacular
inauthenticity should be articulated by way of a trope that is so visual, so
reliant on formal exposition? The truth-claim made by the Situationist chi-
asmus is made simultaneously with the revelation of its own textual artifice.
Similarly, does the chiasmus not serve as a quick-fix impression of a closed
totality and simplify the relationship between its constitutive elements?
Chiasmus is a visual trick, a magic mirror; it can have a stupefying effect.
Richard Lanham writes that, ‘The ABBA form seems to exhaust the possi-
bilities of argument, as when Samuel Johnson destroyed an aspiring author
with, “Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good
is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”’90 Chiasmus does
not allow for exigent factors, only repetition and reversal. Though Debord
implies that dialectical criticism is inherently chiasmatic, the chiasmus is a
structure that can only solve its own problem.
These logical objections to chiasmus reveal something of the SI’s poetic
license. The Situationists valued the chiasmus, I would suggest, for its
uncanny poetic truthfulness, its aphoristic self-assuredness. In the Situation-
ist critique, the chiasmus figures a jouissance in language that the spectacle
has not yet fully recuperated. The chiasmus, as a word game, performs a
(very) minor revolutionary act that confirms the enduring pleasure of sub-
version, play, and iconoclasm. Vincent Kaufmann claims that Debord devel-
oped a poetics of revolution based on ‘the appropriation of language’ from
its administration by spectacular power.91 Both Debord and the English
Section regarded rhetorical freedom as one of the few freedoms as yet
uncolonised by the spectacle. As such, to simply occupy and celebrate that
territory might be a politically antagonistic gesture in itself.
In the historical narrative of this book, chiasmus serves another, wholly dif-
ferent, function: it figures a particular historical relationship. Marx’s chiasma,
as mentioned, frequently indicated a process of historical repetition, reversal,
and correction.92 Debord used a chiasmus to establish the basis of the SI’s
project when he wrote that ‘Dadaism sought to abolish art without realis-
ing it; Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing it’.93 Similarly, he
emphasised that détournement works historically as well as textually: the ‘the-
oretical consciousness of a movement whose traces must remain visible within
it is manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts
and by the détournement of all the achievements of earlier critical efforts’.94
Debord’s understanding of historical reversals radicalises and makes teleolog-
ical Lautréamont’s assertion, so important to the Surrealists, that ‘Plagiarism
is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his
expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea.’95
The development of the British Situationist practice, from Heatwave
through to the English Section, assumed a similar relationship with the SI.
The English Section repeated and reversed, or détourned, the SI. It used the
SI’s terms and analysis but rearranged them to reveal different aesthetic-
political formulations. The English Section did not directly transfer Situa-
tionist theses from France to Britain: its translation was cultural, not literal.
These early British Situationists were plagiarists. They took what was
incorrect in Situationist theory once it has been transplanted into a British
context and replaced its false ideas with right ideas. The process would be
accelerated and exaggerated once the English Section morphed into King
Mob, to be discussed in the next chapter.
Expulsion
The activities of the English Section were disrupted, though not entirely
thwarted, when it was expelled from the SI on the 21 December 1967,
after just over a year of membership. Radcliffe, always the most wary of
the SI, had already resigned in November for personal reasons. He has
since claimed, ‘I was thoroughly disillusioned with the SI, although I prob-
ably never had many illusions.’96 The expulsion of the remaining English
Section remains a contentious issue to this day. The SI gave its version
in an unusually lengthy account in the twelfth Internationale Situation-
niste (September 1969). It recounted how Vaneigem had visited New York
in November 1967 as the SI’s delegate to meet with the individuals who
would thereafter form an American Section. They were not named, but this
section was centred on Robert Chasse, Bruce Elwell, Jonathan H orelick,
and Tony Verlaan.
An anarchist named Ben Morea, who was behind the Black Mask group,
requested a meeting with Vaneigem but was refused. The SI claimed that
Morea was in conflict with the soon-to-be American Section ‘on virtu-
ally every question concerning revolutionary action’.97 Vaneigem also fell
out with Morea’s friend, ‘a certain Hoffman’, who dared offer Vaneigem
‘a mystical interpretation of his text “Basic Banalities”’.98 Morea and his
cohorts were already in contact with the English Section, and after a series
of accusatory letters between Morea, the English Section, and Paris, the
SI asked the English Section to renounce Morea and Hoffman. Though
the English Section initially agreed, no denunciation appeared and so the
English Section was deemed to have sided with Morea rather than with
Vaneigem. Such an act of treason ensured its expulsion, and the SI spitefully
concluded that, ‘the English never denied that Morea was teamed up with
a mystical idiot.’99
The rest of the SI’s article alleged that the English Section had felt
excluded and unappreciated by the SI. The SI is characteristically vitriolic
towards its ex-members: ‘They hadn’t dared to say so, but they were pained
by the Continentals’ lack of interest in what they were going to do. They
were left isolated in their country—all surrounded by water’. The SI also
accused the English Section of a sort of revolutionary hubris: ‘England
being (according to them) much closer to a revolutionary crisis than Con-
tinental Europe, we “Continental” theorists were supposedly moved by
spite at seeing that “our” theories would be realized somewhere else.’ The
events of May 1968, the SI held, were sufficient rebuttal of that prediction.
Although the SI acknowledged the integrity of Donald Nicholson-Smith,
at least before he left Paris to return to London, it poured scorn on Gray,
who ‘now publishes a rag called King Mob which passes, quite wrongly, for
being slightly pro-situationist, and in which one can read eulogies to the
eternal Morea.’100
A later account of the expulsion, by the American Section, notes that
Gray was originally to have accompanied Vaneigem as a European dele-
gate to New York, though Gray actually arrived a day after his expulsion.
The American Section also claimed that Verlaan had visited London soon
after, spoken with the ex-English Section, and contested its expulsion with
the SI. This suggests that relations between America and England were
actually much friendlier than the impression given by the SI’s fiery rhetoric,
though the American Section did criticise Gray and King Mob for their
association with Morea and Black Mask.101 These groups were factional
to the end.
Despite these very personal attacks, Gray’s anthology Leaving the Twen-
tieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (1974)
was the first collection of Situationist texts translated into English. The facts
in Gray’s introductions are often questionable and his translations were
always highly idiosyncratic, but his reflections are interesting in relation to
the moment in which they were written, two years after the SI was dissolved
and during a lull in Situationist activity either French or English. In his essay,
‘“Those who make half a revolution only dig their own graves”: The Situa-
tionists since 1969’, Gray writes,
The presence of the SI never made itself properly felt in either England
or America. The English and what could well have become the Ameri-
can sections of the SI were excluded just before Christmas 1967. Both
groups felt that the perfection and publicising of theoretical critique
was not sufficient: they wanted political subversion and individual
“therapy” to converge in an uninterrupted everyday activity. Some of
this they saw, though on a very limited and local scale, the following
year: the Americans as The Motherfuckers and the English as King
Mob. Neither group survived that apocalyptic summer of 1968 […]
Henceforward the dissemination of situationist ideas in both coun-
tries was dissociated from the real organisation that alone could have
dynamised them.102
A rather less partisan account of the English Section’s expulsion is offered

by George Robertson in his 1988 survey of post-Situationist activity in
Britain. Robertson claims, ‘Because they [the English Section] had developed
their positions without the SI and had not taken part in ongoing theoret-
ical and tactical debates, they soon came into conflict with the “official”
SI “line”’.103 Robertson recognises that the English Section did not simply
develop in parallel to the SI; it threw other influences into the mix, but its
association with Morea, whom the SI regarded as an enemy, was too great a
challenge to the SI’s authority.
The SI characterised the English Section as oedipal and ostracised, and
made much of an Anglo-Continental antagonism. It is true that the English
Section never fully ascribed to the SI’s party line, but it is also true that
by 1967 the SI had made all its major theoretical contributions. After the
events of May and June 1968, the SI went into terminal decline and such
expulsions became increasingly common. Its influence and its legacy were
escaping its control, as it had predicted they would, and all that was left
was to dissolve the organisation. The English Section may have escaped just
in time.
Notes
1. Nigel Fountain, Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966–74 (London:
Comedia 1988), 58–59.
2. Jonathon P. Eburne and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, New Literary History, spe-
cial issue ‘What is an Avant-Garde?’ 41:4 (Autumn 2010): vii.
3. See Stuart Hall, ‘Life and Times of the First New Left’, New Left Review 61
(January–February 2010): 177–196.
4. Charles Radcliffe, ‘Two Fiery Flying Rolls: The Heatwave Story, 1966–1970’, in
Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe (eds), Dancin’ in the Streets: Anarchists,
IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as recorded in the pages of
The Rebel Worker and Heatwave (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr 2005), 327–381.
5. Franklin Rosemont, ‘To Be Revolutionary in Everything: The Rebel Worker
Story, 1964–68’, in Rosemont and Radcliffe (eds), Dancin’ in the Streets, 60.
6. Situationist International, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity
Economy’ (1966), in Ken Knabb (ed), Situationist International Anthology
(Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets 2006), 197. This tract was first issued in
the States in 1965 in an English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. It was
reprinted in French in Internationale Situationniste 10 (1966): 3–11.
7. Franklin Rosemont, ‘Souvenirs of the Future: Precursors of the Theory & Prac-
tice of Total Liberation’, Rebel Worker 6 (May 1966) in Tom Vague (ed), King
Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International (London: Dark Star
2000), 8.
8. Heatwave 1 (1966): 1.
9. Charles Radcliffe, ‘A Very Nice Very Respectable Very Useless Campaign’, Rebel
Worker 6 (May 1966), in Vague (ed) King Mob Echo, 7.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. See Richard Kempton, Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt (New York: Autono-
media 2007). The Situationists claimed their own influence on Provos in ‘Révolte
et récupération en Hollande’, Internationale Situationniste 11 (1967): 65–66.
13. ‘Provo: What Is the Provotariat?’ Heatwave 1 (July 1966), in Vague (ed), King
Mob Echo, 20.
14. Charles Radcliffe, ‘The Seeds of Social Destruction’, Heatwave 1 (July 1966), in
Vague (ed), King Mob Echo, 27.
15. Ibid., 28.
16. Situationist International, ‘Le Bruit et la fureur’, Internationale Situationniste 1
(1958): 4.
18. Radcliffe, ‘Two Fiery Flying Rolls’, 375.
19. Radcliffe, ‘The Seeds of Social Destruction’, 28.
20. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin 1960), 204.
21. Stuart Hall, ‘Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the Cultural Turn’,
International Journal of Cultural Studies 10:39 (2007): 43.
22. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber
and Faber 1991), 32.
23. See John Clarke and Tony Jefferson, ‘Working Class Youth Cultures’, Stencilled
Occasional Papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University
of Birmingham (November 1973).
24. Dick Hebdige, ‘The Style of the Mods’, Stencilled Occasional Papers of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham (Spring
1974), 9.
25. English Section, ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolu-
tion’ (1967), in Vague (ed), King Mob Echo, 68.
26. Ibid.
27. Hebdige, ‘The Style of the Mods’, 8.
28. Radcliffe, ‘The Seeds of Social Destruction’, 31.
29. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen & Co.
Ltd. 1979), 28. See also Valentin Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy
of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar
1973).
31. Ibid., 371.
32. Bill Brown, ‘Heatwave, Thirty Years Later’ (1996), available at his own site:
http://www.notbored.org/heatwave.html (accessed 20 January 2016).
33. Radcliffe, ‘Two Fiery Flying Rolls’, 362–363.
34. Hussey, Game of War, 210.
35. Ibid., 386; Radcliffe, ‘Two Fiery Flying Rolls’, 364. Perhaps the ‘English Section’
was one of the many flourishes that Gray added in his early (1974) retrospective
of the SI, in which he included a list of SI members and the sections to which
they belonged. Gray (ed), Leaving the 20th Century, 132–133.
36. For the SI’s account, see René Viénet, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupa-
tion Movement, France, May ’68 (New York: Autonomedia 1992).
37. It was eventually published in pamphlet form as The English Section of the Sit-
uationist International, The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of
Revolution (London: Chronos Publications 1994), though I shall refer to Tom
Vague’s publication of the English Section’s text in King Mob Echo.
38. U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, De la misère en milieu étudiant. The Situationist Inter-
national Text Library, available at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/fr/
display/12 (accessed 20 January 2016).
39. Members of the Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg, On
the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychologi-
cal, sexual and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its
remedy (London: Active Distribution, Dark Star and Public Reading Rooms
2008), 23.
40. ‘Ten Days that Shook the University’ has since been republished as a pamphlet
with the English Section’s translation but the original French title. See Members
of the Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg, On the Poverty of
Student Life.
41. Ibid., 9.
42. Ibid., 17–18.
43. Situationist International, ‘Instructions pour une prise d’armes’, Internationale
Situationniste 6 (1961): 4.
44. The introduction to ‘The First Daffodils in the Pissoire’, in Heatwave 2 (October
1966) reflects, ‘We have omitted resistance on the industrial front, not because
we are unaware of its importance but because it’s already covered elsewhere:
“Solidarity”, etc.’ See Vague (ed.), King Mob Echo, 46. In ‘The Revolution of
Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’, however, the English Section
accuse Solidarity of having failed to address everyday life in its critique of mod-
ern capitalism.
45. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, theses 73–124.
47. English Section of the Situationist International, ‘Postscript: if you want to make
a social revolution, do it for fun’, On the Poverty of Student Life, 21.
48. Ibid., 22.
49. Ibid., 23.
50. Ibid., 24.
51. Ibid., 21.
52. Ibid., 24.
tion’, 63.
54. Bill Brown, ‘Comments on an article by the English Situationists’, available at
http://www.notbored.org/english-comments.html (accessed 20 January 2016).
tion’, 68.
56. Ibid.
57. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’,
in Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1991), 131–132.
58. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth trans. Constance Farrington (London:
Penguin 1967), 103.
59. See Toni Morrison (ed.), To Die for The People: The Writings of Huey P. N ewton
(San Francisco: City Lights Books 2009).
60. Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Basic Banalities (2)’ (1963), in Knabb (ed) Situationist Inter-
national Anthology, 164. This article was published ‘Banalités de base’ across
two issues of the SI’s journal: International Situationniste 7 (1962): 32–41 and
International Situationniste 8 (1963): 34–47.
61. Situationist International, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity
Economy’, 197.
62. Ibid., 196.
63. Situationist International, ‘Adresse aux révolutionnaires d’Algérie et de tous les
pays’, Internationale Situationniste 10 (1966): 47.
64. ‘The New Proletariat: Nigger as Class’, Black Mask 10 (1968): 3.
65. Marjorie Perloff, ‘“Violence and Precision”: The Manifesto as Art Form’, Chicago
Review 34:2 (Spring 1984): 70.
tion’, 69. My italics.
67. Ibid., 70.
68. Peter Fryer, ‘Spectacles: Review of La Société du spectacle by Guy Debord, and
of Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations by Raoul Vaneigem’,
Times Literary Supplement (21 March 1968): 286.
69. Art & Language, ‘Ralph the Situationist’, Artscribe International (November–
December 1987), in Blazwick (ed.), 93–94.
70. The review was reprinted in Internationale Situationniste, where, with charac-
teristic venom, the Situationists dismiss Lefort as an ‘academic Marxist’ once
involved with Socialisme ou Barbarie but now in pursuit of ‘an ordinary aca-
demic career’. Situationist International, ‘Comment on ne comprend pas des
livres situationniste’, Internationale Situationniste 12 (1969): 47.
71. T.J. Clark, ‘Foreword’, in Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999), vii.
74. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press
1999), 10.
75. Situationist International, The Real Split in the International (London: Pluto
Press 2003), 29.
77. Anselm Jappe offers a critical comparison of the two theorists in ‘Sic Transit
Gloria Artis: The “End of Art” for Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord’, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith, SubStance 28:3 (1999): 102–128.
78. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 206–208.
79. Karl Marx, ‘Postface to the Second Edition’, in Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben
Fowkes (London: Penguin 1990), 103.
80. Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle, in Œuvres, 853.
81. ‘Debord to Nicholson-Smith, 27th April 1978’, Not Bored, available at
http://www.notbored.org/debord-27April1978.html (accessed 20 January 2016).
82. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black and
Red 1977), unpaginated.
83. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Zone Books 1994), 143–144.
85. In 1973, to aid his translators, Debord produced a document indicating
the sources of many of the text’s détournements. See ‘Relevé provisoire
des citations et des détournements de La Société du spectacle’, in Œuvres,
862–872.
86. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, theses 12, 19, 21, 29.
87. Ibid., theses 2, 9.
88. Situationist International, ‘Le Détournement comme negation et comme pre-
lude’, Internationale Situationniste 3 (1959): 10.
90. Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms 2nd Edition (Berkeley:
University of California Press 1991), 33.
91. Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans.
Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2006), 175.
92. See John Paul Riquelme, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Karl Marx as Symbolic
Action’, History and Theory 19:1 (February 1980): 58–72.
95. Comte de Lautréamont. ‘Poésies’, 240.
97. Situationist International, ‘Les Dernières exclusions’, Internationale Situation-
niste 12 (1969): 83.
98. This was Abbie Hoffman, who would soon after found Up Against the Wall,
Motherfucker with Morea, and later achieve notoriety as founder of the
Yippies. Situationist International, ‘Les Dernières exclusions’, 83.
99. Ibid., 84.
100. Ibid.
101. Robert Chasse and Bruce Elwell, ‘Field Study in the Dwindling Force of Cog-
nition Where It Is Least Expected: A Critique of the SI as a Revolutionary
Organisation’ (1970), quoted in Tom Vague, King Mob Echo: From Gordon
Riots to Situationists & Sex Pistols (London: Dark Star 2000), 40–41.
102. Chris Gray, ‘“Those who make half a revolution only dig their own graves”:
The Situationists since 1969’, in Leaving the Twentieth Century, 135.
103. George Robertson, ‘The Situationist International: Its Penetration into British
Culture’, in Stewart Home (ed.), What Is Situationism? A Reader (London: AK
Press 1996), 121.
4 Long Live King Mob
‘Browned off with the English so-called revolutionary scene? Read about the
Mother____, Black Mask and other American gangs in King Mob – 2/- in
stamps post free from: BCM/King Mob, London WC1’
—Advert in International Times 58 (13–25 June 1969)
We should pause at this moment in this history of British Situationist practice

to reflect on what was at stake for the emergent tradition when the English
Section was excommunicated from the Situationist I nternational (SI).
By 1967 the English Section was experimenting with a performative and
theatrical textual style meant to evoke the ludic rebellion of juvenile delin-
quents. The SI, at the same moment, had made its so-called ‘political turn’—
it had expelled its artistic factions, to focus on theoretical critique and
negation. The English Section, that is, had begun to aestheticise Situationist
theory at the same moment that Debord was voicing his suspicion of aesthetic
representation in Society of the Spectacle. Vincent Kauffman describes the
SI in this period as ‘angels of purity’, for whom ‘everything visible is false,
impure […] The source of infection is the image’.1
The SI, as we saw in the previous chapter, faced a problem. It wanted to
imagine, and ideally to experience, a mode of living not prescribed by the
spectacle, but to represent and affirm an anti-spectacular ontology would be
to delimit it, and thus offer it up for recuperation. Instead, the SI’s challenge
was to negate the spectacle’s negation of life. The affirmative moment, the
glimpse of the authentic experience or the directly lived life, would be a flash
of illumination catalysed by the specific determinate negation enacted by the
SI’s critique.
The SI’s iconophobic rejection of aesthetic representation, its turn to the
anti-aesthetic, was prompted by what I shall call its anxiety of recuperation.
At the SI’s 1961 conference in Gothenburg, Attila Kotányi articulated the
paradox that had arisen from the SI’s paranoiac hypersensitivity to the recu-
peration of visual motifs:
Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as

to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was under-
stood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call
them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We
are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t
mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that
has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without
doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be
coopted [envahi] by society and used against us.2
Kotányi saw no possibility for the SI in its search for anti-spectacular forms
other than to engage with the spectacle’s deleterious regime of representa-
tion. Aesthetic objects were necessary, yet necessarily anti-Situationist. The
SI proclaimed its horizon to be the end, or the supersession, of art—art as
an institution, qua Peter Bürger, but also art as aesthetic representation, as
the creation of a world other than the one we immediately experience. The
Situationist revolution would make impossible any separation of represen-
tation and experience.
However, Kotányi’s proposals demonstrate how the SI’s hyperbolism
served to conflate aesthetic sensibility with spectacular misrepresentation.
At the very least, the SI remained blind to the afterlives of cultural objects,
and also refused the possibility that the spectacle itself could be made a site
of contestation. Such were some causes of its anxiety of recuperation.
The lumpenproletarianisation performed by the English Section was,
meanwhile, one effort to push against spectacular misrepresentation—that
is, to produce an image that the spectacle wouldn’t or couldn’t accommo-
date, and thus the English Section would reveal that something else is pos-
sible. The English Section placed less emphasis on negation than did the SI.
As Debord wrote, ‘Revolution is not “showing” life to people, but bringing
them to life.’3 King Mob, the group that rose from the English Section’s
ashes, accelerated the latter’s project. King Mob did want to show life to
people. It wanted to remind them of life’s most profane explosions of plea-
sure as well as its most crushing moments of despair; it wanted to explore
the boundaries imposed by the spectacle, and the extent to which those
boundaries might be transgressed.
So what image of life did King Mob choose to show? Was King Mob’s
aestheticisation of Situationist theory the result of a failure to comprehend
the SI’s ‘style of negation’, or was it a tactical Anglicisation of that style,
an adaption to different cultural and historical conditions? These questions
will structure this chapter. King Mob’s style has since come to characterise
much British Situationist practice across its various forms, even though this
style was a direct contravention of the oftentimes po-faced visual austerity
and intransigent rhetoric of the SI’s orthodoxy. King Mob established a new
programme for British Situationist practice after the latter had jettisoned the
method of negation central to the SI’s critique. King Mob also shone light
on an anti-tradition of British dissent, which provides a different means of
historicising the British Situationists to the late modernist framework used
elsewhere in this book.
Long Live King Mob 111
The origins of the King Mob group are shrouded in myth and rumour—
most of which the group itself began.4 After his expulsion from the SI with
the rest of the English Section, Christopher Gray formed this new group,
named after graffiti found on the walls of Newgate Prison in London after the
anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780. The King juxtaposed with the Mob:
now, the wild and uncontrollable delinquents were to become sovereign.
At the same time, this name leant the group a singular persona to cre-
ate as it wished. King Mob wanted to become a modern manifestation of
Captain Swing or General Ludd, the collective identities used by the English
Swing rioters of 1830 and the Luddites, respectively. A letter signed ‘General
Ludd Yorksheer’ would eventually appear on one of King Mob’s posters,
warning ‘the bosses’ that ‘we will soon bring about the grate revelootion’.
Importantly, these associations placed King Mob in the historical tradition
of vernacular and working-class revolt documented in E.P. Thompson’s The
Making of the English Working Class (1963), although Debord had already
prophesied that the new phase of proletarian assault on capital was ‘follow-
ing a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to attack the machin-
ery of permitted consumption.’5 King Mob named its journal King Mob
Echo, a play on a common title of regional newspapers, but also an indi-
cation of its project to echo historical revolutionaries. The title of a poem
by Norman O. Brown in the first issue of King Mob Echo, ‘Return of the
Repressed’, perfectly encapsulates the group’s effort to summon an enduring
spirit of anti-authoritarian resistance.
King Mob thus presented itself a spectral revenant of earlier historical
groups that had acted on their hostility to capitalist accumulation. About
Gordon Riots allusion in particular, Jon Savage suggests,
In applauding this hidden moment of British history, the group were

attempting to reemphasize a disordered, anarchic Britain that had pre-
viously been swept under the carpet. It was an attempt to give a specif-
ically British context to the rumblings of discontent that, even before
the events [of May ‘68], were growing louder.6
Where the English Section had sought to ally itself with a new lumpen, King
Mob sought to actively become a new lumpen. The pop culture historian Fred
Vermorel, once closely associated with the group, has described King Mob as
‘a band of hooligan pedants based in the Notting Hill area of London.’7 The
group’s membership is difficult to determine, always having been unofficial
and impromptu, though the twin brothers David and Stuart Wise were cen-
tral. They had previously been in contact with Ben Morea and Black Mask,
for which they had written, and have since done the most to document and
reflect on King Mob’s activities.8 They describe the group as ‘a loose affiliation
(hardly a group) of disparate though confused revolutionary individuals.’9
King Mob’s auto-mythologisation is evident in Jonathon Green’s Days in
the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971 (1988), an oral
history of the London counterculture. In one exchange, another King Mob
associate, Dick Pountain, remembers,
We terrorised the early IT [International Times]. When they were

still at the Indica bookshop one of the earliest King Mob/Situationist
actions was going and breaking in there and scaring the wits out of
them. Nothing violent, just language and posture.10
‘Language and posture’: this is important. Pountain offers another story,

about a sit-in at the University of London Union gate-crashed by King Mob:
‘The New Left crowd tried to run it. We gave Robin Blackburn a really bad
time, howled him down, told him he was a wanker.’11
King Mob was active at protests, happenings, and public stunts, but
its identity was constructed through a distinctive textual style. The group
delighted in confrontation and profanity, gleefully antisocial behaviour.
Alan Marcuson, who would found Frendz magazine with Green in 1969,
explains his attraction to King Mob in terms of their radical difference to
most other groups of the period: ‘They were much more fun […] their
pamphlets were more interesting than the boring fucking Trots, who really
were the most tiresome bunch of people I have ever come across.’12
Many other legends, Apocrypha, and half-truths about King Mob can be
found in Tom Vague’s ‘speed history’ of the group, King Mob Echo: From
Gordon Riots to Situationists & Sex Pistols (2000), as well as David Wise’s
memoirs. Some have been repeated so often that they’re widely accepted as
fact, such as the one about Guy Debord visiting the Wise brothers’ Notting
Hill flat to find not the revolutionary militia he was promised but two blokes
watching Match of the Day and drinking Tennants Super. While myth and
self-aggrandisement was part of King Mob’s project, this book will stick to
firmer territory, to consider the image that King Mob created of itself in its
journal, King Mob Echo.
King Mob Echo

The group’s archive consists of six issues of its journal, and various pam-
phlets, posters, and photographs of its graffiti. King Mob’s work is inher-
ently marginal. Its interventions typically reiterated and disseminated other
work; it conjured old and not-so-old ghosts. In the first King Mob Echo
(Figure 4.1), the marginality of the group’s work and its idiosyncratic inter-
ests are demonstrated by way of a two-page spread containing, as its main
article, a text appropriated from Raoul Vaneigem. Around that text, in a bri-
colage style, the editors have placed an image of Man Ray’s Gift (1921)—a
readymade, consisting of an iron with thumb tacks glued to its base—and a
passage from Richard Huelsenbeck’s En Avant Dada (1920). These are also
accompanied by a cartoon of two peasants, an excerpt from Freud, and a
brief passage from Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957),
a book previously mentioned by Debord in Society of the Spectacle and
Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life (both 1967). Cohn’s book
revisits millenarian cults of late medieval and early modern Europe, which
believed that history would soon be interrupted by a momentous event lead-
ing to their collective deliverance. The appeal of this type of eschatological
thinking to radical Communists is easy to recognise.
Figure 4.1 Cover of King Mob Echo 1 (1968).13
Elsewhere in King Mob Echo 1 there is a translation from the SI’s pam-
phlet on the Watts riots, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity
Economy’, cuttings from newspaper articles about spontaneous violence, an
image of Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse, and text from one of Jack the Ripper’s
letters. The Vaneigem text mentioned above, which admits to being ‘freely
translated’ from the original, is (re)titled ‘Desolation Row’.14 This is an allu-
sion to Bob Dylan’s song of the same name, in which fairytale characters,
literary figures, and film stars contemplate their ineffectuality in a world
that they recognise to be facile, farcical, and absurd: ‘And nobody has to
think too much | About Desolation Row.’15
The article in King Mob Echo begins with a similar contemplation of
the relationship between symbolic fictions and the dejected reality of the
present. The article claims that in bourgeois society ideology has replaced
myth as the thing that excuses and reinforces social repression. Nihilism, in
contrast, is anathematic to bourgeois ideology and as such might be beyond
recuperation by the spectacle. Ideology, writes Vaneigem/King Mob, ‘can
never integrate the total negation of the nihilist.’16
But, the article contends, nihilists have yet to act on a world historical
scale, and others who have done so ‘have lacked a sense of the total decompo-
sition of social forms which nihilism announces.’ So, for example, Vaneigem/
King Mob criticises Marx for having failed to analyse ‘Romanticism and the
artistic phenomenon in general’, and Dada for having contained ‘the seeds
by which nihilism could have been surpassed; but it just left them to rot’.17
Youth might harness nihilism, the article continues, but it shares the
faults of Dada. Both hold ‘The same contempt for art and bourgeois values,
the same refusal of ideology, the same will to live’, but they also display ‘the
same ignorance of history, the same barbaric revolt, the same lack of tac-
tics’.18 Vaneigem/King Mob thus propose a distinction between active and
passive nihilism:
The active nihilist does not intend simply to watch things fall apart.
He intends to speed up the process. Sabotage is a natural response to
the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; pas-
sive nihilism is counter-revolutionary.19
Passive nihilism is the nihilism of the spectacle and its recuperated ‘Joe Soap
intellectuals’, ‘crypto-fascists’, ‘pop artists’, and ‘psychedelic impresarios’. It is
the nihilism of those who do not believe in what they do but do it anyway. It is
‘an overture to conformism’. Vaneigem/King Mob argues that ‘What we need
now is the conjunction of nihilism and historical consciousness’.20 Modern,
active nihilists, that is, need to understand what came before them. The article
offers a constellation of figures that might inspire the active nihilist: the famil-
iar proto-Surrealist triumvirate of Sade, Fourier and Lautréamont; the militant
anarchists ‘Ravachol, Bonnot and Mahkno’; and the rather more surprising
home-grown suggestions of the English Romantics and Jack the Ripper.21
The challenge was to construct an anti-tradition of those who have
refused and rebelled against bourgeois society—an anti-tradition that
would receive its newest representative in the spectral figure of King Mob.
In this way, the King Mob group continued the English Section’s efforts
to disaffiliate itself from the political landscape that surrounded it, and to
recognise a new revolutionary subjectivity from the lumpen, from the cast-
aside. Charles Radcliffe, of course, distanced himself from the anti-nuclear
movement which he saw as recuperated, and the English Section denounced
the ‘false intelligentsia’ which ran from ‘the CIA subsidised torpor of the
latest New Left to the sanctimonious little tits of International Times’, all of
whom constituted a ‘New Establishment’.22
King Mob’s was an anti-tradition rather than, say, an alternative tradi-
tion because it needed to constantly and ruthlessly critique itself. The second
King Mob Echo (1968) includes an exchange of letters between Gray and the
Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck—in his late 70s by 1968—in which both par-
ties denounce the student movement of the day. Gray is particularly dismissive
of the ‘free’ or ‘anti’ university projects associated with Alexander Trocchi,
both his project sigma and, at the time, his involvement in David Cooper’s
short-lived ‘Antiuniversity of London’ in Shoreditch. Gray accuses Trocchi of
having limited his concept of revolution to the plane of culture, and thus hav-
ing lacked a sense of totality.23 What was at stake in Gray’s attack on Trocchi
was the claim to be the correct interpretation of Situationist theory in Britain.
As we saw with the English Section’s expulsion, the SI was venomous in
its denunciations of rivals and ex-members—a tactic it had inherited from
André Breton. King Mob gladly mimicked this practice, and in so doing it
set the tone for decades of internecine disagreements in British Situationist
circles. Such disagreements, in part, exemplify Freud’s account of the ‘nar-
cissism of small differences’. Yet, petty as they may seem, they also demon-
strate another way that British Situationists anticipated developments made
in ‘post-Marxist’, post-1968, theory. Laclau and Mouffe, for example, write,
The rejection of privileged points of rupture and the confluence of

struggles into a unified political space, and the acceptance, on the con-
trary, of the plurality and indeterminacy of the social, seems to us the
two fundamental bases from which a new political imaginary can be
constructed, radically libertarian and infinitely more ambitious in its
objectives than that of the classic left.24
Against an understanding of politics as the stand-off between ‘two opposing

systems of equivalences’, as in the orthodox Marxist conception of class
struggle, Laclau and Mouffe propose that politics should be understood in
terms of hegemony and antagonism, whereby socio-political struggle occurs
between inherently relational forces constantly in flux and on manoeuvre.25
When the English Section and King Mob sought to relocate revolution-
ary agency away from the classical proletariat; when they advanced, some-
what perversely, all possible internecine quarrels; and when they stubbornly
denounced all those whom they regarded as the recuperated false friends of
the revolutionary movement, they disrupted the political imaginary and ges-
tured towards the ‘non-binaristic, non-“political” way of thinking politics’
that Trocchi, ironically, had demanded.
Situationist disagreement endlessly restages conflict, and it does so in
order to contest the concomitant Situationist fear that the spectacle has
sublimated all the necessary oppositions of political life. Because the specta-
cle was understood to subsume all antagonisms, the Situationists’ task was
to exacerbate tension at all costs. King Mob undertook this task with the
maximum of flamboyancy and belligerence.
Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker

The third King Mob Echo (1969) marks the group’s most radical departure
from the SI’s programme. It tells the story of the New York anarchist groups
Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, the latter more com-
monly known as the Motherfuckers.26 It was for their association with these
groups that the English Section had been expelled from the SI, as we saw in
the previous chapter.
King Mob Echo 3 reprints a few texts by Black Mask and the Motherfuckers,
but the issue is primarily one long essay in which Gray introduces Black Mask
as a ‘real’ interpretation of Dada and Futurism—specifically, as a modernisation
and lumpenproletarianisation of the historical avant-garde. Gray emphasises
the sensationalist and destructive character of Futurism. It is ‘science, elegance
and violence.’27 Gray eulogises Marinetti for his ‘post-artistic way of life’:
Marinetti beating up Wyndham Lewis in an allnight urinal and hanging

him up on some adjacent spiked railings by his coat collar … Marinetti
imprisoning a bevy of wealthy culture-vultures in a belltent and driv-
ing his motorbike over it full throttle time after time … Marinetti, even
at the end, at one of Mussolini’s galas, kicking over a banquet table on
top of Hitler, just to show that he really couldn’t give a fuck.28
The King Mob group aspired to a similar infamy, which it saw Black Mask
in the process of achieving. Gray reports how Black Mask’s Provo-style
happenings targeted modern art institutions, which it saw as the agents of
recuperation. He recounts the story of a ‘panel of experts on Futurism, Dada
and Surrealism’ that attempted to hold a discussion on ‘the true revolu-
tionary meaning of modern art’. The event was intended as a trap for the
local troublemakers Black Mask, who would surely show up and in turn
be shown up by the experts. Black Mask, however, heard about the trap,
printed off thousands of false invitations to a party promising free food and
drink at the venue, and distributed the invitations to all the ‘hardest bas-
tards’ and ‘down-and-outs’ that they could find. The event was duly thrown
into chaos by the arrival of these unwanted guests, who demanded from the
organisers what Black Mask had promised them.
Inspired by such actions, King Mob restaged in London a prank previ-
ously carried out in New York by Black Mask at Macy’s department store.
An account of the event made it into International Times 51:
at Christmas […] they went into Selfridge’s in Oxford Street, one of

them dressed as Santa Claus, took toys from the counters and handed
them to children. Natural Result: in no time the fuzz arrive and
everyone is treated to the spectacle of the fuzz taking toys away from
the kids, and finally carrying out a defiant Santa Claus.29
Back in King Mob Echo 3, Gray argues that Black Mask and the ‘French
Situationists’ were the only contemporary White groups to understand the
Watts Riots, and as such were able to ally themselves with the ‘post-Watts
Blacks’.30 Gray notes with delight that Black Mask’s founders, Ben Morea
and Ron Hahne, preached ‘revolutionary violence’ and ‘were kids off the
street, not middleclass dropouts.’31 They were the revolutionary lumpen he
had longed for, though his impression of these American anarchists was
clearly coloured by his caricatured impression of British hooliganism. He
describes the ‘theoretical dimension’ of Black Mask as ‘fuck off, you cunt.’32
Figure 4.2 King Mob poster (c.1968).
Black Mask had first appeared in New York in 1966. By late 1968, it
had morphed into Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker, which had originally
formed as the Lower East Side chapter of the Students for a Democratic
Society. The Motherfuckers continued Black Mask’s project but with an even
more militant programme. They presented themselves as a ‘street gang with
an analysis.’33 Their pamphlets preached ‘armed love’ and quoted Huey P.
Newton’s ‘If you don’t believe in lead, you’re already dead’.34
The Motherfuckers’ actions included shooting the poet Kenneth Koch
with blanks as he gave a reading at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church-in-
the-Bowery, an important locus of American experimental poetry (a context
that King Mob, unsurprisingly, omits from its account of the event in King
Mob Echo 3). The Motherfuckers chose Koch because he ‘was a symbol to
us of this totally bourgeois, dandy world […] We were determined to be out-
rageous to force people to decide where they stood on things. We wanted to
push people, force them to think. “Why shoot Koch? He’s just a nice poet.”’35
The gunman was the poet Allen Van Newkirk, but Koch and attendees origi
nally thought that the action was in solidarity with the jailed poet Amiri
Baraka. Baraka’s poem ‘Black People!’ (published 1969) had provided the
line from which Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker took its name, which
adorned pamphlets that the ‘assassins’ threw out at the Poetry Project.36
Like the Black Panther Party, the Motherfuckers complemented their
direct actions with a social programme. They involved themselves in tenant
disputes, rent strikes, and the provision of food and medical supplies to
disadvantaged inner-city neighbourhoods.37 ‘But perhaps the most radical
aspect of all they did during the summer of ‘68’, Gray writes,
can be seen as their faltering but persistent attempt to create a new

form of self-expression beyond art and politics: a new revolutionary
language. In the first place, they started to write in the language of the
streets. What, a few months before, had been ‘The poverty against which
man has been constantly struggling is not merely the poverty of mate-
rial goods; in fact, in industrially advanced countries the disappearance
of material poverty has revealed the poverty of existence itself’ became
‘Your community represents death. You eat dead food. You live dead
lives. You fuck dead women. Everything about you is dead … The strug-
gle is for real life …’ From the Situationist SALON down to Skid Row.38
Gray’s terms—the supersession of art, the poverty of existence—are clearly

indebted to the SI, but at the same time he signals his distrust of Situationist
rhetoric. As he recoils from what he perceives as the haughtiness or inac-
cessible difficulty of the French ‘Situationist SALON’, Gray is attracted to
Black Mask and the Motherfuckers for their bluntness, their immediacy,
their lack of sophistication. These are the qualities that Gray associates with
‘the streets’ and the new lumpen that he and the British Situationists had
been trying to corral (see Figure 4.2).
Gray also demonstrates the British Situationists’ thirst for the new, their
rejection of that which is already politically recognisable and legitimised.
Bourgeois society may represent death, Gray says, but the language with
which the SI levels its critique of bourgeois society is not one of vigour and
vitality. The SI is secluded away in the salon: an image heavy with historical
and class associations. On the other hand, Black Mask and the Motherfuckers
represent ‘a new revolutionary language’.
We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw

King Mob’s admiration for Black Mask and the Motherfuckers played a
major role in the redirection of the British Situationist tradition, away from
Continental modernism and towards a more vernacular, hooliganistic reg-
ister. King Mob also moved away from the radical sociology of Heatwave
and towards a practice more in keeping with the Americans’ street-gang
posturing. In the pamphlets and posters that accompanied their actions, the
Motherfuckers’ aesthetic was aggressive, masculine, and threatening. Their
iconographic repertoire consisted of Native and Latin American revolution-
aries, skulls and skeletons, and weaponry (see Figure 4.3). Representations of
women, as in Internationale Situationniste, were highly sexualised.39
Figure 4.3 Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker poster. Reproduced by King Mob as
the cover to the pamphlet ‘Art Schools Are Dead’ (1968).40
Gray’s dichotomy between ‘the Situationist salon’ and the M otherfuckers’
language of the streets was not entirely accurate. The Situationists weren’t
prudes. Internationale Situationniste includes much material that was con-
frontational and explicit, chosen specifically to offend bourgeois sensibili-
ties. However, where the Situationists détourned their imagery—that is, they
placed found images into new contexts in order to expose the spectacular
ideology latent to the original—the Motherfuckers addressed their audi-
ence directly, to perform a type of interpellation comparable to the famous
‘Uncle Sam Needs You’ propaganda. Where the SI negates, the Motherfuck-
ers affirm: the Motherfuckers trade in role-models, objects of desire, figures
of identification.
The Motherfuckers’ aesthetic practice, frequently recycled by King Mob,
did not seek to make its audience question their relation to the image—or,
at least, this function is not prioritised. The SI used détournement to affect
precisely this type of reflexivity. One technique was to add captions to inter-
rupt familiar visual forms such as cartoons, pornography, or reportage. The
text was typically of a different register to the image, and the juxtaposition
of the two forced new readings from the ensemble. For example, the ninth
International Situationniste includes a photograph of a topless woman
reclining in a hammock, taken presumably from a soft porn magazine.
However, a hand-drawn speech bubble has been added to the photograph
so that the woman is made to declare that ‘the emancipation of the workers
will be their own work’.41 Not only does the juxtaposition of pornogra-
phy and ultra-left sloganeering change the function of this image, but por-
nography more generally is revealed to be part of a spectacular regime of
representation that defers rather than satisfies desire. The détourned image
becomes the antistrophe to the original image; the détournement undoes
the original.
But détournement like this does not simply content itself with a cri-
tique of the content of mass media imagery. Something else happens: the
viewer’s comfortable or passive engagement with mass media imagery is
called into question. One is forced to recognise one’s own immersion in
the spectacular regime and the difficulty of imagining a position outside
of it. For example, another photograph in Internationale Situationniste
9 depicts a group of White men, many smiling, standing in front of the
body of a Black man that is being burned. The photograph is from the
Omaha race riot of 1919. The man was Will Brown, lynched, shot, and
burned by the White men. It is clearly a deeply upsetting image, from an
appalling historical moment. Yet the SI’s addition of the sardonic com-
ment, ‘The roles reserved for Negros in the spectacle’, makes the image
doubly distressing.42 It hijacks the position from which the viewer wants
to express their repulsion: certainly, this is an image that invites out-
rage; but the comment doesn’t confirm that outrage. The détournement
disrupts the assumed relation between viewer and image, and one is left
alienated not only from the type of inhumanity displayed within the
photo, but also from the position of critical detachment one might habit-
ually assume.
Situationist visual détournement attempts not only to defamiliarise
certain types of image—a familiar modernist tactic—but also to defamil-
iarise and complicate the way that we engage with those images. The his-
torical avant-garde’s practice was extended in this manner because, by the
1960s, the forms of mass media about which earlier cycles of modernism
had remained ambivalent had themselves extended into the spectacle; this
extra dimension of reflexivity constitutes one instance of the late modernism
of the Situationists. In contrast, the Motherfuckers gladly utilised a range
of spectacular tropes to produce images that encourage straightforward
modes of identification. Although both approaches targeted the living death
of bourgeois society, both also propagated other forms of repression. The
Motherfuckers’ imagery addressed itself exclusively to the gaze of the White
heterosexual male. The SI failed to address those forms of repression which
are so obviously entrenched in the images it chose to détourn, yet which
fall beyond the remit of Situationist discourse, not least heteronormativity
and sexism. In the détourned soft-porn image described above, the SI says
nothing of the woman, only of the worker.
Ideologically, King Mob remained closer to the SI than to the hippie
mysticism of Morea’s groups, though its aesthetic practices were drawn
from the Motherfuckers. However, King Mob replaced the latter’s alpha
male excesses with a less eroticised, less libidinal black humour. It inhe
rited this from Heatwave and Rebel Worker, both of which had delighted in
Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour (1939). As Penelope Rosemont wrote,
‘Unlike other forms of humour, black humour is totally unacceptable to
present society […] Black humour releases all of the power of unconscious
desire.’43 True to form, King Mob celebrated the crude and the bagatelle.
One pamphlet that the group distributed at the 1968 occupation of the
London School of Economics, in support of an upcoming anti-Vietnam War
demonstration, depicts a simplistic line-drawing of a headless female torso,
legs spread, with the caption, ‘Keep the dialectic open’. Another, of a man
about to have his oversized penis cut off by a giant pair of scissors, declares,
‘Puritanism will castrate our revolution!’
A sympathetic observer might associate this fixation on genitals with
Mikhail Bakhtin’s exposition, via Rabelais, of the politically subversive
meanings of the grotesque.44 King Mob shares with Rabelais a delight in
the ‘bodily lower stratum’ and the unbridled, unrefined pleasures associated
with supposedly vulgar lower classes. Just as the Rabelais’s carnival was an
inversion of the church’s hegemony, and Bakhtin’s invocation of the plea-
sures of social disorder an implicit challenge to Stalinism, this sympathetic
observer might argue that King Mob’s glorification of base pleasures was a
condemnation of the SI’s refusal to represent joy and frivolity.45
Of Tom Vague’s collection of the group’s texts and posters, King Mob
Echo: English Section of the Situationist International (2000), David Wise
notes that the crudest cartoons have been excluded. He considers this a
success for King Mob:
we were out to upset and we really didn’t care that much just how we
did it. If that meant public lavatory walls as our sources of inspira-
tion too—well so be it! Cocks and Cunts and Shitting—well I never!
[… these cartoons] meant that King Mob could never really be men-
tioned again in respectable PC circles.46
Wise perhaps overstates the likelihood that King Mob would ever have been
discussed in ‘PC circles’, but his implicit critique of the squeamishness and
self-censorship of left-libertarian factions, including the SI, seems accurate.
Better to Be Horrible Than a Pleasant Altruistic Hippy

In and beyond its cartoons, King Mob’s aesthetic was lumpenproletarian-
ised, a playful attempt to project the under-class position that it wanted to
embody. Its iconography followed but took leave from the Motherfuckers’
machismo, to draw on archetypes, caricatures, and myth-figures of a British
lumpenproletariat. Jack the Ripper reappears in King Mob Echo, signalling
the group’s attraction to antihero nastiness. He is joined by cartoonish vil-
lains from comic books, tabloid newspapers, and pulp horror stories. These
figures did not have the sociological significance that delinquent youths
had for King Mob’s precursors—that is, these were not representations of
new revolutionary subjectivities. Rather, King Mob’s delight in ugliness and
provocation was pantomimic and proto-punk. Its revulsion towards British
bourgeois values manifested itself as a desire to be revolting in return. The
cartoon penises, the glorification of murderers, the shameless sexism: all
seem to ask, how far can we go? Can we make something so ugly that even
the spectacle rejects it, or whose obscenity is actually illegal?
This calculated brutishness was a critique of, on the one hand, British
bourgeois values, and on the other hand, the SI’s moral haughtiness and
visual austerity. In regards to the former, King Mob continued the project
that Cyril Connolly recognised in English Surrealism—that is, it sought to
‘tweak the tale of that old circus lion the British Bourgeoisie’47 (in France, of
course, this is the tradition of épater la bourgeoisie). In regards to the latter,
King Mob protested that the SI’s cold aesthetic reserve neither challenged
the conservatism of the spectacle nor spoke to those most in need of Situa-
tionist theory.
King Mob’s tactic of separatist violence is explained and retrospectively
renounced by David and Stuart Wise:
King Mob’s hysterical overemphasis (without adequate explanation)

of violence, whether Futurist, or contemporary hooligan outbursts,
played into the hands of a charismatic romanticism of deeds which
mistakenly equated genuine theoretical development with the dead
hand of academia. Without such a distinction the way was open for
the return of English philistinism and the renewed acceptance of the
university salon.48
Violence, they suggest, is legitimate but only when adequately theorised

rather than mindless, a qualification that King Mob was not always able to
convey. The violence of the SI’s texts and images was at the level of form,
the violence of negation. The violence of King Mob’s aesthetic, however, did
always extend beyond the level of content: the crudity of its language, the
anti-patrician brashness of its visual motifs, the moral repulsiveness of its
imagery.
As mentioned, King Mob was keen to disaffiliate itself from both the
New Left and the counterculture’s prevalent hippie ideology (although in
retrospect King Mob appears very much a part of the hippie movement,
albeit not in its peace-and-love guise). David and Stuart Wise continue,
The most deranged manifestations of hate against the present organi-

sation of society were greeted with fascination. Jack the Ripper, John
Christie […,] child killer Mary Bell. […] Look at the monstrosities pro-
duced by bourgeois society—isn’t that sufficient to condemn the golden
afternoon of hippy ideology? […] Better to be horrible than a pleasant
altruistic hippy, as a kind of undialectical overreaction to hippy.49
The textual form that most clearly corresponded with King Mob’s antiso-
cial desires was graffiti. Alongside the Hammersmith & City tube line at
Westbourne Park, where affluent commuters arrived into London from the
suburbs, King Mob painted:
same thing day after day – tube – work – diner [sic] – work –
tube – armchair – tv – sleep – tube – work – how much more
can you take? one in ten go mad – one in five cracks up
More King Mob graffiti appeared around West London, much of which
détourned popular hippie expressions into violent Futurist outbursts:
All you need is dynamite (The Beatles’ ‘All you need is love’)
Hashish is the opium of the people (Marx’s ‘Religion is the opium

of the people’)
I don’t believe in nothing – I just feel like they ought to burn

down the world – just let it burn down baby (from a Newsweek
article, but a reference to the expression ‘burn baby burn’, popularised
during the Watts uprising)
Graffiti is typical of King Mob’s practice: antisocial, ephemeral, imma-
terial, spectral. It rarely reveals its author, it is inherently public, and it
only exists for any length of time if a photographer happens to document
it.50 But like the graffiti that appeared around Paris’ Latin Quarter during
May and June 1968, King Mob’s literal street-writing was an attempt to
enact the twin sentiments of la philosophie est dans la rue and les murs
ont la parole.
King Mob’s Peculiar Romanticism

Lots of political and religious groups, as well as individual pranksters, had
discovered graffiti in this period, but there is a curious detail about King
Mob’s examples that bears sustained investigation. The group frequently
took lines from English Romantic poetry and sprawled them in paint on the
walls of Notting Hill and its surrounding boroughs. From Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s Dejection (An Ode)’ (1802), it took, ‘A grief without a pang,
void, dark, drear, a stifled drowsy greif’.51 It misspelled the second ‘grief’.
From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (1819), it took, ‘Asses,
swine have litter spread | And with fitting food are fed | All things have a
home but one – | Thou, oh Englishman, hast none!’52
Figure 4.4 Photograph of King Mob graffiti by Roger Perry. Courtesy of

Kate Bindloss.
From William Blake, meanwhile, it took two aphorisms from ‘The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell’ (1790–1793). First, it took, ‘The road of excess leads to
the palace of wisdom’ (Figure 4.4).53 This line had already been appropriated
by the SI in its 1964 essay ‘Now, the SI’, and when the English Section later
translated the SI’s pamphlet ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’, it added the aph-
orism to the text’s conclusion. Second, King Mob took, ‘The tygers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction’ (Figure 4.5).54 A photograph of the
latter, on the side of what was then Basing Street Studios, made it onto the
reverse of a Cat Stevens LP, 1970’s The View From The Top.
The connection between these British Situationists and English Romantic
poets does not stop there. Back in its pamphlet ‘The Revolution of Modern
Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ (1967, discussed in the previous
chapter), the English Section declares that ‘Delinquent violence is a sponta-
neous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on every-
one.’55 The phrase ‘abstract and contemplative role’ is clearly drawn from
the SI’s critique of the spectacle, but the English Section also subtly alludes
to Wordsworth’s famous statement in his 1800 preface to Lyrical Bal-
lads that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’56 This
détournement conflates violence and poetry to recall a long avant-gardist
tradition of violent provocation as (anti-)art gesture, epitomised by Breton’s
verdict that ‘The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down the street,
pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the
crowd.’57 In ‘Desolation Row’, King Mob had included Vaneigem’s criticism
of Marx for overlooking the fact that ‘Romanticism had already proved […]
that art—the pulse of culture and society—is the first index of the decay
and disintegration of values.’58 When Chris Gray spoke of the necessity to
move ‘from the Situationist SALON down to Skid Row’ and to speak in the
‘language of the streets’, he also echoed Wordsworth’s claim to have forgone
‘poetic diction’ in favour of the ‘language of men’.59
King Mob’s repurposing of Romantic poetry into graffiti performs this
‘decay and disintegration of values’ in a particularly visceral manner. Its
everyday environment is literally inscribed with the spectral presences
of Coleridge, Shelley, and Blake—indeed, these poets are made to speak
through the same channels as the antisocial delinquents with whom the
various British Situationists allied themselves. Yet English Romantic
poetry seems a far cry from the SI’s critique of the capitalism’s mod-
ern, spectacular forms. Not only is Romantic poetry a surprisingly lit-
erary archive—the Situationist squeamishness about the ‘literary’ was
discussed in the previous chapter—but it is also a thoroughly canonised
and commodified one, apparent on any visit to the Lake District today.
But this Romantic turn demonstrates the productive contradictions of
King Mob’s identity: its disdain for high-culture alongside its recourse
to canonised voices of English literature; its pure antisociality in the
present alongside its sense of historical community; its desire for a new
revolutionary language alongside its ventriloquism of poets nearly two
centuries old.
The British Situationists recognised that English Romanticism arose in
part as a response to comparable political conditions to their own. In the
late eighteenth century there was the violent imposition of industrial capital-
ism in Britain, and in France the revolution beginning in 1789. In the 1960s,
in England and in France, there was the uneven yet combined development
of both spectacular capitalism and its Situationist critique. The British Situ-
ationists sought to reconstruct a Romanticism that deployed something of
its original radicality in the present.
Critical attention to King Mob is scant, but in his 1988 survey, ‘The Situa-
tionist International: Its Penetration into British Culture’, George R
obertson
notes the ‘peculiarly English Romanticism’ of King Mob. He explains,
For various reasons—a traditional British suspicion of intellectual-

ism, the historical presence of a Romantic element in the British left
avant-garde, etc.—it seems that in Britain there was an attraction to
the superficial, subjective and spectacular aspects of the SI.60
Robertson regards the Romantic inheritance of ‘the British left avant-garde’

as self-evidently conservative. Its Romantic element is assumed to be incon-
gruous with the SI’s avant-gardism, and is to blame for an anglicised Situ-
ationist practice whose attentions have been misdirected. But what if these
British Situationists were actually involved in a radicalised reworking of
English Romanticism, whose politics may not be so far from those of the SI,
nor so distant even now? Or, what if these British Situationists actually rec-
ognised and sought to illuminate a Romantic element latent to Situationist
practice even in its ‘proper’ francophone articulations?
King Mob’s invocation of Romanticism suggests a historical conscious-
ness quite at odds with Robertson’s accusations. And King Mob’s own
choices of predecessor—the Gordon Rioters, Swing Rioters, Luddites—
suggest they the group aligned itself with a tradition of vernacular British
dissent, rather than with modernist currents. In ‘The End of Music’, David
and Stuart Wise continue,
Ideas were mooted in ’68 which were sufficiently tasteless to horrify

the prevalent hippy ideology and its older, more conservative forms—
romantic English pantheism. For instance, the dynamiting of a water-
fall in the English lake district was suggested, with a message sprayed
on a rock: ‘Peace in Vietnam’—not because there was a deep going
interest in the war like there was in the United States but because
the comment was an absurdist response to ruralism and the revolu-
tion had to be aggressively urban. There was a suggestion to blow
up Wordsworth’s house in Ambleside, alongside the delphic comment
Coleridge lives.61
The Wises’ conception of the relationship between King Mob and the
English Romantics is, in this instance, purely iconoclastic. These proposed
but unrealised King Mob actions all abuse a specific image of Romanticism
in order to aggravate the group’s nemeses, those whom it perceived as the
hippies who claimed a different, ruralist and pacifist, version of Romanti-
cism for themselves. King Mob wanted something more visceral and vio-
lent, in rhetoric at least, and made Romanticism the medium and archive
through which a revolutionary praxis was articulated, however seriously or
mock-seriously. David Wise admits that King Mob did inherit something
from the Romantic tradition and he describes English Romanticism as
the most radical movement of its kind, far superior to ‘anaemic’ English
Surrealism.62 King Mob, Wise writes, attempted a ‘relentless though appre-
ciative critique’ of English Romanticism.63 This ‘appreciative critique’
began with Wordsworth.
Wordsworth (rather than Blake or Shelley, who are candidates more
obviously radical in their aesthetics or politics) is the primary connection
for three reasons: because the British Situationists definitely read him, and,
to judge by their détournements, did so closely; because his engagement
with the revolutionary situation in France was direct, contemporary, and
productively fraught; and because, like Society of the Spectacle, his 1800
Preface to Lyrical Ballads offers an aesthetic theory—a de facto manifesto
of early English Romantic poetry—and a reflexive explication of how that
aesthetic theory has been applied to its own articulation.
The various British Situationists’ engagement with Wordsworth was
idiosyncratic and, though broadly historicist, not aligned with any partic-
ular academic approach. Their reading of Wordsworth’s poetry did not,
for example, privilege its engagement with specific political debates or its
attempt to revolutionise eighteenth-century modes of reading and hierar-
chies of poetic genres. Instead, the English Situationists recognised that
Wordsworth’s early project responded to large-scale political changes and
their effects on everyday life, and that he sought aesthetic responses whose
very form might be antagonistic or even incommensurable with the new
social order being imposed. The crossover between the Romantic and Situa-
tionist projects might thus come in the form of a shared ‘aesthetic ideology’,
Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘situation-specific function of [a text’s] aes-
thetic’.64 Jameson explains that ideology is not something which informs or
invests symbolic production; rather, the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and
the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological
act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal
‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.65
In the Preface, Wordsworth writes that his contributions to Lyrical Ballads
were intended to evoke ‘the principal laws of our nature’ through ‘the inci-
dents of common life’. ‘Low and rustic life’, he continues,
was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of

the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are
under less restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language;
because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of
greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contem-
plated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural
life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary
character of rural occupations are more readily comprehended; and are
more durable; and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men
are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.66
The abounding organic metaphors exemplify Wordsworth’s conception
of an inherently good human nature from which people are distanced as
society becomes more ‘civilised’ and sophisticated, which, M.H. Abrams
explains, Wordsworth received as an eighteenth-century commonplace.67
Nature, as the physical correspondent of that universal human nature, fig-
ures in the Preface as the source of authentic experience. Rustic lives allow a
closer proximity to that source of authenticity, and a rustic aesthetic allows
for its representation with minimal mediation. Wordsworth’s radicalism is
here literal: a return to the roots, to radix. Through his appraisal of the
‘essential’ and the ‘elementary’, Wordsworth introduces his rustic aesthetic
as a return rather than an innovation; he has uncovered or recovered rather
than discovered it; and uncovered or recovered it from what he saw as the
false mediations and specious gentility of eighteenth-century verse diction as
derived from polite rhetoricians like Hugh Blair. Wordsworth’s discussion of
an ‘emphatic language’ was itself a détournement of an important concept
from that discourse.
The dichotomy that Wordsworth established between a rustic life that is
experienced in all its richness and a more sophisticated life that has lost its
immediate connection with nature is echoed by a distinction that Debord
makes in the first thesis of Society of the Spectacle. ‘In societies dominated
by modern conditions of production’, he writes, ‘life is presented as an
immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has
receded into a representation.’68 The title of the first chapter of Debord’s
text heralds the spectacle as ‘the culmination of separation’. Like Word-
sworth, Debord associated authenticity with that which is experienced
directly, without mediation. The society of the spectacle, for Debord, is char-
acterised by representation divorced from experience, evident in the prolif-
eration of mass media and in the increasingly polarised forms of political
representation that accompany alienated social relations. What might be
obscured to a reader today is how both Wordsworth and Debord’s aesthetic
formulations (both of which rely on idyllic, even prelapsarian, conceptions
of authenticity) were issued as responses to socio-economic changes in late
eighteenth-century England and post-war France, respectively. More specif-
ically, Wordsworth and Debord both held that authentic experience, or at
least its possibility, was being obscured and sequestered by successive phases
of capitalist accumulation.
The period during which Wordsworth composed Lyrical Ballads was
momentous in reshaping British society. Marx describes the ‘primitive accu-
mulation’ of the period, when the socio-economic landscape as well as the
physical landscape were dramatically reorganised to facilitate industrial
production. Workers, ‘freed’ from the bonds of feudalism, were violently
expropriated from the land they worked and, therefore, from their means
of production.69 Through the enclosure of common land, a class of peo-
ple was forced through coercion and legislation into cities, left with only
their labour power to sell, and thus bound in the chains of wage labour.
‘[T]he history of their expropriation’, Marx writes, ‘is written in the annals
of mankind in blood and fire.’70 Wordsworth knew that capitalist agrar-
ian reform also served to create an army of the dispossessed—people who
could not be expected to gravitate immediately to industrial employment,
and who would remain outside the new industrial working class. This is
one reason why vagrants and discharged soldiers appear so frequently in his
early poems. When we read Marx’s insistence that ‘the methods of primitive
accumulation are anything but idyllic’ alongside Wordsworth’s poems, we
can realise that the latter’s investment in images of rural idyll was a gesture
of defiance and resistance.71
The socio-economic changes to which Debord’s text responds can also
be understood as a phase of capitalist accumulation. This argument is made
by the Retort collective, which includes T.J. Clark, formerly of the English
Section. Retort describes the concept of the spectacle as
a first stab at characterizing a new form of, or stage in, the accumula-
tion of capital. What it named primarily was the submission of more
and more facets of human sociability – areas of everyday life, forms
of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of
ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human
beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down on them from on
high – to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the
market.72
The phase of accumulation to which Debord responded was capital’s

encroachment not of common land but of everyday life: spectacular rather
than primitive accumulation.73 Wordsworth and Debord both recognised
that the processes of division inherent to capitalist accumulation—the
division of labour in industrial production, and the division of experience
and representation in the spectacle—force the separation of people from
direct, unmediated, and authentic experience. As Rancière has recently
remarked, the SI’s critique of the spectacle is based in ‘the Romantic vision
of truth as non-separation’.74 Though Wordsworth and Debord articulate
similar conceptions of what constitutes and what obscures authenticity,
thereafter their paths diverge. Wordsworth believed that there were poetic
subjects appropriate for the representation of authenticity; Debord believed
that any affirmative art would ultimately collude with the spectacle.
Authenticity, according to Wordsworth, is transferred in the ‘passions
of the heart’ and ‘elementary feelings’, though he makes concrete these
abstractions. His contributions to Lyrical Ballads take as their subject mat-
ter a host of allegorical but individualised figures on whom he hangs his
vision of authenticity. Take, for example, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’.
In response to changes in the Poor Laws which Wordsworth understood as
an attack on mendicancy and almsgiving, the poem directly addresses the
‘Statesmen’ who had denounced the beggar’s lack of economic productivity.
Wordsworth advises them to ‘deem not this man useless’ (67), and launches
a multi-tiered defence of the beggar.75 He begins with a pantheistic affirma-
tion of the interconnectedness of the spiritual and the material, to remind
law-makers that all men should be equal:
’Tis Nature’s law […]

A life and soul to every mode of being
Inseparably link’d (73, 78–9)
That argument is complemented by a more pragmatic one in which the

beggar, as he passes through the village collecting alms, acquires symbolic
importance as a manifestation of the community’s charity: he is ‘A silent
monitor’ (115) whose presence pushes the soul towards virtue. Finally,
Wordsworth makes the Christian argument that the beggar facilitates the
charity of even the poorest members of the community, who might be
able to offer him only ‘a blessing on his head’ (155) but this allows them
to demonstrate their altruism. The beggar is a solitary figure, but he per-
forms a social function valuable in economic, humanistic, and Christian
terms. In addition, because the beggar has become physically as much a
part of the landscape as the birds and trees, he lives in the proximity to
nature that Wordsworth extols. From a hypothetical case study of the
human impact of legislation, the beggar becomes an archetype and image
of authenticity.
At the opening of the poem Wordsworth warns that ‘The class of Beggars to
which the old man here described belongs, will probably soon be extinct’.76
The threatened disappearance of that class of mendicants, and the authen-
ticity that Wordsworth has it represent, was due to capitalist accumulation
and the legal structure that legitimised it. Such was the case for many of
the protagonists of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. ‘The Female Vagrant’,
‘Michael’, ‘The Mad Mother’: these are victims of socioeconomic processes
whose monolithic advance is belied by the poems’ apparent quaintness, pro-
vincialism, and acquiescence in fate. Wordsworth’s representation of pre-
(or sub-) capitalist classes also reflected onto a contemporary discourse of
poetry. He sought to prove incorrect the ideologues who regarded certain
experiences—poetic, authentic experiences—as incommensurable with the
lower classes. Debord would certainly have appreciated that effort to offend
bourgeois sensibility.
However, the figures represented by Wordsworth were fictionalised and
idealised as much as they were the record of struggling underclasses. Paul
de Man claims that the blurring of documentary and fiction is characteristic
of Romantic literature.77 Similarly, John Barrell observes that the depiction
of the rural poor in the eighteenth century became not only increasingly
common but also increasingly idealised, to become only half revelations
that occluded the miseries of poverty.78 The British Situationists recognised
that Wordsworth’s commemoration of soon-to-be eradicated, pre-capitalist
ways of life was not simply nostalgic, but a tactic of resistance and assault.
In their Anglicisation of the SI’s work, they replicated Wordsworth’s t actic:
they privileged the SI’s discussion of juvenile delinquency over its many
other concerns, and even attempted to locate that delinquency structur-
ally as evidence of a ‘new lumpen’ class that was the repository of revo-
lutionary potential. King Mob not only chose that name for itself but, by
way of its actions, its graffiti, and its fiery rhetoric, role-played as a violent
lumpenprole. These are examples of Romantic tactics—literary, imaginative,
and performative—adjusted to address the conditions of spectacle described
by the SI.
‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ concludes by imploring the Statesmen to
allow the beggar to live freely in the countryside:
As in the eye of Nature he has liv’d,

So in the eye of Nature let him die. (188–9)
Wordsworth was both sermonising and making a pragmatic demand

against forced resettlement. That his final couplet should summon the
‘eye of Nature’ illuminates two of his assertions regarding the relationship
between the aesthetic and the authentic. First, Wordsworth was confident
that there existed a language suitable for the articulation of authenticity,
evident in his rejection of high poetic language in favour of the ‘low and
rustic’ language and homespun wisdom of this maxim, as well as the cou-
plet’s uncluttered formal mirroring. Second, Wordsworth allied that poetic
faith with a philosophical proposition: that authenticity can be recognised
and represented.
‘The Convict’ (which was included only in the 1798 edition of Lyri-
cal Ballads) corroborates but also complicates the aesthetic ideology that
Wordsworth was developing. Like ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, the poem
engages with a pressing political issue and calls for the sympathetic treat-
ment of those on society’s margins. But it also passes a verdict on the possi-
bility of experiencing and representing the authentic. The poem’s narrative
is simple. At its opening, the poet celebrates the view from a mountainside.
For reasons unexplained, he is compelled to visit a convict. At the cell, the
poet continues to survey what is before him. There is a succession of images
of sight and vision: he encourages the reader to ‘behold’ (12) the convict, to
notice his downcast ‘eyes’ (15), to ‘gaze’ on his ‘ visage’ (17), and to consider
his own ‘view’ (24). Indeed, the reader is encouraged only to look at the
convict, and not to reflect on why he might be in his miserable situation.
The decisive moment occurs when the poet’s gaze is reciprocated, which it
is not in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’. In ‘The Convict’s antepenultimate
stanza, the convict ‘half-raises his deep-sunken eye’ (41) to see the poet out-
side his cell. The ‘motion unsettles a tear’ (42), and the poet believes that his
presence is being questioned. He replies (aloud or not, we can’t be sure) that
he is there to share the convict’s sorrows. He then expresses his Godwinian
aversion to penal law. He tacitly acknowledges the convict’s guilt (49–50)
but confides:
My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine,

Would plant thee where yet thou might’st blossom again. (51–52)
His commendation of transportation over capital punishment is uncon-

vincing. The plant metaphor feels heavy-handed and patronising.
Wordsworth’s indictment of the convict may be sardonic, or it may be a
refusal to become embroiled in juridical procedures only marginally more
successfully addressed in Coleridge’s ‘The Dungeon’ (which remained in
the 1800 edition), which speculates that of the ‘poor brother[s]’ in jail,
‘Most [are] innocent, perhaps’ (3–4). Either way, Wordsworth does not
offer the convict as an image of authenticity as he does the beggar. Instead,
he uses what was to become a recurrent theme of his poetic method: the
recognition of the poet’s intrusion into the scene; the poet, indeed, being
seen himself. It is this theme of interruption and disenchantment that allows
Gabriel Josipovici to locate Wordsworth towards the start of a crisis of
representation that became known as modernism.79 Coleridge’s ‘The
Dungeon’, by way of contrast, never troubles its omniscient perspective,
and thus never draws attention to the act of seeing and then of writing
about what has been seen. In Wordsworth’s poem, the poet’s presence is
acknowledged; he is witnessed in his act of witnessing. He fails to artic-
ulate a satisfactory response to the political issue that he faces, but as a
result the poem’s focus is on the poet’s experience of distinguishing authen-
ticity from its debasement.
The SI did not take up a Romantic faith in positive aesthetic experience,
but repeated the denigration of vision that Martin Jay identifies as common
to much twentieth-century French philosophy.80 The SI avoided identifying
so positively an image of authenticity equivalent to the old Cumberland beg-
gar, and it dismissed the individual’s ability to distinguish authenticity from
its inverse simply through observation. For the SI, positive representation in
an era of spectacle only perpetuates alienation. The SI feared that if it were
to represent positively that which it deemed authentic, such representations
would inevitably be recuperated by the spectacle, divested of their authentic
content, and circulated as mere images; the inauthentic sign would replace
the authentic signified.
When he voiced the SI’s opposition to ‘the dominant conditions of artistic
inauthenticity’, but the paradox of needing to create art anyway, mentioned
at the start of this chapter, Attila Kotányi added that the SI’s ‘impact lies in
the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever
people are ready to struggle for them.’81 The evasiveness of his term ‘certain
truths [certaines vérités]’—like Debord’s ‘everything that was directly lived
[Tout ce qui était directement vécu]’—suggests that maybe the SI’s critique
of spectacle did maintain a normative basis. Benjamin Noys, for example,
has described the SI’s vitalism, its ‘retention of a ground of reality as positiv-
ity’ at odds with its professedly negative critique.82
Following this suggestion, Kotányi and Debord’s phrases come to indi-
cate the SI’s response to the problem of recuperation of images of authen-
ticity. It took recourse to what we might call a Situationist sublime: a vague
and tentative gesture towards an authentic something else, which cannot
be given a positive aesthetic form for fear of its spoliation by the specta-
cle. That something else can be represented only negatively, by way of the
style of negation and détournement. ‘The real values of culture’, Debord
wrote, ‘can be maintained only be negating culture.’83 Clearly, this verdict is
at odds with Wordsworth’s project, and it would seem that King Mob pre-
ferred Wordsworth’s approach to the question of how to represent authentic
experiences.84
The Infernal Method

Blake taught King Mob other lessons. Their affinity with him is easy to
comprehend. King Mob and Blake worked in and on London, yet neither
identified with prevailing radical movements. Blake was only ever periph-
eral, for example, to the publisher Joseph Johnson’s circle that involved
many important writers, social theorists, and Dissenters. Blake remained
ideologically distinct from Wordsworth as well as from other Johnson circle
figures such as William Godwin, Mary Wollenstonecraft, and Anna Laeti-
tia Barbauld, largely due to Blake’s idiosyncratic version of Christian faith.
Like many within the 1960s counterculture, King Mob was attracted to
Blake’s outsider status, his English mysticism, and his efforts towards a ges-
amtkunstwerk with his illustrated poems. Blake’s ‘Proverbs from Hell’, in
‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, are loaded with proto-Surrealist and
thus proto-Situationist lessons, ranging from their language of desire ver-
sus restraint, to their reversal of conventional wisdom (‘Sooner murder an
infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’85), to their insistence on pro-
fane joy. Blake’s ‘Exuberance is beauty’86 is particularly reminiscent of Breton’s
‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all’.87
We have already seen that both the English Section and King Mob appro-
priated Blake’s ‘Proverbs from Hell’. More than that, King Mob learned
from Blake that critical art must encompass the good and the bad, affirma-
tion and negation, pleasure and pain. In The ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ of William
Blake (1973), a text that emerged from the resurgence of interest in Blake in
the British left of the 1960s, G.R. Sabri-Tabrizi reads Blake’s ‘The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell’ as a riposte to Emanuel Swedenborg’s theology and,
specifically, his philosophy of predestination which, Sabri-Tabrizi argues,
Blake understood in class terms.
Swedenborg conceived of Heaven as the divine principles of love,
affection, and attraction: all passive pursuits. Because active, manual
labour was an obstacle to Heavenly pleasures, Swedenborg condemned
Figure 4.5 Photograph of King Mob graffiti.88 Originally published in Roger Perry,
The Writing on the Wall (London: Elm Tree Books 1976), 50. Courtesy
of Kate Bindloss.
working people to lives divorced from divine pursuits. Sabri-Tabrizi con-

textualises Swedenborg’s disdain of active labour by noting his privileged
background. Blake, a working man, refuted Swedenborg’s metaphysics to
insist that divine principles must have a material basis. Blake thus reversed
Swedenborg’s use of the terms ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’. For Blake, knowledge
derives from experience and man can only develop through the combina-
tion of active experience and passive spiritual pursuits: the marriage of
Heaven and Hell.89
In the opening section of the poem, ‘The Argument’, Blake encapsulates
the lesson to come:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason

and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.90
In the poem, Blake expounds a form of dialectics that embraces contrar-

ies and conflict. He wanted to provoke and to give voice to that which
is elsewhere condemned as Hellish or repulsive. He calls this his ‘infernal
method’, which involves speaking in the ‘voice of the devil’ and arguing
with angels and prophets.91 King Mob was also adept at playing Devil’s
Advocate, as well as acting as ‘tygers of wrath’ on the ‘road of excess’. The
infernal method resembles what Walter Benjamin identified the Surrealists
as having inherited from Lautréamont and Rimbaud: ‘One finds the cult of
evil as a political device, however romantic—a device that can be used to
disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism.’92
King Mob’s pamphlets even resembled Blake’s printed plates physi-
cally. The flyer that the group distributed at its 1968 Selfridges interven-
tion, when renegade Santa freely distributed gifts to children, has the text
in the centre of the page with illustrations adorning the margins. Draw-
ings of candles, mistletoe, and bells contrasts with the angry sermonising
of the text: ‘Christmas is a punishment this year. It was always a drag […]
Let’s smash the whole great deception, occupy the fun palace, and set the
swings going. Grab the gifts and really give them.’93 The pamphlet could
have been printed quickly and cheaply as a plain-text mimeograph, but King
Mob chose instead a more combined aesthetic, just as Blake sought to unify
disciplines—painting, poetry, engraving, printing—on his printed plates.
Blake even drew attention to the physical process through which his
poetry was produced. In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, the poet recalls,
‘I was in a Printing house in Hell and saw the method in which knowledge
is transmitted from generation to generation’.94 Knowledge is transmitted,
of course, as a result of manual labour as well as intellectual commitment:
texts need to be printed. Blake’s radically materialist poet continues,
the notion that Man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged;
this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which
in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away,
and displaying the infinite which was hid.95
King Mob’s was a similarly infernal method. Like Jack the Ripper, it wrote
‘from Hell’. It wished to corrode decorum and decency to reveal something
else. ‘It was meant to be great’, begins the Selfridges flyer, ‘but it’s horrible’.
The Anti-Spectacular and the Hyper-Spectacular

King Mob’s Devil’s Advocacy and Surrealist black humour are both demons
trated by another flyer, produced to celebrate Valerie Solanas’s shooting of
Andy Warhol. The flyer offers a further hit-list that includes Mick Jagger,
Richard Hamilton, and Miles from International Times—it apologises for the
‘inferior quality of the English cop-outs’ on the list. The pamphlet’s title, ‘The
death of art spells the murder of artists. The real anti-artist appears’, reflects
King Mob’s accelerated version of Dadaist anti-art. Images of guns and threats
of further retribution on the celebrities of the counterculture reflect the out-
law machismo the group inherited from Black Mask and the Motherfuckers.
The flyer isn’t a comfortable read—of course, it isn’t meant to be—but
nor is it entirely convincing. It doesn’t demand to be read seriously. In fact,
for all its shock-value and over-performed lumpen aggression, the flyer
soon comes into focus as a very familiar genre of text: a satire, or maybe a
grotesque. Like Debord’s scandalous literariness discussed in the previous
chapter, King Mob’s anti-art also begins to occupy familiar aesthetic catego-
ries despite its anti-art rhetoric.
The different versions of scandalous literariness practiced by the SI, the
English Section, and eventually King Mob might all be read as forms of jou-
issance, of freedom, of delight in language—all of which, on the one hand,
push back against the concomitant anxiety that everything will inevitability
be recuperated and, on the other hand, affirm the possibility of an anti-
spectacular ontology. Debord wrote that, ‘The most extreme destruction of
language can be officially welcomed [by the spectacle] as a positive develop-
ment because it amounts to yet one more way of flaunting one’s acceptance
of a status quo where all communication has been smugly declared absent’;
at the same time, the spectacle’s function ‘is to use culture to bury all his-
torical memory.’96 But while the Situationists recognised that the spectacle
degrades language, flattens experience, and buries history, they responded
by attempting to summon a ‘literature irreconcilable with the [spectacle’s]
standard of truth and interpretation’, to appropriate an expression from
Keston Sutherland’s analysis of Marx’s similarly literary style in Capital
(1864).97 In short: certain discursive modes that can variously be described
as literary might signal territory not yet entirely colonised by the spectacle.
King Mob’s literariness was of a vastly different type to that of Debord
and the SI, yet it maintained the belief that language, used in certain ways,
could gesture towards something else. As discussed in the previous chapter,
Debord’s writing reflects what he called his ‘style of negation’. He sought
to present the antithetical, negative, images of the false positives of spectac-
ular ideology. His prose is precise and elegant, though abstruse, and deliv-
ers confident and totalising assertions rather than dialectics-in-process or
the working-through of logical contradictions. The resultant impression of
hermeneutic conclusivity has caused some critics to take Debord to task
for claiming that his is a dialectical method. The representative trope of
Debord’s prose style, identified in the previous chapter, is the chiasmus. Its
structure mirrors the process of détournement that characterises Debord’s
specifically negative dialectic.
King Mob, on the other hand, developed a more allusive and intertex-
tual literariness. It invoked a pop-cultural memory diametrically opposed to
Debord’s more conceptual engagement. Its emphasis was not on form, as in
Debord’s chiasmus, but on content—an overload of visceral and transgres-
sive imagery. King Mob inverted Debord’s iconophobia, to produce an aes-
thetic practice that was phanopoetic in Ezra Pound’s sense of using ‘a word
to throw a visual image on the reader’s imagination’.98
The differences between Debord’s formalism and King Mob’s pop-cultural
allusiveness stem from their different conceptions of where alternatives to
the spectacle might be found. Debord was reluctant to prescribe the c ontent
of anti-spectacular forms. He refused to offer images of anti-spectacular
authenticity—only the experience of his style of negation. King Mob, on the
other hand, attempted to identify sites of contestation immanent to the
spectacle and to exacerbate tensions therein. Marinetti, skid row, dynamite,
millenarian peasants, historical rioters, Western gunslingers: King Mob’s
texts abound in symbols, icons, and images of transgression, of conflict, of
rebellion. We might think of this switch from negation to affirmation as a
move from an anti-spectacular Situationist practice to a hyper-spectacular
one. King Mob thus brazenly defied the SI’s line that ‘there is no such thing
as […] a spectacular situationist’.99
The shared principle of King Mob and Debord’s literary modes is their
performativity—the authors’ beliefs that aesthetic objects have the capacity
to signal a different mode of being. The style of Debord’s writing is meant
to be experienced as something frustrating, a struggle, because the intel-
lectual labour it demands acts as an antidote to the infantilising and pas-
sive conditions of the spectacle. King Mob may have misrecognised this
difficulty, and dismissed it as an elitist quality emerging from the so-called
Situationist Salon. In this sense, King Mob’s caricatured image of lumpen
vulgarity was a philistine collusion with the populist stereotype of British
culture as insular, xenophobic, and fearful of Continental abstraction. This
stereotype, prevalent in the left as well as the right, was still evident a decade
later in a report in International Times that remembered, ‘Paris 1968 was
rich in nameless wildness […] It was marred by a small group of embittered
scene-creamers, who called themselves the Situationists, and who tried in
typically French fashion to intellectualize the whole mood out of existence,
and with their very name tried to colonize it.’100
King Mob replaced Debord’s difficulty with something more quotidian,
vernacular, and familiar. That familiarity may have been a weakness: the
irruptive potential of the ‘style of negation’ was lost in King Mob. It aban-
doned the modernist formal difficult that, in the SI’s logic, was a guard
against recuperation. There’s an irony in the fact that Debord saw the spec-
tacle as infantilising and so produced something difficult, yet King Mob saw
Debord as difficult and so produced something infantilising. As Vermorel
has recently written, King Mob was ‘Bash Street Kids version of Situation-
ism’.101 The SI dismissed King Mob as an infantile disorder, as yet more
récuperateurs.
These critiques are easy to make. We might, however, read King Mob
in a different light. Was its performance of lumpen vulgarity actually an
ironic overstatement of the anti-intellectualism so prevalent in Anglophone
engagements with the European avant-garde? Was its black humour a check
on the SI’s tendency towards authoritarianism—its active nihilism a check
on millenarian zealousness?
One thing is certain: King Mob made explicit the connection between
historical and contemporary vernacular dissent, and established a prac-
tice that would be repeated and reworked by generations of successors,
examined in the next chapter of this book. It also served as a demon-
stration of some of the paradoxes of Situationist aesthetic theory. The SI
wanted art to represent its own supersession. It believed that art in the
age of spectacle is fundamentally debased, yet art nonetheless has the
duty and privilege to entertain questions of authenticity. These are the
paradoxes to which Kotányi responded with the unconvincing notion of
anti-Situationist art. King Mob responded by developing a British Sit-
uationist aesthetic that exacerbated paradox and proudly flaunted its
own contradictions. Iconoclasm and tradition, anti-literary and literary,
anti-aesthetic and aesthetic: a critique of the spectacle made by way of the
spectacle’s own products.
Notes
1. Vincent Kauffman, ‘Angels of Purity’, in Tom McDonough (ed), Guy Debord
and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press 2004), 288.
2. Situationist International, ‘La Cinquième conference de l’I.S. à Göteborg’, Inter-
nationale Situationniste 7 (1962): 27.
3. Guy Debord, ‘For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art’ (1961), in Knabb (ed),
Situationist International Anthology, 396.
4. Partisan accounts of King Mob’s origins can be found in Hussey, Game of War,
207–214; Savage, England’s Dreaming, 23–36; Vague, King Mob Echo: From
Gordon Riots to Situationists & Sex Pistols, 39–53; David and Stuart Wise,
‘End of Music (Punk, Reggae: A Critique)’ (1978), in Home (ed), What Is Situ-
ationism? 63–102; and David Wise, Stewart Wise, and Nick Brandt, King Mob:
A Critical Hidden History (Devon: Bread and Circuses 2014).
6. Savage, England’s Dreaming, 33.
7. Vague, King Mob Echo: From Gordon Riots to Situationists & Sex Pistols, 43.
8. See Wise, Wise, and Brandt, King Mob: A Critical Hidden History. The website
Revolt Against Plenty, maintained by David and Stuart Wise, also contains many
primary and secondary texts. Available at http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/
(accessed 8 February 2016).
9. David and Stuart Wise, ‘End of Music (Punk, Reggae: A Critique)’, 67.
10. Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground
1961–1971 (London: Heinemann 1988), 126.
11. Ibid., 251.
12. Ibid., 250.
13. King Mob Echo 1 (1968): 1.
14. Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Desolation Row’, King Mob Echo 1 (April 1968), in Vague
(ed), King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International, 81.
15. Bob Dylan, ‘Desolation Row’, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records
1965).
16. Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Desolation Row’, 77.
17. Ibid., 77, 80.
18. Ibid., 81.
19. Ibid., 79.
20. Ibid., 77–78.
21. Ibid., 81.
tion’, 69.
23. ‘King Mob: Two Letters on Student Power’ (November 1968), in Vague (ed),
King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International, 85–90.
24. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso 1985), 152.
25. Ibid., 151.
26. Other histories of these groups include Osha Neumann, Up Against the Wall
Motherfucker: A Memoir of the 60s, with Notes for the Next Time (New York:
Seven Stories Press 2008); Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker:
The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea and the Black Mask Group
(London: Unpopular Books and Sabotage Editions 1993); and Up Against the
Wall, Motherfucker: An Anthology of Rants, Posters and More (Melbourne,
Australia: Homebrew Press 2007).
27. King Mob Echo 3 (1969) in Vague (ed), King Mob Echo: English Section of the
Situationist International, 104.
28. Ibid.
29. ‘Report from France’, International Times 51 (28 February–13 March 1969): 5.
Sadie Plant notes that this stunt has since been copied in Poland by Orange
Alternative. See The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a
Postmodern Age (London: Routledge 1992), 148.
30. King Mob Echo 3 (1969), 105.
31. Ibid., 107.
32. Ibid., 105, 104.
33. ‘Affinity Group = A Street Gang with an Analysis’, King Mob Echo 3 (1969),
118.
34. See Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker: An Anthology of Rants, Posters and
More.
35. Ben Morea and Ron Hahne, Black Mask & Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker:
The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea and the Black Mask Group
(Oakland, CA: PM Press 2011), 157.
36. Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s
(Berkeley: University of California Press 2003), 172–173. For King Mob’s ver-
sion, see King Mob Echo 3 (1969), 111.
37. It is worth remembering the involvement of radical guerrilla groups in social
justice projects of this type, which are often ignored in more reactionary his-
tories. Histories of the Angry Brigade, for example, often ignore its members’
efforts to establish Claimants Unions. See Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade:
The Cause and the Case (London: Gollancz 1975). In fact, King Mob’s most
immediate political intervention was much more socially democratic and com-
munitarian than its rhetoric would suggest. In June 1968, King Mob members,
dressed as pantomime horses and gorillas, convinced local families to occupy
the closed-off Powis Square Gardens, West London. King Mob tore down the
square’s gates, and the council subsequently opened the gardens to the public
with a children’s play area.
38. King Mob Echo 3 (1969), 113.
39. For the beginnings of an effort to understand the sexism and homophobia of
the Black Mask, Motherfucker, and King Mob aesthetics, see my article, ‘Sex
and the Situs’, World Picture 4 (Spring 2010), available at http://english.okstate.
edu/worldpicture/WP_4/Cooper.html (accessed 1 February 2016). For a more
fully rounded version of the same, see Kelly Baum, ‘The Sex of the Situationist
International’, October 126 (Fall 2008): 23–43.
40. Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker poster. Reproduced by King Mob as the
cover to the pamphlet ‘Art Schools Are Dead’ (1968). ‘Henry’ refers to the nine-
teenth century French anarchist bomber Émile Henry.
41. Internationale Situationniste 9 (August 1964): 36.
42. Ibid., 9.
43. Penelope Rosemont, ‘Humour or Not or Less or Else’, Rebel Worker 6 (May
1966), in Vague (ed.), King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist Inter-
national, 12.
44. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloom-
ington, Ind.: Indiana University Press 1984).
45. That is not to say that the SI refused the possibility of joy and frivolity. Biograph-
ical accounts suggest that many Situationists were indeed practising libertines
despite the coldness of the SI’s aesthetic.
46. Wise, Wise, and Brandt, King Mob, 49–50.
47. Connolly, ‘It’s got here at last!’
49. Ibid., 67. The article also mentions Gray’s idea for an unpleasant pop group,
which is frequently cited as the inspiration for Malcolm McLaren’s forming of
the Sex Pistols.
50. Roger Perry, photographer for Time Out magazine in the 1970s, documented
the political, humorous, and downright weird graffiti around London in his clas-
sic The Writing on the Wall, recently republished (London: Plain Crisp Books
2015).
51. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London:
Penguin 1997), 308. King Mob has ‘greif’ for ‘grief’.
52. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Poetry and Prose (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions 2002), 394.
53. William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes
(London: Oxford University Press 1966), 150.
54. Ibid., 152.
55. English Section of the Situationist International, ‘The Revolution of Modern
Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’, in Vague (ed), King Mob Echo: English
Section of the Situationist International, 68.
56. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ (1800), in William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 2nd Edition, ed. E.L. Brett & A.R. Jones
(London and New York: Routledge 1991), 246.
57. Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, 125.
58. Vaneigem, ‘Desolation Row’, 80.
59. Wordsworth, ‘Preface (1800)’, 251.
60. Robertson, ‘The Situationist International: Its Penetration into British Cul-
ture’, 123.
62. Wise, Wise, and Brandt, King Mob, 39.
63. Ibid., 52.
64. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (London: Routledge 2002), 9.
65. Ibid., 64.
66. Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, 244–245.
67. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1953), 103–114.
69. Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 873–904.
70. Ibid., 875.
71. Ibid.
72. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London:
Verso 2005), 19.
73. The phrase ‘The colonization of everyday life’ was popularised by Henri
Lefebvre, but he took the expression from Debord. See Michael Trebitsch,
‘Preface: The Moment of Radical Critique’, in Henri Lefebvre, Critique of
Everyday Life Vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso 2002), xxii.
74. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London:
Verso 2009), 6.
75. All references are to William Wordsworth, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’,
in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, hereafter cited in text by line
number.
76. Wordsworth, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, 205.
77. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University
Press 1984), 1–17.
78. See John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English
Painting 1730–1840 (London: Cambridge University Press 1980).
79. See Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press 2010).
80. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-
Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press 1994).
82. Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary
Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2010), 98.
84. Another fundamental difference between Romanticism’s aesthetic philosophy and
that of the Situationists relates to the role of the individual. For Wordsworth, the
poet is someone possessed of ‘more than usual organic sensibility’ (‘Preface’, 246).
The Situationists, meanwhile, followed Lautréamont in believing that ‘Poetry
must be made by all. Not by one.’ (‘Poésies’, 244).
85. Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, 152.
86. Ibid.
87. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin 1999), 160.
88. Roger Perry, The Writing on the Wall (London: Elm Tree Books 1976), 50.
89. G.R. Sabri-Tabrizi, The ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ of William Blake (London: Lawrence
and Wishart 1973), 76–99.
91. Ibid., 154.
92. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’
(1929), in Selected Writings: Volume 2 1927–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press 1999), 214.
93. Vague (ed.), King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International, 99.
94. Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, 154. See also Joseph Viscomi, ‘In the
Caves of Heaven and Hell: Swedenborg and Printmaking in Blake’s Marriage’,
in Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds), Blake in the Nineties (Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press Ltd. 1999), 27–61.
97. Keston Sutherland, ‘Marx in Jargon’, World Picture 1 (Spring 2008), available
at http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_1.1/KSutherland.pdf (accessed
1 February 2016).
98. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions 2010), 37. Debord
is closer to Pound’s category of ‘logopoesis’.
99. Situationist International, ‘La Cinquième conference de l’I.S. à Göteborg’,
26–27.
100. Heathcote Williams, ‘The Illegible Split in the Situationist International’, Inter-
national Times, 4: 1 (1978): 26.
101. Fred Vermorel, ‘Blowing up the bridges so there is no way back’, in Paul
Gorman, David Thorp, and Fred Vermorel (eds), Eyes for Blowing Up Bridges:
Joining the Dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren
(Southampton: John Hansard Gallery 2015), 22.
5 British Situationism Today
‘There is always, in such movements, a moment when the original tension

of the secret society must either explode in a matter-of-fact, profane strug-
gle for power and domination, or decay as a public demonstration and be
transformed.’
—Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia’ (1929)1
In 1972, Guy Debord dissolved the Situationist International. He announced

its end in a text co-written with Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The Real Spilt in
the International: Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time. The
text explained the necessity of dissolving the SI before its legacy was too
besmirched by the post-1968 explosion and dilution of Situationist activity.
Nonetheless, with characteristic self-assuredness, Debord maintained that
history would prove correct the Situationist project. For Debord, the occu-
pations movement of 1968 had represented the moment when ‘a generation
began to be situationist’, and the SI itself had become ‘merely the concen-
trated expression of an historical subversion which is everywhere’.2 The
time had come, however, for the Situationist International (SI) as an organi-
sation to disappear—as it had always willed.
Across the historical narrative that this book has offered, the pres-
ence of an organised group—that is, programmatic, but also with organs,
embodied—proved problematic for British practitioners attempting to
develop an anglicised version of the Continental avant-garde practice. The
earliest British Surrealists found it difficult to maintain productive relations
with André Breton’s group; Alexander Trocchi, the English Section, and
King Mob were all dismissed by the SI. At the same time, the representative
body of the anglicised practice required the productively dissonant relation-
ship with the Continental authority: these ever smaller and ever more arcane
avant-garde groupuscules were distinctly oedipal; and their borders were
defined and policed through series of denunciations and disavowals. It is
now time for the book to break from linear narratives of Surrealism’s evolu-
tion into Situationism, and of the migration of both from France to Britain.3
Instead, this final chapter will consider the impact of this long history of
anglicised avant-garde practice on contemporary cultural activity, and to do
so it must look beyond self-identifying avant-garde groups. To bring back
a phrase from Chapter 2: we must now look for the dissolute avant-garde.
This chapter will not undertake that search naively. It will introduce a
few spheres of contemporary British avant-garde activity, chosen for their
relation to the two Situationist concepts that have had the most traction in
Britain: détournement and psychogeography. It will offer selected figures
as representatives of British engagements with these concepts—primarily
Stewart Home in relation to détournement, and Patrick Keiller and Laura
Oldfield in relation to psychogeography—and will demonstrate how their
work contributes to the tradition that this book has traced. This is not
a comprehensive account of all British Situationist activity. Such a thing
would be impossible, given what I’ve already said about diffuseness, and
not particularly useful even if it was. Rather, what I propose is that these
disparate spheres of activity are all organised around the same basic ques-
tion: what are the limits of radical aesthetic practice in an age of spectacular
recuperation, and how can those limits be transgressed?
In 1989, the first major retrospective of the SI’s life and work was held
at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the London and Boston Institutes of
Contemporary Art. In the exhibition catalogue, a collection of pamphlets
and artworks by British post-Situationist groups of the 1970s and 1980s
was labelled as the SI’s ‘fallout’. The term was prescient. It worked as a pun
on the Situationist tendency towards internecine squabbling, and it gave the
impression of dispersed and toxic activity that continued well beyond the
event that produced it.
Before we trace that fallout in this chapter, though, it is worth gathering
together the main characteristics that this book has identified in the activi-
ties of British Situationists and their precursors.
To begin, we observed that both the mainstream and countercultural
media in Britain typically approached Surrealism and later Situationism
as something foreign, alien, even unintelligible. ‘The Channel’, Charles
Radcliffe has explained, ‘is much wider than its width.’4 Consequently,
a populist hostility has frequently arisen against what has been regarded as
a quintessentially French taste for the esoteric, the obscure, and the abstract.
Mass Observation and King Mob, for example, both deemed it necessary
to tone down their French sources, to make them more colloquial, more
‘proletarian’.
Second, we investigated how British practitioners incorporated the
Continental avant-garde traditions into domestic literary and cultural
movements. Both Surrealism and Situationism were allied with British
Romanticism: for Herbert Read, Surrealism could be made more palatable
in Britain by presenting it as an extension of Romanticism, both opposed
to classicism; for King Mob, a cultural translation of Situationist practice
involved making it resonate with Romanticism, and the group emphasised
that lessons could be learned from the latter’s tactics of resistance against
Enclosure and industrial capitalism.
British Situationism Today 145
Finally, the Anglicisations of Situationist practice in this book have all
moved beyond surface phenomena to operate at the level of what Fredric
Jameson calls aesthetic ideology. The SI’s particular version of anti-art, its
‘style of negation’, became a British Situationist style that was exaggerat-
edly affirmative; the SI’s tactical iconophobia was transformed into a hyper-
spectacular practice. Both were responses to the problem of recuperation.
In this chapter we’ll encounter more such responses, not least the use of an
intense and insistent formal reflexivity, almost a type of artistic self-sabotage,
as a guard against recuperation. To understand the broader context of these
cultural translations, and to push against both Martin Puchner’s derogatory
account of British ‘rear-guardism’ and the many accounts of repetitious and
depoliticised ‘neo-avant-gardes’, I have proposed a model of Franco-Anglo
correspondence drawn from Harold Bloom’s antithetical method, whereby
literary influence advances through misreading. Repetition, in these
instances, is neither tragic nor farcical, but chiasmic.
Punk Rock, Stewart Home, and the Self-Hating Commodity

The phenomenon most commonly associated with the Situationist Interna-
tional in Britain is surely punk—the whole subculture as much as the music.
The influence is evident in the lyrics, iconography, and fashions of both the
Sex Pistols and first-wave bands of the late 1970s, and post-punk bands of
the 1980s. Punk’s Situationist influence has been debated widely, with com-
mentators usually defending or dismissing punk’s use of Situationist motifs
as sincere or superficial.5 While this chapter will touch on those debates, its
focus will be on the relation of punk to another phenomenon, the ‘pro-situ’,
soon to be explained. More specifically, the following section of this chapter
will introduce the work of Stewart Home, which is both a product of the
punk and pro-situ phenomena, and a critical reflection on them.
Punk has many origin myths, but its Situationist connection is generally
agreed to begin with Malcolm McLaren, founder and manager of the Sex
Pistols. McLaren was also, at one time, a peripheral member of King Mob.
The inspiration for the Sex Pistols, so the legend goes, was a proposal from
Chris Gray of King Mob to form ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.6 Gray’s
Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist
International (1974), with its many risqué images and ‘freely-translated’
essays, was an important sourcebook for punk aesthetics, particularly for
Jamie Reid, who designed the Sex Pistols’ record sleeves. Tony Wilson’s
Factory Records extensively mined the SI’s archives for sellable gimmicks.
The Durutti Column’s debut album Return of the Durutti Column (1980),
for example, took its name from a 1967 SI cartoon that had appeared on
the cover of International Times. The original LPs had sandpaper sleeves
in homage to Debord’s book Mémoires (1959), designed to strip away the
covers of anything they are filed alongside. Debord and Reid were even
thanked in the record’s liner notes for ‘the marketing concept’. This quip,
together with McLaren’s mantra of ‘Cash from Chaos’, reflects what was
described in the previous chapter as the ‘hyper-spectacular’ aesthetic prac-
tice of King Mob—in this case, an exaggerated act of recuperation, profit-
able anarchy.
Other punk groups were less overtly cynical in their adoption of Situation-
ist tropes. Gang of Four and The Mekons—both on the Fast Product label,
the latter taught by ex-English Section member T.J. Clark at the University
of Leeds—the Pop Group, and many groups around Crass and their epony-
mous label all drew heavily on Situationist slogans as part of their efforts to
combine punk rock with radical politics. Given that the SI had little time for
popular music, it is unsurprising that Situationist d iscourse primarily infil-
trated punk culture by way of zines, not least Larry Law’s aphoristic Spec-
tacular Times, the anarchic Kill Your Pet Puppy, and, slightly later, Stewart
Home’s more identifiably avant-garde SMILE.
Vague, produced by Tom Vague and a changing ensemble of actual,
pseudonymous, and fictional ‘vagrants’, provides a particularly stark exam-
ple of the punks’ discovery of the Situationists. Vague began in the late
1970s as a fanzine focussed on Adam and the Ants, when the band were still
punks rather than the famous New Romantics they became. Early issues of
Vague featured the usual DIY fanzine fare: interviews, reviews, gonzo tour
reports, cut ’n’ paste imagery, and hand-drawn cartoons. But in 1985 there
appeared the sixteenth issue, the ‘Psychic Terrorism Annual’ (Figure 5.1).
Alongside articles on the experimental music and art group Psychic TV and
their provocative front-person Genesis P. Orridge, the parody religious cult
SubGenius, and the Slovenian industrial group Laibach, there appeared
‘The Boy Scouts Guide to Situationism’. The article drew the dots between
the ‘Strasbourg scandal’ of 1966 (when the university’s Student Union
worked with the SI to distribute the ‘Poverty of Student Life’ pamphlet)
and the Enragés of May 1968, over the Channel to the student radicals of
Cambridge and Essex (not least the Kim Philby Dining Club) who became
the Angry Brigade, and via King Mob to punk. The essay’s style is frantic,
paranoiac, and plagiarism-heavy, though it betrays a familiar anxiety about
the abstraction of some of its subject matter: ‘we are dealing with idealistic
concepts like realising your true desires. And most people reject that. If some
don’t, all well and good. Nowt wrong with that.’7
The essay is significant, however, because it places punk in an ongo-
ing tradition of cultural radicalism, and makes the cross-Channel con-
nections that other British punks wouldn’t entertain and appear all the
more provincial and petty for not doing so. Johnny Rotten, for example:
‘All the talk about the French Situationists being associated with punk is
bollocks. It’s nonsense!’ He continues, ‘They were too structured for my
liking, word games and no work. Plus they were French, so fuck them.’8
Tom Vague has continued to issue regular ‘speed histories’ of London’s
radical past, youth countercultures, and the more ‘out there’ reaches of
popular culture.
Figure 5.1 Cover of Vague 16–17 (1985). Courtesy of Tom Vague.
Despite Vague’s sense of Continental bonhomie, Rotten’s overstated

thuggery is more characteristic of the British Situationist scene of the late
1970s. As we’ve witnessed, the surest signifier of Situationist authenticity is
to denounce other interpretations of Situationist practice. Punk, too, was
adept in the art of falling-out, of issuing snarling denunciations of cultural
rivals—this it inherited from the ‘pro-situ’ milieu from which it emerged.
Debord used this term, ‘pro-situ’, as a derogatory label for the SI’s followers.
In The Real Split in the International, he observes:
Enthusiastic spectators of the SI have existed since 1960, but in the early
years there were only a handful of them. The last five years have seen
the handful become a multitude. This process started in France where
they were served with the nickname of “pro-situs”, although this new
“French disease” has now spread to many other countries. Their sheer
number does nothing, however, to enhance their vacuity: all of them
make it known that they fully approve of the SI, and prove clueless when
it comes to doing anything else. By growing in numbers, they remain the
same: anybody who has read or seen one has read or seen them all.9
Within itself, Debord argued, the SI had generated a number of merely ‘con-
templative’ members. After Raoul Vaneigem’s resignation in 1970, the SI
had issued a communiqué that accused him of having become one such
contemplative, ‘never displaying anything other than the strongest determi-
nation to do absolutely nothing’.10 Outside of the SI, similarly, had gath-
ered many ‘pro-situationists’ or ‘pro-situs’, who followed the SI as disciples.
To be called a ‘pro-situ’ was an insult, but to call someone else a ‘pro-situ’
was a signifier of your own more authentic engagement with Situationist
principles.
In the 1969 announcement of the English Section’s expulsion, the SI
described Chris Gray’s new project, ‘a rag called King Mob’, as ‘slightly
pro-situationist’. Five years later, Gray’s own Leaving the Twentieth Century
levelled the same accusation at pro-situs at home. ‘Seen from over here’,
wrote an unnamed ex-member of the English Section,
the SI has a lot to answer for: it has spawned a whole stew of “revo-
lutionary organisations”, usually composed of half a dozen moralists
of the transparent relationship; these have inevitably foundered after a
few months—though not without bequeathing weighty self-criticisms
to a breathless posterity. Idiots. Worse: cures. Yet their traits are
undoubtedly linked organically, genetically, to the original SI in its
negative effects: the SI is responsible for its negative offspring.11
By 1987, this pro-situ milieu was so established and so predictable in its con-
cerns and conventions that it became the object of satire. The conceptual art
group Art & Language, for example, offered the caricature of ‘Ralph the Situa-
tionist’, a young man who spouts on about psychogeography in conversations
that are ‘intricate unaccultured messes, empty but teleologically replete.’12
Ralph Rumney, presumably the source of Art & Language’s satire, offered
the following assessment at a 1996 conference on the legacy of the SI:
A quarter of a century ago, the Situationists decided that the time had
come to pass the baton to a new, equally creative, generation. The
baton was dropped. Since then we have suffered, largely in silence,
pro-situs, proto-situs, meta-situs, post-situs, neo-situs, and all sorts
of Situationist derived cults. Soon we will find Moonie-situs, Hare-
Krishna-situs, sects in Manchester and Wapping connected by the ley
line through the Watford Gap […] Scurrility reigns.13
He wasn’t wrong. One of the most difficult aspects of writing a history of
the SI in Britain is that there were so many pro-situ groups, so many Ralphs,
spread across universities, art colleges, labour and protest organisations, and
art scenes. Each pro-situ denounced the next. Ralph was always the next guy.
Similarly, traditions with such strong DIY ethics as Surrealism, Situation-
ism, and punk are notoriously difficult to survey comprehensively, precisely
because such a vast number of individuals have been able to passionately
involve themselves. Surrealism, Situationism, and punk all said that anyone
can be an artist—so, many have had a go. Any history of the latter two tradi-
tions will inevitably be met with protestations about the exclusion of this or
that grouping, but the objective significance of any particular manifestation
of the tradition is impossible to ascertain given the radically and intrinsically
decentred nature of the tradition. Part of the experience of punk and pro-situ
traditions alike is that a local band or an obscure pamphlet can have as much
or greater significance than an original source, in a manner less familiar to
other subcultures or aesthetic movements gathered around principal authors.
Part of the radical diffuseness of pro-situ activity is a result of British
Situationism’s lack of an authoritative manifesto. Martin Puchner describes
how the manifestos of the historical avant-garde undertook an historio-
graphical project alongside their more immediate declarative functions: they
write histories of ‘successions and ruptures.’ Manifestos chart ‘the battle of
the isms’ that constitutes the avant-garde’s history, which Puchner explains
as a result of ‘an intense anxiety of influence’.14 Without a manifesto or
representative organisation around which to gather, the disparate British
Situationists’ energies, attentions, and anxieties have taken many different
directions—and there are many excellent pro-situ pamphlets on a great
variety of political issues—but they have also frequently turned inwards.
In the latter case, a clear narcissism of small differences has operated, and
the plethora of accusations and counter-accusations has indeed come to
resemble a more farcical repetition of the French tradition of ‘J’accuse!’ It
often seems that British pro-situs have spent as much time announcing the
death of Situationism as its arrival. As early as 1969, in a broadside titled
Wall, issued ‘with the assistance of King Mob’, the Oxford Motherfuckers
announced in a distinctly Situationist manner the end of Situationism. It is
‘a bit of a drag’, the Oxford Motherfuckers sighed, that 1969 ‘will certainly
be the last year of active Situationism in Great Britain, since Situationism no
more than Flower Power can hope to survive its own trendiness’.15
George Robertson’s ‘The Situationist International: Its Penetration into
British Culture’ (1988) and Simon Ford’s The Realization and Suppression
of the Situationist International: An Annotated Bibliography 1972–1992
(1995) have both attempted to catalogue the many pro-situ groups that
emerged in the SI’s fallout. Names include Spontaneous Combustion, The
Pleasure Tendency, Hapt, BM Chronos, Here and Now. In the last couple of
decades, pro-situs have turned to blogs instead of pamphlets, and as such
the milieu has dissipated into ever darker depths of the internet.
To recognise more clearly the contributions of this diffuse British
S ituationist tradition to contemporary cultural practices, this chapter shall
turn to the work of Stewart Home, which as I mentioned previously is both
product of and critical comment on these legacies of the SI in Britain. As his-
torian, artist, and writer, Home has maintained a long-standing engage-
ment with the SI. His book The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from
Lettrism to Class War (1988) was one of the earliest extended accounts of
the SI in English. Home placed the Situationists in a current of cultural prov-
ocation succeeded by Fluxus, Punk, Mail Art, and other more subterranean
movements. Home has always contested the hegemony of the D ebordian
faction of the SI in order to reappraise the contributions of its artists, par-
ticularly those of the excluded Scandinavian section who often receive short
shrift in histories of the movement. Home also refuses to be paralysed by
what I have described as the SI’s anxieties about recuperation—its icono-
phobia, its distrust of aesthetic representation. Instead, in his various artistic
interventions, Home elucidates and confronts the paradoxes of Situationist
theory, particularly those that have been exacerbated in its Anglicisation.
Home is prolific—in documenting his own artistic practice16; in pam-
phleteering and blogging; in researching lesser-known members of the
1960s counterculture and especially his mother’s involvement therein;
and in writing novels which, like his other activities, reflect his playful and
provocative approach to questions of the avant-garde, the postmodern, and
the politics of popular culture. Edward S. Robinson’s Shift Linguals (2011)
places Home in a lineage of experimental writing that runs from William S.
Burroughs and Brion Gysin, through Kathy Acker, to contemporary online
art writers. Home’s contribution to the development of ‘cut-up narratives’,
Robinson argues, is to have combined the cut-up method with Situationist
tactics of détournement and plagiarism, as well as with his own tactics of
repetition, pastiche, and ‘cultivated contradictions’.17
Because his many novels revel in their own absurdities, fissures, and deep
layers of irony, to approach Home’s literary career is an intimidating task.
Robinson divides Home’s novels into two periods. There is the early work,
concerned with pulp fiction and punk and skinhead culture, which includes
Pure Mania (1989), Red London (1994), and Slow Death (1996); and there
is the later work, which moves away from pulp to more overtly experi-
mental styles, with much ‘meta’ literary comment by way of book reviews
and bibliographic histories interspersed into Home’s own fictions. The later
work includes 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), Down and
Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004), and Tainted Love (2005). The recent
Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010) might indicate a new period, with
Home’s attention turning to the pornographic spam e-mail as the basis for
more adventures in the cut-up and détournement. Across all of these peri-
ods, Home remains focussed on how radical aesthetic practice might be
pushed to its most challenging and, often, confusing limits.
Red London is set in Hackney, north-east London, and based around a
housing co-op run by a cult called the Teutonic Order of Buddhist Monks.
Some of the residents, including Wayne Kerr and Fellatio Jones, are mem-
bers of the Skinhead Squad, an anarchist urban guerrilla group that under-
takes gruesome assassinations of institutional bourgeois figures, and draws
graffiti at each crime scene of slogans from an underground tract, Marx,
Christ and Satan United in Struggle by K.L. Callan.18 After a series of mur-
ders, punctuated by graphic but comic sex scenes, the novel culminates in a
street battle in which the Skinhead Squad and other lumpenproletarian rev-
olutionary factions run rampant through central London. The novel is laced
with references to its pro-situ milieu. A policeman, for example, is named
Marcus O’Greil, a barely veiled attack on Greil Marcus, whose text Lipstick
Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) was, like Home’s
Assault on Culture, an early account of punk’s Situationist connection.
Home’s novel engages with the long avant-gardist practice of conflating
high and low discourses, critical theory, and kitsch. Specifically, it combines a
type of ultra-left rhetoric drawn from the SI with a sensationalist pulp fiction
narrative. Examples from two of the main themes of Red London—sex and
violence—will demonstrate the clear inheritance from King Mob in Home’s
early writing. At one moment, Fellatio Jones is showing off his library to
Melody Thrush. Jones denounces ‘middle-brow bollocks’ like B.S. Johnson
and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and lauds the paperbacks he buys at Woolworths.19
Thrush notices a title that she’s been hunting, and her enthusiasm for this
book stimulates an impromptu orgasm. The omniscient third-person nar-
rator reverts to an overwrought evolutionary metaphor that reappears at
every sex scene, which themselves reappear every few pages. Each rendez-
vous includes some mention of ‘liquid genetics’, ‘the primitive rhythm of the
swamp’, and the un/scrambling of DNA. In this instance, that metaphor is
awkwardly grafted onto a jargonistic analysis of commodification:
The DNA had seized control of the girl’s body. Genetic codes were
being scrambled and unscrambled in every nerve-ending she pos-
sessed. Under the dictatorship of the commodity, sex and consumerism
are so closely connected that in certain borderline cases, the functions
become confused. Thrush was wet with pleasure.20
A similar conflation of high and low occurs in the novel’s set pieces of revan-
chist ultra-violence. In one instance, the Soho Prostitutes’ Collective, allies
of the Skinhead Squad, invade a Christian charity benefit gig by the reac-
tionary pop-star Sebastian Fame. Like a routine from a kung-fu movie, the
prostitutes storm through the hall, execute the assembled fascists, religious
fundamentalists, and racists, and ultimately crucify Fame on stage. A slogan
from Marx, Christ and Satan United in Struggle is then scrawled, in Fame’s
blood, across the back wall:
Panic and terror will play a major role in the struggle. They add a
much needed aesthetic element to our fight, and assist the comrades in
appreciating the terrible beauty of the class war.21
The Skinhead Squad and the Soho Prostitutes’ Collective, clear allusions to
subcultural trends of the 1970s and 1980s, are based on the type of urban
guerrilla group whose British culmination was the Angry Brigade. Although
largely overshadowed by more violent ultra-left groups such as Germany’s
Red Army Faction, Italy’s Red Brigades, and France’s Action Directe, the
Angry Brigade was responsible for a series of bombings of banks, embassies,
and properties associated with the Conservative Party in the early 1970s.
Former Angry Brigade members have since made important contributions
to gay rights (Angela Mason), experimental poetry (Anna Mendelssohn,
also known as Grace Lake), and British anarchism (Stuart Christie). What
Red London engages with, however, are the speech acts associated with this
period of political activity.
In the Angry Brigade’s ‘Communiqué 1’, within a list of its targets that
includes ‘High Pigs’, ‘Judges’, and ‘Property’, was included the loaded
term ‘spectacles’.22 The police operation to identify and prosecute the
Angry Brigade involved a so-called ‘Situationist Cop’23 who familiar-
ised himself with Debord’s work and tracked ‘the Angries’ via the small
number of radical bookshops in London where the SI’s pamphlets were
available.24 John Barker of the Angry Brigade has since emphasised the
group’s immersion in Italian workerist rather than French Situationist
thought, though he recognises the group’s ‘ironically spectacular’ actions.
He also laments the ‘lame satire’, ‘weird ideologies’, and ‘fetishisation’
of the Angry Brigade by later radicals, though I would suggest that the
combination of satire and fetishism also characterises the Angry Brigade’s
participation in a broader pro-situ milieu, at least in its discursive conven-
tions.25 Those discursive conventions, and the work that they do, demand
closer attention.
In Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Timothy Bewes contem-
plates a small pamphlet that he picked up at an anarchist punk gig in 1984.
Titled ‘Life and Its Replacement with a Dull Reflection of Itself’, and issued
by The Pleasure Tendency from Leeds, the pamphlet, though Bewes does
not identify it as such, is typical of 1980s pro-situ writing, inflected with
influences from contemporary green and anarchist movements. Its theses
include the following:
2.1 We must look forward to the time when merely taking a walk out-
side tickles the pleasure centre. When the deluge of falsified experience
recedes, when the few books which are still read are those which stim-
ulate debate, enhance learning and inspire action. When the parasite
Art is no more.
3.0 What will this future be like? That is what cannot be said, for this
is how falsification starts.26
The Pleasure Tendency’s distrust of representation reflects what has been

described previously in this book as the paradox of Situationist aesthetic
theory—here, only through speaking can the recognition be made that
falsification begins with speech. A different pro-situ group made a more
direct, though less nuanced, critique of the function of language within the
spectacle. In a leaflet that described itself as a ‘Mini phrase-book for for-
eigners (those foreign to this world)’, the group Spontaneous Combustion
offered a series of ‘translations’ of words to reveal their true meanings.
‘Wages’ are described as ‘damages awarded as poor compensation for
boredom, humiliation and frustration’; ‘equal pay’ as ‘equal emptiness;
equal impotence’; and ‘trade union official’ as ‘pimp; negotiator of the rate
of exploitation’.27 Such a text had been proposed by Mustafa Khayati
in the tenth Internationale Situationniste (‘Captive Words: Preface to a
Situationist Dictionary’, 1966) and realised in the run-up to May 1968
in France.28
Back in The Pleasure Tendency’s pamphlet, thesis 2.1 assumes a prelapsar-
ian moment of pure immediacy, of directly lived experience—the sort of
assumption that critics have identified as Situationist theory’s lingering
Romanticism, its upholding of an authenticity that was at some moment
dislodged by the spectacle. Bewes, too, is sceptical of the pamphlet. He
regards it as profoundly conservative, the articulation of bourgeois anxieties
in a countercultural register, the presentation of existential angst disguised
as materialist politics. The Pleasure Tendency, according to Bewes, does not
engage in ultra-left discourse, but quotes it.29
Alastair Bonnett makes a similar observation about Home’s writing in
the 1990s for the pamphlets of the reformed London Psychogeograph-
ical Association, the organisation represented by Ralph Rumney at the
founding of the SI, when he was its only member. Bonnett describes
Home’s project as one of ‘magico-marxism’ that satirises class politics.
Home’s ‘aesthetics of provocation’, Bonnet argues, ‘rely on a sense of
nostalgia for “real” class politics but exhibit a brazen confidence that
revolutionary rhetoric is today so hollow that it can be scripted as a kind
of elaborate joke.’30
Red London does something similar, but the joke simultaneously reveals
Home’s continued belief in the long-term critical possibilities of radical aes-
thetic practice. Home’s juxtapositions of high and low culture are certainly
drawn from a long history of avant-garde practice, but they’re also aimed
back at that practice and its more recent applications, specifically, the pro-situ
ossification of Situationist theory into dogma. Home satirises the discursive
conventions of the pro-situ milieu: the sloganeering, the jargon, the hyper-
bole, the denunciations. He also satirises the late avant-garde’s discourses
about itself, particularly in the darkest days of 1980s and 1990s postmod-
ernism. Red London ultimately works as a self-critique of radical aesthetic
practice. It implies that the exhaustion of radical aesthetic practice—its
descent into pastiche and fetishism—is a tautological consequence of radical
aesthetic practitioners continuously telling themselves that their practice is
exhausted, becoming obsessed with boundary disputes, and refusing to even
contemplate an active, affirmative programme for fear of contravening the
Situationist line.
That said, Home’s vitriolic mockery does extend beyond the small-
difference narcissism of the pro-situ milieu. We do not condescend to laugh
at the stereotyped ultra-leftists and their clichéd slogans in Red London
because we know that Home is also mocking us as readers: we keep reading
the same things, literally, as sex scenes are just rearrangements of a hand-
ful of rude words and ridiculous metaphors. The form of Home’s novel is
itself a joke. It plagiarises, and in its internal repetitions it plagiarises itself.
It performs the vortex of inauthenticity that, Home implies, is the mire of
postmodern experimental fiction.
At times Home is direct in his condemnation of contemporary cultural
production. In one example, the narrative focalises Fellatio Jones to declare,
‘The fiction market was dominated by middle-brow hacks. These bastards
were wrecking the English language with their Booker Prize respectability.’31
More importantly, Home’s polemics are delivered through a textual form
that is itself an assault on the mundane aspirations and sequestered potential
of commodified cultural production. The pulp fiction style of Red London,
a pastiche of Richard Allen’s skinhead novels of the 1970s, reflects Home’s
contention that the novel truest to the cultural conditions of late capitalism is
the pulp novel: endlessly repeatable, superficial, ironic, cheap, and titillating.
Home’s parodic critique of late capitalist culture was, in fact, antici-
pated by the SI, and specifically by the novels that Michèle Bernstein wrote,
ostensibly to generate some funds for the group. Tous les chevaux du roi
(1960) détourned Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782)
and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954). Aside from its retrospective
interest as a roman à clef and particularly as an insight into the SI’s (lack
of) gender politics, Bernstein’s novel plays on the exhaustion and repeat-
ability of the novel in the mid-twentieth century, so much so that Bernstein
détourned Les Liaisons dangereuses a second time in La Nuit (1961). Such
is the nature of this practice of ironised re-production that La Nuit was itself
recently reworked by the group Everyone Agrees as After the Night (2013),
in which the walks undertaken by Bernstein’s protagonists are rehashed
in East London by artists whose multi-media discussions only make them
more aware of the futility of their gesture. The immersive dérive becomes
impossible in the age of smartphones.
Bernstein and Home’s détournement of pulp literature, as both homage
and parody, result in a tainted commodity, even a self-hating commodity. We
encounter here another effort to push against the SI’s anxiety about recuper-
ation, its fear that any aesthetic object that it produced would compromise
or even obscure the revolutionary change that it sought to represent. Home
confronts the Situationist demand that art must represent its own superses-
sion, a part of a longer avant-garde tradition of anti-art, not by shying away
from artistic production, but by hyper-spectacularising it. Home produces
an agonised text that is what it condemns.
In this sense—and to argue that the satirical impulse in Home’s early
fiction is so much scurrilous, as Bonnett has argued, but tactical—I believe
that Home’s project exhibits something of what T.J. Clark has attributed
to the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn, ‘the greatest painter of the 1950s’.32
Clark describes the Abstract Expressionist painting that emerged from the
United States in the mid-twentieth century as vulgar, and that vulgarity is
‘the necessary form of that individuality allowed to the petty bourgeoisie.’33
In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, Clark continues, vulgarity
‘turned out to be a way of keeping the corpse of painting hideously alive’.
The success of Jorn’s greatest art, having emerged from ‘a very different set
of class formations’ in Europe, is that it ‘can never be vulgar’ because,
It just cannot prevent itself from a tampering and framing of its own
desperate effects which pulls them back into the realm of paint-
ing, ironizes them, declares them done in full knowledge of their
emptiness.34
Clark’s account of mid-century American vulgarity as petty bourgeois

clearly differs to my account of vulgarity in mid-century Britain as the pre-
serve of the vulgate or the commons, the thorn in the side of the bourgeoisie.
Nonetheless, there are affinities between Jorn and Home’s reflexivity, their
modernist emphasis on the conditions of production of the artwork, their
ironic reuse of spectacular culture.
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess intensifies Home’s assault on the
publishing industry. It includes extended digressions on trends in publish-
ing, with fierce diatribes aimed, for example, at Chris Kraus and Sylvère
Lotringer and their marketing of French poststructuralist theory to the
Anglophonic world by way of the Semiotext(e) imprint. Home’s novel revis-
its many of his hallmark themes: the reappearance of the fictional writer
K.L. Callan; repetition of and in gratuitous and farcical sex scenes, which
now involve a ventriloquist’s dummy; and critiques of the SI, particularly of
Debord. 69 Things, like many of Home’s fictional and non-fictional writ-
ings, also comments on the biography and bibliography of Alexander Troc-
chi, whose acquaintance with Home’s mother has led to Home suggesting
that, ‘I remain almost literally Alex Trocchi’s illegitimate son’.35
Whether or not Home’s mother did know Trocchi—it is difficult to
ascertain whether Home’s allegations are part of his praxis of lying and
fabulation—Home is certainly Trocchi’s literary son. They share an enthu-
siasm for combining pulp erotica with sloganistic politics, and they both
employ the bricolage textual method that I previously described as Trocchi’s
composite text, his aesthetic of appropriation. Home has confessed that
his ‘revolt against authenticity’ was learned from Trocchi.36 Both of their
bodies of work are based on the assertion that in a world which is funda-
mentally untrue, to tell the truth one must lie: as Debord put it, ‘In a world
that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false’,37 and more
pertinently, ‘in the enemy’s language the lie must reign.’38 Like his adoption
of the pulp novel form as an immanent means of exacerbating the contra-
dictions of commodity culture, Home’s endless lying is both consistent with
and a fundamental violation of spectacular ideology. In the spectacle, the
known lie should never acknowledge itself as such.
69 Things is narrated by its protagonist, Anna Noon, who meets a man
in a bar with whom she travels around the stone circles of Aberdeenshire
following a route described in a story also called 69 Things to Do with a
Dead Princess, whose author K.L. Callan claims to have carried the corpse
of Princess Diana around these sites. The narrator and her accomplice use
a ventriloquist’s dummy as a substitute for Diana’s corpse and intersperse
their travels with much sex and discussion of the man’s literary preferences.
Meanwhile, Anna’s unreliability as narrator becomes increasingly appar-
ent. The dummy appears to come to life, and narrates one chapter as Anna
sleeps, in which he declares that it is actually her male friend who is imagi-
nary and he, the dummy, who is real.
Home’s pulp parodies have, by this time, moved towards a more rec-
ognisably modernist set of concerns. He employs the Joycean tactic of
abruptly shifting the narrative style through a range of different registers,
which produces a debased heteroglossia, a survey of exhausted, clichéd, and
interchangeable styles, which in turn acts as a microcosm of a mundane,
repetitious, and spectacularised literary culture. For example, Anna recounts
one visit to the man’s flat. She begins with a plain, observational style, which
notes simply, ‘There were no longer any books in the bedroom. Indeed, all
the furniture had been removed and clothes he still possessed were heaped
up in a corner.’39 After a whisky, Anna starts to desire the man and she shifts
into an ornate, baroque style: ‘His roseate limbs seemed floating in celestial
light. I stretched up my arms and told my love how delightful it was to be
with him now.’40 As they begin to have sex, the narrative voice changes
again, into a crude, pornographic register: he ‘rammed home his prick with
desperate energy and with a low moaning cry shot forth a torrent of boiling
spunk. I felt my cunt filled to overflowing.’41
The difference between the stylistic oscillations of Red London and of
69 Things is that the former retains some ground of certainty, some assured
identity; above all else, it is a pastiche genre novel. 69 Things, however, is
only composite, and there is no hierarchy of its literary modes. (We made
the same observation of Trocchi’s progression from Young Adam to Cain’s
Book.) 69 Things is also less spectacularly lumpenproletarianised than Red
London, less akin to King Mob’s effort to critique the spectacle by way
of hyper-spectacular forms. In its questioning of linear narrative, of autho-
rial certainty, and of realist modes of narration, 69 Things inhabits a more
‘respectable’ literary territory than does Red London. 69 Things constructs
a complex and self-reflexive narratology, and alludes to recognised mod-
ernist authors who have done the same. Red London, on the other hand,
overstates its own cheapness, with correspondingly cheap allusions—that is,
assuming that we regard Samuel Beckett, for example, as being of greater
literary value than Richard Allen.
69 Things adopts—and explicitly lets its reader know that it is a dopting—
the prose styles of Ann Quin and Beckett: the former détourned in the open-
ing, the latter pastiched in the conclusion. Quin and Beckett were both
associates of Trocchi, and they share with Home a belief that literature main-
tains some privileged position within the assault on banal culture. 69 Things
begins with the sentence, ‘A man who no longer called himself Callum came
to Aberdeen intent on ending his own life.’42 An endnote later in the first
chapter reflects on the prose style of the opening and closing sections of the
novel. The narrator states, ‘Avoiding Ernest Hemingway, I detour instead
towards Ann Quin. Disliking Hemingway, I detour instead to Ann Quin.’
These sentences are then repeated with Hemingway replaced by Gertrude
Stein.43 The verb ‘detour’ suggests ‘détourn’ and, indeed, Quin’s Berg (1964)
begins, ‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside
town intending to kill his father’, and includes many of the plot devices that
Home appropriates for 69 Things, including the ventriloquist’s dummy.44
The final endnote of Home’s novel offers an alternative, condensed, ver-
sion of the story, told in an absurd, Beckettian, style of repetition, variation,
and narratorial uncertainty. It begins,
A man no longer called Alan came to Aberdeen. He told me his name

was Callum. Somewhere along the line he slipped out of my life. The
life slipped out of Callum. If I could reach out and touch him. Reach
out. Touch him. Slipped. Slipped out. Life slipped out. Along the line.
He slipped out. My life. If I could slip out. If I could reach out. A man.
A man called Callum. No longer.45
This delirious and schizophrenic conclusion represents the distilled essence

of the preceding story. Home undermines the certainties that the novel as
form claims: his characters change names and gender; dreamt and wak-
ing moments are blurred; the narrator reflects back on her (or him) self
and queries her (or his) method; farcical plot elements sit alongside ear-
nest accounts of local history; different versions of the events are offered.
As such, 69 Things begins to crack under its own weight, its own overdeter-
mination, its own impossibility.
Lars Iyer’s recent trilogy of novels, Spurious (2011), Dogma (2012), and
Exodus (2013), has also sought to articulate the exhaustion of the novel
form from within. The novels document the wanderings of a hapless pair of
academics as they bicker and ruminate on their inability to think as deeply
as the philosophers, theologians, and novelists whom they try, and fail, to
study. Iyer’s essay ‘Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary
Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos)’ (2012) argues that
great literature—which for him includes Kafka, Lautréamont, Bataille,
Duras—was always antagonistic, always against. In an age of increased
globalisation, populism, individualism, within the banal tolerance of liberal
democracies, there are no longer any feasible againsts. Iyer doesn’t use the
term, but his understanding of cultural politics is based on the triumph of
recuperation, in which antagonisms are collapsed—as opposed to, say, a
more fluid account of hegemony, which maintains that culture is a site of
real contestation.
For Iyer, the contemporary novelist can only adopt a minimal programme:
All efforts are belated now, all attempts are impostures. We know
what we want to say and to hear, but our new instruments cannot hold
the tune. We cannot do it again nor make it new since both of those
actions have telescoped to equivalence—we are like circus clowns who
cannot squeeze into their car.46
Iyer turns to Fernando Pessoa: ‘Since we are unable to extract beauty from
life, we attempt at least to extract it from our incapacity to extract beauty
from life.’47
Home would be unsatisfied by this retreatism, by Pessoa’s suggestion
that we ‘make our failure into a victory’.48 Home’s failures are not victo-
ries, but expositions. He describes a series of experimental novels of which
he is the commissioning editor as ‘where the novel has a nervous break-
down’: this tagline works an apt description of Home’s own work, too.49
69 Things demonstrates Home’s assault on culture by way of culture, by
intervening into recognised and legitimised—but also commodified and
spectacularised—cultural forms to exacerbate their paradoxes and impos-
sible claims. Home’s is a style of negation as was Debord’s, but Home’s is a
style of negation made through the false affirmations of the spectacle, as was
King Mob’s—with all the ambivalence between endorsing or superseding
spectacular aesthetics thereby entailed.
Of course, like all theories, my theory of the hyper-spectacular is only
provisional. It is not difficult to locate the same ambivalence towards spec-
tacular aesthetics in the SI’s own work. Debord’s films, for example, betray
their guilty fascination with the mainstream films that they cut up into new
arrangements. As T.J. Clark has insisted, ‘Modernism is caught interminably
between horror and elation at the forces driving it’.50
Psychogeography, Patrick Keiller, and the Peculiarly English

Punk, the pro-situ phenomenon, and the work of figures like Home all draw
heavily on the SI’s practice of détournement, itself a radicalised version of
the longer avant-garde tradition of placing found objects in different con-
texts to change their meaning. The other sphere of activity in Britain that is
directly informed by the work of the SI relates to its practice of psychogeog-
raphy. In 1958, the SI defined psychogeography as ‘The study of the specific
effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or
not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’51 Psychogeography was
practiced by way of the dérive, which Debord describes in terms of a walk
without a destination, preferably undertaken in a group, when the walkers
move between different areas of a city allowing ‘themselves to be drawn by
the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.’52 Debord
describes the political value of the dérive in the same terms that the notion
of ‘the situation’ is discussed in early SI texts: as an intervention into the
status-quo of the spectacle, of which the modern city is an exemplary man-
ifestation, in order to reveal the extent of social alienation and to become
aware of the possibility of alternative arrangements of social space.
Psychogeography and the dérive were, however, dropped from the SI’s
programme by the end of its first few years, as it shifted its focus from
artistic to theoretical interventions. Psychogeography was deemed to have
become an artistic practice geared more towards the production of spec-
tacular material than its negation. Nonetheless, psychogeography retained
a privileged position in the British adoption of Situationist practices, and
in the narrative of this book the return to psychogeography marks a neat
full-circling, given that the British connection to the SI began with Rumney
and his London Psychogeographical Committee. Perhaps the traction
between psychogeography and British culture relates to the former’s long
prehistory in English literature. As Merlin Coverley has argued, Daniel
Defoe’s work demonstrates that ‘psychogeographical themes are as old as
the novel itself’.53
Coverley’s Psychogeography offers two separate but sometimes inter-
twined lineages: on one side of the Channel, a London-based tradition of
visionary writing, which begins with Defoe and moves through William
Blake, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Machen;
on the other side, a Parisian tradition of flâneurie, which begins, confusingly,
with Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’ (1840, set in London) and moves
through Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and
the Surrealists, while also claiming for itself figures like Xavier de Maistre
and Arthur Rimbaud. Coverley refutes the SI’s claims for the originality of
the idea, but recognises that Situationist psychogeography synthesises the
traditions of London and Paris, and is an important influence on contem-
porary practitioners like J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Stewart
Home, and Patrick Keiller.54
Like punk, British psychogeographical activity spread widely and dif-
fusely, albeit two decades later. We have already encountered the London
Psychogeographical Committee, made up by Ralph Rumney for the SI’s
founding and ‘reformed’ by Stewart Home and Fabian Tompsett in the
early 1990s. As happened with the earlier pro-situ factions, similar psy-
chogeographical groupings sprung up around Britain, issuing pamphlets
and denouncing rivals. The activities of these ‘neo-psychogeographers’ fre-
quently crossed into other territories: Rambling; Land Art; Urban Explo-
ration, or Urbex; and theatrical protest of the type made famous in Britain
by Reclaim the Streets, described as ‘second-wave Situationism’ by Gavin
Grindon.55 Neo-psychogeography eventually bore its own sub-categories,
including mythogeography, schizocartography, and deep topography.56
Psychogeography today has largely shorn its underground past to become
an important touchstone within the proliferation of histories of the relation
between walking, writing, and politics.
Much neo-psychogeography of the 1990s, however, was characterised by
its interest in the occult. Phil Smith suggests that the turn to ‘occultism, con-
spiracy theory and flanerie’ in Britain in that decade was a response to the
dominance of neoliberalism and the dissipation of the left’s traditional forms
of social presence, not least the party organisation imitated by so many previ-
ous avant-garde groups. Bodies of arcane knowledge and practice ‘helped to
fill the void left by dialectical materialism.’57 In contrast, for Bonnett—editor
of the psychogeographical journal Transgressions, which ran from 1995 to
2000—neo-psychogeography’s occult turn, its ‘openness to the power of the
past’, was a continuation of the ‘nostalgic content of radical politics’. After
all, he argues, the SI’s psychogeography was itself ‘propelled by a deep sad-
ness and a desire for a passionate connection to the city.’58 For Christopher
Collier, meanwhile, the magico-marxism of the London Psychogeographical
Association and proximate groups was ‘a “satirical deconstruction” of both
esoteric conspiracies and a dogmatic adherence to leftist political ontologies
and grandiose, teleological posturing.’ Magico-marxism, for Collier, simul-
taneously mocks the SI’s ‘more totalizing rhetorical excesses’ and serves ‘to
inoculate their practice against academic banalization.’59
The current section of this chapter shall focus on Patrick Keiller’s par-
ticular version of psychogeography. Like Stewart Home’s engagement with
punk and pro-situ cultures, Keiller is simultaneously practitioner, historian,
and critical commentator. Home’s project, as described so far in this chapter,
begins with an intervention into an existing sphere of cultural production.
In a comparable way, Keiller’s films intervene into the physical landscape
of modern Britain. Just as Home queries the function of particular literary
forms through projecting onto those forms détourned versions of them-
selves, Keiller’s films are documentary fictions that overlay footage of real
places with fictional narratives and historical research that investigate both
the history of the subsumption of public space to private interests, and the
efficacy of a critical art in contesting those conditions. The recognition that
Keiller has received from British cultural institutions, not least an exhibition
at Tate Britain in 2012, also offers the opportunity to reflect on the recuper-
ation and legacies of psychogeography.
Keiller’s trilogy of films, London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997), and
Robinson in Ruins (2010), announce themselves as documentation of the
fictive journeys of Robinson, a part-time lecturer who has taken it upon
himself to explore the social space of modern England.60 Robinson’s project
combines English and French psychogeographic traditions: one part trav-
elogue in the manner of Defoe, references to whom recur in the films; and
one part Situationist dérive, euphemistically renamed ‘psychic landscaping,
drifting and free association’ in London. The first two films are narrated by
his unnamed companion and sometime lover, voiced by Paul Scofield; the
final film by the unnamed director of the recently named Robinson Institute,
voiced by Vanessa Redgrave, who claims to have been the other sometime
lover of Robinson’s now deceased companion. In all three films, voiceovers
that tell of Robinson’s escapades and researches accompany mostly static
cine camera shots of the landscape, of buildings, of plants, and of ephemeral
and incidental scenes of the types of liminal space that Marc Augé calls the
‘non-place’.61 We never see Robinson or his companion. Like Home’s nov-
els, Keiller’s films experiment with layers of narration that make the autho-
rial presence ambiguous and make certain truth-claims inherent to the form
become instable. Ostensibly documentaries, the films jump between factual
and fictional modes.
In each film, Robinson researches a specific problem: in the first, it is the
‘problem of London’, which he considers to be ‘now a city of fragments […]
no longer organised around a centre’; in Robinson in Space, whose journeys
move throughout England, the problem is of locating the import – export
activity that sustains England’s economy yet which, despite its scale, has
remarkably little social presence; Robinson in Ruins visits the rural land-
scape to question its present ownership and the history of its acquisition by
private and particularly military – industrial interests. The three films pro-
duce a portrait of modern England as corporate-owned, historically unself-
conscious, and seemingly committed to its own social and ecological suicide.
Early in London, Robinson’s idiosyncratic research methods are
announced by the narrator in a tone that perfectly balances sincerity and
incredulity:
Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause

the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical
events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.
The accompanying shot jumps from a panorama of bridges across the

Thames to a close-up of the water’s surface, where oil and bubbles swirl
like a cosmos. The second shot is reminiscent of the close-up on the sur-
face of a cup of coffee that accompanies the narrator’s existential-semiotic
monologue in Godard’s Two of Three Things I Know About Her (1967).62
It also recalls Debord’s explanation of the thematic role of water ‘as a
metaphor for the passing of time’ in his autobiographical film in girum
imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978).63 In Debord’s film, the similarly
unseen narrator says of its shots, mostly of Paris and mostly stolen from
other films, ‘This film disdains the image-scraps of which it is composed’.64
Keiller may not disdain his shots, but like Debord and Godard, he recog-
nises and exacerbates their instability, and their inability to reveal what he
wants to reveal.
Robinson’s research method is restated verbatim in Robinson in Ruins,
whose narrator also mentions that Robinson was keen on repeating
Benjamin’s verdict that, ‘the true creative overcoming of religious illumina-
tion certainly does not lie in narcotics, it resides in a profane illumination’.65
The line is from Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism, in which he discusses the
profane illumination of Breton’s Nadja and Aragon’s Paris Peasant, two of
Keiller’s psychogeographical precursors.
In the first instance, Keiller’s films bring together the profane illumination
with a materialist radical history project. We are, it seems, invited to under-
take Robinson’s project with him. As we focus on the surfaces of modern
Britain in long shot and close-up, the narrator recounts moments of polit-
ical, economic, and technological revolution and counter-revolution. From
the dialectical confrontation of image and narration we are encouraged
to be receptive to a profane illumination that might simultaneously reveal
obscured histories and other futures. In this sense, Keiller’s project draws
on Kristin Ross’s account of the Parisian Communards’ destruction of the
Vendôme Column in 1841, whereby ‘An awareness of social space […]
always entails an encounter with history – or better, a choice of histories’.66
Much contemporary British psychogeography engages in this practice, posi-
tioned somewhere between radical history and magic. Alastair Bonnett dis-
cusses psychogeography’s ‘radical re-enchantment’ of place: the novelist Iain
Sinclair’s attention to forgotten histories is a ‘restitutive impulse [that] forges
bonds of solidarity and empathy with earlier generations of radicals’67; the
London Psychogeographical Association, similarly, reveals that ‘the nature
of power can be disclosed through an understanding of the way [that] con-
cealed forces have been deployed and imposed upon the landscape’.68
Keiller’s films conform to these accounts of psychogeography as the recov-
ery of revolutionary possibilities from a landscape otherwise colonised by
capital, but I want to suggest that they do something more. As I have already
suggested, Keiller’s images are instable, used anxiously. He inherits the anx-
iety of recuperation that pervades Situationist theory. His films draw on a
range of modernist techniques and themes—flanerie and psychogeography,
defamiliarisation and juxtaposition, found images, everyday life—but he is
aware of their out-datedness and their recuperated status. In a recent essay,
‘Imaging’, Keiller writes that Surrealist and Situationist techniques such as
the derive and psychogeography
were conceived, in a more politically ambitious period, as preliminar-

ies to the production of new, revolutionary spaces; in the 1990s they
seemed more likely to be preliminary to the production of literature
and other works, and gentrification, the discovery of previously over-
looked value in dilapidated spaces and neighbourhoods.’69
‘Instead of avant-garde architecture,’ he writes elsewhere, ‘we have the Time

Out Book of London Walks’.70
What conditions served to exhaust the political value of those avant-
garde techniques? When and how did their recuperation become complete
and irredeemable—or did it? In exploring the changing significance of such
techniques, Keiller’s films are sensitive to two contexts. First, he is aware
of the historical and cultural specificity of flânerie and the dérive, and their
different meanings in British contexts. Second, he is aware of the belatedness
of his practice, and of the emergence of other considerations—specifically,
ecological ones—that demand a reconsideration of avant-garde techniques
inherited from a different age. Elsewhere, critics have described belated-
ness as an intrinsic characteristic of British modernism; here, belatedness
becomes a positive quality of late modernism, a degree of historical hind-
sight that allows for a more reflexive practice.
Though the problem in London is supposed to the city’s disappear-
ance, the problem for Robinson might be more accurately diagnosed as
the fact that London is not Paris. Robinson’s re-enchantments seek to
rectify that problem. He visits sites around the capital associated with
French writers, particularly Rimbaud. At Battersea Reach where ‘trains
that carry spent uranium cross the river at night’, Robinson remarks,
‘Sometimes I see the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud.’ The narrator
then reads Rimbaud’s ‘The Bridges’ to a sequence of shots of bridges over
the Thames. Later, the narrator reads from ‘City’, also in Illuminations
(1886), which begins with a sentiment particularly apt for R obinson:
‘I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis
considered modern because all known taste has been evaded […] in the
layout of the city.’71 Robinson is ironically said to imagine Thatcher’s
Canary Wharf development as a monument to Rimbaud’s erotic explora-
tions of the docks that occupied the site before it became the very emblem
of the city’s neoliberal turn.72 The phallic BT Tower is, similarly, imagi
ned as a monument to Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine. Robinson’s
affinity for Rimbaud is easily comprehended. The former would certainly
empathise, as Georges Izambard did not, with Rimbaud’s declaration,
‘I want to be a poet, and I’m working to make myself a visionary […]
To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that’s
the point.’73
Englishness, for Robinson, has become conflated with conservatism,
partly as a result of what the narrator describes as the ‘peculiarly English
form of capitalism’ that they investigate in the second film. At the beginning
of London, against an iconic English scene (Tower Bridge, overcast, light
rain; Figure 5.2), the narrator surveys the cultural climate:
Dirty Old Blighty. Undereducated, economically backward, bizarre.

A catalogue of modern miseries, with its fake traditions, its Irish war,
its militarism and secrecy, its silly old judges, its hated of intellectu-
als, its ill-health and bad food, its sexual repression, its hypocrisy and
racism and its indolence. It’s so exotic, so home-made.
His very proper articulation of embitterment is ‘English’ almost to the level
of parody, though it recalls Tom Nairn’s account of ‘English separateness
and provincialism; English backwardness and traditionalism; English reli-
giosity and moralistic vapouring; paltry English “empiricism,” or instinc-
tive distrust of reason.’74 This was one of the New Left Review articles to
which E.P. Thompson responded with a defence—or rather rejection—of
‘the peculiarities of the English’.75
Figure 5.2 ‘Dirty Old Blighty …’ Image from Patrick Keiller (dir.), London DVD
(London: bfi Video 2005).76
Robinson suggests to the narrator that the root of these problems is that
‘English culture had been irrevocably damaged by the English reaction to
the French Revolution’. Robinson’s interest in eighteenth century English
writers and nineteenth century French ones is thus ‘an attempt to rebuild
the city in which he found himself as if the [English] nineteenth century
had never happened.’ He declares that he wants to undertake ‘a pilgrim-
age to the sources of English Romanticism’, and so heads to Twickenham,
where Turner made ‘the first attempts to transform the world by looking at
the landscape’, home also to Horace Walpole. We realise that Robinson is
looking for clues regarding other directions in which English culture could
have—and maybe could yet—move.
Robinson attempts to anglicise the avant-garde techniques that he adopts.
As Paul Dave notes, Robinson is as committed to techniques learnt from the
historical avant-gardes as he is to the type of municipal socialism and cos-
mopolitanism once represented by the GLC.77 Robinson celebrates the uto-
pianism of Rimbaud and the Routemaster bus, of Benjamin and the NHS,
of Vaneigem and pre-fab council homes.
But Keiller’s Robinson also represents a curious de-anglicisation of a trope
from English literary history, an effort to push against the dismal caricatures
of English culture mentioned previously. The English novel’s first protago-
nist, Robinson Crusoe, was famously described by Ian Watt, following Marx,
as the first ‘homo economicus’. For Crusoe, the profit motive overcame all
other interests.78 James Joyce, likewise, described Crusoe as ‘the true pro-
totype of the British colonist’: ‘All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile
independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence,
sexual apathy, practical and well-balance religiosity, calculating dourness.’79
Robinsons pervade Anglophone literature, and the ‘robinsonade’ even became
a popular genre through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its
theme of ‘struggle against the forces of nature and ultimate success’.80
More recently, the Crusoe character and plot have become ciphers for
reflecting on the ideological course of Anglophone literary history, in works
such as Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’ and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe
(1986). Other Robinsons have been used to explore the experience not of
foreign lands but of home and loss. Weldon Kees’s Robinson poems survey
what has been left behind after the unexplained disappearance of their titular
Robinson, a Jay Gatsby-like socialite.81 Christopher Petit’s novel Robinson
(1993) offers a swansong for Soho in central London, as gentrification elim-
inates the type of underground entrepreneurs represented by its Robinson.
Keiller claims that his Robinson was named after the Irish migrant to the
United States in Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared, renamed Amerika by
Max Brod. However, the opening line of London, ‘It is a journey to the
end of the world’, alludes to another novel with a drifter named Robinson,
Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932).
A more prescient use of the Robinson trope is Rimbaud’s poem ‘Roman’
(1870). Rimbaud writes, ‘Le cœur fou Robinsonne à travers les romans’. Wal-
lace Fowlie translates the line to ‘Our wild heart moves through novels like
Robinson Crusoe’.82 However, it might be more accurate to keep ‘Robinsonne’
as verb, so that ‘to robinson’ is to undertake an imaginative journey, perhaps
to lose oneself—as in, to lose oneself in a novel, or even to derange one’s
senses as a visionary. Because Crusoe himself remained overbearingly sane,
Rimbaud’s neologism is ironic: this is Robinson turned against Crusoe. Robert
Mayer proposes that Keiller’s Robinson is an attempt to ‘undo’ Crusoe and his
legacy, ‘identifying the Protestantism and individualism that we associate with
Defoe’s most famous protagonist as constitutive elements of a catastrophe that
has rendered the Robinson of Keiller’s films a victim of a ‘shipwreck’ in his
own country. Mayer suggests that the ‘dismay, anxiety, and ultimate derange-
ment’ of Keiller’s Robinson might be the very things to ‘destabilize the myth’
of Englishness whose archetype is Robinson Crusoe.83
If the first context that informs Keiller’s wary and hesitant engagement
with Surrealist-Situationist techniques is his sense of Anglo-Franco cultural
difference, the second is his own sense of belatedness. Keiller is aware of the
irony of turning to supposedly avant-garde tactics that are a century old
and that no longer emerge from the peripheries or extremes of culture, but
which have been recognised by the institutions at its very centre. Robinson
in Space begins with a quotation from Raoul Vaneigem:
Although I can see how beautiful anything could be if only I could

change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do.
Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then
the dead weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first
place. A bridge between imagination and reality must be built.84
Keiller revisits the quotation in two of the essays in his collection The View
from the Train, where he suggests that Vaneigem’s assessment is similar to
another quotation to which he regularly returns, Henri Lefebvre’s ‘the space
which contains the realised preconditions of another life is the same one
as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’.85 Keiller explains,
‘I wondered if the prohibition that Lefebvre identifies is sometimes suspended
within the spaces of a film, and, if so, whether this might explain some of
the attraction, and the seemingly utopian quality, of so much film space’.86
Both Vaneigem and Lefebvre appear to succumb to what has been dis-
cussed in this book as the Situationist anxiety of recuperation, specifically,
the sense that the aesthetic representation of a different organisation of
social life is precisely what forecloses the possibility of reorganisation. Peter
Nicholls locates a version of this paradox at the core of Surrealist aesthetics.
He writes that Surrealist automatic writing,
purports to provide an unmediated experience […] of the unified self,

the self in its waking and dreaming life. Only in restoring the inte-
gral connection of consciousness to the unconscious can experience
become whole again. Yet at the same time, the medium of this con-
nection is language, a system of signs whose very mode of operation
entails a certain negation and separation.87
Nicholls explains that the Surrealists, or at least Andre Breton, responded to

this paradox by embracing what Nicholls calls the ‘negating power of lan-
guage’. ‘Now we can see’, Nicholls continues, ‘how Surrealism offers itself
as the summation of one major strand of avant-garde activity, as it strives
at once to cancel and to preserve the Dada moment of pure negation, its
lyric pursuit of the marvellous always shadowed by the death which makes
it possible.’88
Similar assessments can be made of the SI: it too sought a dialectical
mediation of Dada, this time with Surrealism, to culminate the avant-garde
t radition; and it too recognised that its works contained their own undo-
ing, but that it had to continue anyway. In many ways, this decision—
also evident in Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’—represents the fulcrum
between modernist and late modernist aesthetic practice, or between what
detractors have called the historical and the neo avant-gardes.
Patrick Keiller has already made the decision to ‘go on’, to work within
what Paul Mann calls the ‘necessary-impossible’ conditions faced by art that
aspires to be oppositional today.89 As such, if he does believe that film space
is somehow exceptional to this paradox of avant-garde aesthetic practice,
he can only do so anxiously. In narrative terms, his films constantly play on
disavowals, ambiguities, and irresolution. Their protagonist is increasingly
absent; their homodiegetic narrators are increasingly sceptical and ironic
about the project they observe; and Robinson’s objects of study are always
escaping him, just as his findings are always denied to us. London ends with
Robinson having decided that the city ‘no longer exists.’ Robinson in Space
ends with Robinson losing his research funding, after which the narrator
insists, or perhaps admits, ‘I cannot tell you where Robinson finally found
his Utopia.’
In the films’ oscillation between fictional narrative and historical
research, the two modes complicate each other: the fictions destabilise the
truth-claims of the research; and the research, particularly the scale and
the weight of the histories that are narrated, make Robinson’s idiosyn-
cratic exploits seem frivolous and distracting. The films are anxious of
the form that they must assume—that is, anxious of their susceptibility
to recuperation; anxious of the possibility that at the same moment as
they reveal the preconditions of another life, they prohibit its realisation;
anxious that they provide compensatory satisfaction in lieu of real change.
What comes into focus is that by way of the films’ complex paratexts and
metafictions, we don’t engage directly with psychogeography or the search
for the profane illumination; rather, we observe those practices with criti
cal distance. Keiller is not as ironic, satirical, or ‘radically inauthentic’ as
Stewart Home in his reuse of avant-garde practices, but he is certainly very
suspicious of them.
One reason for Keiller’s suspicion towards the avant-garde practices
that he nonetheless feels compelled to retain is that historical conditions
have changed since their formulation. These changed conditions are most
pressing in the final film, Robinson in Ruins, shot during the 2008 finan-
cial collapse. The film is structured differently to London and Robinson in
Space. Where the first two films strike a roughly even balance between their
attention to Robinson and their attention to site-specific historical research,
the final film sidelines the Robinson frame and spends far longer straight-
forwardly reporting on the ecological and financial problems that England
faces. Its politics are articulated with little narrative mediation, and its ratio
of documentary to fiction is weighted towards the former. It is altogether
more urgent.
Paul Dave attributes this urgency to a glimmer of hopefulness amid dire
economic and ecological conditions:
Whilst the earlier films take place within a context in which neoliberal-
ism is so thoroughly naturalized that any revelation of the mechanisms
of its ideological operations appears to offer a sustaining breakthrough
for its opponents, the making of Robinson in Ruins accompanies a
more extensive exposure of the frailty of that system in turmoil, and
consequently it raises the possibility of genuine change emerging.90
Implied in this quotation is a distinction between critical aesthetic practices

and the sort of actions that produce ‘genuine change’, and that the former
can be put on hold when ‘genuine change’ is imminent. In Robinson in Ruins,
however, Keiller’s attention remains as focussed on the possibilities for a
critical, oppositional, or transformative art as it was in the previous films.
If anything, the likelihood of a major reorganisation of English politics
seems as distant as ever in Robinson in Ruins. The scale of the problem
that the film investigates has grown exponentially: where London is con-
cerned with the experiential problem of a city, and Robinson in Space with
the infrastructural problem of a national economy, the problem with which
Robinson in Ruins contends is global and political-economic, the envi-
ronmental degradation that accompanies capitalist growth. The narrator
reports how Robinson has photocopied a passage from Jameson (oft-quoted
by Slavoj Žižek):
It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing dete-

rioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late cap-
italism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.91
To contest that imaginative deficiency, Robinson in Ruins continues the proj-

ect of ‘radical re-enchantment’ that we touched on previously. Keiller cata-
logues historical moments that reveal the barbarism of capitalist relations
in the same manner that Marx sought to denaturalise the bourgeois history
propounded by the ideologues Ricardo and Malthus. Examples in this film
include agrarian revolts in Oxfordshire: Bartholemew Steer’s Oxfordshire
Rising in 1596, and anti-enclosure protests at Otmoor in 1830. However,
the brutal repression of these revolts hardly positions them as moments of
hope. The film also proposes a radical ecological politics. ‘As a surrealist,’
the narrator explains, ‘Robinson believed that designers of artefacts should
seek to emulate the morphogenesis of life-forms.’ Robinson has discovered
‘Lynne Margulis’s view that symbiotic relationships between organisms
often of different phyla are a primary force in evolution’, exemplified by a
series of close-ups of lichen growing on a road sign, which offer a model of
growth profoundly opposed to the neoliberal ideology of competition that
prevails in the human use of the same environment (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3 Still of lichen in Robinson in Ruins. Image from Patrick Keiller (dir.),
Robinson in Ruins DVD (London: bfi Video 2011).92
To continue to trace the influence of Situationist poetics in Keiller’s work,

we might focus on the film’s formal play, rather than the affirmations it
offers, and consider how it advances the inquiry into politicised aesthetics
begun in the other two films of the trilogy. I want to argue that Robinson’s
absence in the final film is not a result of a tactic’s exhaustion, as Mark
Fisher has suggested, but rather its culmination.93 Robinson is never entirely
present in any of the films, neither seen nor heard, but by Robinson in Ruins
he has disappeared entirely. Paradoxically, it is when Robinson is furthest
away in the film’s fiction that we, as viewers, come closest to him, because
the film purports to be footage shot by Robinson and bequeathed to the new
narrator’s research institute.
Robinson’s diminishing presence can be understood as Keiller’s response
to the paradoxes of avant-garde aesthetics, whereby representations of rev-
olutionary social change only contribute to the conditions that block such
a change from happening. Keiller documents and explicates Robinson’s
practice, and catalogues his sources, but he never attempts to reveal the
results of Robinson’s practice. The latter might be little more than his
subjective experience, his Rimbaudian visions or deranged senses; either
way, they are never represented. Just as Robinson finds London to have an
absent centre, we find that the films, too, have absent centres. Though they
can evade neither the commodity form nor the operations of the spectacle,
the films, and particularly Robinson in Ruins, complicate their own s tatus,
neither artworks nor documentaries. They anticipate their spectacular
recuperation and, as such, refuse to present themselves as present-and-
correct art works, as closed totalities that are microcosmically adapted to
the spectacular regime in which they circulate.
Keiller’s aesthetic practice thus invokes tactical absences that accord with
what Vincent Kaufmann calls Debord’s ‘science of clandestinity’.94 Both
are conscious of the importance of holding something back. Nowhere in
the SI’s project are these tactical absences more apparent than in relation
to the ‘Hamburg Theses’ of 1961, which were never written down and
were purposefully kept secret. In 1989, Debord described these theses as
the SI’s most mysterious document and ‘a striking innovation in the suc-
cession of artistic avant-gardes, which until then had given the impression
of being avid to explain themselves.’95 In her account of the SI’s influence
on postmodern Continental philosophy, The Most Radical Gesture, Sadie
Plant locates in the SI’s eventual dissolution tactics of absence, refusal, and
non-participation, which also necessitated the end of Dada, the disbanding
of Provos, and even the dissolution of Italian autonomism. Plant writes,
‘Absences—of meaning, participation, reality and identity—can constitute
useful tactics in the struggle to unmask the social and economic relations of
contemporary capitalist society.’96
Laura Oldfield Ford and the Future for Ghosts

The 2011 publication by Verso of a collected edition of Laura Oldfield Ford’s
Savage Messiah zines reflects the acceptance of the British Situationist tra-
dition by the (relatively) institutional British left. Relations were hostile for
a long period. The English Section had denounced the New Left as a ‘New
Establishment’ in 1967, and it took until 1989 for the New Left Review
to publish a substantial article on the SI, in advance of the ICA’s retro-
spective. T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith subsequently published a
fierce polemic against the article’s author, Peter Wollen, in October in 1997,
though Verso has since embraced the SI wholeheartedly.97
The publication of the collected edition of Savage Messiah also reflects
a certain recuperation of Situationist practice (as, indeed, does this current
book), though as I hope to have demonstrated, the operations of recuper-
ation, and its discursive deployment as a signifier of inauthentic avant-
gardism, require some deconstruction. As King Mob, Home, and Keiller
have all demonstrated, the anxiety and internalised agonisms that result
from anticipating and even hyperbolising the inevitability of r ecuperation—
and the concurrent recognition of a work’s inevitable degree of complic-
ity in spectacular forms—might actually produce a space in which critical
practices can remain critical. Testing the limits of the concept of spectacle is
perhaps a more engaged project than is evading the spectacle.
Savage Messiah ran as a cut ’n’ paste zine for eleven issues between 2005
and 2009. Each issue focused on a particular area of London, and combined
photographs and Ford’s photorealistic drawings of urban landscapes, faces,
and détourned signage with fictional narratives of drinking sessions, love
affairs, and hungover afternoons (not necessarily in that order). The pro-
tagonists are those whom the English Section called ‘the new lumpen’: the
unemployed, ravers, hooligans, punks, squatters, and the last hangers-on
in foreclosed council estates. The predominant discourse is of gentri-
fication and its social and architectural effects, understood as a stage of
spectacular—rather than primitive—accumulation. Ford laments the loss of
spaces in the city that facilitate activity that isn’t consumptive or economi-
cally productive, and gives representation to the subjects excluded from and
inassimilable to the glossy urban-lifestyle PR that accompanies the city’s
ongoing neoliberalisation. Ford envisions ‘redevelopment’ sites as the future
ruins of Ballardian dystopias.
Like King Mob Echo, the layout and total effect of Savage Messiah are
as significant as its narrative content: a typical page resembles the nega-
tive image of, for example, the billboards that adorned the perimeter exclu-
sion fence of the London 2012 Olympics site, billboards that projected the
better world of corporatism, glass-and-steel ‘yuppiedromes’, and endless
shopping malls. Ford’s détournement of the marketing iconography of the
2012 Olympics insists on the presence of people, histories, and local culture
that gentrification tries its hardest to occlude. ‘Estate Agents Up Against the
South-Facing Wall’ is a recurring slogan.
Savage Messiah continues King Mob’s project by way of its effort to rep-
resent, or perhaps construct, a lumpen class as the agent of the negation of
the spectacle, and it continues Keiller’s project by way of its concomitant
attraction to liminal and unreconstructed areas of the London. Formally,
Savage Messiah adopts a punk aesthetic indebted to the surrealist montages
found on Crass Records sleeves, and it privileges an ephemeral and ‘low’
cultural form, the zine, which itself represents a certain refusal of specialisa-
tion, a bedsit gesamtkunstwerk. The cut ’n’ paste aesthetic of the zine also
recalls a DIY spirit that has been lost to more glossy, digitalised, and deper-
sonalised aesthetic mediums (Figure 5.4).
Oldfield Ford’s project can be labelled psychogeography inasmuch
as it seeks the ‘radical re-enchantment’ of the spaces in which we live.
Savage Messiah intervenes into a specific and material manifestation of
the spectacle, which Ford calls the ‘spectacle of redevelopment’. How-
ever, Oldfield Ford, like Keiller, dismisses the label of psychogeography:
‘I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class
men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and
guarding their plot.’98
In his introduction to Verso’s collected edition, Mark Fisher describes
the zines as ‘a samizdat counter-history of the capital during the period of
neoliberal domination’, and quotes Ford:
The idea that I was moving through a spectral city was really strong,
it was as if everything prosaic and dull about the New Labour version
of the city was being resisted by these ghosts of brutalist architecture,
of ’90s convoy culture, rave scenes, ’80s political movements and viru-
lent black economy of scavengers, peddlars and shoplifters. I think the
book could be seen in the context of the aftermath of an era, where res-
idues and traces of euphoric moments haunt a melancholy landscape.99
Figure 5.4 Savage Messiah poster (c.2009). Courtesy of Laura Oldfield Ford.
Fisher suggests that the label of ‘hauntology’ might account more accurately
for the particularity of Ford’s project than does the label of psychogeogra-
phy. Hauntology was a term coined by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx
(1994), though, as Fisher notes, it underwent a transformation in Anglo-
phonic theory around the time when Ford started producing her zines. The
object of the discourse of hauntology shifted from Derrida’s philosophy of
history (by 2005, the ‘End of History’ moment that had prompted Derrida’s
book seemed somewhat outdated) and towards the curious recurrence in
literature, film, and music of the theme of haunting and the motif of the
spectre.100 Hauntology came less to diagnose a world-historical condition,
and more to identify an aesthetic practice, which operates in Savage Messiah
as the ‘staining of place with particularly intense moments of time’, whereby
spectres are ‘not so much ghosts from an actual past [but] the traces of
futures that had never arrived but which once seemed inevitable’.101
Roger Luckhurst has suggested that much discussion of hauntology cel-
ebrates the ‘spectral return’ in lieu of recognising the focussed historicity of
hauntological works. He actually places hauntology, along with psychogeog-
raphy, within a broader literature of the ‘London Gothic’ that arose during
the 1990s and includes figures like Home, Sinclair, and Keiller; we might add
magico-marxism as a related phenomenon. Although the London Gothic is a
critique of ‘amnesiac modernity’ at large, Luckhurst argues, it is also a response,
oftentimes paranoid, to questions of London governance in the period between
the Conservative government’s abolition of the Greater London Council
in 1986 and the Labour government’s establishment of the Greater London
Authority in 2000.102 In the time since Luckhurst’s article, the historical con-
ditions faced by the continuing London Gothic tradition include the financial
crisis of 2008, the return of a Conservative government (in a coalition in 2010,
and as a single party in 2015), and the Olympic Games in 2012.
Beyond a London Gothic tradition, spectres have appeared throughout
the tradition that this book has traced. The English Surrealist group chose
a phantom to represent itself. Trocchi decided that an insurrection must be
invisible. King Mob chose to ‘echo’ the voices of historical revolutionaries, to
produce itself as the revenant of all that the bourgeoisie hoped to have dis-
pelled. Spectres in Savage Messiah, as in Keiller’s films, represent the anach-
rony between the dejected present and promised futures that never arrived;
they interrupt the spectacular time that Debord described as ‘irreversible’.103
Indeed, the spectre might serve as the master trope of the British Situationist
tradition: it stands, metonymically, for the tradition itself; a spectral presence
that continues to haunt culture even when a self-identifying group was no
longer feasible. Jacques Derrida’s description of the spectre might apply here:
‘the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible’.104
On the one hand, then, we might understand spectres as part of a m inimal
programme for the British Situationist tradition, or even for contemporary
avant-garde aesthetics more broadly. In the continued absence of an exit
from the capitalist present, the efforts of Keiller, of Ford, and of their pre-
cursors are to sustain the spectre of revolutionary change, to sustain a cer-
tain antithetical presence in culture even when, due to particular historical
conditions, that presence is more poetic than personified. Andy Merrifield
observes that ‘Magical Marxists’ are people who ‘don’t necessarily write
poetry but who somehow lead poetic lives […] Poetry, accordingly, becomes
ontological for Magical Marxists.’105 Kaufmann offers a similar verdict
about Debord’s oeuvre. For Kaufmann, poetry is both substitute for and
sustenance of revolution:
Between revolutionary periods when the masses accede to poetry

through action, we might imagine that circles of poetic adventure
remain the only place where the totality of the revolution lives on, as
an unfulfilled but imminent potentiality, as the shadow of an absent
individual.106
In the penultimate thesis of Society of the Spectacle, Debord writes that
‘a critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.’107
To become a spectre is to wait, perhaps to be forced to wait. The warning
of Robinson in Ruins, with its worsening economic and ecological crises,
and of Savage Messiah, as it watches London disappear, is that we can only
wait so long.
On the other hand, we might read the ‘spectral turn’ more critically.
Hauntology and the ‘radical re-enchantment’ or magico-marxist versions
of psychogeography both fail to alleviate the paradoxes of contemporary
avant-garde aesthetic practice. Confined to the level of the symbolic, they
rely too heavily on an aesthetic motif, the spectre, to satisfy either the Situ-
ationist suspicion of the aesthetic or the demand that art must represent its
own supersession. Similarly, spectral motifs fail to negotiate the perceived
incompatibility between ‘British’ empiricism and ‘Continental’ abstraction
that has run through the history of the Anglicisation of avant-garde practice.
The only solution to the latter problem might be to associate the spectral
turn with the emphasis on Romantic imagination that has run throughout
this British Situationist tradition.
Instead, it might be more useful to think of Savage Messiah, like K eiller’s
films, as an exploration of the limits of avant-garde aesthetic practices today.
In which case, spectres do not herald lost futures, or retrieve lost pasts,
but represent boundaries between what does and what does not exist; or,
better, between what can and what cannot be done. I suggested above that
Robinson’s increasing absenteeism from Keiller’s films, films of which he is
ostensibly the protagonist, is to refute the artworks’ completion and to deny
the artwork its totality. An instability is created, which serves as modernist
formal self-reflexivity, an effort to draw attention to the medium and its
ultimate insufficiency. It can create other worlds, but it must remind you
of their fictiveness; it must interrupt its own illusions. Importantly, these
recognitions of the artwork’s limits are made within the artwork itself.
Keiller reminds us repeatedly of his films’ inevitable failure: in London, after
explaining Robinson’s effort to forget the nineteenth century, the narrator
confides, ‘Of course, he is bound to fail’.
What I have described as the anxiety of recuperation that pervades this
particular tradition of avant-garde aesthetic practice, therefore, might be as
much an active response to the problem of recuperation as it is a nagging
fear. The anxiety, as it manifests itself in a work’s form, might serve as the
final obstacle to the absolute recuperation of the practice, or at least the
thing that continues to expose the process of recuperation.
As mentioned back in this book’s introduction, Paul Mann suggests that
the avant-garde was always already recuperated, always a necessary constit-
uent in bourgeois culture’s dialectical composition. For all its most utopian
or critical aspirations, Mann argues, the avant-garde could never do any-
thing other than contribute to bourgeois society’s ‘discursive economy’: ‘The
avant-garde’s historical agony is grounded in the brutal paradox of an oppo-
sition that sustains what it opposes precisely by opposing it.’108 Because the
alternative, silence, is untenable, the avant-garde continues anyway. As a
critical theorist—according to Eburne and Felski, therefore, an inheritor of
the avant-garde’s antinomian ideals—Mann writes that he must also make
the ‘necessary-impossible’ decision to ‘go on’, to continue in full knowledge
of one’s inevitable recuperation. This is not a bad faith gesture, but rather a
means to maintain the avant-garde’s critical impulse, specifically by way of
a ‘masocriticism’, in which writing must turn against itself masochistically,
continually doubting and questioning its intentions, recognising its limits; it
must be agonised and anxious.
The anxiety that we find in Home, Keiller, and Oldfield Ford is the aes-
thetic corollary to this masocriticism: art’s effort to gesture towards (if not
fully achieve) its own supersession, and to resist its recuperation. A quo-
tation from Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852)
serves as a fitting coda:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted
from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged
in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that
has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis
they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past …109
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’
(1929), in Selected Writings: Volume 2 1927–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press 1999), 208.
2. Situationist International, The Real Split in the International, trans. John
McHale (London: Pluto Press 2003), 11, 7.
3. The SI insisted that there is no such thing as Situationism, but in this chapter, for
the sake of linguistic clarity, there is. Alternative phrasings that euphemistically
sidestep the term ‘Situationism’ soon become cumbersome. Given the book’s
focus on recuperation, and on the SI’s rejection of British practitioners deemed
to have contravened its diktats, ‘Situationism’ seems apt.
4. Charles Radcliffe, e-mail to author (2 December 2010).
5. The Situationist-Punk connection has been explored in Stewart Home, Cranked
Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (Hove: Codex 1995); Home,
The Assault on Culture; Marcus, Lipstick Traces; Savage, England’s Dream-
ing; Vague, King Mob Echo: From Gordon Riots to Situationists & Sex Pis-
tols; David and Stuart Wise, ‘End of Music (Punk, Reggae: A Critique)’ (1978),
in Stewart Home (ed.), What Is Situationism? (London: AK Press 1996); Paul
Gorman (ed.), Joining the Dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm
McLaren (Southampton: John Hansard Gallery 2015).
6. David and Stuart Wise, ‘End of Music’, 67.
7. Rosemary Pink [Tom Vague], ‘The Boy Scouts Guide to Situationism’, Vague
16/17 (1985): 13.
8. John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (London: Hodder &
Stoughton 1994), 3, 206.
9. Situationist International, The Real Split in the International, 32.
10. ‘Communiqué from the SI concerning Vaneigem’ (1970), in Situationist Interna-
tional, The Real Split in the International, 146.
11. Quoted in Christopher Gray, ‘“Those who make half a revolution only dig their
own graves”: The Situationists since 1969’, in Leaving the Twentieth Century: The
Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press 1998), 135.
12. Art & Language, ‘Ralph the Situationist’, Artscribe International (November–
December 1987), in Blazwick (ed), An Endless Adventure, An Endless Passion,
An Endless Banquet, 93.
13. Alan Wood, The Map Is Not the Territory (Manchester: Manchester University
Press 2001), 20.
14. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-
Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006), 70–71.
15. The Oxford Motherfuckers, ‘Wall’ (1969), in Blazwick (ed), An Endless Adven-
ture, An Endless Passion, An Endless Banquet, 71.
16. See his collections Neoism, Plagiarism and Practice (London: AK Press 1995)
and Confusion Incorporated: A Collection of Lies, Hoaxes & Hidden Truths
(Hove: Codex 1999).
17. Edward S. Robinson, Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William
S. Burroughs to the Present (New York: Rodopi 2011), 203.
18. Robinson claims this was Home’s birth name. Shift Linguals, 201.
19. Stewart Home, Red London (Edinburgh: AK Press 1994), 94.
20. Ibid., 95.
21. Ibid., 121.
22. Angry Brigade, ‘Communiqué 1’, in The Angry Brigade 1967–1984: Documents
and Chronology (London: Elephant Editions 1985), 21.
23. Tom Vague, King Mob Echo: From Gordon Riots to Situationists and Sex
Pistols (London: Darkstar 2000), 56.
24. Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade: The Cause and the Case (London: Gollancz
1975).
25. John Barker, ‘Review—Vague’s Anarchy in the UK: The Angry Brigade’, avail-
able at http://libcom.org/library/review-angry-brigade-vague-book-barker
26. The Pleasure Tendency, Life and Its Replacement with a Dull Reflection of Itself
(Leeds: The Pleasure Tendency 1984), 1.
27. Spontaneous Combustion, ‘Dialectical Adventures into the Unknown’ (1974),
in Blazwick (ed), An Endless Adventure, An Endless Passion, An Endless Ban-
quet, 85.
28. ‘Untitled Tract Published in Bordeaux in April, 1968’, in Réné Viénet, Enragés
and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68, trans. Loren
Goldner and Paul Sieveking (New York: Autonomedia 1992), 127–128.
29. Timothy Bewes, Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso
2002), 186–189.
30. Alastair Bonnett, ‘The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeogra-
phy’, Theory, Culture & Society 26:1 (2009): 60.
31. Home, Red London, 45.
32. T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1999), 389.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 390.
35. Home, ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters: In Memoriam to Memory 13 April 1969.
Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt at the Arts Lab in London’, in Iain Sinclair (ed.),
London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton 2006), 409.
36. Home’s writing on Trocchi can be found in Tainted Love (2005), in Home’s
introduction to the One World Classics edition (2008) of Trocchi’s Young Adam,
and in many entries on his blog at http://www.stewarthomesociety.org (accessed
13 February 2016).
38. Guy Debord, Panegyric Volumes 1 & 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale
(London: Verso 2004), 9.
39. Stewart Home, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Edinburgh: Cannongate
2003), 114.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 115.
42. Ibid., 1.
43. Ibid., 169.
44. Ann Quin, Berg (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press 2001), xv.
45. Home, 69 Things, 181.
46. Lars Iyer, ‘Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto
After the End of Literature and Manifestos’, The White Review (2012), avai
lable at http://www.thewhitereview.org/features/nude-in-your-hot-tub-facing-
the-abyss-a-literary-manifesto-after-the-end-of-literature-and-manifestos/
47. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (London:
Penguin Classics 2002), 307.
48. Ibid.
49. This is the Semina series, published by Book Works, London.
50. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 8.
51. Situationist International, ‘Définitions’, Internationale Situationniste 1 (1958): 13.
52. Guy Debord, ‘Théorie de la dérive’, Internationale Situationniste 2 (1958): 19.
53. Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials 2006), 35.
54. The role of psychogeography in the SI’s programme has attracted much critical
attention. A good starting point is McDonough (ed), The Situationists and the City.
55. Gavin Grindon, ‘Second-wave Situationism?’ Fifth Estate 350 (2009): 11, 50–51.
56. These terms come from, respectively, Phil Smith, Tina Richardson, and Nick
Papadimitriou.
57. Phil Smith, ‘Psychogeography and Mythogeography’, in Tina Richardson (ed),
Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (London and
New York: Rowman & Littlefield 2015), paragraph 7.22.
58. Alastair Bonnett, ‘Walking through Memory: Critical Nostalgia and the City’, in
Richardson (ed.), Walking Inside Out, paragraph 5.11.
59. Christopher Collier, ‘Psychogeography Adrift’, in Richardson (ed), Walking
Inside Out, paragraph 6.47.
60. Quotes from these films are taken from the narrations of the DVDs: London
and Robinson in Space, DVD, directed by Patrick Keiller (1994, 1997, L ondon:
bfi Video 2005); Robinson in Ruins, DVD, directed by Patrick Keiller (2010,
London: bfi Video 2011). I have tried to reference the sources quoted by
the films.
61. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
trans. John Howe (London: Verso 1995).
62. The SI frequently denounced Godard as a récuperateur, most notably in ‘The
role of Godard’, Internationale Situationniste 10 (1966): 58–59. The Situation-
ist comic strip used on the front cover of International Times declares Godard to
be ‘just another bloody Beatle’. Gray (ed.), Leaving the Twentieth Century, 14.
63. Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works, trans. Ken Knabb (Edinburgh: AK
Press 2003), 223.
64. Ibid., 145–146.
65. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, 209.
66. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
(London: Verso 2008), 8.
67. Bonnett, ‘The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography’, 57.
68. Ibid., 60.
69. Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London:
Verso 2013), 186.
70. Ibid., 134.
71. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘City’, in Illuminations, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New
Directions 1957), 57.
72. The SI held its fourth conference (1960) in nearby Limehouse. It explained its
preference for the area ‘famous for its criminals’ in Internationale Situationniste
5 (1960): 19.
73. Arthur Rimbaud, letter to George Izambard 13 May 1871, in Illuminations,
xxvii.
74. Tom Nairn, ‘The English Working Class’, New Left Review 24 (1964): 48.
75. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register 2 (1965):
311–362.
76. Patrick Keiller (dir.), London DVD (London: bfi Video 2005).
77. Paul Dave, ‘Robinson in Ruins: New Materialism and the Archaeological Imagi
nation’, Radical Philosophy 169 (September–October 2011): 20.
78. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Fielding, Richardson, Defoe (London:
Pimlico 2000), 64–65.
79. James Joyce, ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature,’ in Occasional, Critical
& Political Writing (Oxford: OUP 2002), 174.
80. Maximillian E. Novak, ‘Edenic Desires: Robinson Crusoe, the Robinsonade,
and Utopias’ in Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (eds), Historical Boundaries,
Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
(Newark: University of Delaware Press 2007), 20.
81. ‘Robinson’, ‘Aspects of Robinson’, ‘Robinson at Home’, and ‘Relating to
Robinson’, in Donald Justice (ed.), The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 1975).
82. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Roman’, in Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace
Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1966), 52–53.
83. Robert Mayer, ‘Not Adaptation but Drifting: Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and
the Relationship between Film and Literature’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16:4
(July 2004): 820–821.
84. In Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation, the line is: ‘A bridge has to be built
between the work of the imagination and the objective world.’ Raoul Vaneigem,
The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press 2006), 245–246.
85. Henri Lefebrve, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3, trans. Gregory Elliott (Lon-
don: Verso 1991), 57.
86. Keiller, The View from the Train, 185.
87. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms 2nd Edition. (London: Palgrave Macmillan
2009), 307.
88. Ibid., 308.
89. Paul Mann, Masocriticism (Albany: State University of New York Press
1999), xi.
90. Dave, ‘Robinson in Ruins’, 20.
91. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernity’, in The Cultural Turn:
Selected Writings on the Postmodern (London: Verso 1998), 50.
92. Patrick Keiller (dir.), Robinson in Ruins DVD (London: bfi Video 2011).
93. See Mark Fisher, ‘English Pastoral’, Sight & Sound (November 2010) available
at http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49663 (accessed 13 February
2016).
94. Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans.
Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2006), xvi.
95. Guy Debord, letter to Thomas Levin, November 1989, Not Bored, available at
http://www.notbored.org/debord-November1989.html (accessed 13 February
2016).
96. Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 181.
97. See: English Section, ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of
Revolution’, 69; Peter Wollen, ‘The Situationist International’, New Left Review
174 (March–April 1989): 67–95; and T.J. Clark and Donald N icholson-Smith,
‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’, in McDonough (ed), Guy
Debord and the Situationist International, 467–488.
98. Quoted in Mark Fisher, ‘Introduction’, in Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah
(London: Verso 2011), xiv.
99. Ibid., v, vii.
100. Around 2005, music critics started using the term ‘hauntology’, not dissimi-
larly to retrofuturism, in relation to music that used outdated recording styles
and sounds in a way that was uncannily futuristic. The main theorists of sonic
hauntology were Mark Fisher (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/) and Simon
Reynolds (http://blissout.blogspot.com/).
101. Fisher, ‘Introduction’, xv, xiv.
102. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the
Spectral Turn’, Textual Practice 16:3 (2003): 527–546.
104. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning
& The New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge 1994), 7.
105. Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination
(London: Pluto 2011), 11.
106. Kaufmann, Guy Debord, 177.
108. Mann, Masocriticism, 11.
109. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1968), 93.
Index
Abrams, M.H. 128 Boswell, James 28

accumulation 128–131, 160, 171 Breton, André: as ancestor 5, 21, 80,
Adorno, Theodor 9, 23–24, 35, 121; as strategist 26–27, 29–32, 115;
38–39, 97 Surrealist manifestos 16–19, 22–24,
aesthetic ideology 127, 145 37–38, 125, 133
Anderson, Perry 2, 4 Brown, Bill 87, 91
Angry Brigade 139n37, 146, 152 Buchloh, Benjamin 6
Angry Young Men 9 Bürger, Peter 3, 6, 48–49, 59, 110
anthropology 34–37 Burroughs, William S. 55, 66, 150
anti-art 11, 14, 59–62, 78–79, 97,
109–110, 125, 135–138, 145, 154 Cahun, Claude 33–34
anxiety: of influence 54, 149; and Calder, John 74n38
modernism 7, 146; of recuperation Callois, Roger 56
109–110, 136, 154, 165–167, 170, Cambridge spies 28, 146
174–176 Camus, Albert 52–54
Aragon, Louis 29, 162 Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Art & Language 96–97, 148 Studies (Birmingham) 85–87
Augé, Marc 161 chiasmus 99–101
authenticity: and experience 128–133; Clark, T.J.: in defence of the Situationist
political 6, 18; and the spectacle International 5, 9–10, 155, 170; as
90, 97, 100, 109–110, 136–138, part of the English Section of the
147–148, 154–156, 167 Situationist International 88–103;
on modernism 158; as part of
Bakhtin, Mikhail 121 Retort 129
Ballard, J.G. 159, 171 Clover, Joshua 5
Baraka, Amiri 118 Cohn, Norman 112–113
Barrell, John 130 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 124
Barthes, Roland 54, 98 Collier, Christopher 160
Bash Street Kids 137 Connolly, Cyril 18–19
Bataille, Georges 67 Contemporary Poetry and Prose see
Benjamin, Walter 23–24, 35, 38–39, little magazines
47, 134–135, 143, 162 co-optation see récupération
Bernstein, Michèle 50, 154 Coverley, Merlin 159
Bewes, Timothy 152–153 Cultural Studies see Centre for
black humour 37, 121, 135–136, 151 Contemporary Cultural Studies
Black Mask see Up Against the Wall,
Motherfucker Dada 3–4, 17–18, 48–49, 86–87,
Black Panthers see Newton, Huey P. 114–116, 135, 166
Blake, William 88–89, 124, 133–135 Dahou, Midhou 57
Bloom, Harold 54, 145 Dalí, Salvador 33–34
Bonnett, Alastair 153–155, 160, 162 Dave, Paul 164–165, 168
182 Index
de Jong, Jacqueline 68 Green, Philip 69–70
de Man, Paul 130 Grigson, Geoffrey 27
de Quincey, Thomas 57, 75n52, 159 Grindon, Gavin 160
Debord, Guy: as filmmaker 50, 161; Gruppe Spur 61–62
as ‘national treasure’ 6; as organiser
of the Situationist International 57, Haile, Samuel 20
61–64, 68, 80, 87–88, 112, 143, Hall, Stuart 85
147–148; as tactician 4, 67, 110, Harris, Alexandra 3
145, 155–156, 159, 170, 173–174; Harrisson, Tom 34–37
as theorist 47–48, 53, 71, 83–84, hauntology 172–174, 179n100
88–89, 129–133; as writer 79, Heatwave see Radcliffe, Charles
95–101, 136–138, 158 Hebdige, Dick 86
Defoe, Daniel 159–160, 165 Highmore, Ben 35, 36, 40
dérive see psychogeography Hoffman, Abbie 107n98
Derrida, Jacques 172–173 Hoggart, Richard 84–85
détournement 7, 70–71, 97–100, Home, Stewart 67, 145–158, 159–160,
120–121, 128, 133, 150, 157, 171 173, 175
dialectics 17–18, 20–25, 36, 96, 98, Hubble, Nick 35, 40
134, 162, 174–175 Huizinga, Johan 88
difficulty 29, 137 humour see black humour
dissolution of the avant-garde 5, 11, Hussey, Andrew 87–88
26, 48–50, 56, 59, 65, 73, 97, Hynes, Samuel 31–32, 36
143–144, 170
Ducasse, Isidore see Lautréamont, iconophobia 109, 132
Comte de Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
Dylan, Bob 113–114 50, 68, 96, 144
International Surrealist Bulletin see
Eburne, Jonathan 78 little magazines
Eliot, T.S. 4, 13n, 20, 49 International Surrealist Exhibition
empty signifiers 20–21, 90, 94 (1936) 25–28
Everyone Agrees 154 International Times 66, 109, 112,
existentialism 51–54 115–117, 135, 137, 178n62
Invisible Committee 77n132
Factory Records see Wilson, Tony Isou, Isidore 49, 51, 57–58, 61
Fanon, Frantz 93 Iyer, Lars 157–158
Fascism 48n98
Felski, Rita 78 Jackaman, Rob 20–24, 31–32
Fisher, Mark 169, 171 Jakobsen, Jakob 2, 9, 62
Flint, F.S. 18 Jameson, Fredric 56, 127, 145, 167
Ford, Simon 149 Jay, Martin 132
Fountain, Nigel 78 Jeffrey, Tom 40–41
Futurism 20, 49, 116, 123 Jennings, Humphrey 24–26, 30, 34–37,
38–41
Gardiner, Michael 55, 62–63 Jennings, Mary-Lou 39
Gascoyne, David: as historian of Jorn, Asger 62, 68, 155
Surrealism 17–22, 29, 31–32; as poet Josipovici, Gabriel 132
32–33; as member of the Surrealist jouissance see play
Group in England 25–28, 30 Joyce, James 165
Ginsberg, Allen 56, 67
Godard, Jean-Luc 161, 178n62 Kaufmann, Vincent 101, 109, 170, 173
Gordon Riots (1780) 111 Keiller, Patrick 158–170, 173, 175
graffiti 123–124 Khayati, Mustapha 153
Gray, Christopher 80, 87–95, 103, 111, King Mob: aesthetic practice 112–114,
116–120, 145, 148 121–124, 131–133, 134–135, 171;
Green, Jonathon 111–112 anti-tradition 114–115; and Dada
Index 183
114; direct actions 116–117, 139n37; McGrath, Tom 63
hyper-spectacular 135–138; origins McLaren, Malcolm 145–146
102–103, 110–114 Merrifield, Andy 173
Koch, Kenneth 118 Mod culture 82, 85–86
Kotányi, Attila 61, 109–110, modernism: British 2, 3–5, 20, 23, 25,
132–133, 128 119, 145, 162–163, 165–167; late
4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 56, 121, 155–158,
labour see work 174–175. See also postmodernism
Laclau, Ernesto 115 monarchism 9, 19, 39, 156
Lautréamont, Comte de 20, 32, 70, 95, Morea, Ben see Up Against the Wall,
101, 134, 141n84 Motherfucker
Lefebvre, Henri 166 Mouffe, Chantal 115
Lefort, Claude 96–97, 100
Left Review see little magazines Nairn, Tom 164
legendary psychasthenia 56 Nash, Jørgen 62
Legge, Sheila 26, 33–34 Nash, Paul 3, 16, 26, 38
Lettrism see Isou, Isidore New Left 2, 63, 78, 112, 115,
Lewis, Helena 27 164, 170
Lewis, Wyndham 18 Newton, Huey P. 93, 118
literariness 9, 59, 94–101, 131–138, Nicholls, Peter 166
156–158 Nicholson-Smith, Donald 5, 80, 88–95,
little magazines 16–17, 24, 26–29, 98–99, 170
31–34 non-place 161
London Psychogeographical Noys, Benjamin 132–133
Association 1, 10, 50, 63, 153,
159–160, 162 Oldfield Ford, Laura 170–175
Luckhurst, Roger 173 ontology 7–9, 14n28, 90, 109,
Luddism 83, 111 136, 173
lumpenproletariat 92–95, 110–111,
116–118, 122–123, 131, 137, 156, party allegiance 18, 27–30, 40–41, 89,
170–171 91, 160
peculiarity 2–3, 126, 163–164
MacClancy, Jeremy 38 Penrose, Roland 17, 21, 50
Madge, Charles 24–26, 30, 34–37, Perlman, Fredy 98–99
40–41 Pessoa, Fernando 158
magico-marxism 153, 160, 173–174 Plant, Sadie 49, 139n29, 170
manifestos 20, 22, 31–32, 65, 69–70, play 88–92, 101, 109, 136–138, 154
94–95, 127, 149 Pleasure Tendency 152–153
Mann, Paul 8, 167, 174–175 postmodernism 49, 56
Marcus, Greil 75n52, 151 Pound, Ezra 20, 25, 29, 136
Marcuson, Alan 112 Pountain, Dick 112
Marinetti, F.T. see Futurism pro-situ 147–149, 152–154
Marx, Karl 98–99, 101, 114, 128–129, Provo movement (Holland) 81–82
136, 165, 168, 175 psychogeography 69–70, 153–154,
Marxism: in Britain 27–29, 31, 63; 158–169, 171–172
historical materialism 17, 20, Puchner, Martin 3, 6, 22, 149
28–29, 87; Marxism-Leninism 18, punk 19, 122, 140n49, 145–149, 171
27; proletariat 78, 84, 92, 93, 115;
subsumption 14n28 Quin, Ann 157
mass media 11, 27, 35–41,
120–121, 128 Radcliffe Charles: as editor of
Mass-Observation 19, 34–42 Heatwave 79–87; as member of
Mauss, Marcel 67 English Section of the Situationist
May 1968 66–67, 88, 102–103, 121, International 88–95, 102, 144
124, 137, 143, 146, 153 Rancière, Jacques 54, 72, 129
184 Index
Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt 2, 9, 62 Slater, Howard 65
Read, Herbert 19–20, 21, 25–30 Smith, Phil 160
récupération (recuperation): 6–8, 10, Socialism or Barbarism 89
47, 62, 78–79, 109–110, 132–133, Socialist Realism 18, 27–29
158, 166–167; of avant-garde sociology 87, 94, 119
movements 22, 25, 36, 47, 78, 89, Solidarity (group) 89, 105–106n44
153–154, 162–163, 170; relation to spectacle: and aesthetics 7–9, 11–12,
hegemony 87; forms of resistance 95–97, 99, 110, 126–127, 156–158;
12, 47–48, 50, 61, 97, 101, 114–115, forms of resistance 61–65, 71–73,
136–138, 145–146, 174–175. See 79, 83, 87, 90, 114, 122, 136–138,
also anxiety of recuperation 171–174; as a social relation 4, 47,
Reid, Jamie 145 53, 89, 128–129
Remy, Michel 31 spectres 32–34, 171–174
Retort (collective) 129 Spontaneous Combustion (group) 153
revolutionary subjectivity 27, 78–79, Stracey, Frances 7
86–87, 94–95, 114, 122 style: late 5; and radical praxis 11,
Richter, Hans 6 13n12, 54, 79, 109–110, 112,
Rimbaud, Arthur 4, 20, 38, 39, 59, 134, 135–138; ‘style of negation’ 94–101,
163, 165 133; and youth revolt 82–87
Robertson, George 103, 126, 149 Surrealism: and the coincidence
Robinson, Edward S. 150 34–35, 37–38; dream-images
Roditi, Eduardo 16, 19, 20 and constellations 23–24, 36–38,
Romanticism 21, 124–135 162; international variations
Rosemont, Penelope and Franklin (particularly English Surrealism)
79–80 2, 16–21, 26, 29, 31–32; Surrealist
Ross, Kristin 162 Group in England 26–32; and
Rotten, Johnny 146 tradition 21–24; put to work
Roughton, Roger 28–30, 40 24–25, 34–40, 42. See also Breton,
Rumney, Ralph 10, 12, 49–50, 63, André and International Surrealist
148–149, 159 Exhibition
Sutherland, Keston 136
Sabri-Tabrizi, G.R. 133–134 Swedenborg, Emanuel 133–134
Sade, Marquis de 20, 55 Swing Riots (1830) 111
Sartre, Jean-Paul 3, 51–52 Sykes Davis, Hugh 26, 32–33
Savage, Jon 85, 111
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 124 Thompson, E.P. 3, 111, 164
sigma see Trocchi, Alexander Trevelyan, Julian 42
Sinclair, Iain 159, 162, 173 Trocchi, Alexander: novelist 49–59,
Situationist International: American 155; sigmatist 60–73, 115
Section 102–103; and the avant- Trotskyism 29, 30, 60, 112
garde tradition 47–49, 101,
166–167; constructed situation Up Against the Wall Motherfucker
57, 62–66, 69–70, 159; dissolution 102–103, 116–119
143; English Section 79, 86, 88–95,
100–103, 105n35, 109–110; Vague, Tom 73n14, 112, 146–147
expulsions and denunciations 1, 9, Vaneigem, Raoul 58, 62, 81, 83, 93,
49–50, 61, 79, 101–103, 115–116, 102, 112, 148, 166
143, 153; founding 49–50; fourth Vermorel, Fred 111, 137
conference (London 1960) 61–62, vernacular 3, 16, 25, 79, 99,
65, 68, 178n72; fifth conference 117–118, 144
(Gothenburg 1961) 61–62,
109–110; and race 93–94, 120–121; Wark, McKenzie 2, 56, 66
Scandinavian 2, 150; and youth Watts Riots (1965) 80, 113
culture 83 Whitehead, Peter 67
Index 185
Williams, Raymond 10, 63 work 56–59, 83, 85–87, 89–93, 111,
Wilson, Tony 145–146 128–129, 133–135
Wise, David and Stuart 111–112, workers’ councils 89–90
121–123, 126–127
Woods, Alan 10 Young, Alan 42n2
Wordsworth, William 125–133 youth revolt 81–87, 89–93, 114

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The Situationist International in Britain

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

29 AIDS Literature and Gay Identity

30 The Epic Trickster in American Literature

31 Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement

32 Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature

34 Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction

35 James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture

36 British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

37 Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation

38 Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature

39 The Situationist International in Britain

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cooper, Sam, 1983– author.

ISBN: 978-1-138-68045-6 (hbk)

List of Figures vii

1 Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism16

2 Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde47

3 The English Section of the Situationist International78

4 Long Live King Mob109

5 British Situationism Today143

1.1 Diagram of the dialectic of modern poetry, from Rob

This book began as an effort to connect certain cultural and political

‘Seen from over here’, postulated a British ex-member of the Situationist

the SI has a lot to answer for: it has spawned a whole stew of

Britain versus the Avant-Garde

is a defensive formation that places itself within the field of advance-

Meanwhile, in Romantic Moderns (2010), Alexandra Harris documents

Late and Belated Modernisms

The Problem of Récupération

Towards a Heretical Method

particularly reactionary in attributing a privileged, redemptive value

So many of this book’s themes addressed in one quotation: the separation

—whether or not one automatically denounces all academic interest

If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-­modernism,

The first chapter, ‘Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism’, offers a

‘A starting point is a point that one leaves behind.’

The Vexed Question of the Proper Englishing of the Movement

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the

The catalysis of English Surrealism as such is usually located at the meet-

Twelve years later, Gascoyne also asserted Surrealism’s dialectical consti-

Bull-necked demagogues inject a poisonous propaganda into our

The aforementioned text by Roditi, titled ‘The New Reality’, appeared in

On the Inevitability of Surrealism

Surrealism for Read is neither dialectically composed nor incommensurable

Swift is Surrealist in malice,

Martin Puchner explains that Breton’s Surrealist prehistories construct

30s 30s SURREALIST SOCIAL REALIST GROUP

70s Ted Hughes. Adrian Henri

My reading of Breton’s understanding of Surrealism’s genealogy as a

Breton’s Surrealist prehistories are the equivalent of this ‘combination

the English, perennial late arrivals when anything avant-garde is con-

Why the English Have No Taste

before exposing ourselves to a ten-years-belated imitation of Paris, there

If Surrealism is a dialectical response to specific cultural and social ­conditions,

Close study of the philosophical position of the French surrealists is

Madge’s insistence on the vernacular character of English Surrealism was

The International Surrealist Exhibition

The bulletin proposed a series of explanations as to why Surrealism had

In reality, the Surrealists were expelled not primarily because of politi-

1 Surrealism in England, or English Surrealism16

2 Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde47

3 The English Section of the Situationist International78

4 Long Live King Mob109

5 British Situationism Today143

If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism,

If Surrealism is a dialectical response to specific cultural and social conditions,

Figure 1.2 Illustration of attendees of the International Surrealist Exhibition

Figure 1.3 Photograph of Sheila Legge as the Surrealist Phantom (1936) by

Figure 2.2 ‘Resolution of the fourth conference of the Situationist International