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Originally
appeared in Spur No.4 (February 1961) signed by Debord and SPUR, and in
Internationale Situationniste No.6 (August 1961) signed by SPUR. Translated
by Reuben Keehan and taken from Situationist International Online
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On Social Repression in Culture
SPUR/Lothar Fisher, Dieter Kunzelmann,
Uwe Lausen, Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm & Hans-Peter Zimmer
INDIVIDUALLY, THE ARTISTS of the modern era who do not simply reproduce
the permissible mystifications have all clearly been more or less rejected
to the fringes of social life. This is because they are obliged to pose
- even through illusory or fragmentary means - the question of the meaning
of this life: the question of its use; while it remains without meaning,
it has no lawful use outside of passive consumption. By its very nature,
then, it signals the poor conditions of an uninhabitable world. And their
personal exclusion from the world - by the comfortable or attractive separation
of tragic elimination - is produced naturally, so to speak.
On the contrary, avant-garde groups - or individuals among them - who
formulate a definitive program for changing all of these conditions come
up against a consciously organized social repression. The forms of this
repression have changed a lot since, say, forty years ago, with the development
of society itself and that of its enemies.
In the Europe of the 1920's, fingers were pointed at whatever scandalized
the permissible social and cultural values; the avant-garde was considered
accursed. In the society that has developed since the second world war,
there are no longer any values whatsoever, and as a result the accusation
of not respecting a particular convention can no longer find an audience
among the backwards sectors of the public, and remains attached to a rather
outmoded system of coherent conventions (much like Christian conception).
For those who carry on the project of creating new values, the controllers
of culture and information no longer stir up scandal: they tend to be
the unshakable organizers of silence.
These new conditions of struggle initially postpone the work of a new
revolutionary avant-garde; hindering its formation and then slowing its
development. But they also have a very positive sign: modern culture is
empty; no solid force can be opposed to the decisions of this avant-garde,
from the minute it is successful in making it known as such. The sole
task of this avant-garde must be to impose a day of reckoning before it
compromises its discipline and its program. This is exactly what the Situationist
International intends to do.
This declaration was published in February 1961 in issue 4 of Spur,
organ of the German section of the SI.
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