Watts 1965 . . . Minneapolis 2020 Here’s what the situationists said about riots, looting, and the condition of black people in America 55 years ago (commenting on the Watts riot of 1965). Many things have changed since then, but the fundamental things still apply as time goes by. . . TRANSLATED by Ken Knabb ____________________________ August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police… …
TRANSLATIONS: Eng / GR Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France? Certainly, we know the facility with which the specter of the… …
17 November 2019 (The text published in french language at “A contretemps” at 17 November 2019). The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the whole world affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable… …
The French political theorist, activist and poet Ivan Chtcheglov was following his Ukrainian father as a revolutionary of his time. His father, Vladimir Chtcheglov, was sentenced to two years imprisonment following the 1905 Revolution. After he was released, Vladimir Chtcheglov left the Russian Empire. In 1910, Vladimir and his wife moved to Paris where he worked as a taxi driver. He took part in the 1911 driver strike. Ivan –… …
1 The traditional goal of aesthetics is to produce, by means of art, impressions of certain past elements of life in circumstances where those elements are lacking or absent, in such a way that those elements escape the disorder of appearances subject to the ravages of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty that is inseparable from duration, and that even goes so far as… …
“To deny society, one must attack its language.” – Guy Debord. The impossible is a closed universe. Nevertheless, we possess the key to it and, as we’ve suspected for millennia, its door opens on a field of infinite possibilities. More than ever, this field belongs to us, to explore and cultivate. The key is neither magic nor symbolic. The ancient Greeks called it “poetry,” from the verb poiein, to construct,… …
“Real life is absent. We are not in the world.”—A. Rimbaud Existence is elsewhere. By now, we know this much too well. We cannot find the fullness capable of giving any meaning to our time on this earth either in a job that sends us traveling along through the crossroads of the career or in a daily life from that no longer holds any wonder for us. We may be… …
A member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970, Raoul Vaneigem is the author of Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Gallimard, 1967),[1] from which the most forceful slogans of May 68 were drawn, and around thirty other books. The most recent to appear is L’État n’est plus rien, soyons tout (Rue des Cascades, 2011).[2] Siné Mensuel: Can you give… …
Conversation with Raoul Vaneigemby Hans Ulrich Obrist May 2009 / e-flux magazine Translated from the French by Eric Anglès HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say,… …
Guy Debord’s THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, originally published in 1967, is easily the most important radical book of the twentieth century. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Debord’s book is neither an ivory tower “philosophical discourse” nor an impulsive “rant” or “protest.” It is an effort to clarify the nature of the situation in which we find ourselves and the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. It examines… …
Wandering about the lack of serious invitations or preparations from the side of Italian Movement against the meeting of G8 leaders in Italy during July 2009,… as we are searching for voices of revolt and resistance in Italian society, as we observe the Italian antagonistic movement to follow the way of the Left parties into oblivion, as we observe the Italian fascists to take more and more power in Italy… …
artwork: Void Network Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimurm Igni: a Film. London: Pelagian Press, 1991. film review written by Stefan Pfohl Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation, another way of acting within the historical and psychic geographies in which the event of your own reading is here and now taking place; here and now taking the place of… …
Void Network proudly presents a multi media retrospective for Yves Le Manach this wonderfull situationist, this spiritual friend of us, this influential critic of delusions. Born in Paris 1942 / political activist in Paris in the sixties / member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire / collaborator of the Informations Correspondance Ouvrières / moved to Brussels in 1970 / published on the Internationale Situationniste / editor of Artichauts de… …
