Socialisme Ou Barbarie Research Articles

L'Internationale Situationniste, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Crisis of the Marxist Imaginary

In Paris, Guy Debord and a small, changing cast of friends and supporting characters2 tracked through the Parisian cultural and political underground along the path laid earlier by the Surrealists.3 Skilled as provocateurs, anxious to abandon the constraints of artistic production and to acquire legitimacy as revolutionaries, Debord and his friends almost immediately began to look to the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, edited by the group of the same name led by Cornelius Castoriadis.4 SB is a crucial, though little discussed, referent in the evolution of Guy Debord. The relationship was central for Debord, and worked on several levels. After months of discussion with SB militants, Debord joined the group for a few months during 1960-1961. The merger was inconclusive and strained. However, in the pages of the journal L'Internationale Situationniste, SB played an important role as the symbol of the revolutionary with which Debord increasingly identified. Initially, SB was simply part of the political landscape. However, once Debord became more involved, SB became much more central, and the Situ journal much more deferential toward the older group. Debord was a sympathetic observer of SB, and his accounts form one of the few views of the group from an outside perspective. SB functions as an Archimedean point around which the Situs tried to pivot from art and cultural dissent into revolutionary politics. When SB exploded in 1963 and Castoriadis began to publish his long text Marxisme et la th6orie r6volutionnaire-in which he argues that it has come to the point where one can either be Marxist or a revolutionaryDebord began a sustained attempt to exclude SB from the revolutionary movement and to usurp its role in a new revolutionary vanguard. Elements of SB's

Chambre sourde: L'antiesthétique de Malraux (review)

Book Reviews cations coming about within traditional prosody; secondly on newly developing form (l'impair, free verse, stanzaic change, rhyme); and finally on die merging of prose and poetry, as well as die increased focus on significance and typography. There are purposeful and plentiful examples diroughout and, if it is perhaps bom regrettable and understandable diat no reference is made to excellent pertinent scholarship by British and American critics, good reference is made to pronouncements at once by French scholars and poets diemselves. Altogether, die work is most welcome , especially at its relatively modest price. Laurent Fourcaut's Lectures de la poésie française moderne et contemporaine possesses, equally, many worthy qualities and is, largely, very conscious of what it does not accomplish. "Ni une histoire de la poésie française, même succincte, ni un tableau des grands courants qui la traversent , ni un inventaire systématique des ses mêmes. Pas davantage de mises au point tiiéoriques sur la versification, la musique du vers ou la sémiologie de l'image." Rather, Fourcaut claims to examine, via a series of textual analyses of individual poems—Michaux's "La cordillera de Los Andes," Char's "Évadné," Prévert's "Promenade de Picasso," Bonnefoy's "Vrai corps," Jaccottet 's "On peut nommer cela horreur," an excerpt from Claude Royet-Journoud's Les Objets contiennent l'infini, and, finally, what is termed an extract (but is in fact a suite of individual texts) from Esmer Tellermann's Distance de fuite—what he calls the poeticity of each selected text: "cette résultante encore mal élucidée de toutes les spécificités du texte poétique." Such poeticity is broadly, but well, mapped out in an introductory "reader's guide": its elements range from "sound effects," rhythm, poetic ends, relationship of text to page, lexicality, intertextuality, myth, and so on, including die imbrication of poetry and die sacred. As can be seen, Fourcaut's book is by no means merely formalistic in its orientation. The conceptual dimension of poeticity has, perhaps surprisingly for some, but most appropriately, a significant role to play in analyses that yet remain happily anchored textually. It is good to see Prévert given a place so often denied him, and good, too, mat Esther Tellermann is chosen to "represent"—without really any banner being flown—a younger generation rife wim talent, new and challenging perceptions of the poetic. If, again, as with Aquien's/Honoré's book, it would have been good to see included, at least in the bibliography, some recognition of excellent criticism in English, Fourcaut's accomplishments remain insightful, eloquent and eminenüy worth the 49 francs. Michael Bishop Dalhousie University Jean-François Lyotard. Chambre sourde: VAntiesthétique de Malraux. Paris: Galilée, 1998. Pp. 113. Revising mis review, I hear of Jean-François Lyotard's death. I would like to dedicate tiiis short text to his memory, and to his friends and students, henceforth Ien alone wim the echoes of his silent, questioning laughter. It is tempting to reduce die work of André Malraux to an impatient fantasy of authorship and self-monumentalization. The transfer of his ashes to the Panméon seems a metaphysical and political undertaking of literary apotheosis. Yet, in challenging mat national-aesthetic reduction, Lyotard's Chambre sourde gives me autfior of Antimémoires another chance, and shows diat writing undermines any ideological project. Chambre sourde, so titled as a discreet homage to Bardies' Chambre claire, is Lyotard's second unforeseeable encounter witii Malraux. What in De Gaulle's minister of culture seduces die philosopher of "post-modernity" and die "différend," die former militant of "Socialisme ou barbarie"? Lyotard perceives a writer who participates in me "désœuvrement nauséeux" affecting post-war literature, and thus radically displaces the common reception of Malraux, re-placing him in die company of Céline, Bataille, Artaud, and Camus. In 1945, God is more dead man ever, and so is humanism, buried beneadi the ashes of Auschwitz. What's next? Nothing, an "ontologie du Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 99 L'Esprit Créateur néant." We hear Bataille's phrase: "La souveraineté n'est...

On the Marxist Imaginary and the Problem of Practice: Socialisme Ou Barbarie, 1952-6

`On the Marxist Imaginary...' is an excerpt from a larger work that uses the history of Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-67) to examine the role of the problem of praxis in Cornelius Castoriadis's more political writings. The present article examines the schema his revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie developed between 1952 and 1956 to link working-class experience, autonomous strikes, and possibilities for revolution and socialism.

Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group (1949-65)

The political and theoretical views developed by the radical group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 onward, have only recently received some attention outside the French speaking world.2 For a long period things were little different in France where the group and its similarly named periodical also received scant attention. only changed after the students' and workers' rebellion in MayJune The remnants of the journal, which had been unsaleable up to then it had stopped appearing three years earlier suddenly became a hot-selling item. Many of the 'heretical' ideas published in it seemed to be confirmed by the unexpected revolt. In 1977 the daily Le Monde wrote on the intellectual efforts of Socialisme ou Barbarie: This work aIthough unknown to the public at large -has nevertheless had a powerful influence on those who played a role in May 1968. In the writings of the group one finds most of the ideas which are being debated nowadays (from workers' control through to the critique of modern technology, of Bolshevism or of mar^).^ In Socialisme ou Barbarie an attempt was made to consider the bureaucratization of social movements. The central questions were: is it an iron law that movements opposing the existing order either fall apart or change into rigid hierarchies? How can militants organize themselves without being absorbed or rigidified into a bureaucratic apparatus? Socialisme ou Barbarie first posed these questions because the group asked itself why things had gone wrong in the traditional labour movement. After all, in the course of the twentieth century this movement had increasingly alienated itself from its grass roots and taken on the shape of turgid labour and trade union bureaucracies. In reaction to this development Socialisme ou Barbarie tried to stimulate new types of opposition. The approach used was that of direct democracy. The history of the group was essentially a lengthy search for a new relationship between spontaneity and organization, between practice and theory. The debates which took place during this search often had a freshness which is still relevant today.

Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Situationist International

only just arrived, writes Guy Debord in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, adding that nothing, in the last twenty years, has been so thoroughly coated with obedient lies than the history of May 1968. In its lapidary style, this passage is typical of Debord, whose revolutionary tracts inspired a generation of radicals and helped set off the May 1968 uprising in France. Reading Debord, one sees easily how his thoughts are still able to strike sympathetic readers like piercing light through a dense fog, as American activist Tom Ward put it recently. In any case, whatever one may think of Debord's strident tone, in the present end-of-millennium atmosphere of postmodernity, the message of the Internationale Situationniste seems more relevant than ever. The situationists were a group and political activists who gained a wide following in Europe and the United States beginning in the late sixties. The group was formed in 1957 with the merger of several avant-garde organizations that took their inspiration from Dada and surrealism. The two principal organizations were the International Movementfor an Imaginist Bauhaus, founded as an alternative to Max Bill's school at Ulm by the Danish painter Asger Jorn in 1953, and the Lettrist International, an association of artists, poets, and filmmakers who had been active in Paris since 1952. The latter group was represented by Parisian Gil Wolman and by Debord, who emerged as the group's spiritual and intellectual leader. During the first few years, the Situationist International (SI) included from half a dozen countries, mostly European. They held conferences on average once a year and published a journal in French, directed by Debord. The Internationale Situationniste, as it was called, is still the best record of the group's activities from 1957 through 1969. Some situationists also staged events at the Rive Gauche and Rene Drouin galleries in Paris and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where the Dutch painter-turned-urbanist Constant showed his model encampments, entitled New Babylon, in 1959. The success of these shows-New Babylon, in particular, can now be seen to anticipate the megastructural fantasies of Archigram -prompted the SI to schedule a group exhibition at that same museum for April-May 1960. Unfortunately the project was brought to a halt by disagreements within the group, which resulted in a split and several expulsions. The argument concerned the attitude to take toward cultural institutions. The majority, centered around Debord, wanted to broaden the group's activities beyond the art world; they called for the complete supersession of art in alliance with insurrectionary movements around the world. The Swedish and German factions, on the other hand, were skeptical about the possibilities of abolishing capitalism and argued that for the short term, at least, the art world offered the best opportunities for meaningful work. Having expelled the artists in the summer of 1961, the SI regrouped around Debord and turned increasingly toward theory. This phase was nourished by Debord's association with the renegade Communist party philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who taught at the University of Nanterre and headed a study group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, which also included Jean Baudrillard and Frangois Lyotard. Debord developed his own original reading of Marx in the context of this nonorthodox anti-Stalinist tradition, which used Marx's early manuscripts to develop a critique of everyday life against the party-line philosophy of Althusser and structuralism. Debord's principal contribution--set out in his most important work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)-consisted of joining Journal ofArchitectural Education, pp. 196-199 ? 1996 ACSA, Inc.

Introduction to Castoriadis

Abstract The following interview is in a sense self-explanatory. But it is also limited, by the format, by the breadth of the issues covered, and by its retrospective orientation. For whomever has followed the development of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie through the pages of its journal; and for whomever has had the occasion to discuss with Castoriadis (or Lefort, Lyotard, Mothé or others in the group), the Interview demands a supplementary commentary. In addition, Castoriadis' discussion of the functioning of the group and of its evolution, is admittedly and necessarily partial (in both senses of the term). In light of the work of Lefort published in Telos 22, and with regard also to the work of J.-F. Lyotard2 (in Telos 19), the following remarks may prove useful.