In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people’s passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of détournement. Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its “Communist” pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world.
The Situationist International Anthology is the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English. It presents a rich variety of articles, leaflets, graffiti, and internal documents, ranging from experiments in “psychogeography” to lucid analyses of the Watts riots, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other crises and upheavals of the sixties.
For this new edition all the translations have been fine-tuned and the bibliography has been updated to include comments on dozens of newer books by and about the situationists.
Book details:
Editor and translator: Ken Knabb
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9798887440576
Published: November 2024
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 544
Subjects: Philosophy: Political • History: Social History • Anarchism, Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
About the Editor
Ken Knabb has translated numerous works by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, including Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (2014; reissued by PM Press in 2024), Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works (2003; to be reissued by PM Press in 2026), and the Situationist International Anthology (2006; reissued by PM Press in 2024). Knabb’s own writings, published in Public Secrets and posted at his Bureau of Public Secrets website, have been translated into more than fifteen languages. He is currently presenting a series of Zoom webinars on The Society of the Spectacle and the Situationist International Anthology.
