hydrarchist writes: The following review was published as a web exclusive from Mute Magazine, an excellent London-based mag covering 'Culture and Politics After the Net.'Recently they shifted from a bimonthly to a biannual production schedule and thus will be making more use of their website. Check them out. Simon Ford is author of "Realization and Suppression of the Situationist International An Annotated Bibliography, 1972-1990," (AK Press, 1994),

Three Recent Books on The Situationist International

by Simon Ford

More than any other post-war avant-garde organisation the Situationist International (SI) has been, until very recently, very poorly served by a mythologizing and historically lazy discourse of hagiography and wilful misunderstanding. There are signs, however, that SI studies are changing and with these changes some interesting dilemmas are emerging, illustrated by the contrasting tones of three recent books on the SI: The Tribe by Jean-Michel Mension, The Consul by Ralph Rumney and Guy Debord and the Situationist International edited by Tom McDonough.

The Tribe was Jean-Michel Mension's name for a small group of young people who, for a few short years (1952-1954) drifted around the bars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, avoiding work, committing petty crimes and plotting the demise of bourgeois culture. Mension entered this milieu fresh out of reform school at the age of 16 and on the run from his family of "old communist militants". There he gravitated towards the extrextremists of the Letterist International (LI). Led by Guy Debord, the group was a testing ground for many ideas later adopted by the SI. At the time it consisted of a cast of shadowy figures -- some known for signing texts they'd never read -- including Pierre-Joël Berlé (who ended up a mercenary in Kantanga), René Leibé, Gaëtan M. Langlais, and Mohamed Dahou (part-time guitarist and hash dealer). More seasoned avant-gardists included Gil J. Wolman, Jean-Louis Brau, and Serge Berna, host of the Meeting of Failures and author of its 1950 manifesto. "They portray us as DUDS, and that is what we are. We are nothing, we mean it, NOTHING AT ALL, and we intend to be of NO USE."



It was this "slacker" attitude that Mension subscribed to without restraint, and for him it was the defining characteristic of the tribe: "If someone had said 'I want to be a famous painter'; if someone had said 'I want to be a famous novelist'; if someone had said, 'I want in whatever way to be a success'; then that someone would have been tossed instantly out of the back room right through the front room onto the street. There was an absolute refusal; We rejected a world that was distasteful to us, and we would do nothing at all within it.";

The Tribe vividly captures, through conversations between Mension, Gérard Berréby and Francesco Milo, these nihilistic times and adds flesh to the myriad of obscure names associated with the group's small mimeographed magazine, Internationale Lettriste. Mension had missed out on being a founder member of the group (at the Aubervilliers Conference, 7 December 1952) because of "intoxication, severe intoxication, added to the fact that I had been arrested." Arrests and black-outs were an occupational hazard for the hardcore refusniks based at Chez Moineau, a small bistro at 22 Rue Du Four. It was Parisian café society, but back streets away from the tourist-beaten paths leading to the celebrity existentialists at the Café de Flore and the Deux-Magots.



Mension claims that the first time he spent "quality time" with Debord was on his 18th birthday, when they sat on the pavement all afternoon and into the evening drinking cheap wine. The rest of his time was spent hustling for enough money to be able to spend the night in Moineau's, singing, playing chess, arguing about the latest books, and trying to score with the many women associated with the scene, including Michèle Bernstein, Sarah Abouaf, Vali Myers, Paulette Vielhomme, and Éliane Brau (girlfriend first of Debord, then married to Mension, then married to Jean-Louis Brau and later author in 1968 of Le Situationnisme ou la nouvelle internationale).

Fortunately for the group -- and history -- into this milieu stumbled Dutch photographer Ed Van der Elsken. His documentary photographs of the tribe (his style and subject matter anticipating Nan Goldin and the dissolute school of photography) eventually found their way into the innovative photo-novel Love on the Left Bank (1956). It was Elsken that took the justifiably famous photograph of Mension posing with "Fred"; (real name Auguste Hommel) in his dirty white trousers scrawled with LI slogans. His photographs are used extensively throughout The Tribe but frustratingly they are not discussed by Mension in the text. Perhaps it is because they might have contributed to his exclusion from the LI for being, as Debord put it, "merely decorative". Also disappointing is the glossing over of Mension's "career" after his LI years, apart from brief mentions of his joining the Communist Party in 1962 and the Ligue Communiste in 1968.

The Tribe forms the first volume of a series that its publisher, Verso, calls rather portentously, Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and its Times (even though both books are much stronger on the SI's pre-history rather than "its times"). It was published simultaneously with the second volume -- Ralph Rumney's The Consul -- which follows the same format of interviews with Berréby and photographic portraits and illustrations. Like the first volume it could have done with more explanatory footnotes, both to add substance to some of the assertions in the text and to help out the reader coming to the LI for the first time.

The story he tells is as adventurous and precociously debauched as Mension's. Rumney was born in 1934 in Newcastle but was brought up in Halifax, Yorkshire. His father was an ex-miner turned vicar while his mother died when he was just 14. His first experience of scandal occurred when he requested to see a book by the Marquis de Sade in his local library. After just six months at Halifax School of Art his attempts to avoid national service took him to Cornwall where he worked as the sculptor Barbara Hepworth's assistant. Still on the run he eventually moved to Paris where he encountered the Moineau tribe and made close friendships with Guy Debord, Jean-Claude Guilbert and François Dufrêne. It was here that Rumney picked up the nick-name The Consul after the main character in Malcolm Lowry's influential study of alcohol and madness, Under the Volcano: "When I was young I drank enough to go mad,"; said Rumney looking back. "Now, after a rather difficult period, I drink with the moderation of the extremist."

Unlike Mension the experience at Moineau's seemed to strengthen his resolve to make a name for himself in the art world and by 1953 he was back in London editing his own magazine, Other Voices. His semi-abstract paintings were also beginning to get noticed and after his first exhibition at the New Vision Centre Gallery in 1956 he was under contract to the Redfern Gallery, participating along with Patrick Heron in the seminal "Metavisual, Tashiste, Abstract" exhibition of 1957. This was also the year that Rumney travelled to Cosio d'Arroscia, under the auspices of his own one-man-group, the London Psychogeographical Committee, to participate in the formation of the SI.

One of his proposals at the conference was to produce a psychogeographic map of Venice. As he recalls in the book it was also to prove his downfall. When it arrived late for inclusion in Debord's new journal, Internationale situationniste, Rumney was summarily excommunicated. In its place Debord published a couple of mug-shots of Rumney and a short text "Venice Has Conquered Ralph Rumney": "Rumney has disappeared, and his father has yet to start looking for him. Thus it is that the Venetian jungle has shown itself to be the stronger, closing over a young man, full of life and promise, who is now lost to us, a mere memory among so many others."

The exclusion hit Rumney hard and he retreated from avant-garde circles but continued painting and looking after his family, which now included his wife, Pegeen Vail, daughter of Peggy Guggenheim. But Pegeen died in 1967 from an overdose of sleeping tablets and whiskey, and her mother tried to have Rumney arrested for "murder and failing to assist a person in danger". Partly to escape her attention Rumney sought refuge at Félix Guattari's clinic at La Borde. Only after he was assured there were no grounds for his prosecution could he leave Paris. In 1970 he returned to work as a broadcaster on the radio station ORTF. In March 2002, as his friend and translator Malcolm Imrie recounts in the afterword, he died of cancer after a long illness.



At this point in the review our perspective changes, as we shift from oral history to the "organized knowledge" of academic enquiry. The phrase comes from T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith's contribution to Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Edited by Tom McDonough, it is a much expanded version of a special issue of October published in the winter of 1997. It's really two books in one: the first part consisting of newly translated SI texts and the second half made up of interpretative essays on the group's legacy. There are, of course, no prizes for guessing which half is the most inspiring and provocative. Take for example Théo Frey's "Perspectives on a Generation" (1966), where he predicts an internet, or in his words a "universal communications network", that "radically suppresses the distance between things while indefinitely increasing the distance between people."

In its second part Guy Debord and the Situationist International includes an examination of Asger Jorn's modification paintings by Claire Gilman; a review of the SI's architectural theories by Libero Andreotti and McDonough; and reviews of Debord's films by Giorgio Agamben and Thomas Y. Levin. Unnecessary ballast is provided by "Holy"; Greil Marcus's "The Long Walk of the Situationists" a text of limited analytical and historical interest apart from it probably being the one that introduced many in the New York intelligentsia (i.e. the October milieu) to the SI when it first appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement in 1982.

The closest the book gets to the tone of the The Consul and The Tribe is Kristin Ross's interview with Henri Lefebvre, author of Critique of Everyday Life and the nearest the SI got to a contemporary academic mentor. In his conversation with Ross, Lefebvre talks about the period 1957-1961 when he often drank tequila at Debord and Bernstein's flat and discussed such topics as the transformation of unitary urbanism into the ideology of city-planning. True to form the relationship could not last and when Debord claimed that Lefebvre had plagiarised a SI text on the Paris Commune the affair was over. "In the end it was a love story that ended badly, very badly," said Lefebvre. "There are love stories that begin well and end badly. And this was one of them."

And like the memory of a love affair, the history of the SI leaves behind a miscellaneous collection of tokens -- the photographs, the letters, the locks of hair and the fading memories. The dilemma lies in the relative status of these forms of representation, these last orders of knowledge: the reminiscences, the documents and ephemeral leaflets and posters, the artful and the snapshot photography, and to interpret these, the academic analysis and the processes of reproduction, and the meta-discourse of reviews such as this one. And if the affair ended badly, as it always did with the SI, those remnants bear a painful reminder, especially when that love was unreciprocated in the strongest terms.





Jean-Michel Mension // The Tribe // Verso, 2002 // 132 p. // ISBN 1859843948 // Price: £10.00 // Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.



Ralph Rumney // The Consul // Verso, 2002 // 124 p. // ISBN 1859843956 // Price: £10.00. Translated by Malcolm Imrie.

Tom McDonough (editor) // Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents // MIT Press, 2002 // 492 p. // ISBN 0262134047 // Price: £29.95 (hbk.)