Situationist International Anthology

"""The accused have never denied the charge of misappropriating the funds of the Strasbourg Student Union. Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay some 5000 francs for the printing of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature inspired by the 'Situationist International.' These publications express aims and ideas which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the purposes of a student union. One need only read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking any experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories and bored by the drab monotony of their everyday life, have the pathetic arrogance to make sweeping denunciations of their fellow students, their professors, God, religion, the clergy, and the governments and political and social systems of the entire world. Rejecting all morality and legal restraint, these cynics do not shrink from to advocating theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion and a permanent worldwide proletarian revolution with 'unrestrained pleasure' as its only goal."" --Judge Llabador, Strasbourg District Court (13 December 1966) ""This explosion was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West -- groups, moreover, that do not know what they would put in its place, but that delight in negation, destruction, violence, anarchy, brandishing the black flag."" --Charles de Gaulle, televised speech (7 June 1968) ""In the U.S.A. the Situationist International is mostly known as a small group of dadaist provocateurs that had something to do with the May 1968 uprising in France. The name has been batted around in reference to punk, because Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren supposedly was connected with the situationists. The situationists were, ah, sort of like the Yippies, one hears. Or New York's Motherfuckers. . . . The Situationist International Anthology makes it clear that the Situationist International was something considerably more interesting: perhaps the most lucid and adventurous band of extremists of the last quarter century. It makes almost all present-day political and aesthetic thinking seem cowardly. . . . It is exhilarating to read this book."" --Greil Marcus, Village Voice (1982)"