VI~ Art and Modern Life 693 I Innumerable other meanings of the word 'myth' can be cited against this. But I have tried to define th ings, not words. 2 The development of publicity, of a national press, of radio, of illustrated news, not to speak of the sun ival of a myriad rites of communication which rule social appearances, makes the development of a semiological science more urgent than ever. In a single day, how many reallv non-signifying fields do we cross' Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages to me.
1 The notion of word is one of the most controversial in linguistics. I keep it here for the sake of simplicity.
4 Tel Que!, II, p. 191.
2 Guy Debord (b. 1931) Writings from the Situationist International
A thread runs through the French avant-garde from Baudelaire to Surrealism which focuses on the unexpected, the bizarre, the magical aspects of the condition of modernity; these aspects are supposedly experienced as revelations by those who know how to read the modern city. Always incipiently revolutionary, after the effective demise of Surrealism in the post-war period, this cultural tradition was developed by the Situationist International: an organization formed in 1957, reaching a high point of effectiveness in the May Events of 1968, and disbanding in 1972. The Sl emerged as a synthesis of the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (itself descended from Cobra, and including Asger Jorn as a leading member), and the Lettrist International (involving Guy Debord). Twelve issues of the International Situationist bulletin were issued, Texts represented here embody the movement's key concepts: the derive; detournement; and centrally, the concept of the spectacle. All extracts were written by Debord and are taken from the Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, California, 1981, pp. 50-4, 55, 307-8, and 74-5 . (Individual titles and dates of composition and publication are given with the selections.)
I Report on the Construction of Situations . . . Revolution and Counterrevolution in Modern Culture
First of all we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that this change is possible through appropriate actions. Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new ones, means more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and mores, but applied in the perspective of an interaction of all revolutionary changes. What is termed culture reflects, but also prefigures, the possibilities of organization of life in a given society. Our era is fundamentally characterized by the lagging of revolutionary political action behind the development of modern possibilities of production which call for a superior organization of the world. [ . .. ] One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its phase of liquidation is that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation, it at