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Internationale Situationniste

1958-1969 [http://www.nothingness.org/SI/]

The Situationist International was founded in 1958, being one of many splinter groups of French post-war avantgarde movements which, in their organizational structure and Marxist discourse, shaped themselves after the Surrealist group around André Breton.

But unlike the Surrealists, the Situationists did not take their chief inspiration from Freudian psychoanalysis and an aesthetics of psychic automatism, but from Marcel Mauss' anthropological studies of gift economies and Marxist sociology of the urban space. From Lautréamonts late-romanticist poetics of plagiarism and Brecht's estrangement effect, the Situationists distilled their concept of "détournement", the simultaneous appropriation and decontextualization of signs as an artistic and critical method.

From 1958 to 1969, the journal "Internationale Situationniste" appeared in succession to the pre-situationist leaflet "Potlatch". This periodical was a détournement by itself in that it camouflaged as an academic journal, complete with theoretical essays, definitions of Situationist concepts and fake-official conference reports of Situationist activities. With its printed permission for free reproduction, translation and alteration of its content, the "Internationale Situationniste" appears to have been the first "Open Content" publication of the world.



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