Cosmonauts of the Future
LUCK AND CHANGE
DAGGER AND GUITAR
Asger Jorn
The status of the aesthetic problems of the present day
"One evening I sat Beauty on my knees - And I found her bitter
And I abused her.
I armed myself against justice.
I fled. O witches, O misery, O hatred, to you my treasure was
entrusted!
.. Misfortune was my god. I stretched myself out in the mud. I
dried myself in the air of crime. And I played some fine tricks on
madness.
And the spring brought the idiot's frightening laughter.
- oh! every vice, anger, luxury - magnificent, that luxury - above
all, falsehood and sloth."
Arthur Rimbaud
The two unsolved problems hindering further progress in the systemiza-
tion of the scientific research of aesthetics today are the declining ability
to give the topic a serviceable definition and the difficulty in finding the
clear and tenable distinction between the object of aesthetics and the object
of art, especially in the question of the essence of dance, music, poetry and
pictorial art, that is to say, the essence of the fine arts. As far as these are
concerned, an understanding has been generally reached that they are not
identical with the aesthetie, but merely represent an especially effective and
rarely failing technique for the exposition of aesthetic effects. Moreover, in
certain circles there is also a gradually dawning feeling that the fine arts
themselves never represent pure beauty, but are above all arts, and as such
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always more than beauty, with an effect going deeper and transmitting
more than the purely aesthetic. This is something we touch upon here in
the indication of the ethical character of art and which is manifested in
more recent art by the pictorial content being moved from the aesthetic
over to the magical, even though this word has to be understood in a new
meaning as the expression of power.
As far as the problem of aesthetic definition is concerned, then the
difficulty lies in being unable to limit the aesthetic area to an easily compre-
hensible field of activity with a clear distinction between the true methodical
activity of aesthetics and auxiliary investigations into other disciplines,
economics, sociology, politics, biology, psychology, technology, religion etc,
from which benefit and experience can be derived. Furthermore, the blurred
boundary between aesthetics and art also causes even the most rigorous sep-
aration between aesthetics and the other philosophical areas (ethics, logic)
to have no objective validity and to be based merely upon sensory illusion
uncovered more and more by each new experience.
If, in an attempt at empirical aesthetics, we take the road of expe-
rience to find the aesthetic object in the articles and laws of beauty, we
immediately come up against resistance from subjective judgement,
which perceives the human being as a primary existence in relation to his
thoughts. This judgement, the individual's judgement, takes its point of
departure in the individual's reaction to the sensed object, a precondition
and a point of departure which no one can deny.
The objective synthesis
If the individual judgement necessary to construct an aesthetic doctrine
is to be coordinated with the aesthetic judgements of other individuals,
then this can only happen by getting behind these judgements in order to
analyse the common preconditions reflected in the internal psycho-physi-
logical similarities and the bio-sociological dependence of the individu-
als, as is done, for example, in medical science, to discover the common
human subjectivity or the community of inter-human interest which is a
bio-physiological, sociological and cultural fact.
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The wider question then becomes whether this organic community of
interest extends out over the human into the vegetable and animal king-
doms, whether the whole biological world can be perceived as a collected in-
terdependence, a fellowship of interest, an organic subjectivity and mutual
necessity, and historically as an evolutionary unity, or, in short, whether we
can make aesthetics relate to the natural sciences.
However, to achieve a real objective aesthetics it is necessary to dem-
onstrate a causal unity between the forms of reaction of the organic and the
inorganie worlds which reaches from the macrocosmic aesthetics of the uni-
verse itself to the atom's microcosmic reactions of an aesthetic character. If
this is not possible, then the results of both subjective and objective aesthet-
is are worthless and the establishment of a scientific aesthetics impossible.
The synthesis for which I am here the spokesman definitively breaks
with the intermixing of aesthetics and art theory, a break which is based
upon new experiences and arguments, the most weighty of which is
perhaps the recognition, derived from the development of modern art,
of the value of so-called primitive art and the consequent understand-
ing that aesthetic recognition and any acquaintanceship with the idea of
beauty, the understanding even of the difference between the thing and its
depiction, is quite meaningless for elemental artistic creation. As, into the
bargain, it is apparent that modern aesthetic education, as known from
the art academies, is directly restrictive to creative ability in art, these facts
demonstrate that not only is the aesthetic knowledge of our time worthless
but also directly damaging and thus, in other words, false.
The extreme definition of aesthetics
This acknowledgment, which is shared by all aestheticians, has gradually
made it generally appreciated that aesthetics should not be understood as
a phenomenon exclusively connected with the fine arts. On the contrary,
it represents one of our forms of existential experience, its subjective point
of departure in interest having forced science to perceive the object of
aesthetics as impenetrable by exact, scientific research, so that it has
to be perceived as something which can be described and to a certain
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extent limited, but not defined and computed, remaining a demonstrable
and communicable unknown', which can throw its light over one of the
problematic forms in which our being exposes itself, and thereby have an
instructive significance for art and criticism.
That this instructive significance is only to the detriment of both
art and criticism has really nothing to do with science nor obviously the
critics, but it involves artistic activity and the artists' working conditions
themselves in the most painful way. Because of this inconvenience it must,
of course, be the artists themselves who, by theoretical activity, have to
intervene and change course about this point.
What have I then been able to change in this hazy picture? Apparently
something quite insignificant, as I have only tightened up this 'aesthetic
definition' from being something unknown and enigmatic' to mean 'the
unknoren' or everything unknown and enigmatic. By this clarification of
the aesthetic object, it takes on not only a subjective and existential but
also an objective and essential significance, from its smallest detail to its
greatest context. This makes possible the establishment of the following
outline, of which we will only have occasion in the following text to deal
with the first half and point c. III.
Brief outline of the fields of activity in aesthetic research
Thesis: The aesthetic object is defined as the unknown, and aesthetics as
the empirical science of the reactions of the known to the unknown or the
unknown, unexpected or uncontrollable reactions of the known.
1. Objective aesthetics
then becomes the empirical science of the immediate reactions of
substances to other substances and of the character of the substance's
macrocosmic and microcosmic phenomena towards the borders with the
non-existent, and thus the effects of chance.
2. The aesthetics of the natural sciences
then becomes the science of the reactions of biological organisms to
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unknown, unaccustomed or unexpected impulses and of their abilities to
invoke such impulses biologically.
3. The aesthetics of the human sciences
becomes the empirical science of man's experiential and recognitive reac-
tions to everything unknown, divided over the subjects:
a. Psycho-physiological aesthetics
The empirical science of man's spiritual and physical reactions to
everything unknown: 1, destructive, 2. passively negligent as well as 3.
actively absorbent reactions.
b. Sociological aesthetics
comprises the empirical science of the societal group's positive, nega-
tive and passive reaction to the occurrence of the unknown in societal
life and society's ability to invoke unknown phenomena in all areas,
political, economic, technical, artistic, scientific, ethical, philosophi
cal, cultural, ideological, religious, etc.
c. The aesthetics of art scholarship
This comprises the empirical science of man's expansive reactions to
unknown external and internal impulses, as aesthetic art is defined
as our ability to invoke and satisfy unknown interests, phenomena,
things, thoughts and ideas.
The aesthetics of art scholarship is divided into two groups, the aesthetics
of direct experience and the aesthetics of indirect recognition, which can
be grouped as follows:
c.I. The aesthetics of human artistic action
The empirical science of human reactions to what cannot be done;
the interest in creating and enjoying unknown things, thoughts and
pictures created by people. With connections to psycho-physiological
and neurological aesthetics in general, this is divided into:
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a. The aesthetics of productive experience
The empirical science of the process of human creative experience,
which develops in a dialectical relationship of opposition and de-
pendence to:
b. The aesthetics of receptive experience
The empirical science of the human ability to absorb aesthetic art
experiences. Both are developed in connection with the artistic
material which represents:
c.II. The aesthetics of the art-work or the artistic means
The empirical science of the character of the art object and its aes-
thetic effect upon the producer and consumer, comprising:
a. The aesthetic character of technique in general.
b. Aesthetic technique or the fine arts which form:
1. Psychological sensory aesthetics
The empirical science of immediate sensory effects (sound,
pitch, light, colour, form, movement, etc.)
2. The aesthetics of mental conception
The empirical science of the aesthetic effect of visual formula-
tion and conception. This leads to the opposite of the aesthetics
of experience:
c.III. The aesthetics of recognition
The empirical science of human intellectual reactions to what is not
known. This is divided into two contrasting activities:
a. The aesthetics of fantasy and speculation
The empirical science of the human activity of idea and thought
in the treatment of subjects neither understood nor known and
the reactions of people to the results of such speculations and
fantasies.
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b. The aesthetics of scientific research
The empirical science of human interest in and attempts to gather
exact knowledge about hitherto unknown phenomena which can
be analyzed empirically, as well as the abilities and means to do
this, and the significance of this activity for human art and aes-
thetics in general.
The aesthetic phenomenon - summing up and definition
Disinterested pleasure'
Kant defined beauty as 'universal, disinterested and necessary pleasure
but as pleasure is really nothing other than a kind of interest, we have to
reject this self-contradictory definition and assert that aesthetics is the
interest in the unknown, the effect of which can be unpleasant as well as
pleasant, antipathetic as well as sympathetic. This brings out feelings of
distaste or delight which give us the opportunity to judge the object of the
experience as either ugly or beautiful, a biological reaction called attrac-
tion and repulsion in the mineral world.
The essence of aesthetics is unconditional and immediate interest or
spontaneous reaction, and the aesthetic object is that phenomenon which
invokes this immediate interest, whilst the aesthetic subject is the field of
immediate interest.
"Known and unknorn
Beautiful are the things we see.
More beautiful are the things we understand,
but by far the most beautiful
are surely those we do not comprehend."
Niels Steno
Only the unknown or the apparently and partially unknown can possess
this aesthetic property. What one already knows is effective only through
its recognizability and corresponds to those deeper, regular interests
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which, on the strength of their vital significance and regulatory essence,
we call ethical interests.
However, as soon as we become aware that the known and the unknown
are relative phenomena, the question then becomes whether we can con-
nect them with anything at all. We could say that the objectively known
is everything that acts as facts, as impressions in the conteat of sensory
material, and can be directly or indirectly sensed. But therefore it is not
certain that we know it, and as in itself this is a matter of acquaintanceship
or transmission, we must find another yardstick for the known and the
unknown. What do these two concepts really mean? The latter is derived
from the former as its opposite, but this does not take us very far, and we
already appear to have excluded in advance any possibility of an empiri-
cal analysis of this subject, as science, as is well known, is based upon the
study of the comprehensible, the known or the actual.
We are not, however, giving up, even though we will have to reduce the
area of aesthetic study to the border phenomena between the known from
which we start and the unknown, to the study of the unknown reactions of
the known and the effect of unknown phenomena on the known.
Aesthetics perceived as interest in the unknown
"Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerie und Medizin
und leider auch Theologie
durchaus studiert, mit heissem Bemühn.
Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Tor!
und bin so klug als wie zuvor."
Goethe
Aesthetics as the law of change
But what have we really embarked on here? Simply that the true point of
departure of aesthetics is the law of change, allowing the unknown and the
new to arise in the universe and create evolution, whereas the known is the
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static cycle or law of immutability, which we have perceived as the ethical
principle of nature. Here immediately we are in the elemental philosophi-
cal conflict between compatibilists and incompatibilists, empiricists and
idealists. The latter was a school founded by Socrates, who came to the
conviction that 'we only know that we know nothing', that everything is
unknown and thus aesthetic. We also know about the opposite school of
determinists, and aver simply that they are both correct, in the same way
as the scientists who quarrelled about whether light was rays or waves,
since the law of change exists on the strength of and because of the law of
immutability, in the same way as the radiant character of light is condi-
tioned by its wave system, and the aesthetic principle of nature is precisely
its radiant essence, the material's 'ideality' or éclat.
We have thus transferred the world of the metaphysical concept over to
matter, but can this work? Yes, it depends exclusively on whether it can form
a system and if this system, which we regard as primary, connects naturally
with the secondary spiritual or metaphysical system to form a unit.
Subject or area of interest
The elementary metaphysical concept is the subject, normally defined as
"the conscious ego;, the observing, thinking, feeling, active individual, and
thus the human object. But if we take into account how humanity origi-
nated, this definition is too narrow. When did the human embryo begin to
be a subject? The question is meaningless. Here we will use the concept of
the subject as a designation for any exclusive or limited sphere of interest
in matter, any system of action, any individuality. But the limited phe-
nomenon in matter is what is called the object. Object and subject should
thus only be two different ways of perceiving the same phenomena and two
different sides of their essence. Quite so!
This subjectivity of matter or classification of interest can be called
the qualitative properties of the material, and the feeling, thinking and
observing properties' are just the most consummate and differentiated
means of existence of this subjectivity or sphere of interest, which here on
earth has achieved the greatest perfection in humanity.
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Objective subjectivity
Objective science is the science of how matter thinks, about the spirit of mat.
ter. Subjective science could be called the science of how material feels, of the
material's interests or the material's soul, its enthusiasms or eros, its body-
forming principle. This science of the objective subjectivity of the material,
which makes it corporeally identical with the spiritual and thus perceives
the spiritual as a physical phenomenon, is obvious and easily understood if
it is really made clear what an object or a body is. We can buy the materials
in a human body at a chemist's shop, but we cannot unite them into a hu-
man body, yet the human body endures even when the materials of which
it is formed are renewed. One is the same even though one is someone
else. We can shape a lump of clay into a vase and a sudden movement will
change it again to a lump of clay. We can lay out a rail-track and constantly
change all the material. Even if there are completely new materials, it is
still the same track, the same region of interest, the same context.
The bodily perception of the soul
We are, however, in no doubt that the living person exists as a latent pos-
sibility in the material we have bought. Thus the impotence we feel before
a dead person whom we wish were alive is not caused by the soul forsaking
the body. That it cannot do. But by the human soul having disintegrated,
so that we are unable to put it together again.
Therefore, unlike the spiritualists, we perceive the visionary faculty, the
highest achievement of the aesthetician, not in the form of a detachment
of the soul from its bodily mortal frame, but as a superior and intense
radiation and receptive activity with its unavoidable centre in the physi-
cal ego. From this it follows that we evaluate the proficiencies acquired by
this clairvoyance according to their ability to serve our actions. With this,
our opponent relationship to spiritualism in its traditional form appears
to be clarified.
The subjective context of material
The word interest means what is between certain phenomena and thus the
context. We have defined subjectivity as interest or context.
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Every cell in the human body is an object and at the same time an area
of interest, a subject or acting individual. Cells are again part of the areas
of interest of the organs which in fellowship form a human ego, body or
individual, together with his mental equipment. The individual is a part
of the ego of the family, the group, whose common interest is given its self.
conscious expression in its codex of action or ethics. Together all human
groups, classes, peoples, nations and races form a joint human object,
humanity, which is thus not an idea but an actuality, a body, an ego or
subject, which is, for example, the common object of medical science and
the very basis of actuality for the whole of technique and culture, the joint
human interest. I call this perception Nordic humanism.
Aesthetics as meaninglessness and cynicism
"For a long time I boasted of possessing all possible landscapes, and
found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry derisory.
loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks'
backcloths, inn-signs, cheap prints; unfashionable literature,
church Latin, badly spelt pornographic books, grandmothers'
novels, fairytales, little books for children, old operas, silly refrains,
naive rhythms.
I dreamed of crusades, voyages of discovery never reported,
unrecorded republics, suppressed religious wars, revolutions in
manners, movements of races and of continents: I believed in all
enchantments."
Arthur Rimbaud
Secret interests
We are, however, going beyond human, even organic subjectivity and
maintaining that even the least atom with its rotating nuclear system, as
well as the solar systems, must be perceived as spheres of interest, units of
activity or subjects. The study of the interests of these materials and peo-
ples is not only complicated but dangerous, especially as far the latter are
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concerned. Not everyone is interested in having their interest clarified and
this is undoubtedly the real reason that an objective and scientific basis for
the so-called human sciences' has not yet been established and that there
is still no interest in doing so. Yet we have apparently got to the stage that
today artistic, philosophical, ethical and aesthetic development is simply
demanding the renewal that can only be established by the recognition
and study of the objective subject.
Subjective Knowledge
"Who follows his own head must also stand on his own feet."
Danish proverb
We have stated that what is called objective knowledge is just the intellec-
tual demonstration that a phenomenon exists in the world. But the word
lenore has a more immediate sensory meaning, as when one says, I know
myself. Here the word has the same meaning given to the Greek origin
of the word aesthetics. Subjective knowledge is thus a direct context, an
acknowledgement of a phenomenon. For a subject, the absolute known, that
which is within bounds, is thus a part of the context, the established, the
determined, the lare.
The aesthetics of subjectivity
"Everything like is unalike."
However, we know that all phenomena, objects and spheres of interest
are in constant change, are established, extended and dissolved, enter into
other contexts, exchange, are condensed and exploded, that there are thus
different degrees of acquaintanceship, right from the most airy and super-
ficial to contextual, flowing and yet firm, compact, almost immobile and
unbreakable connections, and that the aesthetic stage is thus the study of
the superficial individual stages.
Universal rationalism
Aristotle, who in his metaphysics stressed the experience of this constant
movement or change in matter by which it takes on new forms, maintained
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that it is the realization of an all-embracing reasonable plan that the divine
spirit is following in the shaping of the cosmos through the development of
nature, which is gradually and logically following the purposeful meaning
of our existence, with which human reason can lead us into harmony. The
movement in, for example, a plant's genesis is invoked by 'external' causes
(Aristotle was the first person who dissociated himself absolutely from
objective subjectivism), like the seed from the mother-plant. But the form
that occurs as a plant is because of an intrinsic power in matter, and thus
in the seed, of a preordained kind (inheritance?). The seed thus contains
the coming plant in itself as a possibility which could come into being or
reality, be activated, be unfurled and take on an actual form that is the true
being. Every form is in this way developed by other forms, and all these
forms ultimately point back to the first cause which is consequently the
absolute divine idea.
The imbalance of matter
"He also makes new who destroys the old."
Even with due regard paid to Aristotle's doctrine of catharsis, this percep-
tion can only be a half-truth, and therefore wrong, especially when its
further enlargement in connection with Christianity's belief in providence
and the doctrine of immortality is borne in mind. On the other hand,
Hume's liberation of the purely deterministic perception of the world
offers no opportunity for the establishment of an opponent relationship
between aesthetics and ethics, but forces, as we have noted, the estab-
lishment of the former as a side of the latter in the doctrine of pleasure.
His philosophy thereby becomes purely analytical without a perspective
of development, or what we could call positivity, inclination forward or
imbalance, and this absolute equilibrium automatically forces the denial
of the actual existence of the objective context, which is only delineated in
the dynamic of motion and not in what is stationary. Then even a realistic
ethics becomes an impossibility.
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We maintain the following:
No providence exists for people other than our oven foresight, where ever we
get that from, but we merely wish to maintain that it is always the present,
existence, actuality or reality that manifests itself as the static and abso-
lute, and that all development is and must be a break with the known, with
lares, and takes place through the ceaseless dialectic between the establish-
ment of lare and lawbreaking, between ethics and aesthetics.
One-sided moral upbringing towards reason and justice, which incul-
cates an absolute disgust of all stupidity, injustice, lies, brutality and heed-
less, ugly self-assertion, to which orphanage children and future kings in
particular are subjected, results in just as one-sided tendencies towards
servility and desperation.
Aesthetics as injustice, disaster and crime
Law creates lawbreaking
"You walk over dead men... of your jewels Horror not least charming
and Murder, amongst your dearest trinkets, there on your proud
belly dances amorously."
Ch. Baudelaire: Hymn to Beauty
On the other hand, it is health that changes the drama of life from be-
ing a perpetual tragedy to being a principle of development. All renewal
consists of casting oneself out into the unknown and thereby into almost
certain annihilation, and even if it is the exception that proves the law or
rule by renewing it, no successful renewal or introduction of the unknorn
can happen without the context and the order being destroyed, crushed
and dissolved to give way to new contexts. This revolutionary unrest, the
unknown, incomprehensible and incompatibilistic element in existence,
where the old is destroyed to give way to new, is the inevitable law of the
universe and humanity. Incompatibilism is determined, and determinism
acts only through this. The transcendent is immanent.
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Lawbreaking creates lare
"Diamonds are polished in diamond dust."
Taras Bulba
If one loses this understanding of the dialectical context between law
and lawbreaking necessary to establish this, then, instead of perceiving
lawbreaking as a necessary ingredient, one must necessarily feel it as a dis-
turbing, destructive, devilish element in existence, as something absolutely
wicked, as nature's tragic principle. By denying this absolute ideality and
independence of the aesthetic we are turning away from the abstract doc-
trine of suicide, which is its logical extreme point, and like everyone with
'sound common sense' also turning from what it demonstrates: that all
development would stop if sound common sense' came to rule.
Unforeseen happenings
"Did you not see recently how eagerly the dove there over the
treetops beat the air with its wings?
He had seen his mate and the nest with the young: that was the
reason for his quick flight.
It appeared to him that it was under his own power that he moved
his wings and took the shortest way. But it was love, his downy
young and his beloved that awakened his soul, and this that
thereafter moved his wings.
Love is like the coachman who looks after the reins and controls us
as the rider controls his horse. He obscures our soul and convinces
us that we sit as chiefs or coachmen."
Swedenborg
The circle of interest dominates the cycle of materials and life. But things
can suddenly happen that quite change the picture. It can so happen that
the dove suddenly leaves his track. As if drawn by a strange force within
or without, it is thrown up against quite different experiences that attract
and entice it. Apparently, we say expressly, there is nothing here for it
to like, let alone love. On the contrary, there is something immediately
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loveless, something disquieting and unpleasant, something surprising, the
unknown, and because this is new it is meaningless, irritating, unreason-
able and worthless, but nevertheless a force, which, like the lighthouse or
the lamp, could throw one off course, possibly even kill and annihilate, but
which does, at any rate, innervate, interest, animate and obsess with an
externally warm and inner cold excitement.
Why -why not?
"Misfortune often makes people pale, as hot water does lobsters;
Why this? Yes, the whole aesthetic problem consists of just this why - why
not? If the question is answered, the enchantment is lifted, the unknown
has become known, but the incomprehensible is often just dissolved by
this intervention in an even greater sum of unknowns.
This is the essence of aesthetics. Is it of value but at the same time
valueless, is there something harmonious in the paradoxical, something
obvious in the unknown, in the insecurity and dissatisfaction? If one ac-
cepts that this is the case, then one accepts the obviousness and meaning
of aesthetics, the actuality of the illusion. The need to separate illusion
from reality results in concepts of god, but the need to make illusion reality
and reshape reality according to our illusions is aesthetic activity or what
'one calls the fine arts. The metaphysicians seek what is in this world, but
not of this world. The aestheticians seek the precise opposite, what is of
this world but not in it.
The legality of the illegal
"To do a great right, do a little wrong!"
Shakespeare
Aestheties is the ceaseless hunt of the universe, nature and humanity to
prove that nothing supernatural exists, for the truth of aesthetics is namely
nothing other than the naturalness of the unnatural, the humanity of the
inhuman, the health of the anomalous and sick, the clarity of the dark-
ness, the good fortune of misfortune, the competence and power of the
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incompetent and powerless, the significance of the insignificant, the track
of the trackless, the reality of the unreal, the rightness and the truth of the
intolerable, of dislike, nastiness, faithlessness, lack of respect, disobedience,
injustice, recklessness, cynicism, distrust, insincerity, falseness, immoral-
ity, irresponsibility, crime and lawlessness, the order and utility of the ca-
pricious, the ephemeral, the terrible, the awful, the doubtful, the uneven, the
unusual and misplaced as well as the unusable, useless, inept, disordered
and impractical, in short, all that is not interesting except in its immediate
effect, the new, the radical, the original and experimental, the fertility of
the earthquake.
Aesthetics as repellent abnormality
"When the Indian teaching about evil perceives God as just as much
the source of evil as of good, thus in a way placing the Devil in the
Trinity, is this not Hegelianism?"
Soren Kierkegaard
The pleasure of distaste
This and nothing else is the immediate effect of the unknown in the known,
the primary or extreme aesthetic effect, pure aesthetics. It is neither beau-
tiful nor pleasant, but it is the raw material from which the beautiful is
born, and, what is more, from which life itself is created.
You will perhaps say it is impossible for the repellent to be the precon-
dition for the attractive, but let us just push these phenomena into the
distance a little, into the future of the past, in the example of memory, so
that we can more easily see their attractive sides. How truly exciting and
unforgettable, wonderful were those catastrophic events we experienced at
that time, even though they were shocking, astonishing, terrible, upsetting,
irritating, provocative, innervating and inspiring, and what a marvel it
was that they strengthened us instead of crushing us and what a miracle
that they really took place, even though we had perhaps not experienced
themselves ourselves but had read about them in the newspaper or in a
novel. It was sensational or, in short, aesthetic.
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Although we have thus pulled back from the phenomenon in order to
perceive its meaning, we can nevertheless ascertain that this is the point
that cannot be excluded - whether aesthetics should be made into a vital
and independent function: the procurement of the unknown.
Dysmorphism and abnormality
"All sins are no more complicated than that they all would get their
deathblow if one eradicated breach of confidence.
Nis Petersen
On the occasion of the breakthrough of Expressionism in Denmark, a
certain Professor Salomonsen undertook a very notorious and ridiculed
analysis of this new aesthetic phenomenon and came to the conclusion
that it was a sort of "dysformism' or an ugliness-seeking epidemic, like the
medieval self-tormentors, flagellants and other sick phenomena. So the
man was quite right, but he just did not understand that the ugly is not
ugly in itself, but is perceived so only because it is incomprehensible and
unknown and therefore meaningless, and that therefore any renewal at
once appears ugly, because the ugly is nothing other than the abnormal,
and the ugliness grows with the size of the abnormality. Only in the instant
the meaningless has been comprehended, possessed, owned or under-
stood, does it become beautiful.
Thus there is no way around it. If aesthetics is to have a meaning, it
must be as the meaninglessness of existence, and if it is not to have mean-
ing, then it thus becomes meaningless anyway.
Aesthetics as curiosity and wonder
"Zum Erstaunen bin ich da."
Goethe
Asger Jorn Luck and Chance Dagger and Guitar
37
The interest of the new
When something is neither lovely, good nor logical, but nevertheless at-
tracts us, then this interest can only be explained as purely immediate
interest, curiosity, wonder or astonishment. Curiosity is thus nature's
primary aesthetic factor.
'The objects we meet for the first time immediately exercise a mental
impression upon us; says the Russian painter Kandinsky, and in our need
to collect rarities and rare experiences or strange and sensational articles,
curiosities, we have the starting point of our aesthetic activity. This capac-
ity and need is not associated only with humanity, even birds and insects
can demonstrably develop such an aesthetic activity by the collection of
strange stones, shells, pieces of metal ete. That even fish are immensely
curious is known by everyone.
According to these observations, the capacity for wonderment is thus
the basic element of aesthetic activity. No one shows wonder at the nor-
mal. But where does the abnormal come from? We are not the first who
have banged our heads against this problem. However, we feel that it arises
from within, as a part of the life process.
The need for the new and the desire for adventure
"Foreign food and forbidden fruit taste best:
That certain reactions are normal or known is to say that they have direct
preconceptions or demonstrable grounds. Where these are lacking, we are
before unknown products of the known. As we do not reckon with actual
unknown powers, we must perceive these activities as their own object, a
selt-contradictory capacity in matter, as a sort of osmotic pressure in the
spheres of interest, as innervating factors of tension, acting as an attrac-
tion towards the unknown. One could call this need for the expansion of
capacity for development the healthy sickness. Rationalists call it, char-
acteristically enough, 'horror vacui, or fear of emptiness. The opposite
description deciderium ad vacuum, longing for the unknown, the curiosity
or aesthetic capacity of matter must be more correct.
38
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
Aesthetics as tension, surprise or shock
"The higher a species is
the more uselessly it behaves.
Hens do not write aphorisms."
Nis Petersen
New and useful
The capacity for wonderment is thus a primary characteristic of the in-
dividual's or species's stage of evolution. The human being is the most
curious, whimsical and changeable being in nature. This is the reason for
our power.
In his history of Denmark, Professor Arup stresses that tattooing and
the use of strange attachments are phenomena just as old as protective
hide clothing. We venture to assert that they are older and that even hide
clothing was originally only used to appear sensational. An old, emaciated
and frozen shaman one day just discovered that it was warmer to keep the
bearskin on all the time. We believe that any new development begins as
something meaningless and worthless, from which the ability to create val-
wes is conditioned by the ability to occupy oneself with the valueless, and
that this law is not just valid in the world of art but also in the biological
sphere, and even overall, because nothing new can immediately be correct.
But can we consequently make curiosity and the capacity for wonder-
ment into the elemental phenomenon of aesthetics without further ado? It
has to be said that it was not us who discovered this placing. Throughout
the centuries and right up to Surrealism, surprise or shock has been per-
ceived as a basic factor in the sphere of aesthetic experience.
Surprise and wonderment
"For him beauty was always the hidden."
G. Brandes on M. Goldschmidt
Writing of unreasonable, pre-logical or irrational actuality, that border
phenomenon between the existing and non-existent, Descartes says
Asger Jorn Luck and Chance Dagger and Guitar
39
(although he exchanges pure wonderment with its sympathetic offshoot
admiration) that 'admiration (wonderment), that is to say first and fore-
most surprise, is the only thing that does not rest upon an organie process,
but exclusively on the state of the brain.'
That his latter statement about the activity of the brain alone is dis-
proved by the fact that we are able to evoke the shock of surprise by purely
physical means (with insulin shock, etc.), and that we have recognized the
organic character of the brain and nervous system changes nothing in the
condition we have here, which is the essence of surprise itself: the break
with the organic, that is, the anti-organic effect in matter.
Aesthetics as opportunity or possibility
"Writing forewords is like remarking that one is in the process of
falling in love. The soul searches restlessly. The puzzle is given
up. Every event is a hint of explanation. Writing a foreword is like
bending a branch to the side in the jasmine cabin and seeing her
sitting there secretly: my love.
- and how is he who writes this? he goes amongst people like a dupe
in winter and a fool in summer, he is hello and goodbye in the same
person, always happy and carefree, pleased with himself, a feckless
gadabout, yes, an immoral person.
Soren Kierkegaard
Luck in misfortune
Here we are at the very core of extreme aesthetics, its lack of precondi-
tons, its groundlessness, its non-dialectical curtness towards nothingness,
to what it is directed towards and seeks to overcome. This position as the
negation of nothingness abolishes the normal dialectic of thesis, antithesis
and synthesis. It is the thesis that seeks the unknown antithesis, and the
ganne is a merciless either - or, luck or misfortune, renewal or an nihilation,
and we cannot therefore call aesthete reactions true causal reactions, as
we reject all theories of divine guidance, being forced to perceive them as
40
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
secretions, provocations, reactions of opportunity or possibility, as this is
their immediate aspect, and this is precisely what we are trying to bring
out.
The paradox of aesthetic science
"There are some truths, at least, of a particular modesty and tick-
lishness of which one does not come into possession if not suddenly
- that one must surprise or abandon."
Fr. Niet&sche
But how can one make science in this way? Let us explain our position.
The disinterested research which is the mechanism of science is a result of
human interest in its purest form, interest in being interested. We want to
maintain this state, even though the result of the research influences our
other interests and develops and renews them.
However self-contradictory this may seem, we could thus well interest
ourselves in something that for us does not exist, in the unknown, but the
real paradox lies in our interest consisting of wanting to know the un-
Inoren. When we have achieved this, the object of our research dissolves in
our hands. This is what makes the establishment of the science of aesthetic
experience so enormously difficult. Acquaintanceship or experience hills
and dissolves the unknown, the aesthetic object. From being interesting it
becomes unimportant. But this is an inner subjective process. Therefore if
we are to work on the problem, we must find a method to keep the interest
awake, to preserve our wonderment. However, as scientific truth is pre-
cisely the opposite of this, we can only approach it in short lightning visits
that leave as few traces as possible, in order to keep the ability for experi-
ence awake and vitality intact in us. Life cannot be studied in a cadaver,
nor experience in knowledge, nor fire in ashes.
Asger Jorn Luck and Chance Dagger and Guitar
41
Aesthetics as fanaticism and intolerance
"It is strange that people are so angry with the Jesuits. In a certain
sense, everyone who is enthusiastic about an idea and wishes only
its realization is to that extent a Jesuit."
Soren Kierkegaard
Self-forgetfulness versus memory
Burnt children fear the fire, they say, but this is not so for foolish or forget-
ful children, for what is forgotten is also new. One must thus have a short
memory to continue to be a good aesthetician, whilst one must have a long
and good memory to be a significant scientist, as science is nothing other
than experience, recollection or memory.
Aesthetic understanding is the completely intolerant will or control, the
absolute talent. Scientific understanding is complete tolerance, disinterest-
edness, the all-forgiving lack of talent.
To contain enough of both these characteristics to establish an aesthetic
science has not hitherto been vouchsafed anyone, and we would not assert
that we have it. We would just like to point out that in any such expla-
nation one has to evaluate whether the passion of the idea is sound and
well, and that the necessary experience for this is not achieved through the
experience of the art of others and imagined experiences, but only through
an intense and conscious experience of the aesthetic and artistic process
during its creation, during the transformation of matter to a sphere of
interest or art. An aesthetic science must not only be true, it must also be
interesting, not just useless ashes but firewood or artistic proficiency.
The need for non-critical experience
"Experience is the best teacher."
Don't talk, artist - create!' they say, and even if it is from time to time
necessary to open one's mouth to correct certain misunderstandings, there
is something right about this. If only one could then get the artist, and
incidentally also the viewer, to stop listening to what people who don't
understand art say about it.
Asger Jorn Luck and Chance Dagger and Guitar
41
Aesthetics as fanaticism and intolerance
"It is strange that people are so angry with the Jesuits. In a certain
sense, everyone who is enthusiastic about an idea and wishes only
its realization is to that extent a Jesuit."
Soren Kierkegaard
Self-forgetfulness versus memory
Burnt children fear the fire, they say, but this is not so for foolish or forget-
ful children, for what is forgotten is also new. One must thus have a short
memory to continue to be a good aesthetician, whilst one must have a long
and good memory to be a significant scientist, as science is nothing other
than experience, recollection or memory.
Aesthetic understanding is the completely intolerant will or control, the
absolute talent. Scientific understanding is complete tolerance, disinterest-
edness, the all-forgiving lack of talent.
To contain enough of both these characteristics to establish an aesthetic
science has not hitherto been vouchsafed anyone, and we would not assert
that we have it. We would just like to point out that in any such expla-
nation one has to evaluate whether the passion of the idea is sound and
well, and that the necessary experience for this is not achieved through the
experience of the art of others and imagined experiences, but only through
an intense and conscious experience of the aesthetic and artistic process
during its creation, during the transformation of matter to a sphere of
interest or art. An aesthetic science must not only be true, it must also be
interesting, not just useless ashes but firewood or artistic proficiency.
The need for non-critical experience
"Experience is the best teacher."
Don't talk, artist - create!' they say, and even if it is from time to time
necessary to open one's mouth to correct certain misunderstandings, there
is something right about this. If only one could then get the artist, and
incidentally also the viewer, to stop listening to what people who don't
understand art say about it.
42
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
He who will not listen, has to feel; is another saying, and as feeling is
aesthetics precisely, this explains something fundamental: that the aesthe
tician will not be content with secondhand experiences, but will get into the
hard school of the facts themselves. It is the task of aesthetics to confront
people constantly with themselves and their own experiences, to get them
to feel and believe more in their own feelings and sensations than in the
words of others. This Doubting Thomas attitude is neither an expression
of lack of faith nor sepsis, but, on the contrary, of an expression of a need
for experience without criticism that will realize the idea, the fantasy, the
performance and the word in sensory perception. When the aesthetician
reads a sign The ice is unsafe;, then for him this is not just an invitation
to see whether the sign is true, but also to see how unsafe ice feels. This is
the precondition of aesthetics, development and progress: that one gets on
thin ice.
Aesthetics as surplus of power or luxury
"The superfluous, a very necessary thing."
Voltaire
The aggressivity of the desire for experience
Children and naive, forgetful and inexperienced people have their el-
mental aesthetic areas intact. They marvel easily and are without routine
because of their ignorance. Consequently there is something childish in
preserving one's aesthetic need: one's capacity for wonderment, the long-
ing for the new, for possibilities, for following one's impulses, whims, eater-
nal causes and preambles, the invitations, temptations and provocations
of others, the predilection for openings, introductions, beginnings and
sketches, one's capacity for impulsive, immediate and unpremeditated ac-
tion. It is called keeping oneself young.
This initiatory capacity in children and young people with the great
possibilities for development is a natural power for growth. It is an aggres-
sion or conquest, a reaching out beyond the static ego.
Asger Jorn Luck and Chance Dagger and Guitar
43
But one must not forget that children, idiots and naive people are also
more limited and bigoted than experienced and developed people, because
all organisms seek stability, limitation or morals. They therefore have to
smash and destroy in order to develop, and as they neither understand nor
know nor recognize anything other than their own world, they perceive
many of the actions of developed people as meaningless, incomprehen-
sible and unnecessary occupations, as games or secret black magic and
wizardry, and will behave accordingly.
If one has absorbed or rejected all the normal skills and knowledge, but
has nevertheless preserved one's
childishness' or need for wonderment,
then one will be drawn towards the unknown in human society and be-
come a conqueror, adventurer or researcher in the fabrications of the life
of the imagination, the inventions of art life and the discoveries of science,
if one does not simply become an oppressor or exploiter of other people.
Held & hasard. Dolk & guitar [1952] (Copenhagen: Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende
Vandalisme & Borgen, 1963), pp. 17-30 & 33-52.
Translated by Peter Shield.
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de Jong—critique of detournement
kac attac
Wed, Sep 13, 6:53 PM
to Stefan
CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICAL
PRACTICE OF DETOURNEMENT
Jacqueline de Jong
1
After the exclusion of the German art group SPUR from the Internationale
Situationniste, Jorgen Nash and I decided that the way this exclusion had
taken place called for protest on our part. The reaction to this protest (this
protest was made in Paris on 13th February 1962 and published in Sweden
some time later and was sent to the people concerned) in the No.7 issue of
the Internationale Situationniste postulates some deeper going problems.
Thus I will try to make clear what actually happened on the 10th February
1962.
2
The SPUR Group (Gruppe SPUR) had indeed got themselves involved in
activities which were unacceptable to us (the I.S.) and they had made their
position even worse by publishing a seventh issue of their journal without
informing Attila Kotanyi and myself; a decision made by the I.S. congress
in Göteborg (end of August 1961) had chosen us to collaborate in the ed-
iting of the future SPUR journal issues, to establish in this way a closer
I.S.-SPUR connection. The SPUR issue No.7 had been made in Italy. In
this issue, the Gruppe SPUR turned over to an economic and practical col-
laboration with people who are officially declared anti-Situationist. This
tact did not prevent SPUR from realising this issue in a way that on the
last page of the SPUR book, in which all the issues of the journal is printed
with the SPUR manifesto, the names of these very (anti-I.S.) people ap-
pear as collaborators in the journal. We asked SPUR to explain No.7 and
the last page of the book. Nevertheless they did not seem to get to the point
of giving an acceptable explanation, which put them in an extremely bad
78
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
position. Four members of the Conseil Central of the I.S: G.E. Debord,
Attila Kotanyi, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, had declared at the begin-
ning of this meeting that as far as they were concerned the case was closed
and SPUR was excluded from the Internationale Situationniste because;
Spur had written a letter to Debord in which they had refused to show
the requested texts (to be given to another I.S. member). The explanation
given for the refusal given by SPUR at the CC was that the texts were at
the translator and would have been sent later on. Since none of the other
members of the I.S. present at the meeting of the CC February 1962, had
seen this letter of SPUR until that very moment we were asked by this
group of four (Lausen, Debord, Vaneigem, Kotanyi) to make up our minds
about the exclusion of SPUR, and informed about the fact that whatever
our decision would be this group of four would in no case change their
minds.
3
It is evident that with this ultimatum the possibility of any open discussion
was cut short completely and that SPUR's eventual explanations would
have in any case no value whatsoever to the decision of this group of four.
Jorgen Nash refused to decide within a such a short time as the situation
was too important and therefore the action completely without value.
Nevertheless we did instigate a discussion by trying to get the explanations
but were cut off by the demand for a immediate decision. Debord speaking
on behalf of the group of four accepted this and added that, only those who
agreed with him could come back to the meeting later on in the evening.
He further said that it would be evidence of our solidarity in the matter
of SPUR's lawsuit. Only later in the evening when we got the tract Nicht
Hinauslehnen' which had obviously been printed before the CC meeting
their game became clear to us. To us the taking of an only political ac-
tion and position in this case seemed absolutely absurd. It is a pity for this
group of four to have published in I.S. 7 at the moment that SPUR was
[next page]
Jacqueline de Jong
Critique of the Political Practice of Détournement
79
A
.. receiving summons to appear in court. ........ ET LE RESTE DU
PROCESS est a POINT MORT.
After having spoken and eaten with the SPUR group in the evening we
met the group of four again with the intention of discussing. But what we
got the moment we were seated around the meeting table was NICHIT
HINAUSLEHNEN' with Debord's remark 'of course if you had not ac-
cepted the exclusion of SPUR this printed matter would have in any case
been thrown on the table!' By coming we had accepted an exclusion of
SPUR but on another basis and not just in the moment of their lawsuit.
The discussion on that matter was closed AND THE .
5
BIG FIGHT HAD STARTED. After this evening I went home with the
most disgusting taste in my mouth. I decided to wait until the end of next
day's meeting, where, of course apart from the SPUR people we would all
meet again to talk about everything but Spur's complete misunderstanding
and contradictions within the movement itself seem to exist and therefore
the necessity of an intern dictionary had been decided. The next day a de-
cision was taken to promote clearer understanding inside the movement
and of a [indecipherable - ed.] theoretical work such as a dictionary of
situationist terms and concepts etc as there exists several misunderstand-
ings and different interpretations and explanations which make a practical
collaboration inside the I.S. quite difficult. No word about SPUR anymore.
The meeting was soon finished. We left and Nash and I decided to meet
again in the evening. After a long discussion we (Nash and I) decided
to make our own protest in the form in which is done (here present) - a
method having been presided by Guy Debord's fractionnary print: Nicht
hinauslehnen'. Nash left for Sweden. I stayed in Paris. Nothing was seen or
heard from the group of four until issue No. 7 of the I.S. journal came out
with its significant content. In the above-quoted text of IS. 7 it is written
that on the 15th March Nash and Elde pronounced themselves suddenly
against the Internationale Situationniste. The expression of suddenness
of a date (15th March) is rather strange when the published protest is not
80
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
at all against the Internationale Situationniste but against the action of
four members of the I,S. who seem to think that their fraction includes
a totality of the I.S. with all its implied limitations. I am only to take this
insult which they make by writing that we pronounced ourselves against
the IS. as seeming to be one of those misunderstandings or even contra-
dictions as during the last CC it was a clear fact that the terms and theories
of the I.S, were not understood by everyone in an absolutely similar way
and that even complete misunderstanding and contradictions within the
movement itself seemed to exist and therefore the necessity for an internal
dictionary had been decided on.
6
Misunderstandings and contradictions are not only of great value but
in fact the basis of all art and creation, if not the source of all activity in
general. The entire institution of society is built upon these facts. And it is
only in political activity that they are considered to be: A) the basis of all
politics B) the means to be used in politics C) the danger to be avoided and
denied. IN FACT REAL politics consists of all three points simultaneously
and interplays with the last two points (B+C) as best seems fit. And that is
exactly where we are today in the I.S. In our protest we do not attack the
movement and its theory and action. We do indeed not even attack one
single point of the I.S. All we protest against is the organisation which four
members of the I.S. have tried to establish into what we have always and
will always consider as Situationist, the movement of the I.S.
7
And where in the Situationist movement does a practical and theoretical
limitation up to that point exist? Why is a protest against a non-accepted
political action of four members an accusation against the entire I.S.
movement? What the hell is left of the I.S. as a movement if the establish-
ment of an organisation comes to that point where open protest against
this establishment seems to be considered as against the movement? I
don't believe that these purely political activities which have been made
will ever be able to détourn what is and will always be the I.S., even with
Jacqueline de Jong Critique of the Political Practice of Détournement
81
the détournement of its own texts it will always have its misunderstand-
ings and contradictions and it will always need them apart from the four
politicians), not for the organisation but for its development. All right; but
what if their decision is fixed, these four members have by an exclusion
of other members shown that their action was completely political and
absolutist (absolutist, absolutist, absolutist). Does any theory, idea or ac-
tion of the movement depend on them, these four members of the same
movement?
8
And neither do I believe that I could attack the theories or actions which
I have always considered as Situationist and of which movement I have
chosen to be a member. Only the false use of this movement should be
attacked. If the four are right, that our protest is an attack against the
Situationist movement and against them and their personal activities
then it will mean that ONLY they and what is theirs is Situationist. In that
case I must admit that my opinion on the Internationale Situationniste
is, was, and will always be wrong. I refuse to undertake a suicide in this
way, as others would have to do the same along with me. As the mention-
ing of the third signature, which happens to be miné, seems to have been
neglected because of the fact that there is perhaps a misunderstanding
(already shown during the CC) about my position I will try to explain. You
say in your text, Guy Debord, that the entire I.S. (consisting as it seems
of you and the other three signatories of the Nicht Hinauslehnen' and
the Danish voice J.V. Martin) is false, that I, as the only Dutch member
of the IS. was chosen as the representative (of Holland) of the CC. But
when we made the list of the members of the CC for our protest we had
to control by asking the excluded SPUR, as you neglected in Goteborg
to make a protocol written and signed by all of us with every decision.
Nash, Kunzelmann, Zimmer, Prem, Sturm + Strid being in Paris for the
CC declared that in fact I had been chosen as Dutch member of the CC at
the congress in Goteborg, where they were present. And Elde signing the
protest statement later on in Sweden, agreed with this. In the issue No. 7
(1.5.) my name as member of the CC does not appear. Bad memory and the
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
82
neglect by all present members of the I.S. of a signed protocol means that
there are now two different opinions of the then not yet excluded members
of the IS. present at the congress in Goteborg. Nowhere in our protest is it
written that the Scandinavian Section will be transformed into a Bauhaus.
Thank you for informing us about this, Guy Debord. I actually thought
this had been talked over to a decisive point before the Conseil Central.
Where in our text is it written that you tried to intimidate us (the minority)
with an atmosphere of civil war, which has ruled since two days (helas)
in Paris? Paris happened to be in an extremely bad situation (10-12 Feb
1962) and to foreigners coming from perhaps too calm countries even if
they are Situationists this makes an impression which is undeniable. To
mention that in an introduction in the protest does not mean to be intimi-
dated, as you see.
9
I regret to have to admit that here it becomes clear why our collaboration
in MUTANT seemed difficult, Guy Debord; when you open up the New
York Herald Tribune of the 30th December 1961 you will not find the pub-
lication of the open letter to President Kennedy and Governor Rockefeller,
written by the members of the academic staff of University Colleges and
Research Institutes in the New York City and the Cambridge-Boston area
after which we made MUTANT as you indicate in I.S. no. 7 but in the New
York Times (international edition of 30 Dec. 1961). For an ultimatum is
made by a fraction towards another part of this same movement (see last
page). What is wrong is the fear of facing the reaction after the offence
made by an ultimatum, that then appears and exists between the 'ultima-
tors' towards the others. On the base of this fear, a cold war and a thermo-
nuclear agitation are made by what are the 'ultimators' or provocateurs.
As long as neither the 'provocateurs' or 'ultimators' get a protest from the
others, this game goes on. When there are several provocateurs they all
try to be the strongest, and then it becomes an economic, social, ete. ques-
tion. There have to be found new ways out to détourn the problems (from
A-Bomb to shelter, etc.). And this goes on until the disaster OR until a
protest of the non-provoking but provoked lot. As long as Europe prefers
Jacqueline de Jong
Critique of the Political Practice of Détournement
83
to be provoked in this way in the hope to one day become strong enough
to be provocator itself, it's quiet. But if Europe will start protesting against
ridiculous provocation - and it might be that not all of Europe will do so,
but only a part, because of a certain tradition in which one part has always
shown a desire for clarification of necessary facts AND another part has al-
ways had an extreme capacity and desire to détourn facts. WHAT THEN?
10
What has happened here has an extreme importance because this sort of
game is very close to another game which has to be considered as quite
dangerous for Europe. Why do we protest and why do we want to clarify a
situation which appears to us as wrong and damned unclear? Why do you
protest against our desire to clarify things? You détourn our protest very
smartly into a false one. Well done! But had you printed our protest in the
IS. issue 7 your détournement would have been completely unnecessary
(and obviously ridiculous) as far as facts go. I'm absolutely not interested
in facts, but when I see that there is a point where they are necessary, I
use them. And you prefer to détourn them rather than use them. This is of
course a fantastically good tactic up to a certain point. And that is where we
are now. When détournements come to this point inside an organisation or
movement, they are not called détournement anymore, but SABOTAGE.
It is not possible to be together in a movement if the distrust or disinterest
is so great that a discussion on a subject does not even seem to be needed.
The Anti-Nash fight which you have started, has not so very much to do
with what has to be considered as the Internationale Situationniste move-
ment. The fight which has started with your fractionist exclusion of SPUR
and our protest against what we considered as being an un-Situationist
action has only started. It will go on. This means that all the I.S. evidently
knows the existence of a Dutch member of the CC is false. Only all the
members of the I.S. still left seem to know that.
11
I'm proud that you call us gangsters, nevertheless you are wrong. We
are worse; we are Situationists. The continual process of inclusions and
84
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
exclusion of the I.S. have after the last events come to the point where
the IS. has to be considered either as an avant-garde school which has al-
ready produced a series of first-class artists thrown out after having passed
through their education OR as an anti-organisation based upon a new ide-
ology which is Situationist and which has not yet found in details its clear
formulations in the fields of science, technique and art. The Situationistic
notion cannot be on art, it is an ideological and elaborative development.
Everybody who develops theoretically or practically this new unity is
automatically a member of the Situationist International and, from this
perspective, The Situationist Times is made. The IS. is a movement de-
clared publicly as an anti-organisation. The reason why Debord wanted
the exclusion of the Gruppe SPUR was a pure question of discipline in an
organisation which has absolutely no rules.
[The text was originally presented as a handwritten graphic text in The
Situationist Times where the sentences flow into and out of spirals, are
written as clumps and show no clear continuation from one page to the
next. Its very graphic, labyrinthine form makes the text take on the ap-
pearance of an improvisatory outburst and we have tried to maintain
an element of this by only slightly editing the language or the sentence
structure.]
"Critic on the Political Practice of Détournement", The Situationist Times, no. 1, 1962.
Transcribed by Howard Slater.
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Situcratic + co-ritus
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to Stefan
89
THE STRUGGLE OF THE
SITUCRATIC SOCIETY:
A SITUATIONIST MANIFESTO
Modern industrial society has so far been organised along classical lines
as developed in Greece and Rome. During the industrial period following
the French Revolution there have been cycles in which all the different
forms of such a method of government have been explored. This has been
a valuable experience. It has shown that the enlightened autocracy of Plato
and the more or less aristocratic military dictatorship which replaced the
legal government as well as the various forms of democracy (including the
latest edition, the so-called people's democracy) - that none of these have
been capable of creating a form of government to meet and satisfy human
needs, much less to allow life to flourish and prosper.
The new phenomena which dominated industrial society from the
beginning, despite some pioneer romanticism, is the growing socialisation
of all the means of life which is itself the ineluctable consequence of ma-
chine techniques. By socialism we understand the inclusive principle which
makes society the centre, meaning and purpose of all human activity. It is
all the same whether one takes this evolution to mean progress or whether
one interprets it as a growing threat to human freedom. Both attitudes
amount to the same thing. Socialisation will spread in one way or another.
Man can only dominate his future environment if we face this fact. We
must use this knowledge to evolve the means of liberation. In order to win,
it is essential for us to extricate ourselves from the principle of fatalistic
necessity and to regain a new potential of choice and self-determination.
The social structure which fulfills the conditions for freedom is
what we have termed the situcratic order. The point of departure is the
de-christianisation of Kierkegaard's philosophy of situations. This must
90
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
be combined with British economic doctrine, German dialectics and
French social action programmes. It involves a profound revision of
Marxist doctrine and a complete revolution whose growth is rooted in the
Scandinavian concept of culture.
This new ideology and philosophical theory we have called situology.
It is based on the principle of social democracy inasmuch as it excludes all
artificial forms of privilege. It is the only existing guarantee which ensures
that human life can develop in all its cultural variety and without crushing
the special abilities of the individual in an anonymous society designed
for the unfit. Sartre says that we should always ask what would happen if
everyone acted like me. Our answer is that we should all die of boredom.
We want to make it possible for man to be able to gamble his life. This can
only happen if everyone is allowed to have indvidual freedom of action.
The first Situationist International was founded in Paris in 1957. Its
function was to formulate and develop Situology. During the last five years
some serious differences of opinion have arisen. These have led to the pro-
gressive exclusion of many Situationist comrades in Great Britain, Italy,
Holland, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.
Needless to say this continual up and down has imperilled the movement.
It looks like it might be becoming an international training college for
avant-gardists, a sort of finishing school for serious artists. It was not for
this that the Situationist movement was founded. All the various tensions
came to a head in Paris on February 10th 1962. At that council meeting the
Parisians excluded the German Situationists of Gruppe SPUR (Munich).
They did this at the very moment when the group was being tried by neo-
Nazi authorities in West Germany: charged with producing degenerate art
(entartete kunst). It is with great regret that we have to place it on record
that the Paris declaration came as a stab in the back to our comrades;
it was used by the German authorities as a weapon to discredit Gruppe
SPUR in court. Only after the verdict had been announced did Paris sud-
denly declare its solidarity with the German Situationists. A meaningless
gesture rather late in the day.
This sort of vacillation shows that the Situationists' action pro-
gramme - at the intellectual level - is suffering from a cancer. The root of
The Struggle of the Situcratic Society: A Situationist Manifesto
91
this cancer lies in the adherence to old-fashioned, classical and ultra-rigid
patterns of organisation.
To avoid the disruptive consequences of this disease, the Dutch rep-
resentative Jaqueline de Jong proposed in The Situationist Times to go
ahead with the Situationist programme of anti-organisation by dissolving
the central organisation. Now anyone is free to become a Situationist with-
out the need for special formalities. It is up to the individual to fulfill the
Situationist ideology in the best way that seems fit. This does away with all
problems of inclusion and exclusion.
The Franco-Belgian group of Situationists answered the above
proposal with a categorical No. Articles published in Internationale
Situationniste and the Copenhagen journal Information declared that
the Scandinavian group of Situationists around Drakabygget (Secretary:
Jorgen Nash) had been excluded from the Situationist International. They
also saw fit to level a stream of querulous accusations against us which
we reject out of hand. Whatever happens we shall adhere to our role in
the Situationist revolution. We shall continue to do our duty. Here and
now this document is our witness: we proclaim the foundation of the
2nd Situationist International. We look upon this action in the light of
historical necessity. The action has been forced upon us. At the same time
we trust that the split will only be temporary. We foresee that our own
Situationist evolution and that which has its roots in Paris will be followed
by an East European Situationist Movement. The three groups each evolv-
ing from its own set of problems and attitudes shall one day unite into a
Situationist International.
For the sake of Europe it is very important that genuine differences
and variants should not be suppressed. On the contrary these characteris-
tie differences have a vital part to play in the development of a Situcratic
community.
Oddly enough Situcratic history has followed the same trend as the
Communist International during the last century. The latter separated into
the 2nd Social Democratic and later into the Communist International.
With us the process has been speedier. Our experience throws new light
on the way in which socialist splinter movements come about. The process
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COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
cannot be explained merely in terms of internal self-criticism as has usu-
ally been done in the past when people have looked for an explanation for
changes in social structure. Yet there is clearly a parallel between the two
movements.
Niels Bohr's complementary theory is based on the observation that
one cannot give a simultaneous description of position and movement.
This is more than a purely abstract scientific observation. Indeed some-
thing of the same incompatability between position and movement under-
lies Bohr's own scientific methods and procedures. Let us for the moment
disregard the overtones of recrimination and abuse in our present contro-
very. Let us assume that the Scandinavian and French programmes are
both equally well-meaning, intelligent and correct. We shall then find that
there is a fundamental difference of assumption between us. If we discard
all prejudice we shall see that the problem, as seen by Guy Debord from a
Paris point of view, is purely a matter of position. This same applies to this
analysis of situation. The Scandinavian outlook is completely different. It
is based on movement and mobility. Once we understand this difference
the split between the two groups seems natural and inevitable. We must
agree to differ in order to let the two opposing tendencies work out their
own salvation. Any attempt to force them both into the same mould will
lead to frustration and further conflict. Therefore the creation of a 2nd
Situationist International is not a matter of progress or regression. It is the
natural result of Situationist dichotomy which operates from two funda-
mentally different assumptions and programmes.
We want to steer clear of Parisian problems of position at least
until such time as these problems have been clarified to the point where
they become amenable to systematic and rational discussion. Positional
Situationism starts out by making projects. This is a typically Latin pattern
whereas Scandinavian Social Democracy is called reformative because
its plans arise out of the situation itself. This method seems to be quite
alien to the French way of thinking at the present time and they therefore
regard it as taboo. These differences automatically preclude any form of
close Franco-Nordic co-operation. In this argument neither side can claim
to have a monopoly of the right ideas.
The Struggle of the Situcratic Society: A Situationist Manifesto
93
Greco-Roman thinking is rooted in political and social theory. It is
opposed to our own way of thinking because we believe that man as a hu-
man being and individual stands at the centre of all worthwhile activity.
Sartre's scholasticism has been called humanistic but in fact this
human being is a socio-centric creature. The Franco-Belgian Situationists
base themselves on the same principles as Pascal, Descartes, Grace and
Gide. Action precedes emotion. Emotion is a primary, non-reflective intel-
ligence: passionate thought/thinking passion. We are not saying that the
French method is wrong or that it cannot be used successfully. We merely
say that our two outlooks are incompatible, but they can be made to sup-
plement one another. Lastly this: Scandinavian politicians who chose to
ignore these fundamental differences will do so at their own peril. They
will get an unpleasant surprise at the Nordic emotional reaction.
The 2nd Situationist International is a freely organised movement. It
is a voluntary association of autonomous work groups, whose programme
as agreed in Stockholm is briefly as follows:
A.
Freedom for science and intellectual life. Scientific knowledge shall
be pooled. The achievements of science belong to society as a whole. A
world organisation must be set up to ensure that scientific discoveries are
made to benefit all mankind. Scientific inventions shall not be sequestered
by individual states or departments of state. Science shall not be used as an
instrument of repression or terror.
The new world organisation will resemble UNESCO, but without
being dominated by any single political power group or alliance. It shall
be based in Prague. But Czechoslovakia must be released from its satellite
attachment to the Soviet Union. This is a perfectly feasible demand.
It is inevitable that scientific knowledge and technological skills
should be unevenly distributed throughout the world. It is therefore
impossible to socialise science on a global scale. But the achievements of
science can and shall be made available to all.
B. Art shall be for the benefit of mankind. Art and culture can only
function properly when they are free from political interference. It is nec-
essary to establish autonomous centres of cultural activity and colleges for
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COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
the people. Such institutions will come under the protection of the new
UNESCO in Prague.
C.
The labour movement was once considered to be the salt of the earth.
Today it is more like a milk cow whose udders are being pumped in an ef-
fort to get more and more material benefits at the expense of the mind. All
the same our material standards have not risen to such great heights when
seen overall. We have the spectacle of society which, on the one hand, is
consumer-minded but on the other hand is controlled by shopkeepers of
every kind. They are in charge of business, politics and cultural affairs. The
Situationist movement wants to achieve freedom of the mind.
D.
We shall work towards the accomplishment of the MUTANT pro-
gramme of interplanetary economic expansion: the abolition of military
designs, the destruction of all atomic weapons. If mankind is nevertheless
doomed, we prefer that we should all perish together. We are opposed to
any plan which favours the survival of a bunker aristocracy.
Situationists and nordic rebels
We admit that Scandinavians are feeble planners and probably even
feebler at carrying out other people's plans. We do not always distinguish
between theory and practice. We intend to produce our theories after the
event. Now that we have become involved in a Situationist evolution we are
planning towards feasible objectives. The French work exactly the other
way round. They want everything straight before they start and everybody
has to line up correctly. With them it is fall in or get out. As for strategy,
they believe in frontal attacks regardless of the costs. They do not seem to
realise that by making weak frontal attacks they are playing into the hands
of the enemy and wasting their own strength. It pays the enemy to provoke
such attacks. We do not believe in this strategy.
Another important difference is this. The Scandinavians strive to-
wards reform whereas the French aim at Revolution. We build on the past
and we let new ideas grow out of past experience. This can be called an
organic principle, it can also be called ultra-conservatism.
The Struggle of the Situcratic Society: A Situationist Manifesto
95
Today terms like conservatism, progress, revolution and reaction-
ism have become meaningless. The terminology of liberalism is equally
fatuous and played out. There is no point in using phrases of this kind for
the Nordic philosophy of situations which is essentially tradition-directed
Herein lies our strength. On this we base our ideology and our working
principles. If the French Situationists cannot accept our view, they must
make their own plans and go ahead independently.
There are some people who will fail to grasp the significance of the
Situationist struggle. The head-on collision in which we are involved will
strike them as inexplicable. But we are convinced that one day this phase
will be seen as an event of primary importance for Europe: the moment
before a decisive breakthrough. To those who think that a verbal battle
is not worthwhile, we would like to say this: A word war is better than a
world war.
SIGNED:
Jorgen Nash (Denmark); Jens Jorgen Thorsen (Denmark);
Gordon Fazakerley (Great Britain); Hardy Strid (Sweden);
Staffan Larson (Sweden); Ansgar Elde (Sweden);
Jacqueline de Jong (Holland); Patrick O'Brien (Eire)
(Members of the Stockholm Conference in August 1962).
"The Struggle of the Situcratic Society: A Situationist Manifesto", The Situationist Times,
no. 2, 1962, and Drakabygget, no. 2-3, 1962.
125
CO-RITUS MANIFESTO
Jens Jorgen Thorsen, Jorgen Nash & Hardy Strid
1
The Renaissance is irrevocably over. And if we did not work on eradicating
it, one day it would eradicate itself.
2
With an enormous bang. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0...
3
In the European cultural tradition there is an insurmountable barrier be-
tween performer and audience. This barrier is blocking cultural evolution
and threatens to make all of us into twaddling fools in the supermarket
of the culture industry and victims of an anonymous repression on an
unheard-of scale.
4
We want to create new rituals. Rituals are human thinking shaped in so-
cial patterns. Every cultural pattern is a ritual.
5
'The European cultural tradition is as one-eyed as the individualised cen-
tral perspective of the Renaissance. From here there is only one position to
View things from at a time: the position of the artist or the audience. The
cultural ritual created in this way by the Renaissance made the exhibition
a confining trap, which Tinguely, Happenings, Fluxus and the Nouveau
Realists are still helplessly caught in.
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Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
6
Individualism is utopian. However, it became the defining perspective of
European culture and it produced the divide between the individual and
the group, between the ideal and the banal, between art and anti-art, be-
tween the creator and the sheep. It produced the spectator, the consumer.
It produced Communism, Cubism, Liberalism, Fascism. Now the utopian
epoch is over. No more utopias can be produced. Time has run out.
7
The perspective of the Renaissance became the leap of technology, but at
the same time it became the pretext for doing nothing in cultural life.
8
Tradition tells us that when it comes to the artist or the spectator it is sub-
lime or banal. We say: from our point of view art is happening in the space
between. In the space between people, in the space between the sublime
and the banal. It is the very functioning of art we want to change. It is here
and now it is happening.
9
We are de-christianising the idea of the Folk High School. We are de-
animising the African tradition. We are stealing and borrowing as we feel
like. We are using the heritage. Moreover, we allow ourselves to play with
it.
10
This is the first time it has been said to the audience: Come and join us.
Get down to it. Everybody has right of appeal,
Jens Jorgen Thorsen, Jergen Nash & Hardy Strid CO-RITUS Manifesto
127
11
CO-RITUs is washing art shining clean. It is the bomb under cultural life.
But we do not need to attempt assassination. Cultural life has been at a
standstill since 1850.
"CO-RITUS Manifest", leaflet written for the CO-RITUS show at Galerie Jensen, 1962.
Translated by Jakob Jakobsen.
Gmail kac attac
Jorn—The Natural Order
kac attac Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 1:53 PM
To: Stefan Kac
REREAD)
THE NATURAL ORDER
Asger Jorn
The law of contradistinction
Under the name of the Copenhagen Interpretation, Niels Bohr's theory of
complementarity has gradually attracted notice the world over and day by
day is penetrating more and more to the centre of the complex of problems
around modern thought.
This preoccupation with the theory of complementarity is so un-
avoidable not on scientific but on philosophical grounds, in as much as it
appears to be a new philosophical principle which, to put it mildly, is like
a bull in a china shop in relation to the philosophical tradition. Really it
is something far more dangerous. It is a new factor that either dissolves
the possibilities or demands completely new rules of the game, because
the theory of complementarity appears to be a law supported by scientific
experience.
The first reaction has been attempts to repudiate the scientific char-
acter and the consequent well-knit legitimacies of the hypothesis. Since
the probability of getting around the problem in this way gradually ap-
pears to have diminished, a growing mood of panic has begun to spread
in philosophical cireles, a panic already latent during the whole modern
development of science, where philosophy or the so-called humanities
have been on retreat across the board. Today philosophy has shrunk to
being the branch of scholarship about the history of philosophy. At a time
when the perception of philosophy as a creative activity is about to be
given up and where a new ahistorical form of existence is being prepared,
where humanity's historical and philosophieal periods have been brought
to a close, Bohr's theory appears to be the first sketch for a completely new
scientific philosophy, independent of everything which has hitherto been
united under the name of philosophy.
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If the foundation of science is the equation, that is, comparisons of
uniform dimensions or quantities, and thus above all a doctrine of resem-
blance, a doctrine of symmetry, then the doctrine of unity can be charac-
terized as central to philosophy, the doctrine of the unity or correlation
of things, thoughts and incidents, of their adherence to rules. One could
therefore correctly maintain that any legal conclusion is in itself unscien-
tific, and is a piece of philosophy even if it rests upon scientific analyses.
Law means correlation and what creates panic in philosophy is that
Bohr's law is the law of the lack of correlation, a law of incompatibility,
a law of separation, an anti-law law or, if you will, an anti-philosophical
principle with philosophical consequences, and thus a new unity of op-
posites, a doctrine of dissymmetry.
The philosophical consequences of the Copenhagen Interpretation
are as follows: either one must accept that it is no longer possible to estab-
lish a valid philosophy or one must accept the necessity of the simultaneous
presence of several complementary or mutually incompatible but equally
valid philosophical systems, principles or tendencies.
Only the latter conclusion gives philosophy new possibilities for
existence. However, if one wishes to go this way on the basis of Bohr's
principle, it soon becomes apparent that it leads nowhere. If one neverthe-
less wishes to go this way, then it can only happen by a critique of the
Copenhagen Interpretation, but as the foundation of this is scientific, a
purely philosophical critique can conclude nothing at all. It can only pos-
tulate certain lacks, an incompleteness, which must be logical as well as
purely experiential. Niels Bohr himself and his collaborators must either
clearly prove the incorrectness of the critique and the impossibility of
changing or extending the Interpretation in these realms of experience,
or they must also realize the possibility of such a change. The concrete
demand I pose here is colossal. It is the demand for a third interpretation
of the character of light completely independent of the wave theory as well
as the particle theory, and thus a third complementary theory of light, a
theory of the plastic form of light.
When I associate myself with the necessity of the development of
such third theory of light, I have two reasons, a logical one which rests on
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
135
the assertion that any complementary relationship must always be at least
triple and can never be established in a purely duple system. In any two
descriptions of a phenomenon, for the description to be sufficient or com-
plete a third necessary description is always ignored, which is only to say
that the three descriptions form a unit and thus become philosophically
accessible. The other reason is founded purely upon my experiences of
light and colour, acquired as a painter, even though I base my opinions on
the investigation made by the South Jutland painter Philipp Otto Runge
around 1800 and reworked by Goethe in his theory of colour.
Goethe's demonstration that there are concrete optical characteristics
in the essence of light and colour which do not form part of the descrip-
tions of light postulated up to that time (Newton) are, in my opinion, valid
to this day with regard to both the wave theory and the particle theory. I
hope to be able to demonstrate that such a concrete material exists, de-
manding its own separate description, without again committing Goethe's
error of refuting the correctness of a scientific systemization on an amateur
basis. But if a new doctrine of form which could replace the Renaissance's
descriptions of form is to have general and scientific validity, I am in agree-
ment with Goethe that it must begin with a description of the form of light.
In the following text I hope to be able to indicate this possibility without
driving up all too many of the blind alleys of the speculative method.
The Copenhagen Interpretation. The Silkeborg Interpretation
Is it by chance that Bohr's theory is called the Copenhagen Interpretation?
Is it by chance that it was postulated in Copenhagen or does it have
natural roots in the Scandinavian mentality or pattern of thought? I am
posing this quite absurd question because such a causal context will in
the future automatically form part of the reflections on the problem of
complementarity the world over simply because of the name on the la-
bel. The question is then whether one can imagine and construct such
a Scandinavian principle of unity. If one can, this means that a specific
Scandinavian philosophy exists, something no one had imagined before,
and that one can talk of Scandinavian philosophy in the same way that
one talks about Greek, German, French, English etc. philosophy. Is there
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a common denominator to, or a more profound connection between, for
example, Soren Kierkegaard' situation philosophy and Swedenborg's
fundamental principles, to take two of the North's thinkers whose teaching
has had a fundamental significance for modern culture? Is this common
denominator also valid for Tycho Brahe and can it also include Niels Bohr's
philosophical viewpoint?
It has been shown to the point of triviality how analytical mathemat-
is and geometry has its starting point in Euclid's geometry and in Greek
logic, and that all this development is a result of the mentality and life
pattern which developed in and with the Greek polis. No one disputes
the logic and the experience of this development from this particular and
clearly defined environment.
Can the same method be used for a Nordic development where the
environment is ill-defined and imprecise and the aversion to unity appears
to be inborn? To make the question concrete - is there a connection be-
tween Existentialism and Bohr' theory of complementarity? The answer
must immediately be a clear no, as every attempt to combine Bohr's thesis
with any already existent philosophical principle at all has led to a hope-
less self-contradiction.
The only logical consequence must be that an inductive method can-
not be created on the basis of the Copenhagen Interpretation, and, if this
is accepted, then the inductive method is completely bankrupt. Several
scientists have already taken the consequences of this attitude and agreed
that it is no longer possible to form a model or a picture of the modern
Weltanschawung. We do not at this moment wish to discuss the rights or
wrongs of this postulate. We only want to draw attention to a simple fact
and an unavoidable consequence in connection with this principle. From
this perception, one can no longer allow oneself to talk about an image of
the world' or about "images' on the whole, as according to this postulate
they have no scientific relevance. If one then represents this bankruptcy
as the 'new scientific image of the world', this can only be stamped as a
swindle and a deceit. One could just as well call the lack of an image an
image as call a world which no longer exists, which no longer possesses the
context that could justify the label 'world;, a world.
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
137
Every image is an illusion and thus exists in a complementary
relationship to reality. The picture and the world have always been two
complementary areas. Even a geometrical figure is an image, a picture, a
work of art, a pure illusion, and scientists can no more suspect what hu-
manity will be able to imagine in the future than can tram conductors or
customs officers. The only thing scientists can establish today is that it is
not possible to undertake a description of the most recent scientific experi-
ences upon the basis of the classical form of description or even upon the
basis of forms of description which have developed on a completely new
foundation, apparently independently of the classical form of description.
That is all.
It is here that the Copenhagen Interpretation begins by setting up an
absolutely unforgivable taboo, a completely irrational prohibition, which
Werner Heisenberg expresses in this way:
"The concepts of classical physics form the language by which we
describe the arrangements of our experiments and state the results. We
cannot and should not replace these concepts by any others… We must
keep in mind this limited range of applicability of the classical concepts
while using them, but we cannot and should not try to improve them
Only on the basis of this stupid sanctification of the classical inter-
pretation of the concepts of elementary physics and geometry does the
conclusion automatically follow that the new physics is indescribable be-
cause the descriptive form is laid down. The prohibition against meddling
with the elementary descriptive forms thus really becomes a prohibition
against making a completely new elementary basis of description, a new
pictorial form. By the maintenance of this prohibition, the Copenhagen
Interpretation blocks the way it has itself scientifically opened up.
Here we turn back to the question I asked myself at the beginning of
this section. Can an elementary philosophical basis as clear and simple as
the classical one and with its roots in Scandinavian thought processes be
tound? Is it possible, for example, to describe the relationship between the
dimensions in a quite different but just as simple way as Euclid's discursive
account? Perhaps this is an idea that only my own personal imagination
could reconcile, a vision I myself have discovered and of which only I
138 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
can enjoy the fruits. But I have much pleasure in imagining a connection
between Ole Romer's statement of the constant called the speed of light,
the characteristically right-angled clash which H.C.Orsted demonstrated
existed between electrical and magnetic poles and then Niels Bohr's
demonstration of the constant he called the quantum. What do we know
about forms today, other than that they are constants? What difference is
there between spatial statics and other forms of constants? It amuses me
to imagine a world where topology or the so-called analysis situ is united
with Kierkegaard's situation philosophy and this again with a plastic world
picture which includes and explains all the elements of nature in a unity of
time and space in unceasing transformation, where the constants are only
metamorphoses.
As I, in order to satisfy such an irrational desire for logic on the basis
of such extravagant wishes, am forced into criticizing the Copenhagen
Interpretation, I have decided that I will modestly make do with calling my
perception, which is above all a kind of corroboration of the Copenhagen
Interpretation, the Silkeborg Interpretation.
The rules of the game
Against the postulation of Bohr and Heisenberg, I set the following state-
ment of the scientist C.D. Darlington, quoted by John Dewey in his book
Reconstruction in Philosophy: 'Scientific discovery is often carelessly
looked upon as the creation of some new knowledge which can be added to
the great body of old knowledge. This is true of the strictly trivial discover-
ies. It is not true of the fundamental discoveries, such as those of the laws
of mechanics, of chemical combinations, of evolution on which scientific
advance ultimately depends. These always entail the destruction or disin-
tegration of old knowledge before the new can be created.'
Niels Bohr has done neither one thing nor the other. He has done a
third thing, created a both-and. This solution may perhaps be of interim
value because the problem is thereby pushed to one side and given time to
mature, but it can never be a definitive solution. It is nothing other than an
agreement to ignore a set of crucial problems which are gradually forcing
themselves more and more upon the attention.
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
139
Einstein based his statements upon the classical definition of the con-
cept of the experiment as an experience that could be expressed, communi-
cated and understood. Bohr's scientific experiences went against Einstein's
rational perception to the degree that Einstein felt himself forced to come
out with the purely sentimental-religious argument that God did not play
dice. However, with these new experiences the concept of play is irrevo-
cably introduced into natural science. Interestingly enough, at precisely
the same time Johan Huizinga was demonstrating on a purely humanistic
basis the fundamental significance of play to human cultural life with the
book Homo Ludens. At the turn of the century, the Norwegian-American
author Thorstein Veblen had demonstrated with great irony that play is
the foundation of every system of social hierarchy in his book The Theory
of the Leisure Class.
The consequences of the opposition between the ideas of Einstein
and Bohr will not, to my mind, be fathomed before the basic concepts of
classical physics and mathematics have been interpreted in a new way
which makes it possible either to discard them completely or to integrate
them into a new context with the world that opens up with the new
physical experiences. Incidentally, the Copenhagen Interpretation, with
its taboo, has been completely unable to stem the semantic disintegration
taking place everywhere, something which is so obvious that even an old
politician like Stalin was clear that something was wrong. The classical
world picture belongs with the classical form of language and will vanish
with it.
Thoughts, words and actions
Why do the Latin peoples think and express themselves far more rapidly
and more precisely than others, and why do Englishmen only listen to a
man who finds it difficult to express himself and whose thoughts move
forwards with a boring long-windedness? Because the Latin peoples think
exactly as they speak and because the starting point of their thoughts is
the word. From a Latin or classical perception there exist no thoughts for
which there are no words, as each thought has in a subtle way arisen as
words. The characteristic of a thought is that it can be expressed. That it
140 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
can be expressed is to say that it can be understood by others, that it is a
social reality, and, as language is an accepted fellowship, that only com-
municated thoughts exist. Only the socialized thought exists in the Latin
perception as thought, because only that thought which is expressed so
that it is understood by others exists. However, this is not a definition of
the activity of thought itself at all, but only of socialized thinking. From this
it must be logically concluded that in the classical meaning no individual
thinking exists. Therefore in the classical cultures each new word, each
new concept, is a direct attack on the social unity of society itself, based as
this is precisely upon the absolute meaning and context of concepts. This
explains why Socrates and all creative Greek philosophers were 'enemies
of society' because of their new ideas.
Any identification between thought and expression, their union in
what we call a concept, is the standardization or rationalization of thought,
the abolition of its variability as far as meaning is concerned. A concept
can only have one meaning if it is to be understood, so that it can thus
enter into intellectual communication, intellectual fellowship in dialogue.
Therefore the identification of thought with word is nothing other than
the standardization of thought, the maintenance of one uniquely permit-
ted way of thought, of a particular set of meanings. He who does not follow
these rules of the game, or at least allows it to appear that he does not, is
simply not taken into account. He does not exist. The advantage of this
systemization is that it gives a swift and very clear process of thought and
expression and that the rules of this game can be learned by anyone who
has sufficient aptitude. This is called classical education. However, it also
prevents anyone who knows the combinatory possibilities of all the ex-
pressions (which is invariably the case as, after centuries of philosophizing,
all the possibilities of the game have been revealed) having the possibility
of setting out one single original thought, one single new idea, on the basis
of the conceptual system. If one demands such a creative originality, then
one has to begin to play with the concepts themselves.
If one says to a man, you are a hero, whilst at the same time thinking
that he is a prat, then one is apparently thinking the opposite of what one
is saying. In reality, one means the opposite of what one is saying, for it is
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141
not easy to explain what one has said as anything other than the expres-
sion of a thought, which thus must have had a reason, an ulterior thought,
which is not the thought that the man is a prat, but that it is advantageous
to say something else. One can thus think one's own thoughts without
saying anything, or even whilst simultaneously saying a third thing. It
is maintained that one can only think in words, but it is difficult to say
how words and thoughts are connected. One can easily read a text aloud
without hitting upon a single thought that is expressed in the text, just as
one can act without thinking about what one is doing, or think without
putting one's thoughts into action. It is this powerful play of possibilities
which represents the individual creator and separates his being from all
others. In order to orchestrate people in a social harmony, it is necessary
to agree mutually, at least, to give up one or more of these characteristics.
The more characteristics that are given up, the more the human being's
individuality is abolished. Such a socialization of humanity produces dif-
ferent cultural types according to which individual characteristics have to
be renounced in order to have the right to be a member of the society. Seen
in this perspective, Scandinavian socialization appears to be based upon
the socialization of the thought, Latin socialization upon the socialization
of the word and that of the Slavs upon the socialization of the action. By so-
cialization should be understood that which all the members of the society
are theoretically agreed upon and perceive as common property.
The possible and the actual
One cannot answer anything that cannot be posed as a question, but it is
surprising how much one cannot express in a concrete question. All posed
questions are simply conditioned by the words we have available to form
questions: what, where, whom, how, why, when. All of these questions can
be starting points for a philosophical principle and can be interpreted in
various ways, but the question still remains the same. The starting point is
still the same. If, as far as elementary physics is concerned, one thus retains
these classical interpretations, then these concepts are not an isolated area
pempheral to the conceptual area of modern physics but its foundation.
112 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
The most hotly discussed concept today, which sooner or later wil
demand an unequivocal solution, is the interpretation of the concept of
actuality. What is the Copenhagen Interpretation of the actual? There
the actual is placed in opposition to the possible and it is stressed that the
transformation from the possible to the actual takes place with a leap.
What then is the possible according to the theory of relativity? The pos-
sible can be arranged in two opposing groups of possibilities. One is called
the past, which contains all the events we know (at least in principle) and
about which we have been able to hear (in principle). In the same way,
we postulate by the concept of 'future' all events we could influence (in
principle) and which we could attempt to change or prevent (in principle).
In classical theory one postulates the future and the past as separated by
an infinitesimally short interval of time we call now, the present, or the
instant. In the theory of relativity we have come to understand that this is
not so. Future and past are separated by an interval of time which exists,
the length of which is dependent upon the distance between the observed
phenomenon and the obseryer.
At any given point in time, the observer can find himself unable to
recognize and influence a phenomenon taking place at a distant point in
the period separating two clearly specified moments. One of these is the
moment when a light signal has to be triggered at the point of the event in
order to reach the observer at the instant of observation. The other is the
instant when a light signal sent by the observer at the instant of observa-
tion reaches the place of the event.
All events which take place between these two specific times can be
called 'simultaneous' or contemporaneous, actual or timeless. As past and
future according to the Copenhagen Interpretation are the possible, thus
the present must be the actual. Here, without knowing it, the Copenhagen
Interpretation is completely in agreement with dialectical materialism.
There is just the difference that dialectical materialism asserts that every-
thing is simultaneous or actual and that the actual is the same as the objec-
tive, whilst the objective in reality, like all experience, belongs to the past.
That the positivists identify actuality with future, and therefore have to
give the observer (the influencer) an unequivocal role in the process, is
143
another error, which Niels Bohr attempts to avoid by simply cutting out
the observer as an influencing element, to make him one with the condi-
tons of the observations, with the instrument, without however managing
to free himself from positivism.
The Marxist perception that everything is actuality was already for-
mulated by Engels in the perception that everything is process. This per-
ception was made even more precise by Lenin in his definition of matter
as that which is given to us by our senses. As we cannot sense latent energy,
only kinetic energy, this is really to say that this is a statement that all
energy is kinetic, that mass and energy are the same. In Marxist terminol-
ogy, drawing attention to the contrast between latent and kinetic energy is
called formalism, which one could well say is correct. But as an object is
just a formal thing or a form, this dialectical materialism works completely
without objects.
The misunderstanding of the Copenhagen Interpretation is to drag
around with it the classical identification of object and actuality instead
of using the two concepts as opposites and acknowledging that three and
not two complementary elements exist, namely the objective, the actual
and the subjective or, to put it another way, object, instrument and ob-
server. What in reality both dialectical materialism and the Copenhagen
Interpretation are agreed upon is that instrument and actuality are the
same. To instrumentate or to set up an experimental condition is really
nothing other than to combine a simultaneity or contemporaneity.
Not long ago, Niels Bohr warned against wanting to define more
precisely the dividing line between object and subject, as the mobility of
this dividing line appears to advance development. The instrumental and
the technical are the same and it is in reality actuality that thrusts itself
between object and subject, between past and future, between knowledge
and influence. Hegel had already observed this strange development,
which he called 'Entfremdung, and which Marxists maintain is a capitalist
fault that will vanish with the transition to socialism?
I myself am of the opinion that it is immensely important to demar-
cate the scientific from the technical and the technical from the subjective
or human, if we are not to run into the crazy catastrophe, of which this
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conscious blindness had led us to the edge. To clarify and define their
relationship to technique is the one and only responsibility scientists
have today, and this they fulfill in order not to be the ones with the prime
responsibility.
Work demands an instrument, a tool. To look demands, if not a mi-
croscope, a telescope or a set of spectacles, then at any rate a pair of eyes
to look with. But that which one has to look with, one cannot at the same
time look at. I have the impression that it is this context that Bohr calls
complementarity. Movement is the instrument with which one ascertains
positions and positions are the instrument with which one ascertains
movement. At any rate, to move or change something one must have the
Archimedean point outside of that which is to be moved.
Interest, instrument and object
The critique of the complementarity principle propounded here is a purely
artistic critique, a critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation as a work
of art. In common with dialectical materialism, this way of looking at it
situates the subjective or interest as the foundation for any observation..
Without interest, no attention. This attention can be compelled by other
interests or be a pure and voluntary personal curiosity. From this attitude
one can differentiate purely artistically between three forms of interest:
1. artistic or purely human interest,
2. technical, pragmatic, methodical or purely instrumental interest,
3. scientific or purely empirical interest in experiences.
From these three complementary forms of interest, actuality or the instru-
ment takes on three basically different meanings and purposes.
The instrument is neither object nor subject. As modern science
has had to demonstrate that the instrument influences the object under
observation, that the arrangement itself of the experiment changes the
conditions of the object, then this relationship has nothing at all to do with
subjectivity, for subjectivity is above all will and wish, and in this case one
cannot say that it is the observer's wishes which influence the object, un-
less by his interest in observing. As far as the technician is concerned, the
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145
relationship is completely the opposite. He wishes to influence the object
with his instrument, to operate, to generate a process. If the instrument
cannot influence the object, it is of no use in the technical sense, it has no
technical interest. This adversarial condition between the relationship of
the scientist and the technician to the instrument is clear and unambigu-
ous. This adversarial condition can only be clearly seen from the artist's
angle, because he is not interested in the object at all, only in the subiec-
tive and in instruments which can serve these subjective interests, which
are purely purposeless curiosity, the liberation from tedium. He wishes to
play on or with the instruments, and anything at all that he sees or senses
is therefore a possible instrument. In principle he cannot accept that the
object, 'das Ding an sich', exists at all. Instruments serve only one thing for
him, pure subjectivity or 'das Ich an sich. In the artistic sense the instru-
ment is thus a means of expanding human activity and interest.
From a technical viewpoint, the goal of instrumentalization is the
instrument itself and a development identical with a growing instrumen-
tation, the cementing of a practical causal relationship. The instrument
here is a replacement for human activity and interest, das Ding für mich.
In scientific observation, on the other hand, the instrument serves to
eliminate the influence of human interests and activities on the objective
process.
In relation to the causal world of technique or the logical object world
of science, the contrasts are so sharp that unalloyed artistic activity has to be
perceived as a purely destructive world, whilst the destructive in art has the
opposite sign. It is this that I called the aesthetic world in my book Luck and
Chance. This is the only one that gives the concept of value any meaning, a
world that is deliberately ignored or resisted by all modern philosophers,
politicians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, teachers and scientists,
and which made C.D. Darlington add to the already quoted text, We need
a Ministry of Disturbance, a regulated source of annoyance, a destroyer ot
Toutine, an underminer of complacency; or, in other words, a ministry of
aesthetic activity. The necessity of this centre for organized "ill-doing' is per-
haps above all conditioned by the destructive power of the military having
become so widespread that it must be abolished or abolish itself.
146 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
The cultivation or dissolution of personality
How is the present, the actual, to be expanded to comprise ever greater
ahistorical or eventless periods of time in a simultaneity, so that to an ever
greater extent it abolishes the meaning of time? This can happen by cou-
pling the events together into ever greater events where the whole of time
becomes literally a waiting period, 'en attendant Godot. At the same time
the event one is building up becomes more and more monstrous.
'To be educated is to be observant;, a Danish author has stressed
recently. He could have added that to educate is to shape, and society's
intellectual culture thus consists of shaping people to concentrate their
attention upon the same things.
To be an artist is to create attention. Therefore a creative artist can
only distract people from their forced attention. Only the inattentive per-
son can observe and draw attention to something new. Artistic upbring-
ing consists in uneducating the people and making them inattentive and
instead opening their eyes, ears and other senses.
An artist cannot live where he is forced to concentrate his attention
upon what any stupid idiot could hit upon, regardless of how educated
such behaviour is. He has to leave.
I hereby declare that I only acknowledge a land as my fatherland if it
consistently refuses to have anything at all to do with powers which own
atom bombs. One could call this treason. As it is so, I owe it to my father-
land that I accept being called a traitor.
For me the event itself, the situation, the living instant in immediate
contact with past and future, with what I know, is the only acceptable reality,
the artistic and the intelligent reality and the realistic and intelligent art.
In the last century, Kierkegaard complained that Christianity was
being abolished by its own spread. However, that this was at all possible
demonstrates that in Kierkegaard's perception Christianity was not an
eternal but a temporal phenomenon. If Kierkegaard identified the instant
with the eternal, the present with the divine, then Marxists can safely
maintain that socialism is the secular realization of Christianity, of the
all embracing and eternal instant, as one of my old Communist comrades
recently asserted to me, for what science is helping the technicians to
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
147
develop today, what they in fellowship call progress, is the gradual evolu-
tion of the present in time and space.
Therefore I can today indicate that it is actuality itself, human reality,
that is being abolished by the spread of industrialization. This human real-
it is no longer valid as quality but only as quantity, as amount. The mis-
take in Bohr's terminology lies to an even higher degree than the Marxists
in identifying amount with mass, quantity with quality, and calling an
amount that represents a determined unit or mass a quantum.
The profound and explosive conflict today growing within Commun-
ist and Socialist development is based upon the realizations that to an in-
creasing degree are bringing to light a problem in relation to which it has
hitherto been more or less unnecessary to take a position. However, this
development is splitting into two opposite tendencies of a completely new
character, towards either a human or an inhuman evolution. Marxism's
superiority over all earlier philosophies lies in it being the first attempt
to unite the scientific perception of truth with human ethics and norms of
action which, to use Hoffding's definition, are a perception of health. If, as
Friedell and Nietzsche, one perceives what I would call the aesthetic purely
negatively, as the negation of both truth and health, then we will see that
the modern philosophical and political struggle is to a greater and greater
degree about how far aesthetics or the perception of beauty have any right
to exist, about whether there should still be freedom for Loke as well as for
Thor.
Form and container
With the Copenhagen Interpretation's reservation of a place of honour
for classical metaphysics and logic and the apparent commencement of
à completely new construction by its side, the conflict between the new
and the old physics is avoided. It is otherwise with its relationship to
materialistic dialectics. Here it is war to the knife, even though Bohr care-
fully avoids saying anything concrete, making do with a head-shaking'not
understood'.
Dialectical materialism has been able to avoid discovering that
it has abolished the object because there matter is only perceived and
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acknowledged as substance for processes and not as forms in itself, and
thus only in its character of raw material. Hereby arises the peculiar and
absurd theory about quality's sudden change into quantity, which, de-
spite everything, is immensely effective in a purely technical sense as an
explanation.
By dividing this dialectical opposition into three complementary
forms of observation, the observation of constants or masses which we
call qualities (and not like Bohr quanta) and the observation of amounts
which we call quantities and finally the observation of changes or processes
which we call values or variations, it is possible to acknowledge dialectics
and the theory of complementarity as two of three complementary systems
of experience, an artistic, a technical and a scientific system. However, this
initially presupposes that one recognizes the limited field of dialectics and
at the same time goes in for my postulate that in every complementary
relationship there must be at least three complementary factors. Even if I
have not been able to demonstrate that this is the case in the relationship
object-instrument-subject in a sufficiently convincing way, it seems to me
that we can, at any rate, request an explanation as to why.
When, after this first superficial tour around a number of problems,
we turn back to our first problem, we can do so with a more comprehen-
sive acquaintanceship with the framework in which I have arranged the
knowledge and the elementary experiences I as an artist have had to gather
in order to come in contact with the intellectual surroundings in which I
live and which to an ever increasing degree are marked by the expressions,
language and conceptual world of scientific thought.
In his collection of articles Atomphysics and Human Knowledge,
Niels Bohr emphasizes that in the never ending striving for harmony
between content and form there is reason to remember that 'no content
can be represented without a logical framework and that any form, how-
ever useful it has hitherto been, can become too narrow to include new
experiences.'
The word form can have several different meanings. In this case
there can be no doubt that, in its adversarial relationship to the concept
of content, the word form means container. Here Bohr does not make the
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149
Marxist mistake expressed in the dogma, 'the only true form is the form
of the content, a mistake which, however, becomes true according to the
definition of truth and reality given here, and as such makes necessary a
supplementary statement that the only actual form is the opposite of the
content. When Bohr talks about framework he is talking about actual form
not true form.
The logical framework for scientific description is the forms of lan-
guage. This attitude is also expressed in historical development, as one
no longer discerns sharply between formal logic and studies of semantics
or even philosophical syntax….; says Bohr. In our discussion we will not
regard mathematics as a separate branch of knowledge but rather as a
refinement of the common language.
The harmony between container and content, between the milk bot-
tle and the milk, does not mean that the bottle is made of milk, but that
its form holds the milk in place, gathers the milk into a three-dimensional
form. Thus milk is given an actual form. If we had wished to give it a true
form, an objective form identical with the content, we could have just
quick-frozen it. But in our case the milk is framed by a container. This
could be of metal, clay, cardboard, glass etc. and thus have its own true
content of various characters. Such a container could be used not only for
milk but for an endless number of fluids and powders unless a prohibition
is made from pure convention against using the container for anything
other than one particular form of liquid by the application of a label.
The container is an instrument. So are language and the philosophi-
cal concepts described. Werner Heisenberg says, the only thing one can
say about philosophical concepts like causality, space, time etc. is that they
are indispensable instruments for present scientific research,; but to define
the limits of their spheres of usefulness is impossible.
Here Niels Bohr agrees with Heisenberg, as he says, 'The distinction
between object and subject necessary for unambiguous description is up
held by the fact that with every communication that contains a reference
to ourselves, we, so to speak, insert a new subject which does not appear as
an element of the communication's content. It hardly needs stressing that
it is precisely this freedom in the choice of the line of demarcation between
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subject and object which gives room for the phenomena of the manifold-
ness of consciousness and the possibilities of human life.'
In this form, the postulation does not separate the will of the in-
strument from human will and must invariably lead to the blind alley in
which Bohr finds himself when he says, 'The problem is how far we can
talk about freedom to act in agreement with our possibilities.' No, we have
no possibilities of action at all if they have to be identified with our instru-
ments, and at a certain point this is the demand of science and in this case
of Bohr, as he wishes all actions which cannot be described in words to be
reckoned as non-existent. In agreement with Einstein, he calls this a clear
logical demand, as the word experiment (which means attempt: A..J.) itself
refers to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what
we have learnt. This presupposes in the first place that one cannot or may
not do something that one cannot express, that one cannot or may not
attempt something that one cannot at the same time express, but it also
means that one does not have leave to express oneself artistically, for the
artistic is precisely the telling to others what one has done without thereby
having learnt anything at all or imparting any experience whatever to
others.
New consequences mean new logic
In his definition of the experiment, Bohr emphasizes that it is not a question
of specialized experiments, scientific experiments, but that the definition
should have a universal validity. As justification or reason for this demand
he produces a new demand, the demand for logic, which Heisenberg has
already described as an instrument. In reality, this demand is to the effect
that human thinking should be identical with the framework in which it
is traditionally organized, and that it is forbidden to take this apparatus
to pieces to see how it works in order to make another. However, at the
same time, this is what Bohr wants and regards as absolutely necessary
when he says, 'It is precisely this impossibility of setting, by observation,
a sharp distinction between subject and object that creates the neces-
sary latitude for the expression of will; and continues elsewhere, 'As far
as the relationship between reason [logic? A.J.] and instinct [the reflex
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151
or unconditioned action without cause? A.J.] is concerned, it is above all
decisive to understand that no human thought in the true sense is possible
without the use of a conceptual construct based upon a language which
each generation has to learn from the beginning again. This utilization of
concepts represses to a large extent not just purely instinctive life, but even
stands in a distinct complementary adversarial relationship to the display
of inherited instincts. If we look with wonder at the superiority in relation
to man with which the lowest animal can use the possibilities of nature
for the necessities and propagation of life, the most correct explanation is
often that for these animals there is no question at all of conscious thought
in our sense... The execution of such actions is only possible, when refuge
is not taken in conceptual thought.
I am of another persuasion and associate myself with those biologists
who maintain that the whole of biological development has happened
through sparks of conscious thought, and, if this is so, is identified with
intelligence and not with conceptual thinking. I assert that a concept is not
a thought but a device, an instrument for thinking, and that a complemen-
tary form of thought thus exists to the thought that constructs concepts
(philosophical thinking) as well as pure quantitative thought (scientific
thinking) or calculation, and this is subjective thought, willed thought or
wishful thinking.
There are thus two possibilities. Either such a purely wishful thinking
does not exist, or it exists, but is forbidden on scientific grounds, stamped
as abnormal, unhealthy thought.
If science has use for a philosophical apparatus in order to undertake
its experiments, then it is of course obvious that this apparatus must in
perfect condition at the moment it is to be used as an instrument. However,
if the apparatus is not good enough, and fortunately Bohr says that it may
never be good enough, then it must be improved. But this in itself says
that the scientist at the observatory cannot at the same time undertake his
observations and enlarge the telescope with which he is to see. If science
has thus use for philosophy as an instrument, it must find that which best
suits it and protest if it is not good enough. However, if the philosophers
on their part are to elaborate a set of meanings with universal validity, they
152 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
must also have standardized their building materials, words. They cannot
agree to them being pulled apart and used in a thousand ways meaningless
to philosophy. But if the language is not rich enough, then there is only one
way in which it can be enriched, through literary and poetic development,
the only thing that can enrich and refine the language in itself as language,
as expression. However, philosophy is not developed as an instrument for
science nor poetry as an instrument for philosophy.
Bohr maintains that the logical framework for scientific description
is in the forms of language and continues, This attitude is also expressed
in historical development, as one no longer discerns sharply between for-
mal logic and studies of semantics or even philosophical syntax…. In our
discussion we will not regard mathematics as a separate branch of knowl-
edge but rather as a refinement of the common language.
With this perception, Bohr has consigned the whole of language to
one large container in which can be found an orientation from the sedi-
ment of daily speech towards refined language, mathematics. This simply
means that Bohr accepts that one has use for instinct with which to make
philosophy and one also has use for philosophy with which to make sci-
ence. However, instinct must be confined and only those drops which
philosophy distils in its alembic have the right to exist, and this same
situation is necessary' as far as philosophy is concerned. Yet he does not
think that the consciousness of society functions in such a way that the
drops from the pure test-tube of science are directed straight back into
the alembies of the primitive instincts where they act as huge, heaven-sent
instruments. The facts show us that it is the instincts which have use for
scientific research and keep it going and here only he who works directly
with instincts, the artist, has positive power. No compromise is valid here.
Dialectical materialism starts from the realistic perception that it is
life that determines consciousness and not consciousness that determines
life, but forgets that life shapes consciousness by developing it in a dialecti-
cal opposition to life, in a continuous protest against the conditions of life,
and that an identification of life with consciousness is simply the death of
intelligence, is an unconscious reflex. Classical scholars perpetrated an-
other misunderstanding in perceiving life as something quite independent
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153
of practical existence. It appears to me that the theory of complementarity
could give both a more correct and more effective and, at any rate, a more
realistic picture of these conditions. However, if this is the case then we
have to avoid, for example, J.P. Jacobsen' Arabesques being perceived
either as daily speech' or as another mysterious form of mathematics.
Artistic refinement must be accepted as a spiritual development comple-
mentary to both the rationalistic development of instruments in daily life
and to scientific and logical development. Everyday art does not exist, for
art is celebration, and is so even if there is celebration every day and every
instant of that day. Art is the phenomenal itself and the phenomenal is the
unique. If the word 'phenomenon' can no longer be used in this meaning,
then art no longer exists, and neither do the sensory phenomena.
Either phenomenal or functional
Niels Bohr maintains that it is impossible to distinguish between the be-
haviour of material bodies and our observations of it. In order to find a
true parallel to this knowledge of the limited validity of the accustomed
idealizations that the atomic theory has given us, we must turn to an area
of science so far removed from physics as psychology or even to the kind of
epistemological problems already posed by thinkers like Buddha and Lao
Tze in their efforts to find an expression for the harmony in the great drama
of existence in which we are simultaneously actors and spectators. This
old situation has, however, completely changed, for a role which is neither
that of the actor nor the observer but that of the instrument is growing like
lightning. More and more, we are all becoming instruments or functionar-
is, and those groups which can really call themselves active players as well
as free spectators, whose freedom in one of these areas dominates all their
other functions, are becoming less and less in relation to the total popula-
tion. What is worse, even the concept that should cover these two groups,
that of the elite, is in reality just an expression for the most rigid and re-
sponsible and immovable of functionaries who have not the least power, for
porer is beauty, grace. In modern society this is replaced by what is called
impartiality, which is really no more than scientific control.
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Bohr's anti-artistic position can be established from the following
statement, As a more appropriate method of expression, I suggested that
the word phenomenon be exclusively used to refer to observations gained
under stated circumstances comprising an account of the whole experi-
mental arrangement.' If this concept is to replace the simple description
of sensory impressions in general and if Bohr' description is not merely
to characterize specialized scientific phenomena or more correctly scien-
tifically treated phenomena, then phenomena, the world of the senses in
itself, will no longer exist.
I would therefore suggest that this definition is changed to a phenom-
enon is a sensed or observed change. This definition allows us to establish a
new perception of the intermediate relationship, to establish the transition
between causality and non-causality, a problem that first took on universal
significance after the observations of Bohr forced science to give up the
belief in absolute relativism, absolute process or absolute actuality. This
paradox that the law of causation cannot be given general validity but at
the same time cannot be deprived of any validity is really the reason for this
new philosophical conflict, and this has also given me the opportunity to
introduce the aesthetic, defined in agreement with Baumgarten as sensed
or observed changes, as an integral part of human thought or intelligence
without doing violence to that artistic autonomy which has hitherto been
necessary to all philosophical systems.
Pawns, the other players and spectators
What Bohr has discovered, or rather the conclusion that Bohr should have
reached from his observations, is that conditions and laws are not the same
and never can be, that they are complementary opposites. Conditions are
set in advance and rules are deduced. If the rules deduced from an ex-
periment or a game are identical to those conditions set for the game, then
nothing new at all has been experienced, and if they are in harmony with
those conditions then anything novel is unimportant.
The conditions for an experiment can never be identical to the condi-
tions during the experiment and must stand in a complementary adver-
sarial relationship to them. The condition of the experiment itself is that it
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
155
can either succeed or fail. If this possibility is not present, the experiment
cannot be recognized as a true experiment, but must only be perceived as
the purely experiment-free repetition of an already undertaken experi-
ment. The experimental content of the repetition of an already undertaken
experiment has only a purely subjective significance as an experiment for
those who were not present at the time, but who have followed the instruc-
tions as to how it is to be undertaken, and are not therefore themselves ex-
perimenting. The definition of experiment laid down by Bohr and Einstein
really excludes any truly new scientific research from the area they call ex-
periments and thus does not even cover the purely scientific experiment at
all. The fact alone of having proved that an experiment can be repeated is
in itself a proof that it is no longer an experiment, and this proof is present
when all Bohr's conditions are fulfilled.
Thus, if the validity of a scientific experiment is to be recognized,
the general condition is that all the conditions which presuppose the pos-
sibility of the carrying out of the experiment are known, that the result
of the experiment itself has hitherto been unknown, and that, when they
are present, it can be repeated under the same conditions. The result of a
scientific experiment is the description of the experiment.
The separation of laws and conditions, which is the separation be-
tween idea and experience, can only happen outside the field of the experi-
ment, in the actuality where the game is under way.
Dialectics - triolectics. Dynamics and statics
What now remains is to give a presentation of the relationship between
dialectics and the complementary system. My abilities and my knowledge
only permit me to sketch the possibility of such a connection. As I have
said before, I cannot nor will not attempt to prove it.
In its perception of history, dialectical materialism has, by involving
the historical past in the present, celebrated great triumphs. No one can
deny that I am the synthesis of my mother and my father. These two per-
sons are not possibilities but necessary actualities in my existence in the
same way as my four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, sixteen
great-great-grandparents, etc. back until in the fourteenth century, when
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I have over a million necessary kin. The whole dialectical apparatus func-
tions irreproachably. However, if instead of moving into the past, I follow
the family trees of these innumerable forefathers in the direction of the fu-
ture, then the whole of the dialectical system dissolves in an impenetrable
jungle of accidents. Certainty is lost. What in one direction is determinism
is chance seen in the other.
But what if one now wishes to force this same dialectical economy to
be also valid into the future, then there is no longer anything that can be
done, neither as past nor as future, for then the future has become iden-
tical with the past and the past identical with the present. This is what
happens purely logically if the theory of dialectical materialism is followed
up in its present form. That the Soviet Socialist Republics do not do this
at all demonstrates their whole evolution and their philosophical silence.
How far this break with the principles of dialectical materialism is uncon-
scious or a hidden manoeuvre justified on its subjective basis, I will not
say. However, the result is the same. We will have to find out for ourselves.
Dialectics is based upon a conviction about the endless union of
polarizations or two-sided oppositions into syntheses, which then again
produce dualities. That there is something correct about the unity of du-
ality cannot be explained away as long as the polarity of electricity and
magnetism has not been explained away. But if this principle is transferred
to politics, and internal national polarization, right and left, is abolished,
then a country has to seek its polarization outside itself. That such a po-
larization between East and West can be of high dynamic quality for the
development of trade on both sides in a sort of naive competition or cold
war, there can be no doubt. It is like a football match where both sides are
trying to win. However, let us now imagine a whole new type of football
field, where, instead of two teams and two goals, there are three teams
in play and three goals. Now what would happen when the three teams
began to play against each other? It would swiftly be discovered that it
is impossible to control which of the two attacking enemies had scored.
It would become necessary to invert the rules so that the victory was a
negative one, so that it was the team that has defended itself best and had
let in the least goals that was the victor. The victory becomes defensive and
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not offensive. The game would of course adjust itself accordingly. It would
not be an exciting game at all. This is how a third power can neutralize a
tension between two powers. Therefore two-sided opponents are always
aggressive whilst three-sided ones are defensive. Whether this in itself de-
scribes the transition from dialectics to complementarity, I will leave un-
said. Whether a three-sided relationship is static or constant is dependent,
however, upon whether a rising tension occurs. Then this could perhaps
lead to an actual explosion, the possibilities of which are abreacted in a
two-sided relationship by the duel's incessant consumption of energy. No
political advice whatsoever lies in these observations. I am only trying to
discover what happens.
Two dialectical oppositions neutralize each other, like positive and
negative. Where there are three mutual oppositions, such a synthesis can-
not occur. Here we seem to be discovering the philosophical rule of Bohr's
complementarity theory.
But let us move to the area which has my special interest as an artist,
the character of light and colour. One can make a spherical model of every,
absolutely every, colour possibility available in Runge's colour ball, with
the spectral circle at an oblique angle on the black-white axis, and get all
the colours lying in a rectilinear relationship to the centre of this sphere, at
the same distance from the centre, to neutralize each other so that they, by
mixing together, under all circumstances return to the grey colour in the
centre. Here I ask science, how is this possible? Is this not the most perfect
mechanical model one could imagine? What is the explanation of this
polarity? Can it be a subjective accident with no foundation whatsoever in
the order of nature and the physical characteristics of light?
If we now regard the three primary colours blue, yellow and red which
slide harmoniously over each other in the spectral circle, and place them
in a triangular relationship to each other, we will see that even though all
three are constant, irreducible colours, then the complementary colour to
one is the median proportional colour between the other two, the evenly
mixed colour of the other two. It is thus the three primary colours which, in
accord with Bohr's definition of complementarity, relate complementarily
to each other, whilst what have hitherto been called the complementary
158 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
Ittwia
ROD
GUL
violet
RoD
ALR
Sion
GUL
FIG. 1. THE SPECTRAL DIALECTIC
ROD = RED, BLA = BLUE, Gron = Green, GUL = YELLOW, Hvid = White, Sort = Black.
colours relate dialectically and not complementarily to each other, as their
synthesis abolishes the colour effect. This observation lies at the root of
my whole taxonomy and under any circumstance abolishes the possibility
of using both the traditional interpretation and Bohr's interpretation of
complementarity' within the world of colours.
According to recent information, the Swedes have established that
gila tissue has significance as a constant in the nervous system, something
that Fridtjof Nansen is said to have indicated as a possibility as early as
1886. By this, they can be said to have in practice abolished the basis for
the centuries-old conflict between the advocates of the three colour theory
and the complementary colour theory and given a synthesized explanation
for them both, in that the visual cells are trichromatic whilst the whole
mechanism of sight works in accordance with the system of complemen-
tary colours. This shows that in this area there appears to be a connection
between complementary statics and dynamic dialectics. But how does this
model relate to the optical phenomena themselves?
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When we observe nature, everything becomes greyer and greyer the
more it spreads out and becomes distanced, whilst the grey in our model is
in the centre. Could one imagine an inverted perspective where the things
became smaller and smaller the closer they came, and thus an inverted
space that would be the spatiality of light? Is our perception of space one-
sided, like our perception of past and future and thus oriented? Should the
idea of the expansion of the universe be supplemented with another about
that same universe in the process of shrinking? I don't know. I only know
that just as the Renaissance's perspective picture of the universe does not
satisfy us any more and therefore art since Impressionism has sought to
base itself upon completely new principles, so it now becomes a question
about pictorial art, about how far new perspectives can be outlined for
anything at all.
Three world pictures
1. The variable entity
2. The process of creation
3. The process of liberation
At each corner of the borders of the old Chinese empire stood a stone on
which was written World's End'. Society and universe were one, were the
world. As it was discovered that there was a world outside Verona, so there
arose the problem of the extension of the world that classical culture had
chosen for its own, the accepted world, society. However the fission between
the two worlds, society and universe, had already been observed, and the
recognition that the laws of the universe were different from those of society
had been established, even though the tendency to harmonize will always
be at work in human consciousness. The belief that the formula for this
harmonization has been found is called religion. I do not believe in the pos-
sibility of an unambiguous world picture, but the lines of direction given
here do permit the conjecture that it is possible to develop three mutually
complementary world pictures, providing one keeps them strictly separate.
A picture can only be a picture of the process under which the picture
came into existence, nothing more. This is true also of a world picture. At
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any rate, this is the reason why I, as an artist, dare postulate that there
exist three complementary world pictures which cannot under any cir-
cumstances be identified with each other because they occur under three
opponent processes, which I will briefly sketch here.
You take a lump of clay and shape it plastically into an image without
losing any of the clay and without adding new clay. This method is the
exact expression of the homeomorphie world picture, the a priori of which
is that nothing gets lost and nothing is created, but where everything can
be changed. I have the impression that this world picture is the foundation
of what is called the wave interpretation.
When Heerup entered the Academy's Sculpture Department, he
used this method and was immediately thrown out, because he could not
reconcile himself to the particle method, which consists of first securing
an arbitrary number of small particles and then beginning to place these
particles in position, one against the other, a development which is con-
ditioned by the number of particles and stops when there are no more.
This progressive process of development, the a priori of which is that new
quantities can be constantly added, expresses the classical world picture
that has to be established before the process begins, as if it were an imagi-
nary container or mould into which the molten metal is poured.
Finally you can go in the exact opposite direction to the latter as you
begin by removing those parts of a given material, for example a rock or a
piece of wood, which do not belong in the picture. This comes into exist-
ence directly by the breaking down of the material, by the removal of the
picture-less material from the pictorial material. Here the image-making
is directly identical with destructive action, with pure action, with what
we will call radiant action, effect or activity, phenomenal action. These are
three different actions of creation.
If I have not talked of any specific world picture in the last two cases,
it is because the expansive explanation of the universe is in reality a hybrid
product where you paste on something here and remove something there.
What in my opinion characterizes modern atomic physics is that it has cer-
tainly isolated the world picture constructed upon the wave interpretation,
but only at the expense of an imprecision which arises through a fusion
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161
of the particle and the ray concepts. Only when one decides to set up a
complementary description of all three observations, will the three world
pictures clearly emerge. That they could emerge simultaneously seems to
be excluded, however, as it would hardly be possible to describe a pure par-
ticle observation unless on the basis of a mixture of ray and wave descrip-
tion. Just as a pure description of the radiation phenomenon presupposes
a mixture of wave and particle description, so a fission is conditioned by
a fusion, not because of the deficient objectivity of the theory, but because
we would otherwise be unable to observe, because there is no place for the
observer. I would like to know if I am right about this interpretation.
What do we observe?
The empirical doctrine of classical physics constructs its proofs on the
basis of direct observation. This is no longer possible today. What one uses
as a basis for one's conclusions is no longer the sensation of the object itself
but signs of the object's behaviour deciphered by measuring instruments,
on photographic plates and so on. These signs and not the object itself
have become the only criteria for the demonstrability of scientific state-
ments. The postulate that matter is what is given to us by our senses is
hereby given the coup de grâce, whilst the same thing has happened to the
classical perception of reality.
IfI stand by an aeroplane and it flies away, then I see it getting small-
er and smaller. The classical perception would say that this is imaginary.
"In reality, the aeroplane remains the same size. However, if I now set up
ten cameras at my side and take photographs with the cameras at regular
intervals as the aeroplane distances itself, then I get ten uniform photo-
graphic proofs that the aeroplane really got smaller and smaller. This is the
reason that the classical perception of actuality is no longer valid, also in
daily life. By the perception of actuality here I mean what one can use the
word actuality for. The object has not become smaller, but actuality shows
something different. I will here ignore the lacking proof that it is the same
tier the camera has taken, of the possibility that there could have been
aeroplanes of differing sizes and that the various cameras could have pho-
tographed different machines. What interests us in this experiment are
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the possibilities for the most comprehensive explanation, the most logical
explanation. Anyone can see that this is a problem that plays the greatest
role in art, in the sense that it is the perspective problem itself that is at
issue. The important thing is to demonstrate that we do not see or sense
what is at all, but what happens, that the camera is completely unable to
maintain a picture of the object, of what is, only of what happens, of the
instant however long or short that is. Our senses do not perceive things,
only changes of a quite specific limited kind or form.
Complementary semantics. Symptom versus signal
If we go back to the modern scientific explanation of the use of observation
instruments, we see that, according to Susanne K. Langer (Philosophy in
a New Key), they are classified in an explanatory series of three elements,
object, sign, subject. In this connection, the object is what the subject is
interested in observing. However, when he cannot observe it, he seeks a
sensory phenomenon connected with the object which it is possible to
observe. If he is sure that these two phenomena always appear together,
then he is sure to have found a sure sign that can show him where the
object is to be found at any rate. Such a relationship of actuality or simul-
taneity between a thing and its associated sensory phenomenon is called a
sign relationship. Now it appears that both humans and animals use such
sign relationships everywhere. Indeed, we can just as well establish right
away that any sensation at all is a sensation not of objects but of signs of
these objects' presence. No one has ever seen an object. No one will ever see
an object. One only sees light rays in motion and the refraction of these
movements and nothing else. This is what we take for objects, because we
have always experienced the direct correlation of these two things with
each other. As our sensations are paramount in relation to our experi-
ences, this is the world of objects we encounter, the construction of sign
combinations we will call symptoms in forms or gestalts. This perception
forms the logical conclusion of the materialistic postulate that objects exist
independently of our sensation of them.
This definition of the symptom is different from that of Langer, but has
the advantage that it can be expressed logically in detail and form the basis
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163
for an unambiguous definition of the purpose of scientific research, as the
revelation of symptoms, as the demonstration of symptomatic relationships.
In order for a symptom to be recognized as such, it must be absolutely
rue. If the object is not always and under all cireumstances present where
the sign appears, then the sign is simply not a symptom. A mistake has
been made and the whole thing must be scrapped. This mistake can only
be due to the established sign relationship being false or one sign having
been exchanged for another.
Just as a doctor defines a picture of illness by the combination of
several different symptoms, we define our sensory pictures by combining
sensory impulses in forms of objects or in images of forces and movements.
In contrast to the absolute unambiguity of the symptom, another
form of sign combination, the signal, has a dual character which the for-
mer has not. If we set up an adversarial relationship between the natural
and the artificial, then we are right to call symptoms natural signs and
signals artificial signs. This division which, against the background of our
definition of the symptom, is, as far as I know, quite new in semantics, and
which clashes with other definitions of what is called 'the natural sign',
is based upon the clear separation that symptoms in my definition are
what one would call objective signs whilst signals in contrast are subjective
signs, willed or intentional signs. If this simple arrangement is wrong then
a specialist should easily be able to pull it to pieces.
If a symptom is a sign relationship that is established by the hand of
nature, as one might say, then in order to establish a signal it is necessary
to produce a special device, a special instrument for the transmission of
the signal. Regarded as a sign instrument, the relationship between the
requirements of symptom and signal device is similar to that between the
requirement to use only previously found stones to hammer with and the
permission to make a specially constructed hammer. As an effect, the ditter-
ence is like that between the tracks one leaves when walking and those one
makes on purpose to mark the way with a stick. If there can be opposition to
this definition of the signal as identical with the artificial sign, then it is be-
cause it indeed covers all natural phenomena which have arisen as and ex-
dustvely have the function of sensory effects. This is to say that the song and
164 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
dance of the birds as well as the colour, scent and form of the flowers must
be perceived as artificial signs or signals. This dissolves the old established
adversarial relationship set up between the actual and the concept, or, if you
will, the sensual and the 'actual', where everything apart from human ideas
is perceived as 'nature' From an actualistic perception, the artificial must
naturally have its nature, together with the ideas, under all circumstances.
If we set up the symptomatic relationship object-sign-subject, then
we can set up the signalistic relationship subject-sign-subject. Whilst
symptoms exclusively serve as the orientation of a subject in motion in
the objective world, signals serve as a subjective orientation in relation to
the movements of another subject, either by indicating as symptoms the
presence of the sign-transmitting subject, or by also influencing the sign-
receiving subject's movements and changing them. The signal is artistic
because it is artificial and free in relation to what is being described. The
growling or barking of a dog is a sign that it is aggressive, but is in no way
identical with the aggressive action. On the contrary, it is a sign it uses to
avoid biting. The sign has become more important than the object. This
contrast between action and the sensual sign of the action's potency can-
not be established at all on the basis of a traditional philosophical use of
language (see Benedetto Croce's aesthetics).
With symptoms one can only orient, but with signals one can orient
and direct and thus force something to follow one's will. The orientation
which the subject can establish through the signal is data about its own
state and movements. However, by yet another element the signal can
become indicative, as the signal-transmitting subject describes not itself
but an object, for example an approaching danger, from which we get the
series subject (I) - sign - object - subject (II). Such a form of warning does
not need to be directed towards one single subject, but could be a general
broadcast. It must be noted that such an indicative signalling appears
most often to have an accusatory, provocative or teasing function.
Signal versus symbol
Apart from this insultative characteristic of the signal transmission, an-
other characteristic exists, albeit upon a parasitic basis, which is not in the
most proper sense signalistic, but nevertheless is so, as it is what we call a
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165
false signal, a fraud. For example, the equipment of flesh-eating plants has
to be perceived in this way. At a more developed stage this trickery repre-
sents the ability to lie and to pretend, to play-act. This is possible because,
as already mentioned, the observer believes in the correctness of the signal
and thus in the presence of an object which is not there. If he doesn't then
the effort will be in vain. The observer reacts in this way, allowing himself to
be fooled, because from experience he had the concept that where there was
an object there was a sign. He has mistaken the signal for a real symptom.
His critical sense is not functioning. His reaction to the signal has become
a conditioned reflex. This is what happens when a fox allows himself to be
enticed away from the ducklings by the apparently wounded mother duck.
Allowing oneself to be systematically fooled by such false signals is
called conscious logic or symbolization. To symbolize is to say that one per-
mits the presence of the object to be replaced with an idea or just a concept
2. The difference between idea and concept is that the idea demands an
imaginary signal, whilst this only hampers the concept. Only when any
idea about a concrete object in connection with concept a is eliminated
has one reached pure symbolism, pure concept. With this is determined
not only the difference between symptom and signal but also that between
signal and symbol. A word can thus be used as a symptom as well as a
signal or a symbol. None of these uses can be dispensed with or identified
with each other.
The difference between symptom and signal can thus reveal the
difference between the natural and the artificial, and it is only by the
representation of false signs or symbols that an adversarial relationship
can be established between what we call lies and what we call truth. If, as
is asserted, it is this ability of man to symbolize that lifts him above the
animal world, then this is to say that the one who lies the best lifts himself
the most. This may sound eynical, but it is at any rate what mathemat-
is and classical philosophy teach us. Placed in correlation to the social
requirement for truth it could well give a deal of trouble. When therefore
We asserted in the beginning that a symptom should be absolutely true,
this only has meaning if at the same time an absolute lie is cultivated, for
without this the concept of truth would have no actuality any more. It
would have vanished by dissemination.
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New signals
What has happened in the relativistic experimental arrangement for the
determination of the period of the present is that our sign system has been
duplicated and that the two sets of signal systems have been placed in an
adversarial relationship to each other so that signals can be exchanged. A
dialogue has been established.
If we keep to the world of the senses in the artistic signal relationship
we have an actor, an instrument (the sign) and an observer or spectator
who, just like the scientist, has to collect his observations. In the exchange
of the two light signals, the first signal becoming the most primitive form
of question and the second the most primitive form of answer.
There is no meaning at all in sending a new sign before the answer has
arrived. If questions are continually sent out without answers coming in,
then in reality it is the same question being repeated constantly, regardless
of whether its form changes. Time stands still until contact is made and
communication or dialogue is set up.
The longer there is between question and answer, the longer time is
wasted by having to wait. The interesting part of the relativistic explana-
tion is namely what can be scientifically proved - that time can be wasted.
This is an enormously important observation for the understanding of
the principles of the Marxist economic doctrine, which is based upon the
English principle of time is money.
Symbol versus symptom
If there is a particular reason to perceive the world of the signal as identical
with that of art or, to be quite precise, the world of the fine and beautiful
arts, it is simply because for humanity the beautiful is when the signalistic
becomes art. Let us put it this way, what we will call magic is an intermedi-
ate thing between what we call symptoms and what we call signals.
Let us first establish that a causal relationship between the symptom
and its object has in no way been established. It is not thunder because
there is lightning. It has not rained because it is wet everywhere. It is not
because one has a fever that one is sick and so on. However, it is quite dif.
ferent if one is able to change a movement with the help of signals. This can
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167
only be explained as a causal connection. In order to operate, and thus for
technical reasons, the revelation of such possibilities for the establishment
of a causal connection is a consequence or a number of consequences or
a chain of consequences with the help of another consequence which is
the only one that has significance. It is therefore the technician's require-
ment from science that it will not only find symptoms, but above all es-
tablish causal connections, this in itself being the opposite of a scientific
analysis. The establishment of objectively operative causal relationships is
technique. The establishment of subjectively operative causal relationships
is magic or art, is captivation. Simple-minded thought does not separate
these two forms. The belief in an almighty god is the belief in a universally
subjective causal relationship. The belief in justice is the belief in a socially
subjective causal relationship and so on.
That such causal systems are not true does not hamper the fact both
that they are actual (if they are not mistaken) and that they function, help
or hinder people in doing certain things. That the concept of magic has
also been given a non-metaphysical interpretation in this account is a
consequence of the remaining interpretations. Our definition simply says
that magic is doing what one wants and yet coming well out of it, which
one could also call the Faustian perception of art. In the classical view,
magic is a pseudo-science constructed from particular concepts and ideas.
It is only when one accepts this definition of magic that one can assert
that runes, for example, do not have a magical origin. Metaphysical defini-
tion is necessary in classical philosophy because it has no place at all for
non-conceptual thought, thought without tools, thought that is based only
upon the talent of thinking.
Instead of magic, one could call this form of thought introductory
thought, for it is not completely without context. One could just as well
also call it seductive thought or aesthetie thought: one could call it thought
tor particular occasions or whatever. But it seems to me to be quite unnec-
essary here to describe this phenomenon, as I could never measure myselt
with the authorship of Soren Kierkegaard in this region.
The dialectical opposite to truth is lie. When Bohr sets up a comple-
mentary opposition between truth and clarity, then he has in reality given
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shouted
Las
sanidhed
lidle
FIG. 2. THE FIRST TRIOLECTIC
Skonhed = Beauty, Legn = Lie, Sundhed = Health, ide = idea, Sandhed = Truth, magi = magic.
me the key to the acknowledgment of the triple character of complementa-
rity, as imagination or illusion also exists in a complementary relationship
to truth as well as to clarity, unless he does not reckon with fantasy as an
important psychic activity at all.
If the dividing line between the symptomatic and the signalistic
represents the opposition between the natural and the artificial, then the
dividing line between the symptomatic and the symbolic represents the
opposition between the real and the imaginary, and thus that which we
call the truth and the mendacious, and is the mechanism itself which al-
lows the setting up of an adversarial relationship of truth-lie itself.
It is here that the inner structure of modern science is about to fall
apart. It is from this point that the sickness today is spreading into all sci-
ence, for science has no conditions at all at its disposal for concepts such as
actuality, reality, experiment or phenomenon. However, just one concept is
to this degree identical with science, in that it fuses with the unambiguity
of the concept, and that is truth. If science is not true then it is simply no
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
169
more, it has vanished. Any attempt at a scientific approach to philosophy
must pass through the control of truth. If science today wishes to appeal
to philosophy, it must identify itself or we must identify it if it will not do
so itself, and the question, What is truth?' is the same as the question,
What is science?' In its modern evolution, science has appropriated truth,
has identified itself with truth, but it cannot introduce scientific truth as
an unidentified truism into philosophy, and cannot introduce itself into
philosophy without examination.
What has happened today is that the natural sciences, the classical
sciences, are no longer coherent, but have broken down the middle into
two opposites. Classical natural science was symptomatic in its criterion
of truth. We have clearly shown that the symbol in relation to the symp-
tom is the definition of what we call lie, imagination or illusion. Universal
approval of imagination is called convention or agreement, and an intel-
lectual convention is called a concept. When therefore modern science
clings to the demand for the constancy of the concepts, this means that it
is demanding belief in the constancy of the imagination, in fixed lies. That
this is simply a prohibition against a creative pictorial art we have already
demonstrated. But even such a prohibition cannot save the situation, for
the constancy of the concepts does not secure unambiguity in the concept
of scientific truth, it does not abolish the self-contradiction.
Niels Bohr has laid down that it is the purpose of science to increase
and order our experiences! This statement, which is very unclear, is surely
the reason for the general mobilization in the philosophy camp. That sci-
ence gathers and increases our experiences is the very essence of science,
but then comes the question of the ordering of these experiences. Here the
question then is, do scientists believe that it is a scientific activity to order
experiences, do scientists believe that a scientific method is to be found to
order anything at all, and do scientists imagine that anything at all can be
found which in a direct sense could be called a scientific order? If this is
the case then we are in a serious conflict.
Keeping order is a police affair, and the only thing that science can
pronounce upon is the ascertainment of truths and nothing else. When
science puts itself at the service of order, this means that it has to function
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COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
as an authorized lie detector. It is said that the lie detectors which are used
in the American forces do not react to Italians. They are too clever at ly-
ing. If science really demands participation in controlling the ordering of
our experiences, then it is time that we set up Darlington's Ministry for
the Destruction of International Understanding and Conformation and,
as a focus, set up an institute for advanced lying with training in make-
believe for ourselves and others, a central institute for artistic activity.
This institute could also be called an institute for new ordering or for
creative philosophy or simply the Folk High School, for imagination is
just discovering something for oneself. Discovery and invention are two
opposing activities. Any ordering is an invention. Every systemization is
an art. If the meaning of Bohr's statement is that science does not have a
purely intrinsic purpose because it cannot continue its research without
the results achieved connecting with the public consciousness or, at any
rate, with the consciousness of other research results, and that systema-
tized development is therefore a necessary precondition for the develop-
ment of scientific research, then a very painful controversy will have been
removed. Humanity has always had to systematize its experiences quite
independently of scientific research in order to be able to act with wisdom,
in order to be able to transform its knowledge into something it perceives
as wisdom, and this doctrine of wisdom is in reality philosophical activ-
ity. This activity has developed quite independently of modern science
and has not been equal to constructing a systems theory that harmonizes
with the experiences of modern science. However, today a philosophical
science is necessary, as any philosophy which is contradicted by scientific
experiences is without any actuality, except as an instrument for uphold-
ing social peace, order and stagnation, for supporting social actuality and
avoiding events. Preserving the conceptual definitions of classical physics
also involves preserving classical philosophy and classical forms of society.
Or is the order of the factors reversed? Building a new world of concepts
parallel to and independent of the old is only possible if one finds a new
planet and begins existence in a completely new way. This is perhaps pos-
sible today, but we others who still wish to remain on the earth are not
interested in having it reduced to a museum. We would rather discover
something new for ourselves.
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
171
The rules of nature and the laws of society
A law must be kept, but a rule has to be followed. A rule is thus a regula-
tion of order, but is not itself the order. A rule can be followed in different
ways just as one can order in different ways, but within an order all details
are fixed. One can ascertain if certain rules are being kept, and rules are
thus also a kind of law, although they are not absolutely constant. A law is
to be considered absolute in a given situation, but a rule is a law which one
decides to follow or not follow, and in a given situation or a particular form
of situations is thus still open to choice and decision.
Can there be an objective or scientific separation between laws and
rules? Such a thing could only be arranged if one called all artificial rules
discovered by man laws and only recognized the rules of nature, the rules
that nature follows in and outside humanity's existence, independently
of human will and impervious to human will, ability and knowledge.
Attempts have been made to identify the laws of society with such natural
laws, and attempts have been made to give them a divine, absolute charac-
ter, all in vain. Today everyone has agreed to perceive all social laws, orders
and rules as kinds of contracts which people agree to keep or follow or, at
any rate, to behave as if they keep or follow.
Herein lies the self-contradiction of modern science. We have already
indicated that the lares' of the natural sciences are, without exception,
proof of symptomatic sign relationships. When science therefore talks of
the laws of mathematies, it also destroys the unambiguity and truth of its
statements about laws, for no concept, no mathematical formula is natu-
ral. They are all purely artificial rules which can be accepted or rejected
at will and their essential artificiality is that if they are rejected, they do
not exist at all. The same is the case with words and writing. An unknown
writing, an unknown language, has no existence at all, even if its signs ex-
ist, unless its rules and meaning are known. This is the contrast between
concepts and symptoms. The development of the natural sciences takes
place according to certain rules, but nothing makes these rules absolute,
nothing makes them natural laws, although this is what science tries to
demonstrate. No one can prove that science could not develop according
to absolutely different rules. Today science can no longer find out what the
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rules of its game are or even what the game is. Science has therefore lost
its raison d'être as the unambiguous criterion of truth and thus as science.
The re-erected unambiguity of this concept of truth will be necessary in
order to accept science into philosophy.
What has brought confusion into the natural sciences is the discovery
that one cannot perceive natural symptoms as absolute, that nature does
not follow its own lares' with absolute consistency, and that nature is a
gambler marked to the highest degree both by chance and by rules of the
game of its own, called 'natural laws. However, their absolute infallibility,
in which no one believes anymore, takes from them nothing of their abso-
lute character of being rules of the game for particular natural phenomena.
An answer that is already formulated and given before the question
arises and is posed could, if it was a scientific answer, be called a precon-
dition, or, where the question is of an ethical nature, is called a defence,
and in both cases they take on the character of legality from repeated use.
An essential feature of the original Nordic perception of law was that it
was not perceived as a mutual agreement, a message, or a forced demand,
but as a vow that was absolutely one-sided. Agreement only occurs when
belief in the vow is declared. The relationship of trust is thus a relationship
between both belief and lares.
A law is thus a decision or a prejudice. A defense is the same as a
resistance or a defended point of view, a prohibition.
One can change a law by force whilst being elevated above the law
oneself, and one can in fellowship work out a law that all vow to maintain.
But what in reality are perceived as its basic laws are its theoretical a pri-
oris, and one can demand of them that they are logical, that they are not
self-contradictory, but even where this is achieved one cannot call them
scientific, as they are just preconditions for talking about the results of
scientific investigations, not for the results in themselves. In nature are
found no laws, only rules.
In the most advanced circles of modern culture, games theory has al-
ready become an instrument with which one prepares oneself to play upon
people's credulity. A game is a process the end result of which is unknoten,
an experiment. A superior power is one who can make an opponent play
Asger Jorn The Natural Order
173
a garne, the result of which he knows, and which is thus not a real game
to him. An authority is one whose opposite number knows that he knows
the result in advance, but nevertheless agrees to play. A winner is the one
who plays the best, and a cheat is one who pretends to be following the
rules of the game, but in reality does not. The only player who in the aes-
thetic sense could be an artist is the cheat, because his game is, without
exception, apparent, and thus is pure sensory effect, pure intuition, a
performance. The actor does not play. He plays the role of the player. In
the same way, the virtuoso does not play music. He plays Mozart without
being Mozart. The artist is the only one that is always conscious of this
double game, wherever it is played. An artist never lets himself be fooled
by a politician, unless he perceives him as an artist. Inorganic nature does
not seem able to play the double game or fool anyone. This is the basis of
the relative truth value of the symptom. If truth is symbolic then it cannot
at the same time be symptomatic and vice versa. Truth must be indivisible
if it is to be a truth. An illusion is also a truth if it is defined as a true
illusion. A lie is a form of truth: if its antagonistic relationship to the facts
is defined then it is a true picture. To an artist this is obvious, indeed it is
even the monitor of his originality. In order to really imagine something,
to be able to imagine, one must know precisely what is not imagination.
It is in the symbolic area that the artist finds the concepts of truth of the
modern scientist so deplorably unscientific and illusory - indeed, improb-
ably poor and dilettantish in their illusionism or imagery. Only by handing
over the control of universal imagery to creative artists can scientists today
have order in the tabernacle. In this way, the artist's stance becomes that of
an anti-symbolistic symbolist.
If we thus set up a theory about a complementary tripartition of
symptom - signal - symbol and identify these with the criteria for truth
- beauty - health, meaning by health only balance or legality, then we can
construct a triangle similar to the colour triangle, and with this we can
work out the dialectically antagonistic relationships.
If we perceive the symptomatic relationship as the criterion of truth
and set up the lie as the dialectical opponent to truth, then we must main-
tain that a lie is half symbolic and half signalistic, that a lie is a hybrid
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magi
siqual
idle
Gillede
sy-bol
What
about
ETAICS?
FIG. 3. THE SECOND TRIOLECTIC
magi = magic, billede = image, ide = idea.
product and thus as such more complicated and more interesting than
truth. The great mistake of modern culture has been that, in its idealism,
it has undervalued the cultural significance of the lie and worn itself out
in an eternal hunt for truth, instead of investigating what a lie is. In a
peculiar way, this investigation has been a taboo. The reason is the fear of
losing those illusions that can make people conform to rules and customs.
Nevertheless, at a time when scientific symbolism is stagnating into an
irreplaceable implement, it is enormously important to define the mean
between signal and symbol called pictorial art. In reality it is this, which,
being the opposite of the symptom, places pictorial art in an antagonistic
relationship to science. The recognition of this is of fundamental dynamic
and dialectical significance for both art and science. In its antagonistic
relationship to the symbol, pictorial art is a false symptom produced by
signalistic and symbolic effects, and is in this sense pure illusion. The false
symptom is a representation of the sensual signs that always describe the
Asger Jorn
The Natural Order
175
presence of an object without that object being there. It is the life-like
picture of an apple on a dish, where in reality there is neither an apple nor
a dish, but just a canvas and some paints. Such a picture is not signalistic.
Neither is it symbolic but more or less both.
In the same way, if we seek the dialectically antagonistic relationship
to the signal, then it must be a false signal that is a mixture of symbol and
symptom. Such a hybrid product is called an ideal. Ideals are imaginary
signals, but are imageless, having nothing to do with the world of sensa-
tion, and cannot be produced pictorially. In the sensual sense, they are
anti-pictures.
Similarly, the dialectical opposition to the symbol is a hybrid prod-
uct of symptom and signal called magic. We can thus now polarize these
phenomena in relationships where they mutually abolish each other, and
establish that symptom and picture are deadly enemies just like signal and
ideal and like symbol and magic.
In European culture, it looks as if three basic cultural types are being
separated out, each of which in itself has a tendency to fall back to one of
these antagonistic relationships which, as it were, form the basic tension in
the intellectual structure. It is as if the Byzantine-Muscovite culture above
all emanates from the opposition symptom-picture, as if the Romano-
Latin culture first and foremost stretches between the opposition symbol-
magic, and the Nordic culture above all orients itself along the opposition
signal-ideal, and that the basic European conflicts are identical with the
mutual competition and complementarity of these three orientations. At
any rate, it is possible to explain certain conflicts in religious history from
this viewpoint.
Naturens orden. De divisione Nature (Aarhus: Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende
Vandalisme, 1962), pp. 9-58.
Translated by Peter Shield.
Gmail kac attac
Jorn—CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC POLICY
kac attac Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 1:52 PM
To: Stefan Kac
CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC
POLICY
Asger Jorn
This section, apart from a few rearrangements, was published in French by
the Situationist International in 1959 and dedicated to the Danish syndi-
calist and workers' leader Christian Christensen, who in my youth, when
he lived in Sejs near Silkeborg, was like a father to me and taught me what
economics, economic critique and organization are.
The Marvism which is criticized here is what made Marx maintain
that he was not a Marxist. The old basis, for international communism has
today definitively broken down. Here I could say to all those who are seek-
ing pure socialism, If you are going to the right, then I'll go to the left. I
have already indicated in my book The Natural Order that this statement
should not be perceived in the traditional sense. The illusion that progress
and evolution are the same has come to an end. This has meant that the
communist movement is dissolving. I go in for progress, but in order to
progress one must be able to regress. In his cultural history, Hartvig Frisch
has demonstrated that the forces of progress do not always evolve from the
top, but can shoot out as side-shoots from the trunk. My idea of progress is
therefore based upon an out-and-out revolutionary conservatism, for I am
going back to the composition of the First Internationale and maintaining
that none of its three basic principles - anarchism or the principle of the
evolution of personal freedom, syndicalism or the evolution of wise, social
organizations and socialism or the knowledge of the context of all social
phenomena - can be done without today.
178 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
The main points in my critique
Production and reproduction are, like progress and evolution, two comple-
mentary oppositions.
Neither commodity value nor work can comprise the elemental concept of
social value, which must base itself upon the human being as the source of
value.
Rare material cannot be constant or free capital, as capitalists and social-
ists maintain. Rare material is in a continual reductive process.
Use value is the opposite and negation of the article of utility, as quality is
the opposite of value.
Value in itself and forms of value
The common criterion for truth for any socialist or anti-capitalist politics,
the basis that is still recognized as valid by socialists as well as communists,
is the Marxist analysis and critique of the capitalist form of value, the com-
modity, perceived as the elemental form of the wealth existent in a society
where the capitalist form of production is dominant. This manifests itself
as an immense accumulation of commodities.
This analysis was carried out by Karl Marx in his 'critique of political
economy, a work that was given the name of Das Kapital. Marx does not
just demonstrate that the capitalist form of wealth is the commodity, for
that demonstration cannot take place at all without a precondition that
wealth and value are the same.
As wealth exists as the opposite of poverty, it is precisely this op-
position between rich and poor that socialist politics wants to remove.
However, as, according to dialecties, an opposition cannot be removed
without thereby achieving the removal of or the neutralization of both
oppositions, socialism abolishes wealth along with poverty. If wealth
continues to blossom one can simply demonstrate that socialism does not
exist. The idea of a socialist wealth is not just utopia. It is simply rubbish.
The present crisis of socialism has its starting point in the tact
that Marxism's identification of commodity, wealth and value make the
Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy
179
abolition of value as such the ideological goal of socialism. Thus the con-
cept of value itself becomes an absurdity in socialist terminology, whilst
socialist politics is forced to become a permanent politics of devaluation,
the end purpose of which can only be the absolute abolition of all values.
Nothing in Marxist economic dogma contradicts this goal in a scientifi-
cally logical way. This absolute and all-embracing devaluation is, indeed,
altogether unavoidable and will happen of its own accord whether people
wish it or not. This natural evolution forms the scientific basis of socialist
theory. This tendency is the basic definition of socialist development itself,
the one by which the consequences of all socialist actions are justified, and
is the justification in itself of socialist politics.
We will here attempt to indicate that it is possible to accept the
Marxist analysis and critique of the capitalist form of value, the commod-
ity, without thereby taking over the identification of this form with value
itself as a concept and a reality. This is to say that it is possible to accept
the purely scientific side of Das Kapital without thereby automatically
taking over the political conclusions that Marx drew from it. It consists of
perceiving the Marxist critique not as a critique of value in itself but of a
specially occurring form of value limited in time and space. To get to this
new form of critique, it is first necessary to lay down a new and precise
concept of value which does not contradict itself, and which is at the same
time far more comprehensive than the Marxist one, a concept of value that
harmonizes with the conceptual world of the natural sciences, something
which the Marxist concept of value clearly does not do. In order to do this,
We must find a corresponding definition of the concept of form so that we
can clearly and unambiguously lay down what is meant by different forms
of value. This leads directly to a necessary critique of the concept which in
dialectical materialism goes under the name of objective quality. This is
the purpose of this study.
Concepts are concepts - actualities are actualities
In order to avoid a thorough discussion about this question of concepts,
Marx was obliged to exclude the whole question by saying that it did not
exist at all, that it was irreal. He stated that value is not a concept but
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COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
an actuality, namely the commodity or the exchange value. Thereby he is
really stating that all value is exchange value. Concepts are words which
everyone has agreed to give one and only one meaning. This socialization
of the concepts is altogether necessary to make it possible to explain some-
thing to each other that we can agree on in fellowship. Therefore the whole
socialist theory stands or falls on this tool, with which this theory is trans-
formed to an ideology, becoming clearly and unambiguously socialized.
In this argument Marx forgets, however, that he himself in Das Kapital
defines value as a purely metaphysical and thus immaterial phenomenon,
as an agreement by convention, and thus as nothing other than a concept.
However, even this Marxist refusal to discuss concepts does not hin-
der the rising depreciation in all areas which is a result of socialist politics.
On the contrary. As the actual goal of socialism is the practical abolition
of exchange value, socialism is not just moving towards an eradication
of possible new value theories but towards a state where even the actual
objects vanish, towards a state without actual values.
Marx was himself the first to see this evolution and to go in for it
at full throttle. He even perceived his own Marxist philosophy as the last
philosophy for which there would be a use, and that only in the period of
transition to the socialist society, where all philosophy, even the Marxist,
would be abolished. Here one sees his own economic philosophy replaced
by the greatest economy, as far as philosophy is concerned. His goal was to
make all philosophy unnecessary, including Marxism. Thus this growing
devaluation of everything, of even Marxism itself, is not anything unex-
pected. It is both the conscious and unconscious goal of socialism.
Marx's conceptual confusion is too great to be able to demonstrate
the overall consequences of this consistently anti-progressive ideology. For
example, he talks of the commodity's factors, the use value (defined as the
substance of value) and the exchange value or value in itself' (which he
identifies with the dimension of value). There can be no doubt that di-
mension and value are here perceived as the same. However, he thereatter
divides exchange value into two completely different factors, as he says,
'Any article of utility can be perceived from a double viewpoint, from that
of the quantity and from that of the quality? As dimension and quantity are
Asger Jorn
Critique of Economic Policy
181
the same, value and quantity must also be so. In dialectical materialism,
the concepts of quantity and quality are themselves the key concepts. It
is therefore strange that Marx cannot keep to them when he has to talk
of value and commodities. The reason hits one in the eye. It is altogether
impossible to classify considerations of value, be it under the concept of
quantity or the concept of quality. Even the most diligent materialistic
dialectician falls down here. Is value then really, as Marx himself suggests,
just a purely metaphysical concept? There are only two possibilities. Either
this is the case and then Marxism is neither materialistic nor scientific in
the strict meaning of that expression, or Marxism's concept of value is
out-of-date and must be replaced by a new one. It is this latter perception
that I want to attempt to develop here. In order to do this we must look
a little closer at what could lie in the concepts that Marx is manipulating.
What do, for example, substance and dimension, the two concepts which
in Marxist doctrine are the two factors of form, mean?
Substance and process are in the Marxist sense the same
In order to able to understand Marx's concept of substance, it is neces-
sary to place it in relation to what he calls form. As we are keeping to a
purely materialistic evaluation and conceptual world, we can in the main
confirm that what the Marxists call matter is perceived as substance, and
is normally perceived as being the same as the material's characteristic of
rare material for something, and not in a true sense as an element. In the
Marxist sense, all material is actually or possibly raw material and nothing
else. On the other hand, the form of the material designates its character
as a material different from all other materials, which can be determined
or united in a special object. In this way one talks of different forms of
energy, etc.
These forms of energy stand in a dialectical opponent relationship
to the substance of the same energies. But it is here that Marx is wrong.
In Marx, the concept of form is, so to speak, never placed in relation to
the concept of substance. He prefers to operate with a completely differ-
ent opposition: form and content. Thus he talks of the value's form and
the value's content. A content is what is enclosed in a form. Thus Mars
182 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
declares that the content of value is work and adds to this description that
the true form is the form of the content, which logically makes formal truth
identical with work or with content in the value question.
However, he also says somewhere, We now know the substance of
value. It is work!' We must thus state that in Marx, substance and content
are the same. However, he also declares that use value is the value's' (the
exchange value's) substance and at the same time explains that work is not
the only source of value for the use values it creates, for material wealth. It
is the father. The earth is the mother' But in order for a use value to be able
to be transformed into a true 'value, an exchange value, he himself empha-
sizes that it is necessary to eliminate or completely devalue one factor, the
material character of the commodity, to deny the mother, the earth, which
is the original source. The transition from use value to exchange value
happens by the devaluation of the article of utility's material actuality.
The deficient understanding of the materialistic significance of this
operation can be seen even more clearly in Marxist theory, if one goes a
little closer into the Marxist perception of form. Here it is stated that the use
value is the natural form of the commodity. What does that mean? Mars
adds, however, that the commodity possesses a form of value of a quite
special kind that contrasts sharply with the various natural forms of the
commodity, namely the form of money. If we accept that the use value is the
commodity's actual substance, then it is impossible to perceive an article
of utility as being identical with a natural form. An article of utility is not
a natural form but a cultural form, otherwise a wooden table would have
the same form as a tree. The more one reads Marx, the more one becomes
clear that he hasn't an inkling of what a use value and an article of utility
are. He believes that they are the same. One can excuse him. In spite of his
unique ettorts in the cultural history of humanity, it was not given to him in
practice to immerse himself in either the world of wealth or of use values.
Nevertheless it is precisely this lack of knowledge of the artistic and
the artificial elements in the article of utility's character of wealth that
reduces the extent of the Marxist theories to a limited period in history
which is now past.
Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy
183
We can accept the fact that articles of utility represent the substance
or raw material of commodities. There is, however, just the important
thing that use value is something more and something more essential than
just commodity substance. It is in itself a value that is certainly devalued
in the instant of barter, but immediately takes up its intrinsic value again
in the consumer's hand, when the exchange has taken place. Once bought
by the consumer the article of utility is no longer a commodity. It has again
become an article of utility. This determination is necessary for all articles
of utility except money.
He who manufactures articles of utility does it primarily because
he has use for them. If he makes more than he can use himself, then he
has created a utilitarian surplus value. This surplus production is directly
valueless to himself. If others are interested in it, then he can give it away.
This is called potlatch. However, it is this productive surplus value, and
only this, which is made into commodities, first by the exchange of surplus
products in barter and then by the surplus production being exchanged for
money, this again being exchanged for other articles of utility. Exploitation
arises when a person is not allowed to give his surplus production away to
whom he will. Slavery consists in the person no longer being allowed to
decide what he has a use for himself. One can thus be exploited before one
becomes a slave. The Marxists have not discovered this. However, if one
has no right whatever to decide what, how much and why one produces,
then one is simply an instrument.
What Marx discovered was that all the processes mentioned here is
artificial, that is, discovered by people, and that the article of utility also
has its substance which is the forms of nature. However, nature exists, as
Lenin maintains, independent of our sensing it and our use of it. This
means that nature is not in itself a substance. It is so only in its relation
to the human wishes and abilities that create the articles of utility. Nature
itself is not a means, and has not in itself an end that serves humanity.
Nature is simply the first unavoidable condition for all production. Nature
exists in natural forms. The destruction of these natural forms is the pro-
cess we call the manufacture of articles of utility. One can destroy natural
forms without manufacturing anything. But the manufacture of articles
ionist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
184
COSM
of utility is impossible except by a destructive incursion into the natural
order. This incursion is called culture. So the foundation of socialism in
the order of nature makes its theory a denial of art and culture. This is
apparent above all in socialism's complete lack of understanding of the
agriculture problem.
Use value is the negation of the article of utility
Marx is forced to eliminate the whole problem of consumption to avoid
seeing the holes in his theory. He does this by simply and primitively
maintaining obstinately that there is nothing at all that one could call
use value and what one does call use value is in reality what should be
called the article of utility. If Marx in the beginning maintains that value
and dimension are the same, then he also ends by identifying value with
quality or article, which in reality abolishes the difference between qual-
ity and quantity upon which dialectical materialism is built. In no other
place has Marx used such an agitated tone and such cheap arguments as in
this question and, oddly enough, no postulates have been lapped up with
greater joy than precisely this rubbish, be it by communists, socialists or
capitalists, priests and popes and artists, the whole caboodle.
Marx asserts that the use of the word value in connection with ar-
tiles of utility is just as crazy and pre-scientific as the pre-chemical use
of the word salt not just for true salt but also for substances like sugar
because there is a purely external similarity between sugar and salt. This
parallelization is not, however, a scientific argument but a piece of chi-
canery that the socialists have also used recently in Denmark to assert
that one cannot compare the amounts from the national wealth used for
military purposes with those used for cultural institutions like the National
Museum, because the military, as everyone can clearly see, has nothing to
do with culture. No arguments seem to have so great a carrying capacity as
such mental short-circuits.
Of course, Marx himself believed in his own argument. However,
he did not follow it. He could not solve the problem. But if he had re-
ally followed his own theory in Das Kapital and written article of utility
every time he wrote use value, then he would have swiftly discovered the
Asger Jon Critique of Economic Policy
185
absurdity. But he was careful not to do that, and Marxists since have not
dared to do the experiment, but have all faithfully continued to swallow his
assertion. One has to hinder discussions about this problem. When Marx
says, "Use value is realized in use or consumption', then it would be quite
meaningless to imagine that he is talking of the article of utility, for the
realization of the article of utility is after all because of its production and
not its consumption. One does not realize a roll by eating it.
The use value of bread is realized in the digestion, in the dissolution
and thus in the process of digestion. This is all that can be said directly
about use value. Use value must therefore be exactly the opposite of arti-
cle of utility, the negation of the article of utility as article or object, or as
actual form.
Marx elaborates, 'As use value, the commodity is above all of differing
quality. As exchange value, it can only be of differing quantity. Here we
have arrived back at the concepts of quality and quantity. Does anyone,
after this presentation, doubt that use value cannot be the same as the
article of utility? If one uses an article of utility one cannot at the same
time preserve it as a commodity. In order for an article of utility to be rec-
ognized as a commodity in the modern sense, it must be unused, remain
intact, and it is thus this intact object that Marx calls quality. We will keep
to this unambiguous definition of the concept of quality.
However, it is thereby impossible for use value to be the quality of an
article as one likes to maintain. Quality, if this word is to have one unam-
biguous meaning, must simply mean the article in itself, the extent and
duration of its body, which in reality are the same, its condition.
If I buy myself a pair of shoes, then their consumption and destruc-
tion by wear cannot really be their quality. On the contrary, one perceives
their quality as their resistance to destruction, their permanence or con-
stancy as an article. It is obvious that the shoes will hold their quality best
if one never uses them, if one puts them in a cupboard. This is the way
the shopkeeper has to treat them. The least use diminishes their price to a
degree that no Marxist law can explain. However, if I don't use my shoes,
then they are at the same time without value to me. The value is created
in the use but not by the wear or consumption in itself. I buy good quality
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shoes precisely to avoid them being swiftly worn out, even though this
is, despite everything, unavoidable, if I am to use them. One cannot thus
directly identify use or consumption. For bread the problem is even more
complex. I do not bite the bread into pieces to destroy it but to produce
thereby strength with which to build myself up. Only that part of the bread
that gives me strength is a value to me. The rest is pure garbage.
Value is process
Marx says that 'as an article of utility the commodity is quality and as
exchange value it is quantity. This formula, perceived by dialectical ma-
terialism as a renewal of the scientific concepts, would, however, remain
completely static and unusable, if Marxism did not reckon with what it
calls the transition from quality to quantity and vice versa. This process
has not been given a clear scientific formulation in the ideology of dialecti-
cal materialism.
What evades the attention of Marxists in this formulation is that
Marx's so-called exchange value has no more to do with value than the
article of utility has to do with use value. The Marxist pseudo-value, ex-
change value, is nothing other than the neutralization of two values in a
condition of equilibrium which is called equivalence or equal value - equal
validity. Two values which are equally valid abolish each other's value and
make each other valueless until they are again torn from their established
opposite number. This opposition is fixed in the object we call currency.
Money in itself as an object is valueless. But it is an article of utility, a form.
'The special thing about it, however, is that as it is gradually liberated in its
pure form, where there is no material covering for it, it has only a purely
metaphysical value based exclusively upon belief, upon everyone believing
in it. In the socialist society the banknotes themselves become the measure
of what people believe and value, nothing more. One could abruptly agree
that one no longer wanted to believe in the particular banknotes. One
could make others and the first ones could be ripped up. They would be
valueless, on the metaphysical ground alone that as a matter of pure con-
vention one has agreed not to believe in them anymore.
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The market value of things is not conditioned by their quality, far
less by their amount. It is conditioned by their differences, their variability.
To reduce this variability, to standardize a commodity is therefore to say
that one is devaluing it. This process of standardization is called econom-
is. The exchange value of two commodities is thus not their equivalence
but the dissimilarity in the conditions they offer and this is expressed in
the price difference. By reducing this difference to a price difference of
a purely quantitative nature, one can fix the price. In reality this means
that everything has the same price and thereby there is nothing that has a
price anymore. The price no longer exists. The real exchange value exists
exclusively in the change or variability in price. When all prices are fixed,
trade has become meaningless. The commodity no longer exists. This is
the purpose of socialism.
It should thus be correet to put forward the perception that value
and process are the same and that which Marx calls the value's substance is
the true value and not the dimension of the value as he claims. Dimension
is nothing more than the quantity of a particular quality. However, value is
a particular quantity of qualities undergoing process or change.
Matter or natural forms first become substance in the process that
changes them not to quantity but to other forms or qualities. Outside the
process each substance is, in its own nature, just a special quality or form.
The concept of substance is thus characteristic of nothing other than the
process itself or the transition between two states. Substance is the material
actuality of the change or the transformation. Let us test the possibilities
for a deeper knowledge of the production problem that this opens up.
The cycle of production and consumption
Marx declares that barter implies the following change of form:
Commodity - Money - Commodity (C-M-C)
But this process necessarily presupposes a deeper lying change of form:
Article of Utility - Commodity - Article of Utility (A-C-A)
188 COSMONAUTS O
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Behind this lies a third change of form:
Natural Form - Article of Utility - Natural Product (N-A-N)
The most primitive human life form was based on this simple cycle:
N-A-N. The city society's trade added a new element to the chain in a
cycle N-A-C-A-N. The Greco-Roman money system made the cycle one
notch longer: N-A-C-M-C-A-N. What new element have the social-
ists added to this cycle? It is not our task here to indicate this. We would
just like to stress that only the study of this cycle is able to give us a real
scientific picture of the relationship between production and consump-
tion in modern society. At the same time, it has, however, to be pointed
out that, in contrast to agriculture, industry gives nothing back to nature
in a rebirth of the values it consumes. Industry's consumption of nature
is irreversible, as the natural products it leaves behind have always been
definitively devalued in human and cultural terms. Industry therefore has
a direct contact with that rising depreciation of matter which is called the
expansion of the universe. This is the reason why its advocates do not see
their own place in a cyclic development, and this is the reason that those
who are not in the running must be wary of whichever cycle industry may
now find to launch itself into, for behind that grows no grass.
A commodity is a socialized article of utility
The bourgeois revolution against the nobility, the court and the Catholic
Church had its point of departure in indignation at the wealth, plenty and
luxurious living of these privileged groups, and it set up against them the
bourgeois virtues of modest simplicity of conduct, of thrift and frugality.
Marx did not even discover that it was this sudden and compulsory thrift
in consumption which was the source of capital-creating savings. This
tendency did not come on the agenda at all in the revolutionary ideas of
socialism. On the contrary, there was a tendency to promise all the people
what the privileged classes had before the bourgeois revolution. According
to Marx, the luxury consumption of the individual capitalist plays no role
at all in economic considerations.
Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy
189
It is only against the background of this fact that one can under-
stand why socialists feel themselves so dependent upon capitalists that
they assume a bourgeois-capitalist revolution to be a necessary prelude
to a socialist one. The two revolutions are just two sides of the same af-
fair. Of course, there are purely tactical reasons for not getting too close to
the problem. No one makes a revolution to be frugal, especially not poor
people. But the reason that it is at all possible for socialists to suppress this
problem is that they already assume certain bourgeois-capitalist traits of
character as an obvious necessity amongst the people who are to shape
socialism. This means that what is called capitalism is nothing other than
a particular form of socialism or socialization: a form of socialization really
just as deep-seated as the working class's socialization of industry's means
of production and what complements it, namely, the socialization of the
means of consumption, for a commodity is nothing other than a socialized
means of consumption, a socialized article of utility. In this way the socialist
revolution is nothing other than the completion of the capitalist revolution.
The only element removed from capitalism by this completion is private
savings, nothing else, for the true wealth in the course of life, its variability
in consumption, has already been reduced through the capitalistic mass
production of the same article. It is rare today to find a capitalist whose
consumption exceeds a petty and bigoted life-form. The difference in the
standard of living of a grand duke in the 17th century and a great capitalist
in Rockefeller's period is grotesque and is becoming steadily greater.
If socialists do not therefore need to deal with the socialization of the
article of utility, it is simply because the capitalists have already saved them
the labour. This socialization allowing the characterization of an article of
utility as a commodity has the three following characteristics:
a) Only articles of utility of a common interest to the members of society
can find a sufficiently large market to be able to be used as commodi-
ties. The ideal commodity is the article that everyone wants.
b) Only an article of utility which is found in sufficiently large numbers of
uniform examples can be recognized as a true commodity in the Marxist
sense. Industry is only interested in serial production and the interest
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rises with the number. To open the way for industrial production to
such a socialization, capitalism has had to fight the idea of rarity value
and make people believe that the special value of handcrafted and in-
dividual production was a formalist superstition. This is the reason for
Marx's remark about the enmity of capitalism to art, an enmity that has
become absolute only in the socialist society, where one maintains that
the reproduction is just as valuable as the original.
c) Finally, capitalist production is characterized by the use of art to an
immense extent for propaganda on behalf of popular mass produc-
tion. The advertisement for socialized production is therefore only the
natural consequence of the capitalists' advertisement for a socialized
consumption. Socialists also avoid taking this economic significance
of art into consideration. Therefore they cannot explain why there are
types of wine in France that are half as dear as others even though they
are just as good. The explanation is that because of the lack of advertise-
ment they are not known and cannot therefore be sold for a high price.
The lack of advertisement is due to the limited number of commodities.
The container principle and the concept of form
When we maintain that socialism excludes savings from the capitalist con-
sumption system, then this is really just a propaganda cliché without mean-
ing, for socialism is in reality constructed on the principle of absolute savings.
This can only be understood if one includes the article of utility in the
economic considerations, and this is probably the most important reason
why socialists avoid it. We have been able to establish that the article of
utility becomes a commodity in the instant the producer cannot use it
himself and it thus becomes directly or immediately of no use to him, and
therefore where the direct causal relationship between production and
consumption is broken. Only the article of utility saved up in this way
(placed in reserve) becomes a commodity, and this happens only in the
event of a sufficiently large number of uniform articles of utility existing
in the depot. This system of accumulation is the process of commodity
genesis and is not eliminated by socialism. On the contrary, it has become
an absolutely common principle for all production. The socialist system
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191
is based upon a common accumulation of the whole production, without
exception, before it is distributed. This occurs with the intention of achiev-
ing complete control by such a distribution.
No one up to now has analysed accumulation, which is the same as
saving, in its own form, which is the form of the container. Accumulation
is dialectical interplay between container and content. We have noticed
that substance is often identified with the concept of content, but it is re-
ally nothing more than process. Substance, in the form of a real content,
means the latent power, restrained energy or matter available to be used
in a process. But we have always perceived form as constancy or stability.
A container's form is a form that exists only as a direct opposite to the
content, its function being to prevent the content entering into a process
except under controlled and severely limited conditions. In this way, the
container form is thus something completely different from the form of
the material in itself, where only the content's own form exists. It is only
in the biological world that the container becomes an elemental function.
The whole of biological life has, so to speak, occurred on the basis of a
development of this opponent relationship between container form and
the material's own form. It is this path that technology is continuing in
an artificial way and is definitively systematizing through what we call the
measurement processes, for any goal whatsoever is nothing other than a
form of container, and what is called by that strange expression scientific
control is only the establishment of a constant relationship between objec-
tive forms and artificial container forms manufactured by man.
These measurements or container forms are established as purely
conventional oppositions to the forms being measured. Generally the con-
tainer hides the content's own form and thus possesses a third form, the
sensual form or the apparent form. In the discussion about forms, these
three forms are never clearly separated. But all three forms are actual and
make up sides of our experience of matter. They make up a scale of opposi-
tions that allow us to distinguish between the matter of the unorganized
world, the forms of biological nature and our own purely sensory world.
But another world unites with these three actual forms, the world of imag-
ined forms, formed by thought and fantasy, the symbolic forms.
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Scientific and philosophical systems differ from each other in the way
they confuse and mix up these forms, which, as forms, have nothing to do
with each other, if the descriptions are shaped into clear and unambiguous
concepts. If one can establish that there is an opposition between quality
and quantity as two opposite characteristics of matter which is also the
opposition that exists between units and similarities, then it is precisely
the principle of container form which permits people to be fooled that this
opposition can be abolished as the similarity and uniformity of the con-
tent is neutralized by the container's function as a unit. By this one comes
to the formula; the greater the unit or quality, the greater the similarity
or quantity, as the law of probability abolishes the meaning of the differ-
ences to the same degree as the units are increased in number. In the unit
container-content the opposition between mass and amount is abolished.
This storage of accumulation or box principle, this insurance or sav-
ings principle, is the basis for the whole of the modern tin-can philosophy
which sees progress as the tendeney towards greater and greater simi-
larities. One has just to extend the container, to make it bigger and bigger,
which isn't so difficult as it can be changed independently of the content
because its form has nothing at all to do with the form of the content.
This is the capitalist as well as the socialist principle of development and
all their reflections about the relationship between form and content only
serve the purpose of developing this tinned goods industry.
Surplus and economics
The word state means condition, the static, the quality or the form. The
great discrepancy of Marxism is that it has not understood what the state
in its innermost being is, that it is that purely biological form, the con-
tainer. The biological cycle in nature is called ecology and it is the mistake
of the Marxists not to have seen that unpolitical economies, ecology and
the pure doctrine of the state are the same. Despite the opposite being
maintained, socialism therefore becomes the society of the pure state. This
cannot be otherwise. The day that the lie is rooted out, everything is true
and then truth is abolished. Really this is the way that the socialists wish
to abolish the state.
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Critique of Economic Policy
193
Marxism is the first philosophy that has stressed the economic
problem as the most important, as the basic condition for human con-
duct. In order to avoid the direct consequences of this theory's fusion with
socialism, a distinction was discovered between higher Marxism and what
was called vulgar Marxism. Vulgus means people, just like populus, and
this more lowly regarded popular Marxism, which in reality is not taken
into account, probably corresponds to what were called the vulgar or folk
democracies in eastern Europe after the war. I here have to make this
absolutely vulgar perception of Marxism my own, for I am an adherent of
democracy.
Since industrialization, economics and economic problems have
played a steadily rising role in human activity. It is therefore appropriate
for once to examine thoroughly what this new dominant concept truly
covers. If one goes back to the original speculations about economics, one
discovers that they limited themselves to only one of the three sides that
today comprise economics, namely the ordering of expenditures in a
housekeeping. Neither incomes nor savings were dealt with at that time. It
was only later that the concept of economics was moved over to the savings
achieved by limiting expenditures.
These savings are called economizing. The question of from where
the savings that are to be made or distributed are to come has not yet been
posed. This undefined dimension is called wealth. However once the eco-
nomic question is posed in its entirety as the relationship between income,
saving and expenditure, the basis has been created for the development
of what is called political economy, which deals with the question of the
production, distribution and consumption of wealth.
Expenditure - saving - income
We have already indicated at the beginning that wealth has nothing to
do with what is necessary for the maintenance of life, and thus with the
economic in its true sense. Wealth is surplus, abundance, multiplicity or
what modern economics calls surplus value. If this wealth had always been
used from the dawn of time in accordance with its own essence, as waste,
unprofitable consumption and superfluous luxury, then an economic
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problem would never have existed, but neither would technical develop-
ment. Economic problems first arise the moment wealth is saved, collected
and stored, thus taking on the character of a reserve. It is through the ac-
cumulation of wealth that one economizes. Thus this is immediately just a
question of a choice between consumption and non-consumption and it is
this problem that occupies the thoughts of most people.
Karl Marx was the first person to move the main interest in economic
considerations consistently over to the relationship between production
and saving. He maintained that the saving of products from time im-
memorial has been the source of all humanity's misfortunes and that the
equivalence between human production and consumption is the formula
for happiness, as it hinders the accumulation of wealth. Strangely enough
this leads to the demand for absolute saving.
A completely equable economics would thereby arise, a true econo-
my, and a new economic science, no longer interested in wealth, but, on a
purely economic basis, able to control the harmony between the various
parts of the economic whole. This would make economics an absolute
unit, a quality, by excluding the problem of variability or what we call the
concept of value. Human economics has hereby become identified with
biological ecology and can be perceived as natural, and an integrated part
of the natural sciences. This socialist economics is far superior in its theory
to political economics, because the latter systematically avoids analyzing
the source of wealth. Its success has led to a pure doctrine of political eco-
nomics hardly being found anywhere in the world anymore. Everything
is consciously or unconsciously stamped with the principles of socialist
economics.
Economic policy versus political economy
In order to understand this development, it is necessary to understand
what the concept of politics really means in its basic essence. What in
Hellenic city society was called polities, and is still the fundamental mean-
ing today, are those actions carried out within a social community without
any regard whatever to economic considerations. Politics is surplus fellow-
ship or a social unit's anti-economie actions, the variability in the actions
Asger Jorn
Critique of Economic Policy
195
of a social group. Gathering the description of all these unique and inces-
santly changing events together is called the writing of history. Politics is
thus the medium for introducing something new and unexpected into the
pattern of actions of a whole group. This is called historical development
and is a purely artificial or artistic phenomenon.
The 'critique of political economy of Das Kapital is in no way a cri-
tique of economics as such. On the contrary, it is a critique of the control
of economics through the purely uneconomical activity called politics that
is still frustrating all objective economic calculations. As an antidote to
the political consequences, which are always uncertainty, instability, cri-
ses, social and productive disorder, Marx suggests a socialist politics or
more precisely an anti-political economic system, which must necessarily
remove any possibility or necessity of making politics.
As communists see that the state is used as a political instrument,
the socialist movement reckons that one can dissolve the state by rooting
out the class which dominates politics. The political goal of Marxism is
therefore to replace the state with an inoffensive and automatic adminis-
tration or a system of distribution of those things which could be of com-
mon interest. As in socialist terms that is everything, this is to say that this
administrative apparatus would control everything. Statistics robots will
compute, guided by effective soundings of public opinion, in accord with
the wishes or otherwise of the majority, and in the society of the future
secure us a perfect and effective dictatorship of the majority, without the
least possibility of fooling the people, that is to say, of making politics with
them and thereby allowing people to dominate other people. The problem
will be solved.
There is just the snag that this technical administration which to-
day has developed with growing speed all over the world to the east and
the west, although it abolishes the politics of cultivating polities, does
not at the same time, as was believed, abolish the state. On the contrary.
Everything becomes the state. What was overlooked was the fact that the
state is not and never has been a directly political instrument. The state's
function has always been to avoid or at any rate diminish and even out the
misfortunes that polities brought with it. The state was created to create
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stability and this stability is precisely the same as what is called econom-
is. The statesman in his pure form appears neither as emperor, nobleman
nor capitalist. He comes into history under the name of major domus, the
householder or the economist. In this category we will find all the really
great statesmen of Europe. He is the economist, the bureaucrat, the first
model for the statistics robot, even though he is encumbered with faults
because he is only a human being and not a machine. If the socialist goal
is itself in this way in absolute conflict with the progressive ideas of the
working classes, this is because of this misunderstanding of the concept of
the state, and their great illusion about being able to liberate themselves
from this apparatus by perfecting it.
In order to come to power, the socialists have worked out a political
programme. They are therefore forced to accept the political perception
of the state, a perception which contrasts completely with those perspec-
tives in which Marx believed and which came from the theory of the swift
dissolution of the state. They wish to utilize the apparatus of the state
and thereby become themselves utilized for just the opposite of what they
aspired to. In the Soviet Union, they believed that they were on the way
to abolishing surplus value, but without knowing it they have created the
greatest and most sensational completely unusable surplus value in the
history of humanity, a star that could lift humanity above its attachment
to the earth. The danger of this situation is that they themselves believe
that they have done this of necessity, to defend themselves, and thus for
military reasons. For this reason, they are blind to the fact that this new
human possibility for expansion could not under any circumstances be
coupled with the production of H-bombs, but on the contrary must defini-
tively close this chapter of the history of humanity as the final mistake for
this new perspective to have any possibility at all of development.
Instead, however, bureaueracy swarms everywhere. As the true so-
called power factors' within the areas of capitalism, socialism and com-
munism, these snotty little functionaries are increasing more and more.
Like the counter-revolutionary armies of socialism, they are spreading out
over all branches of human existence, for bureaucracy is the container sys-
tem of society. In the name of economic control, and to preserve their OWn
Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy
197
meaningless little existence, they sit by the innumerable serews and taps
of the whole system of pipes. They have all the power' except one, the one
able to change anything at all, and this is really the only power that counts.
That the social justification for the sputnik and the atom bomb is the same
everywhere, even though they open two quite opposite perspectives, is the
fault of that ridiculous flock of politicians, economists and generals which
in the USA carries the delicious name of the power elite.
Value is inconstancy - quality is immutability
What must now be the consequence of our new definition of value? Firstly
it must be that we can maintain that value never under any circumstances
can be a state of things, a constant. Thus value does not exist in the same
way as things. Values arise and pass away. One cannot therefore own val-
wes, as it is so nicely put. One can only own objects containing a latent
value, a possible value. A substance is a possibility of value. Thus in theory
all objects in the world possess values, if people are able to extract them.
This is thus dependent exclusively upon people themselves. On the other
hand, one could say that everything is value in itself, because everything
is in process. This is just not in people's direct interest. All matter is in
constant emergence and disappearance. Value can therefore be character-
ized as an objective property of matter. Or, more correctly, if quality is the
property of matter then value is the material characteristics or abilities, the
dynamics of matter. The value of a form or a quality thus depends upon the
ease with which one can dissolve the form and liberate its latent energies,
whilst its character of quality consists in its resistance to this. The ease
with which a quality is transformed to another quality is thus its value. The
socialist attack upon the right of private ownership thus comes from the
will to destroy a system that blocks the free play of values by making them
private, which is to say socially inaccessible. However, the law of mechan-
is says that a form of energy cannot be counteracted without the energy
gathering itself after its liberation into an even more inaccessible form
or quality, which thus becomes more valueless and precisely therefore of
higher quality. It is this opposition to which the socialists close their eyes.
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Fixed values do not exist. If they are fixed, that is to say that they
are qualities and not values. In his analysis of industrial society, Marx
demonstrates how variable capital is transformed to constant capital,
that capital from being a value is transformed into a quality, and that it
is precisely this transformation that shows that the transformation of the
capitalist society into a socialist society is unavoidable and necessary. The
socialists have shown their theoretical superiority for it is extremely easy
to demonstrate this process purely scientifically.
Value perceived as process can only be progressive or regressive. It
is here that the socialists have allowed themselves to be fooled, for this
means that value can only exist in the form of rising surplus value or
depreciation, as inflation and deflation. The fixation of a form through a
rising reproduction of the same form is the neutralization of its value, its
transformation to quantity or 'Entfremdung.
Uniform work is valueless - only new ideas create surplus value
Marx maintains that what is called constant capital is the apparatus of
production, and thus the industrial machinery. This apparatus is in itself
unable to enter into a process, to create wealth or surplus value. It can
only repeat the same production in the same tempo. The more industrial
production develops its technical apparatus the more production becomes
valueless as a commodity, until complete automation makes the product
completely free of charge. In this way Marx has shown that it is not the ma-
chines that produce value, in this case surplus value. Surplus value arises
exclusively in variable capital and this variable capital is manpower, the
human being.
This statement makes Marx draw the conclusion that it is the worker
closely where this surplus value really comes from. Where is the variable,
the element of variation that makes the rising profit possible?
It cannot exist in the abilities and diligence of the individual worker,
his personal and professional characteristics. Neither capitalists nor
socialists reckon with this in the industrial production. The workers are
not exploited in their abilities or in the quality and value of the work,
Asger Jorn
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199
but exclusively on the basis of the amount of work, the quantity. Work is
measured in man-hours. As it is thus in the exploitation of man and not of
machine that profit and wealth occurs, Marx perceives the content of value
as the work put into it and the standard of measurement for the object is
one hour's human work in capitalist as well as socialist industry.
But even Marx was clear that it was not because the workers could
be made to labour for longer and longer periods that profit rose. This has
become even more distinct after the organization of the working class and
the reduction in working time, for profit is still rising. How do the Marxists
explain this condition? The explanation is enormously simple.
The precondition for this explanation is that every producing human
in the world has the right to what he himself produces. If this basis, which
is Marxism's great, humanistic achievement in world history, is removed,
then the whole meaning of Marxism vanishes. Now it is demonstrable that
the industrial worker can produce far more than he himself consumes to
maintain life, and with technical development he takes less and less time
to achieve the production necessary for himself. As he nevertheless con-
tinues to work at the same tempo, there is, however, a steadily increasing
surplus of production, and as this is taken from him he is exploited to an
ever increasing degree.
If we now stick to the capitalist and socialist evaluation of industrial
labour as a purely quantitative dimension, where human characteristics
play no role, then it is also quite obvious that the purely mechanical work
could be carried out to a greater and greater degree by machines and thus
carried out free of charge. Then the conclusion becomes in reality that in
principle mechanical work is valueless.
Within mechanics the concept of work is the product of quantity or
tension. If it is possible to disregard tension as a factor in industrial labour
and to perceive labour purely quantitatively, then this is because the whole
of the factory installation keeps production in a constant tension common
to all. This is the reason that there is an equivalence between one man-hour
and another. No variability of any significance is possible in the tempo of
work. Thus the machine represents the inertia or the resistance to changes
in the working process. The valuelessness of labour is conditioned by this
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constancy in tension. If one man-hour is equivalent to another man-hour,
then all human labour is free of charge or valueless. This is the weakness in
the Marxist theory of exploitation, for if industrial labour is without value
in itself, then the worker represents a higher human value than other hu-
man classes, not as maintained because of his work achievement, but on
the contrary because he has preserved his human values intact despite the
work, because these values are not utilized or introduced in the process.
If there is something correct in Marxism's theory of value, it is in
no way connected with work. If the measurement of value is perceived as
man-hours and this has nothing to do with work, then it simply has to
be the human being's time and nothing else that is the variable capital to
which he himself owns the property rights.
Surplus value is not created in the work but in the variability of the
work. In reality this is well known. Movement, change, and not the price
dimension, creates the profit. But where does this variability come from?
It cannot come from the machines working with clockwork precision. It
cannot come from the workers either, who labour with their accustomed
constancy. It is just as unlikely to come from the capitalist or the manufac-
turer who makes the factory yield its utmost, which is also constant. It is
thus the transformation of industry itself as such that creates surplus value.
Therefore surplus value is, as we have seen, the result of a rising accelera-
tion of production. But who creates this acceleration? It is those who have
a new idea, those who discover new machines and processes, the inventors.
Here we are at the true source of rising surplus value, human ingenuity and
imagination. A new invention has already lost its ability to create surplus
value the day all the competitors own the machine, when it is common to
all. The socialist countries have been able to overlook this question because
they have been able to exploit the exploiters in the capitalist countries for
their inventions. But this problem has become topical today.
Time - space - and event
Trade is exchange. Transport is displacement. These two processes are
basically different. Unilateral or what is called irreversible transport, and
thus a transport where neither interehange nor return transport tales
Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy
201
place, is called progress. Progress is thus pure transport. This progressive
movement is necessary in order for a movement to be oriented. Without
it, a rudder has no function at all, even though a boat without a rudder is
also oriented by the advance of the water, as it drifts with the current. In
order to give possibilities of orientation, progressive movement must be
movement collected from within in relation to the surrounding element.
Progress is neither necessary, absolute nor ideal. Einstein explains
that a uniform movement in space is without orientation, and that in a
space speeding off into outer space we can only locate up and down, as we
do on the earth's surface, if the speed is still rising. This explains why what
is called general progress also appears as a general increase in speed, a con-
stant acceleration. The whole of our conscious orientation is conditioned
by this rising acceleration, which unites our universal experiences with our
most primary conditions and thereby creates our ability to experience the
connection called causality. If the idealistic belief in progress is bankrupt
stock today, this, however, in no way abolishes the significance progress still
has for us. We have just lost certain illusions and must in the future base
our perception of the whole question upon quite new principles, which
have to be combined with the three basic factors, time, space and event.
We have to demonstrate that time becomes space and space time. We
now know that a star observed at a distance of 40 light years is just as old
in time as the distance is long. To observe through the instrument of time
or of space is thus a simple interchange.
Time is change which can be regarded as a progressive movement
in space whilst space appears as a constant which can only be observed
if one is participating in that movement called time. Thus neither time
nor space possesses an actuality, existence or value outside this change or
process, that is to say, outside the active combination called the time-space
continuum. The action of time-space is the process and this process is in
itself the transformation of time to space and space to time. These trans-
formations are called events.
The rigidity, inertia, constancy or quality in matter rises with the
speed of movement to the degree that one could put forward the claim
that quality and speed are the same. Value is thus found not in the speed
Asger Jorn Critique of Economic Policy
201
place, is called progress. Progress is thus pure transport. This progressive
movement is necessary in order for a movement to be oriented. Without
it, a rudder has no function at all, even though a boat without a rudder is
also oriented by the advance of the water, as it drifts with the current. In
order to give possibilities of orientation, progressive movement must be
movement collected from within in relation to the surrounding element.
Progress is neither necessary, absolute nor ideal. Einstein explains
that a uniform movement in space is without orientation, and that in a
space speeding off into outer space we can only locate up and down, as we
do on the earth's surface, if the speed is still rising. This explains why what
is called general progress also appears as a general increase in speed, a con-
stant acceleration. The whole of our conscious orientation is conditioned
by this rising acceleration, which unites our universal experiences with our
most primary conditions and thereby creates our ability to experience the
connection called causality. If the idealistic belief in progress is bankrupt
stock today, this, however, in no way abolishes the significance progress still
has for us. We have just lost certain illusions and must in the future base
our perception of the whole question upon quite new principles, which
have to be combined with the three basic factors, time, space and event.
We have to demonstrate that time becomes space and space time. We
now know that a star observed at a distance of 40 light years is just as old
in time as the distance is long. To observe through the instrument of time
or of space is thus a simple interchange.
Time is change which can be regarded as a progressive movement
in space whilst space appears as a constant which can only be observed
if one is participating in that movement called time. Thus neither time
nor space possesses an actuality, existence or value outside this change or
process, that is to say, outside the active combination called the time-space
continuum. The action of time-space is the process and this process is in
itself the transformation of time to space and space to time. These trans-
formations are called events.
The rigidity, inertia, constancy or quality in matter rises with the
speed of movement to the degree that one could put forward the claim
that quality and speed are the same. Value is thus found not in the speed
202 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
but in the transformation of the speed, and the less this speed is the easier
the speed and the direction can be changed. The general acceleration thus
creates a rising progress but is in itself the tendency to greater and greater
inertia. This is the double-edged effect of the general tendency of progress.
A real development of value thus cannot be identical with rising devalua-
tion or acceleration even if it is dependent upon the same.
A person's lifetime or span of years is his personal property. But this
property only becomes value if this lifetime is realized, and the realization
of a lifetime happens through its variation, its changeability. Therefore
the perfect industrial worker realizes nothing of his life during the work-
ing process, as this is completely eventless. Seen in purely human terms,
working time in its industrial form is active waiting time. Therefore the
abolition of the right to private activity only makes the person more and
more valueless. This is the reason why socialization can only have a stand-
ard of value in the activation of humanity's leisure time, if socialization is
to have any human purpose, something which is not necessary. Leisure
time is therefore the only thing that has value in modern society and the
modern form of exploitation is concentrated upon precisely this one point:
how can we steal the individual's free time from him? This is the greatest
problem of modern state politics.
Progress and change. Value is transport
That I bother at all to concern myself with something as deadly boring as
economics and into the bargain do myself the even more killing inconven-
ience of translating what I have written and then publishing it in Danish,
then, of course, this is from the conviction that this ought to be enormously
significant to the Scandinavian people. Whether this is right or wrong is
not my business. With me any responsibility stops at the purely personal
question of conscience, to get it said and especially to get it said at a mo-
ment where it could, if wished, be included in the economic deliberations
which it seems are to bring in their wake deep-seated political changes in
Scandinavia's relationship to the surrounding world, and because these
political deliberations are said to have been concluded upon a purely eco-
nomic basis.
Asger Jorn
Critique of Economic Policy
203
As I set out my theory of value in connection with my theory about
the natural order, it is very evident that this is created from an analysis
of the Scandinavian cultural tradition as compared with other cultural
traditions, and that it is an attempt to take the fundamental Scandinavian
attitude to these problems. If I therefore make the assertion that value is
the transport of forces and not the size of these forces, nor their quantity,
then this is a direct critique of economic policy in postwar Scandinavia,
for, by tying itself to the belief in the superiority of dimension and quantity
over variability, this policy has denied the economic principle which I am
setting out here as a Scandinavian contribution to the problem. If this
theory does not have general validity, then there is always a chance that
it has Scandinavian validity. The unique context of Scandinavian cultural
development from the Stone Age to the present day makes it enormously
simple to demonstrate that our periods of full bloom have always coin-
cided with those periods when we have concentrated all our wealth, our
surplus of human enthusiasm around the problem of transport. This is
especially apparent in the Nordic Bronze Age, the art of which is one long
tribute to the holy transport, and it is apparent in the Viking period, where
the positive element was not the plundering, rapine or trade but transport
and especially the transport of precious goods. We have already indicated
previously that the great humanistic discovery that Marx made was that
only in humanity, never in machines or instruments, arises wealth or
surplus value. This is the reason that human transport, especially if it is
superfluous or unnecessary, is the best source of human wealth. This can
be studied in the immense pilgrim transactions of the Catholic Church in
the Middle Ages, which created all our wonderful church art. The same is
also true today where, with its rising surplus, the car industry is on the way
to making car traffic impossible.
I have found, however, the most shattering commentary to what is
being prepared today in Scandinavian politics in Palle Lauring's fantas-
tically clear analysis of Scandinavia's economic decline at the end of the
Middle Ages in his book about The Sons of Valdemar and the Union.
Every Scandinavian politician ought to read the section on our child-
ishly rash indifference to the transport problem: our self-important Viking
204
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
conservatism and chivalrous enthusiasm tor the jata morgana of the
German regional farmer. History repeats itself. Nothing is learnt. Nothing
is forgotten. I will not go into historical considerations here. The only thing
I would indicate is that a people that voluntarily renounces valuing what is
the most precious element in its own being, in which it has shown itself to
be superior to all other peoples over millennia, has thereby sinned not only
against itself but against all humanity, which develops precisely through
the wealth of differing abilities and contributions to the development of
humanity by the various peoples and cultures. Only by the development of
this our special ability are Danes and Scandinavians as a whole in the same
boat. This is the only boat we have. Without it we are wreckage and bodies
washed ashore. And with uncomfortable clarity this too can be read in our
history. To an overwhelming degree our fame abroad is unfortunately a
stressing of this side of our existence and hardly without reason. However,
this is outweighed by Scandinavians having, on the strength of our special
culture, all the natural preconditions for being the best and most secure
transporters in the world.
Who owns whom?
Let us now sort right from wrong. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx has shaped
a scientific analysis of the economic character of the commodity. The
treatment of this concrete subject is a scientific achievement which can
never be shaken. In this limited area, Karl Marx has realized a scientific
knowledge that corresponds to Heisenberg's demand that it has universal
validity and can be neither changed nor improved:
At the same time, with the economic perspective gradually being
realized more and more, as Marx foresaw, the political programme of
Marxism has lost its interest. In the focus of events, it has already become
past and history. A third value in this work, which can never be dimin-
ished, is hereby liberated, the artistic value, the literary human value.
In human sympathy, even, I dare to say, in poetic and dramatic force,
this work surpasses most of what the poets of the same period have de-
picted. If, through the rich knowledge and the careful documentation, one
is able to decipher the terrible tension of this striking document of its time,
Asger Jorn
Critique of Economic Policy
205
then one cannot avoid seeing life in a different way. I mention this not to
appear as a literary critic, but as just the truism it is for me as it must be for
all humanity. In this area too the value of Das Kapital is universal. It forms
a stage in the history of humanity.
In its demand for the protection of the weak against the thoughtless
and violent exploitation of the strong, it is an accusation and at the same
time a rule of conduct in direct continuation of the doctrine of the New
Testament, which it outdoes at exactly the same point that Christ outdid
the Pharisees of the Old Testament. This is why Christianity is just as little
able to condemn Marxist socialism with any right as the Pharisees were
able to shape a legal judgement over Christ. In the struggle against social-
ism, the Christian church has had to use the same means as the Pharisees
used against Christ. The Pharisees' demand for forgiveness was outdone by
Christ. Marx simply maintains that no individual has the right to draw up
accounts over his efforts in the community. Everything must be forgiven
when everything is owed by all to all. Against this demand, the champions
of Christianity stand just as disarmed as the Pharisees did before Christ.
This is why the principle of socialism is spreading all over the world.
'Communism is a classless societal system with uniform ownership
by the people of the means of production and complete equality of the
members of society; it says in the Soviet Union's Communist Party pro-
gramme. This resembles what is also in the American constitution and no
one can ignore the fact that the means of production in the West are being
more and more socialized.
But what about the exploitation of the strong by the weak?
Verdi og skonomi. Kritik af den akonomiske politik og udbytningen af det
enestäende (Copenhagen: Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende Vandalisme & Borgen,
1962), pp. 6-43.
Translated by Peter Shield
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206
CO-RITUS INTERVIEW:
ART IS POP - CO-RITUS IS ART
DIVIDED WE STAND
Jorgen Nash & Jens Jorgen Thorsen
Nash: Situationism is not a new 'ism' in art - it is a form of action and a way
of life. A command of the moment and a utilization of its possibilities.
Situationist art does not yet exist, but there are situationists working
artistically with the problems of life, attempting to find a new and more
living art. When situationists are being lumped together with people who
set up new art movements it is because the Situationist International has
been attractive for people from three categories: namely, image makers,
writers and architects. This had to do with the situationists' attempt to
change the conformist and sterile environment in which we live, for in-
stance in the cities.
Q: What is the situationists' relationship to society?
Thorsen: Any potential change of society is conditioned by the cultural
possibilities. A classical example is Marx and Hegel. The essential in situ-
ationism is the relationship of human beings to the forces of creativity;
it is the intention to realize these forces through moments of creativity.
The situationist idea is based on the use of art and the forces of creativity
directly in the social environment.
There is both a French and a Scandinavian Situationist International:
the First and Second Situationist International. The First International
wanted a unitary organization of the city and believed that they through
a Freudian method could create the possibilities for a new urban plan; an
architecture constructed according to the inner desires of human beings
desires they believed could be evoked by a quick passage through various
unfamiliar environments. They claimed that there was no situationist art.
Jorgen Nash and Jens Jorgen Thorsen CO-RITUS Interview
207
We believe that situationism is art and the creative human being (the art-
ist) has to get involved in the social situation. We do not believe that the
organization of life is a matter of statisties (statistics are also used within
advertising), but a question of artistic creation - the re-organizing of the
situations. That is why we claim that situationism is art. Art can only be
produced through an experimental activity (CO-RITUS, the concert in the
spiral maze at Malmo Town Hall, CO-RITUS at Aarhus Student Society
and various wall painting actions are some of our experiments).
The Parisian Situationists believed in accordance with their dia-
lectical materialist perspective that human beings are produced by their
environment. Contrary to this we believe that the source of life is the
continuous realization of new possibilities of inter-human activity. Our re-
lationship to Marxism and the radical-liberal Western concept of society is
that we are at the same time reconstructing both systems from the inside.
This is because both systems are on the threshold of entering the same
phase, which consists of two elements:
1. A conformization, which in the East takes the form of a political
and cultural regimentation, and in the West manifests itself as a
schematic commercialized consumerism.
2. An increasing wealth that sets human beings free, economically
speaking. (This development is neither a result of Marxism nor
Liberalism, but a result of the technological progress).
Q: You are publishing a magazine Drakabygget for art against atom
bombs, popes and politicians?
Nash: It is an organ where the anti-authoritarian tendencies within situ-
ationism are expressed. It has been said that we have turned against the
Catholics and the welfare state. That is not the case. We have been fighting
the enemies of total freedom of expression within culture. By popes we
mean not only Pope Paul in Rome - the guy with the piles pillow - but also
Pope Knud at Louisiana in Humlebaek - the guy with the big soft cheese.
The Scandinavian version of the welfare state has the social sympathy of
the situationists. It is wholly a good thing that the work hours are being
shortened. The grotesque thing is that this development has created a new
problem: the problem of free time. According to the situationists this is
208 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
a result of the monopolization of both the artistic freedom of expression
and the human freedom of expression. In the communist countries the
workers did take over the means of production, but the free artists got
kicked in the ass by the commissioners. In Western Europe and America
it is the cultural entrepreneurs (the pop cultural stronghold of Gutenberg
House and its cultural commissioners at the police station in Antoniegade,
Jens Frederik Don't [Lavar] from the television and the careerist Peder
Norgard with his top job at the National Radio Centre), who are control-
ling the publishing houses, film production, newspapers and art exhibi-
tions. These latter are again categorized into those authorized by the state
and those which do not suit the authorities.
We have asked who is going to take over the artistic means of produc-
tion? All the wonderful technological innovations such as radio, TV, film,
rotary press, off-set printing machines, etc. They should not exclusively
become the artists' toys. All these things have been invented to be utilized
by the spiritual intelligence, and not by a bunch of cultural entrepreneurs
or commissioners, which both in the East and the West are mouthpieces
for an enormous control apparatus filled with mentally deaf-mute and col-
our blind fools. Our recent action at the pedestrian street in Copenhagen
Stroget had the motto 'the uncontrollable art' and it shows what potentials
there are when artists utilize those rights which are normally wielded by
advertising. Erik Knudsen's campaign against Radio Merkur, the adver-
tising industry, etc. was an indication of sympathy towards everything
authoritarian, e.g. the State Radio. I believe if an artist is not allowed to
express himself through a programme in the monopolized state radio,
then it should be possible for him to work with the technological intelli-
gence - the radio amateur - as a pirate on the air. And if he cannot express
himself in the authorized magazines without being subject to censorship,
then he must start his own magazine. It is of utmost importance that he
does not give up, which is to say, that he doesn't shut up with what he
wants to communicate.
Q: What role has the audience in CO-RITUS?
Thorsen: The position of the audience is impossible within CO-RITUS.
CO-RITUS wants to abolish the notion of audience - not like Fluxus that
Jorgen Nash and Jens Jergen Thorsen
CO-RITUS Interview
209
bores them into leaving or makes fools of them by making dry caricatures
of European theater - but by making the audience co-creators. By real-
zing the idea that art is not something which unfolds either inside the
artist or inside the spectator, but is a game unfolding between people, we
are contributing to the renewal of the terms of art, the process of creation
and social construction. The basis of art at present makes it a more ad-
vanced evolutionary step than pop. That is the reason why we have made
the controversial slogan (which of course is not totally correct): Art is Pop
- CO-RITUS is Art. To make a human being into a spectator is like cutting
off his balls. We have nothing against pop or advertising. I love milk even
though it is promoted in advertising. We are against those forms which
are allowing freedom to pop and not to art. This is our weapon against
pop, which the anti-pop people do not have, and it became clear at Stroget
and in Montergade where the police used all their powers to stop us. The
anti-pop people are lame theoreticians and the advertising business, eg.
the newspaper Politiken, have cashed in on them.
Q: Should art be ethical, aesthetic or activating?
Thorsen: The term ethics is part of a problematic about ways to activate
oneself and, at times, activate other people. The term aesthetics has
been discussed in so many versions that it could mean either ethics or a
way to activate. I can only understand the question as meaning that the
interviewer himself believes that art is a way to activate. I agree: Art is
simultaneously an ethical and an aesthetic way to activate human beings.
Nash: Divided we stand. It is important in culture that there is space for
people with alternative ideas. Other rules apply to art than to the world
of unions. On the trade union banners it said: 'United we stand'. This led
to victory in many areas. If we are to produce a prosperous cultural lite,
and not the present-day version limited by the authorities, then the slogan
must become 'Divided We Stand.
"CO-RITUS interview. Kunst er pop - CO-RiTUS er kunst - Uenighed gor stark", Aspekt, no. 3,
Translated by Jakob Jakobsen.
THE FREEDOM OF
EXPRESSION IS NOT FOR SALE
Ladies and Gentlemen! We believe you agree with us in that you
yourselves, much more than the police, are able to decide whether
or not you want to listen to our music. Furthermore, I believe that
our voices are not much more noisy than the various bands from
the Royal Guards. We want a lively pedestrian street for the people.
We are therefore making this protest against the patronizing
attitude of the police to the citizens.
- Flemming Quist Moller
We, folk musicians, fiddlers and street painters wish hereby to
express our disapproval of the ministry, the police or any law which
prevents the freedom of expression from unfolding itself.
We believe that folk art is the art of the people and it has the right
to be among the people.
Our opinion is that the people love their own art and want it to
be performed in an unofficial manner without the artists being
stopped by the authorities.
Folk musicians and street painters work with and need the contact
with the people in order to be able to find new ways in Danish
folk art. Therefore, ministers, mayors and police chiefs: Stop the
persecution of the artists when they work in the streets. The streets
are just being transformed into what they are meant to be - festive
streets for the people.
- Bjarne Casar Rasmussen
The Freedom of Expression is not for Sale
251
Through this protest, art enters its communicative phase. The
artists are taking over their natural field of activity. Opponents are
trying to stop this phase by means of film censorship, image control
and musie prohibition. They attack art's freedom of expression with
their art placed on pedestals and their bourgeois music.
We answer this attack by placing art where it belongs and can live.
We encourage artists, architects and city planners to take over their
natural field of activity, in order to work out the problems through
unitary urbanism, CO-RITUS and integrated art. These are the
current methods of changing the conditions of life, the possibilities
for self-expression through a revision of the environment.
Today, in the period where poetry is approaching picture making,
where pictures are approaching theatre, where the theatre is
approaching action. Today we urge:
Let us make the city into a radiant workshop for the new art.
Art will get new power with CO-RITUS
- The Örestad Experimental Laboratory:
Thorsen, Nash, Strid & O'Brien
"tringsfriheden ikke til salg", leaflet from the street festival and occupation of Streget.
Copenhagen 1965.
Translated by Jakob Jakobsen.
THE COMMUNICATIVE
PHASE IN ART:
AN ESSAY ON THE DEATH
OF ANTI-ART
Jens Jorgen Thorsen
The Absence of God is not a limitation anymore. It is the threshold to
Infinity. God's absence is greater. This is more divine than God.
Night is a sun too, the absence of myth is a myth too. The coldest, the
most pure, the only genuine. Georges Bataille
The communicative phase in art consists in establishing communica-
tive fields. CO-RITUS is such an establishment of a field of communication.
The basis of this phase is the disappearance of the spectator (which
isn't the same as the disappearance of the audience) and his replacement
by the participator. A communicative art is an art which lives between.
In the space between people. From that point of view art is no longer just
a form of the aesthetic, of the philosophical, of the chronological or of
mental space. Art becomes a function in the social conception. The social
space. Looked upon this way through the communicative glasses (Fjord),
the organisation of society, the social patterns, town-complexes, business
companies, production companies, stock-car racing traffic, toilet draw-
ings, dancehall life, farming and festivities all become manifestations of
artistic value or at least have artistic possibilities.
The tradition of exhibiting art is in this case a work of art as are the
paintings in themselves. So the communicative phase of art shows up
when you take the consequences of this conception. Today I recommend:
Take the step now. Join CO-RITUS.
Hans Jorgen Thorsen The Communicative Phase in Art: An Essay On The Death Of Anti/AM
257
In the CO-RITUS manitesto of 1961 you will find fundamental state-
ments on this point.
Anti-art is moralisation
The Karl Marx and Hegel theories on alienation. The theory of alienation
is based upon the idea that man is fundamentally good. But made evil,
alienated from his actions by evil surroundings. An assembly-line worker
is alienated from the results of production. In a bad State the human be-
in is alienated. These theories pushed forward the Bert Brecht theatre.
The epic theatre.
As a contrast to the dramatic theatre, where one is only able to iden-
tify oneself with the action. Cry when the hero cries (Brecht). The epic
theatre leaves the spectator free to choose because it tells a story. According
to Brecht you have the possibility to laugh while the hero is crying.
The epic theatre inherently creates estrangement, the dialectical
opposite to alienation. This means that people put into a position as alien-
ated from the story on screen are not alienated from themselves anymore.
They get back the possibility of judging and thinking. Being able to choose
whether to be a 'yes-man' or a 'no-man'. Mixing the epic theatre with the
dramatic one, the absurd theatre was born. Intended progressively, it was
an answer to Brecht from the side of free art. Containing its seducing cock-
tail of emotions.
Mixing the absurd theatre with Zen Buddhism, Happenings rose,
growing into environments, Fluxus, etc.
The method of Zen is to create alienation by means of nature itself,
observing the universal auto-motion long enough to be able to attain
Satori, the highest knowledge.
Inspired by Zen, which refuses all books, formulations and pictures
(they got the nickname the 'stink of Zen'), anti-art tried to push back art in
tavour of morals. Tried turning the artist into an anti-artist and the anti-
artist into a moraliser.
According to the Zen sentence which goes If you meet the Buddha,
Will him and if you meet the patriarchs slay them at your feet: The anti-art
258 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Tents from the Situationist Mowement in Scandinovic and Ebsentere
was born in the late 1950s because of this myth about the disappearance
of contents in favour of a basic conception. If you happen to meet the fine
arts: kill them.
Anti-art is art too.
The absence of art is not a limitation anymore. It is the threshold to art
itself. Anti-art is greater. It is even greater than art itself.
A Goodyear tire by Oldenbourg, a can by Kaprow, a pair of blood-
stained trousers presented by Nam June Paik, a card game by Dick Higgins,
a burp from Vostell or the empty space pointed out by Eric Ander-Zen. All
these are things of beauty. Poems transformed into action, exhibited in-
stead of painted. Each detail a thing from the surroundings placed on the
screen with some purpose or after a certain plan. Exactly as La Gioconda
(Mona Lisa) or another object from somewhere painted on the canvas in
the traditional way.
So Art in the classic tradition leaves the spectator just as open as does
the so-called open performance.
Because of that the salt-dealer Marcel Duchamp and Picabia were
able to give her the official name LHCOQ (her ass is hot) and a little mous-
tache a la Strid. Volf Vostell for instance would never allow you to put a
moustache on him during a performance.
An audience at a Happening is still sitting gazing as if it were in a
theatre or in front of a painting looking for the true basic conception. The
conclusion: is open art any different from basic conception? Is it still art?
Jorn
Zorn
Silkeborg.
Using the theory of complementarity by Niels Bohr, my colleague and
former co-operator Asger Jorn attacks me because of my theory concern-
ing the disappearance of the spectator (in the Copenhagen paper Politiken
and later on in English in The Situationist Times).
As he at the same time attacks the Bohr theory calling it a blind road
(in his book De Division Naturae) I must confess that I find this without
consequence.
259
The spectator is anyhow dead, Jorn states in The Situationist Times.
In any case it is impossible for the spectator to exist. In this he quotes
the Bohr theory stating that observation changes the object you observe.
An electronic microscope for instance changes the electronic relations in
objects observed through it. I quote Bohr:
Studying the primitive tribes the ethnographer is not only aware of
the dangerous interruption he can cause to the culture through his touch
upon it. He is also very often himself on his own body feeling how deeply
his own way of life, his philosophy and mind can be changed through such
studies. Especially I am thinking of the well-known observation among
explorers, that prejudices they were not even aware of before could be
shaken deeply through the harmony human life creates, even under habits
and traditions quite different from their own'
Stating the death of the spectator four years after it had been stated
in the CO-RITUS manifesto, Jorn is rather a little late. We are glad of his
agreement. But he does not understand the basics of my argumentation:
the death of the spectator is mutually the death of the classic artist. Jorn
still works as a classic artist on classic art according to classic perception.
Taking the position of the sublime creator he evidently never under-
stood the idea nor took the consequences of it. The consequences are taken
in communicative art. With the CO-RITUS placing of art in new relations.
CO-RITUS is not anti-art.
So CO-RITUS is not just another death sentence of art. CO-RITUS only
states the conception that the communicative field is not situated where
the Renaissance tradition tried to put it. Artists in the Renaissance tradi
tion from Zorn to Jorn and from Jorn to Zen have been aiming at another
level than the one their works are to be found on. When Jorn tells me (in
Luck and Chance 1963 edition) that the spectator shows up because of
hunger, I must answer that a spectator cannot be filled up by being in the
spectator's position. And when Vostell tells me (Charlottenborg 1964) I
want to isolate man from the mass so that he feels lonely and sees himself",
then I have to answer that the absolute loneliness is impossible as far as I
can see. You cannot mirror yourself without a mirrOr.
260 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
The communicative phase of art is not death of art, but its expansion
Nor do we intend to kill traditional art. But we proclaim disappearance of
an illusion, a lie. We take the consequences:
a) through turning the spectator into a participator
b) through turning the artist into an urbanisor
c) through turning the possibilities of art into the possibilities of the
social space
d) through turning the functional urbanism into a communicative one
e) through turning the fixed picture into a un-composed one
f) through turning communism into communicativism
g) through turning passing (derive) into CO-RITUS, etc.
Very soon the time will come when work starts moving its wings in
order to fly away. A new time is emerging, carried to a new social balance
by servo-technology, automatics and cybernetics. Changes which will
make possible the disappearance of economical circulation in favour of so-
cial circulation of an artistic type. Therefore the old French Situationistic
theory on passing (dérive) is now completely worn out. Guy Debord's
theory stated that by passing (dériving) rapidly through completely un-
known surroundings of labyrinthine character, people should be forced
into a 'verfremdungs'-situation wanting to express new wishes for a new
urbanism. Labyrinths of this sort were named dérive-labyrinths. To me
this theory always seemed nonsense. As a sort of answer we built the Spiral
Labyrinth in the Malmö Town Hall (though the French mathematician
Max Bucaille in The Situationist Times No.3 tried to prove that a spiral
labyrinth is impossible, it is only impossible plane-geometrically). In the
CO-RITUS labyrinth it was made possible for the public to participate
in various activities: building, painting, playing, etc. The process was not
passing (deriving) anymore but communicative creativity.
Non-formal
The passing (dériving) theory was getting weaker. The idea of commu-
nication was growing. This weakening was the real problem behind the
many breaks between the Situationist groups. In order to investigate
these new fields the Örestad Experimental Laboratory in 1961 started
Jans Jorgen Thorsen The Communicative Phase in Art: An Essay On The Death Of Anti-Ar
261
the neo-urbanistic experiments directly in the towns. For instance on the
main streets of Copenhagen. Often in open conflict with the police and
the academic state-authorised artists. In 1965 eight thousand folk singers,
youngsters and our group of artists made the biggest experiment in this
field ever. Starting in 1962, CO-RITUS concertos were arranged in such
towns as Copenhagen, Göteborg, Lund, Uppsala, Aarhus, Malmö. CO-
RITUS-manifestations took place and the results were discussed in the
ÖRESTAD-conferences. After three years of eager experimentation, hav-
in been through Scandinavia's most-discussed artistic manifestations I
must confess that the results are still rather unclear. The possibilities seem
endless. We are now just at the starting point. Where else in today's tired
art world of stylistic reprises do you find that? This will soon enable us to
wave goodbye to anti-art. Anti-art came to Scandinavia after CO-RITUS
was started and it will disappear before CO-RITUS. We understand the
anti-artists' blaming of the audience, the anti-artists' distaste for discipline
and their attempted actions which are a latent longing for new changes.
We praise with joy the new signs of understanding which we are
finally seeing after many years. Our experimental concertos in the street
are starting to gather successors. (Especially we have enjoyed Jean Marc
Quineau's cent mille poems, the Vagn Steen osmotic theatre, the Peter
Boonéan shooting pictures, the Bengt Rooke Wroom Rooms). So today we
recommend, in the period when poetry is getting near to picture making,
pictures are getting near to theatre, the theatre is getting near to action.
Today I urge: Let us make the city into a radiant workshop for the new art.
Art will get new powers with CO-RITUS.
"The Communicative Phase in Art: An Essay On The Death Of Anti-Art", Jens Jorgen Thorsen,
Hardy Strid & Jorgen Nash (eds): Situationister i Konsten (Orkelljunga: Edition Bauhaus
Situationniste,1966).
GENERAL REMARKS
Bengt Ericson &J.V. Martin
1
After fifty years of permanent counter-revolution, the prevailing world,
the society of the spectacle, once more stands face to face with the mortal
enemy that it once thought it could defeat with the aid of words with a
false face value: the working class. Not once, but many times, the existing
spectacular society, with the aid of its epigones - the so-called socialist,
communist and trade union bureaucrats - has made the working class
understand that it 'exists in reality in a fully modern, classless society';
but this society is no more classless than it is modern - even the use of
the word reality' is an abuse and has nothing to do with the conditions
of life offered in a society that is at bottom based on an unreal life, and
in which the working class is constantly deprived of the huge potential it
produces. The revolution-saturated signals which are now flooding over
the world at the international level are a clear sign that the international
working class is aware not only that it has had enough of these lies, but
also that only one kind of society can exist that is at once real and modern:
the classless society. The Situationist International which, in the light
of the experiences of the past century from the proletarian revolutions,
has developed a modern revolutionary theory, has for the last ten years
attentively observed the signals of revolt in the period and its new types of
subversive action, and has at the same time outlined the potential for an
immediate realization of the revolutionary project - that is, the takeover of
power by the people. This project involves nothing less than the creation of
a classless society through the international realization of the power of the
workers' councils. Such a society will form the necessary launching ramp
tor the start of new, exciting experiments in the service of the innumerable
possibilities for the development of a life that is truly alive. The modern
revolutionary movement, which has nothing in common with the array of
278 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
old workers' parties and trade unions, demands everything and permits
no limitations or schisms. If the struggle for the modern revolutionary
movement at the moment looks the same as the one waged hitherto, this is
exclusively because the necessary launching ramp, the classless society, has
not been realized anywhere on this planet. 'For the future, all fundamental
cultural creativity and every qualitative transformation of society will be
deferred until progress is under way in all these areas jointly (Guy Debord
in 'Destruction of RSG-6', June 1963).
2
In a situation where one state after another is shaking in its foundations,
because the workers reject their own trade unions and make it clear that in
future they will be sure to order their own affairs, and where sabotage and
wildcat strikes are spreading as never before, one hears the shouts - loud
enough even here in the Scandinavian countries - from the last shrivelled
remains of a left wing that has long since detached itself from the working
class: for a Marxist-Leninist party which will take the lead in the struggle
of the working class. Whether they call themselves, in Denmark or Norway,
SUF (Young Betrayers of Socialism), or in Sweden KFML (Christian
Union of Mediocre Liars) or belong to one or another of the string of neo-,
semi- or sub-Stalinist and Bolshevik groups'; they promenade (even on the
streets, in transparent form) a purely theoretical 'underdevelopment, and
still represent nothing more than the last desperate attempt on the part of
individual power to conquer the proletariat's independent efforts (for they
can be nothing else) at emancipation, and lead them into a path that can
guarantee these groups or these individuals' future position as new capi-
talists: state capitalism's 'socialist' bureaucrats. The modern revolutionary
movement, on the other hand, is the radical critique of any ideology in the
sense of the individual power of ideas and the ideas of individual power,
and is thus opposed to the schizoid work of such groups. The only area
where such groups can still maintain their illusions is therefore within the
so-famous 'underdeveloped countries'; faithful to the idea of individual
power they therefore devote all their energy to mobilizing the ecumeni-
cal left wing and the Stalinophile bourgeoisie to get them to grant their
Bengt Ericson &J.V. Martin
General Remarks
279
most unreserved support to the so-called Third World's national liberation
movements, and to a grovelling admiration for the world's most gigantic
bureaucracy: China. Since the blinkers of their ideology, customized for
the purpose, prevent them from seeing what is really happening in the
society of the spectacle, they remain blissfully in their belief that the Third
World's liberation movements can form models that can be applied to a
highly industrialized society, and thus fail to see that what these national
liberation movements are working for are societies that are equivalent
to the highly industrialized ones, and thus a 'status quo relationship' in
which a modern revolutionary and international movement cannot accept
involvement. But it is in such situations that the workers in the highly
industrialized societies learn to know their enemies, and when these work-
ers set their plans in motion, the efforts of the left wing are reduced to a
level that can be compared to pure sewing-club blather. In a world without
intelligence the working class in fact represents the greatest intelligence;
and it thus knows better than anyone that a Marxist-Leninist party or any
other party can only stage a new spectacle, a new fabrication in the form
of new representations, classifications and ideology - that is, a new carrot
that new party bosses can dangle in front of the cart to get the donkey
to pull a load that is neither newer nor easier to pull than the old one.
Ideology always serves those in power, functioning exclusively as a tool for
the use of the new power specialists. Whether they call themselves SUF,
KFM-L, FLN ete., etc., these groups are in error: they are no longer living
in 1921, and even then the massacre of the Kronstadt Soviet shows that
they were wrong. For the modern revolutionary movement it is crystal-
clear that such groupings have nothing more to show than the old rags
of the fallen revolution; they have nothing to do with the revolution of
our time. And just as the workers have already driven out the clergy, the
days of specialized activity and the defenders of the false revolution are
numbered. Wherever a party exists, there is no freedom!
3
United as they are within the reactionary left wing, these adherents of the
pseudo-revolution are the best protective corps and reinforcers of state
280 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
power. Their spectacular falsification of all revolutionary actions and ideas
is precisely a necessary guarantee of the continued existence of the state,
either in its bourgeois-democratic, its bureaucratic popular-democratic
or its explicitly reactionary form. How could it be otherwise, when one
knows that the imprint of this or that state in the form of language, mor-
als, customs and taste has always been able to constitute fifth columns
in the mind of a pseudo-revolutionary. In Greece the seizure of power by
the Junta, made possible by the defeat of a genuine revolutionary move-
ment after the end of the war, has been a welcome and timely example
for all Stalinophiles who labour for the continued persistence of the state.
"Serving the interests of the people' is the name of the spectacle with which
they can attract applause from hands clapped pale-pink by the 'demo-
cratic' powers in other countries. Through its court-jesterish participation
in the societal arena of the power elite, such a reactionary left wing serves
to confirm the truth of the statement made by the S.I. in 1958: "We are not
working for the spectacle of the end of the world; but for the end of the
world of the spectacle".
4
Subjected to the prevailing spectacular society of one or another state
bureaucracy, the imbecile left wing's well-staged 'demonstrations' demon-
strate nothing but their own lapdog mentality. It is through such 'demon-
strations' that the left wing's navel contemplation truly comes into its own
and proves to us and the whole world that they have allowed themselves
to be subjected to state bureaucracy's spectacular society-like demagogic
script for mass suggestion - the FLN groups, which are most widespread in
countries with the status of welfare societies, openly use the Vietnam War
to compensate for their inability to combat the domestic state bureaucracy.
Funnily enough, in France and Sweden these groups enjoy a certain good
will from the state, which is accepted by these groups. The fact that they
are at one and the same time both with and against the state may perhaps
explain the groups' schizophrenic relationship with a state that they have
never questioned: the Hanoi state. When the chorus therefore invokes its
new gods (Mao, Che Guevara, Uncle Ho, ete., etc.) it only confirms what
Bengt Ericson & J.V. Martin
General Remarks
281
we already know: that those who claim to represent the revolution (which
can contain everyone's boundless fulfilment of everyone's boundless de-
sire) in reality represent the direct opposite of the revolution: a complete
rejection of the realization of the subject and thus a profound contempt
for the suffering of the masses. But the modern revolutionary, who is him-
self a product of the existing society until he manages to make a future
society a product of himself according to his own intentions, has no use
for the deployment of martyrs and self-sacrifice, but rejects such things as
the foulest type of spectacle which would itself be an impossibility in the
spectacle-free society he himself announces. In a world built up through
the realization of the subject, self-sacrifice is the only crime.
5
As a guarantee that crucial questions will not be asked, the assembly line
of power produces an endless succession of pseudo-problems such as
the problems of the negroes, women, youth, drugs, abortion and sport.
Immediately the imbecile left wing goes tilting at these windmills, thus
evoking gaping admiration from all sociologists, professors, 'intellectuals'
and priests. But the fact is that these pseudo-barricades, all of which can
be swept into the dustbin of history by direct revolutionary action, are de-
liberately built up by state power and its fawning supporters so that no one
will have the time to deal with the main issue, which is the removal of state
power itself. This means that in these latitudes state power, because of the
intelligence of its opponents, is permitted to engage in partisan tactics.
The reactionary left wing's acceptance of the battleground marked out by
state power for the solution of a left wing's leisure problems, where they
fight on the half of the pitch where power wants them to (that is, its own
half), can only be seen as an attempt to hide the truth that is so uncomfort-
able to so-called socialists: their own fear of socialism.
6
From the computer for the preservation of class society, certain words
have been retrieved: "democracy in the workplace' and co-determination
The confusion that has arisen from the emergence of such placebos can
282 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
presumably be seen most clearly in the way the whole Springer press,
from the far left wing to the right wing in international politics, wants
the implementation of such an illusion; thereby also best hiding the
real problem, which is WORK itself. It can come as no great surprise
that all existing parties and parties under formation that have taken out
a patent on the working class want to preserve this class for purposes of
continued extortion, even if it means that the workers must be allowed
to manage their own alienation. The party does not exist anywhere that
will supersede the working class, along with work considered as work. The
supersession of work is no 'utopian' idea (see SR 2); 'on the contrary it is
the first condition for an effective supersession of the market-controlled
consumer society and its splitting of every single human being's life into
enforced leisure time' and working hours' These complementary sectors
of an alienated life must naturally prompt a revolutionary working class to
abolish all alienating work, thus enabling its own supersession considered
as a working class. The external contradiction between leisure time' and
working time' also involves an internal contradiction, where the relation-
ship between utility and exchange value is endlessly reflected. Only beyond
these oppositions can humanity create from its activities a goal for its will,
its consciousness, and enter into a society that it has itself created. The
total and direct democracy of the workers' councils is the solution to all the
present schisms' (Supplement to SR 2).
7
If it were only a matter of replacing those in power with new powers, the
status quo would be maintained; one does not abolish oppression with
a few changes in the details, as patent left-wing bureaucrats apparently
believe. The object is to abolish the powers that colonize daily life, thus
creating the potential for a total transformation of everyday life through
a permanent revolution of the everyday, such that a new day will truly be
experienced as a new day. Instead of new masters we now demand that
we become masters ourselves: masters without slaves, masters of our own
lives. Here lies one of the main problems for a modern revolutionary mass
movement. However, no such movement exists today; but the very fact of
calling for it here creates the potential for its foundation.
Bengt Ericson &J.V. Martin
General Remarks
283
8
clearly bedazzled by its own parliamentarism-accepting party apparatus, a
statement from the executive committee of an alienated organization that
works with alienating means, Venstresocialisterne (The Left Socialists)
in Denmark, reproduced in VS/BULLETIN 33, is revealing. Here we
have a striking proof of the inviolability of the left-political' parties. The
statement says: 'HB [the executive committee] rejects the idea of a new
and better workers' majority without fundamental changes in the power
structure in the form of the establishment of organs for workers' power.
This workers' power cannot be delegated out to members of parliament
and union representatives, but must be established and remain in the
worleplace (emphasized by SR).
Since we know that the experience of workers' councils and their
power is greatly limited against the background of the bureaucrats' fantas-
tic downplaying of this - the only, purest form of total democracy (which
would after all also render them superfluous)
- we must here present a
minimum definition of the power of the workers' councils:
Annihilation of all other powers.
Direct and total democracy.
Practical unification of decisions and their implementation.
Delegates can be dismissed at any time by those who have elected them.
The abolition of the pecking-order of the farmyard (the hierarchy) and
individual specializations.
cipated life.
The conscious mastery and transformation of all the conditions of eman-
The constant, creative, active participation of the masses.
Internationalist dissemination and coordination.
284 COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
9
Since the Situationist International's construction of a situation that led to
the coup against the student union UNEF in Strasbourg and its continu-
ation in Nanterre and the Sorbonne, which triggered the whole French
spring revolt in 1968, many sympathizers have succeeded in implement-
ing similar situations elsewhere in the world. But in contrast to these
places, in Scandinavia they encounter a compact mass of stupidity in a
left wing that wears the mask of the false revolution. If a truly revolution-
ary element were to try to develop a demonstration beyond the plans of a
self-proclaimed demonstration leadership, such a revolutionary element
- which in itself knows that it is not enough to rediscover radicalism in our
time if it is not readjusted to correspond to the existing material equip-
ment - will be regarded by the nobodies of an impotent left wing as provo-
cateurs. Action thus ends not in creation, but in reaction, and it therefore
risks being subjected to the 'fixers' of the 'demonstration leadership' who
do not protect the demonstration from the police but the police from any
revolutionary elements in the demonstration, who are then removed from
the demonstration by these 'fixers' This corresponds precisely to what the
CGT stated about the spring revolution in France: 'Firm action must be
taken against all attempts to lead the workers' movement astray. Realizing
the CGT's blunder would be the same as realizing one's own. Since no one
will defend the revolutionary elements that are proclaimed provocateurs
by the avant-garde of stupidity - well, we will do it. We will designate such
a revolutionary element as Situationist - and this despite the fact that it
may not be fully aware of the modern revolution's theoretical develop-
ments and its future flexible reference point.
10
The sociology that analyses pseudo-life becomes a pseudo-science itself as
a result, and can probably muster a whole army of pseudo-avant-gardes
in the attempt to refute us. It is clear that we can be censured on the basis
of traditional legalities, but since it is just as clear that an avant-garde can
only have its field of action in the present, this will also mean that from the
point of view of the history to come it will far more accurately represent this
Bengt Ericson & J.V. Martin
General Remarks
285
present than its censurers, whereby its criteria for the judgement of this
epoch, contrary to the official values and in favour of the true values, will
turn out to be correct. We are of course fully aware that such a theoretical
development will mean that we have sentenced all those who thought they
were our judges to exist in a delayed and therefore inauthentic present.
When the last sociologist dangles from the guts of the last bureaucrats
and capitalists, the world will probably have no more problems. Don't you
think?
since our theories are nothing more than the mini-life we are all forced to
live and the possibilities of supersession that our world creates, the only
critique of our activity that we can accept is a critique that arises out of the
independent creation by the masses of the conditions of a liberated life.
The revolutionary outbreaks of recent years have only been a confirmation
of the rightness of our theory - now we wait impatiently for the realization
of this critique to render the Situationist International superfluous.
"Almene betragtninger", Situationistisk Revolution, no. 3, 1970.
Translated by James Manley.
IS THIS METAVILLE?
A PROJECT FOR CREATIVE PLAY
Jens Jorgen Thorsen in collaboration with Hoff and Ussing.
Is this METAVILLE what the Situationists dreamed of for ages? The
realisation of the Situtionists thesis of 1961 that the city and people's sur-
roundings must be receptive to playful creative activity. Is it the decisive
crystallisation of the Situationist desire for the people themselves to con-
trol their surroundings and experiment with them? Is this the collective
city we have wished for?
Initial theory
City planners are unable to identify with the real needs of the local envi-
ronment. They cannot because it is not a question of their own needs.
This is why they must base their theses on a simulated standard family
and by this pretence have created the 'standard family. This typical family
doesn't exist and never has existed, neither the Jensens, the Svenssons nor
the Joneses. The major reason for the meagre potentials of surroundings
and of life in modern residential areas is that the individual has no influ-
ence upon his own residence or upon the communal surroundings. Man is
cut off from his surroundings, even the local ones, and is isolated from his
fellow man even in crowded cities. People are made helpless by unshake-
able schemes in property rights.
If we restore to people the right to plan and control their local sur-
roundings and the larger environs, we will provide the basis for a great, new
birth of cooperation, liberation through teamwork, a perpetual CO-RITUS.
We will shape a constant party out of what was called everyday life.
If we wish to provide an escalation of all this, we should at the same
time cause a decline in its contraries. We need to diminish in order to cre-
ate an escalation.
Jens Jergen Thorsen Is this Metaville?
301
WE WILL DIMINISH: Planning from above, e.g. planning on behalf of
others.
WE WILL ESCALATE: The possibility of everyone's participation in the
planning, the occupants' takeover of the planning.
WE WILL DIMINISH: The responsibilities and authority of owners and
housing boards.
WE WILL ESCALATE: The responsibilities and authority of the occu-
pants, the responsibilities and authority of the occupants' district.
WE WILL DIMINISH: The monotony of high standards of materialism
and the reign of mass products.
WE WILL ESCALATE: Materials and building techniques which provide
for flexibility and a wide range of choice in the areas of utility and planning.
The basic idea 1: the technology
In order to reach these goals, we have created a basic procedure which
has two aspects: the one purely technical and the other concerned with
developing and evolving various forms of governing.
On the technical level, our plan is to provide a basic construction
which the occupants themselves can continue and complete as they see fit.
The main idea is to erect a skeleton, a main structure, a sort of landscape
on which various sorts of construction can take place.
The skeleton consists of two- or three-story platforms of concrete
assembled from modular units, fully or partially manufactured, depending
on which method is cheaper at the moment. On these platforms one can
create apartments, institutions, shops, playgrounds, workshops at liberty.
Flexibility has been ushered in by completely avoiding stable walls and by
horizontal modular power lines in the installation's centre with variable
connections.
The high degree of repetition, combined with well-established build-
ing methods, permits cheap construction and in stages, so that financing
will not vary greatly between larger- and smaller-scale units in the build-
ing process.
302
COSMONAUTS OF THE FUTURE Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
Housing will fall into three categories:
Category A: a complete house. The occupant designs the house, which
is delivered fully constructed. Here there is little real chance of ad-
ditional development other than joining and dividing, and creating
life, and creating sheds and greenhouses on the terrace.
Category B: a partially built house. What is delivered is a rough con-
struction, with facade and bathroom. The occupant completes the
house himself.
Category C: is made by the occupant. He installs everything himself in
the rough house.
The basic idea 2: democracy
The other basic point is occupant takeover of the control of the housing
project at all levels.
Governing has two aspects, private and communal.
On the level of private control the occupants decide how their houses
should look and how they should be built and equipped, what sort of con-
struction materials should be used, etc.
On the communal level, occupant democracy will grow in the most
simple and natural way if it is allowed to echo the growth of the city. The
occupants will create their surroundings together and they will themselves
organise the services to be provided.
It appears that the structure of government we suggest will be enable
a form of organisation which is built from the bottom up. We conceive of
an initial phase with the following groups:
Group A: Street groups, approximately 100 of them.
The street groups consist of about 15 to 20 housing units on both
sides of a street. They are in charge of the common areas in the con
structions around stairs, landings and indoors for active purposes.
Group B: Cell groups, approximately 25 of them.
The cell groups consist of from 40 to 70 housing units in a joint
building unit. They are in charge of vegetation within their unit, a
total of about 5,000 square metres which can be used for anything
from swimming pools to animal quarters, open-air theatres or
roller coasters.
Jens Jorgen Thorsen
Is this Metaville?
303
Group C: Neighbourhood groups, approximately 5 of them.
The neighbourhood groups consist of about 300 housing units in
the same geographical unit of construction. They are in charge
of the streets, squares, and the common ground of about 5% of
the housing area which contains nursery schools, kindergartens,
meeting rooms, playgrounds, workshops, etc.. They decide how
streets and squares should be designed and utilised.
Group D: Landscape Government. There will only be one.
The landscape government consists of representatives from all
the neighbourhoods. It is in charge of nature, sports, and entertain-
ment. It controls the entire housing area regarding the sale and
rental of apartments, hotel operation, rental of the larger stores
and the operation of the institutions of a more permanent and
communal nature, for example, schools.
A housing laboratory
By these means the project permits the occupants themselves to partici-
pate in the planning, construction and day-to-day direction of their areas
to the greatest degree.
But into the project is also built the possibility of providing a labora-
tory where specific housing experiments can be made. In this lab it will be
possible to analyze the experiments, as well as the whole building process
as it proceeds, so that the direction and development of the process can be
changed if the occupants see fit and in accordance with the results. These
analyses will contribute to keeping the small stages in the black and the
risks connected with popular ownership to a minimum. Investments in
construction need only depend upon market demand, and one can elimi-
nate faulty investment and the pressures on small investors' budgets which
arise as a result of rental losses and empty apartments.
The analyses from this lab, combined with the experiences and deci-
sions of the occupants, will provide the best foundation for change and
improvement during the process of building this project.
"Is this Metaville?", Antinational Situationist, no. 1, 1974.