notes for the meeting of 5 May 1970


The interventions of the preceding three weeks haven't presented contradictory analyses or propositions. Rather, they have been complementary.

For my part, I bring up the most important (urgent) of the evoked points:

The pursuit of theoretical activity without reifying us as a group of theoreticians: three luminous visions at the periphery of this problem:
-- Creativity and poetic efficacity to be properly respected, again and always, as a sector obliged to the SI [Situationist International], parallel to theoretical works, and individually without abandoning them to the comrades [in the SI] who have a taste for them;
-- The form of this theoretical activity: note that, where the cinema is concerned, it is very urgent because situationism will soon get into the mix, and a certain situationist beauty is in the form; beauty as the splendor of time in the process of being verified; "beautiful as the meeting of a wildcat strike and a situationist tract on the table of the Renseignements generaux" [1] etc.
-- The situationist's pleasure in subversion (the revolution will be a banquet, etc) and his serenity in the destruction of the old world, undertaken communally, verifies, on another level, that it isn't by error that we are together.

Remark: I don't know if evoking the presence of an observer during a week of wildcat strikes is realistic. The first step -- which would, without doubt, allow the SI to involve more than just observers when the next time comes -- appears to be the publication of a wildcat striker's notebook, which would lay out a quick history of a wildcat strike's movement, confirming its more or less formulated analyses of the role of the unions, etc.

There would be plenty of occasions to diffuse such a notebook before, during and after a strike. The content, and perhaps even the visual appearance, should suggest the allure of a CGT booklet [2] and thus incite the fury of the bureaucrats and assure us a dialectically enriched distribution.

Note: written by "Rene-Donatien" (Rene Vienet), May 1970. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! August 2004.

Translator's notes:

[1] A labored detournement of an old Surrealist slogan. Renseignements generaux ("General Intelligence") is France's equivalent of the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation).

[2] Confederation generale du travail (CGT) is a huge labor union in France, Spain and several other countries.




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