Asger Jorn: Pour la forme. Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts (1957/2001) [French, English]

Pour la forme was one of the first projects of the newly formed Situationist International. The publication collected texts of Asger Jorn from the immediately preceding period. As Jorn explained in his introductory “Notice,” the texts collected in that book reflected the evolution of his experiments and encounters among radical avant-garde currents following the dissolution of the Cobra group (1948-1951) and leading up to the formation of the SI in 1957.

Contents:
Guy Debord: Dix années d’art expérimental: Jorn et son rôle dans l’invention théoretique, 7
Avertissement, 10-11
Image et forme, 11-24
Contre le functionalisme, 25-33
Forme et structure, 34-47
Misère et merveille, 48-56
Structure et changement, 57-70
Charme et mécanique, 71-92
Les Situationnistes et l’automation, 93-95
Mouvement et forme, 96-114
Forme et signification, 115-138
Sortie, 142-157

Four texts (plus “Notice”) from the book were translated from the French by Ken Knabb for a comprehensive English-language collection of Jorn’s writings: Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, 1938-1958 (010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2011, edited by Ruth Baumeister).

First published by Internationale situationniste, Paris, 1957.

This edition
Preface by Guy Debord
Publisher Allia, Paris, 2001
ISBN 2844850723
157 pages
via x

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (29 MB)
4 + 1 texts in English (trans. Ken Knabb, 2011, HTML)

Marcel Marïen: Théorie de la révolution mondiale immédiate (1958) [French]

“Théorie de la revolution mondiale immediate was part of a triple issue of Marïen’s journal Les lèvres nues and ends its first series. It was later published as a stand-alone book. Its avowed purpose was “a sketch of an imaginary program for the overthrow of capitalism in every part of the world it controls, to be completed within a year, with a program applicable at any moment and everywhere at the same time.” (45)

The first half of the text is an analysis of contemporary capitalism under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. These days one might worry more about the Anthropocene, but rhetorically, the problem is similar: how to think a revolution at a time when it appears both absolutely necessary and extremely unlikely.

The first part is a sound analysis of the stage commodification had reached by the late fifties, And bears comparison with the better remembered texts of the time. The very success of the worker’s movement in its reformist form had produced a leisure culture. Workers were becoming petit-bourgeois in outlook. Technical change had raised up a cadre of educated workers. Communist propaganda no longer worked very well, whereas capitalist propaganda was making inroads into the unconscious of the working class.

The second part is more surrealist science fiction than social science. For the project there is to use the spectacle itself for revolutionary ends. The form of revolutionary organization is the advertising agency. It is to be called the Leisure Club. It creates advertising and popular media addressed to every diverse pastime, hobby or consumer preference – all to be worked out using the latest social science techniques. […]

While there are charming features of the book that date it, there are also many ways in which it is strikingly contemporary. As Sven Lütticken has pointed out, it is quite likely that former Tiqqun people borrowed the rhetoric of the Invisible Committee and the Imaginary Party from Mariën. One might also think it an anticipation of Adbusters, or even the strategies of Podemos in Spain, which seems to retain a model of the party of the interior while using contemporary marketing techniques.” (taken from McKenzie Wark’s 2016 essay)

Publisher Les Lèvres nues, 1958
111 pages
via Marcell via Ken

WorldCat

PDF (36 MB)

Glass Bead, 1: Site 0: Castalia, the Game of Ends and Means (2016) [English/French]

“The first issue of this journal, as well as Glass Bead’s project at large, is directed towards rethinking art as a mode of rational thought. It starts from the assumption that any claim concerning the efficacy of art—its capacity, beyond either its representational function or its affectivity, to make changes in the way we think of the world and act on it—first demands a renewed understanding of reason itself.

The site on which this issue focuses is Castalia, the fictional province imagined by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game (1943). Set in Central Europe some five hundred years in the future, Castalia hosts a peculiar society entirely dedicated to the pursuit of pure knowledge. Mobilising Castalia as an equivocal image, at once archetype of modern universalism and fortress delegitimized by its own enclosure, the aim of this issue is to revisit and transform the Castalian model for the unification of reason.

Site 0: Castalia, the game of ends and means is structured around partially overlapping charts. These charts are meant to figure specific routes drawn in the site by the contributors to this issue.”

With contributions by Peter Wolfendale, Guerino Mazzola, Andrée Ehresmann, Mathias Béjean, Ray Brassier, Gabriel Catren, Anselm Franke, Benedict Singleton, Keller Easterling, Giuseppe Longo, Martin Holbraad, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tristan Garcia, Fernando Zalamea, Deneb Kozikoski Valereto, Olivia Caramello, Tarek Atoui, Linda Henderson, Freeman Dyson, Alex Williams, Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Laboria Cuboniks, and Amanda Beech.

Edited by Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard, and Inigo Wilkins
Publisher Glass Bead, February 2016

HTML, PDFs (English)
HTML, PDFs (French)
single PDF (English, 16 MB, updated on 2017-12-6)
See also Issue 2