Anthony Hayes — calls himself a person. A participant in a variety of far-left and ultra-left groups and circles over the last three decades, he is currently finishing off a long work on the nature of the critical appropriation and transcendence of the art, politics and philosophy of the Situationist International. In 1997 he published the zine The Journal of Doctor Shamass, of whose titular character, and his inflated importance, we have not heard the last.

 

Three Situationists Walk into a Bar

Or, the peculiar case of the Hamburg Theses

Guy Debord, filmmaker, Situationist and author of The Society of the Spectacle, called The Hamburg Theses ‘the most mysterious of all the documents that emanated from the Situationist International.’ What makes the Hamburg Theses most enigmatic, apart from the fleeting and elusive references made to them in the Situationist journal, is that they were never published — left to fade along with the memories of their ‘co-authors’. Nonetheless their significance to the group was paramount. The Theses were formulated in response to the crisis regarding the role of art and artistic practice within the group. In essence their apparent failure to appear was intended to reflect the Situationist project itself: the rejection of the fetish of objects and other forms of reified human activity beloved of capitalism. In the Hamburg Theses, then, we have the Situationist project expressed in its most concise and impossibly elusive form, making it one of the most vital works of the Situationist International.