The activities of the Lettrist International and the early situationists included the “dérive” (the drift): organized group wanderings through urban terrain, meant to escape, and to provoke the state of mind necessary to contest, modern structures of reification as embodied in dominant architecture, city planning, and the passive habits and routines such structures enforced. An intensely pursued and theorized version of the old Surrealist “strolls,” the dérive was a way for the writers, filmmakers, poets, collagists, and painters who made up the groups to “supersede” both art and work, and thus discover “the geography of real life.” Out of a playful, usually drunken search for whichever streets and alleys called on forth, intimations of utopia would come: the “New City,” the “Hacienda,” which, someday, when revolution brought all the resources of modern technology into ordinary hands, the two bands promised to build. In the meantime, an image of the New City, the city that could be, would help spark the desire for revolution.

Thus Gilles’ cryptic comment to Carole–though, because Bernstein’s book was not a situationist tract but a parody of Pierre Laclos’ novel Les liaisons dangereuses written strictly to make money for the permanently broke Situationist International, neither the group nor its precursor is ever mentioned in its pages, and the commonplace “promène” (walk) is used in place of the arcane “dérive.” In the steps of the 17th-century Précieuses, Debord and his comrades favored made-up words, or old words given new meanings, sometimes almost to the point of a secret language, as a way of developing a critique immune to the recuperative powers of society organized as a spectacle, a show capable of incorporating and neutralizing the most radical negation.

Invented to make money, Gilles went on to invent revolution–or anyway a facsimile. By 1966, the situationists had set forth in their journal Internationale Situationniste (Paris, nos. 1-12, 1958–69) an increasingly violent, seductive critique of modern life, insisting that such things as juvenile delinquency and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 were fragments of a subterranean refusal prophesying the doom of both Western capitalism and Stalinist communism–fragments the situationists promised to make whole. The premises of their critique were rooted in medieval heresies, the early writings of Karl Marx, anarchism, Dada, Surrealism, and Henri Lefebvre’s postwar “Critique of Everyday Life”; the edge of black humor and flee it carried was its own.

To the situationists, alienation had long since left the factory; it was now a sort of virus, propagated by the forces of social control, which colonized even the most seemingly casual, private gestures, this separating each person not only from all others, but even from him- or herself. To them, alienation had become so seamless, so pervasive, that it no longer took a name: it was simply “real life.” But Debord spoke of a “reversible connecting factor” in modern society; he found its potential hidden within the countless alienations that made everyday life, leisure even more poignantly than work, a site both of superficial satisfactions and of the most profound dissatisfactions. The intensifying boredom, irrationality, rage, depression, and hysteria of life in the most advanced societies (assiduously and often hilariously chronicled in the pages of Internationale Situationniste) were to Debord evidence that alienation was not truly accepted as real life, and proof that the desire for real life was irreducible, even when it had no language. To activate the “reversible connecting factor,” to turn society inside out, to pull its string, the speech of real life had to be used, in concert with “exemplary acts”–the apparently trivial, even prankish negations that could spark an irreversible chain reaction of lust and fury, dissolving modern structures of reification in “revolutionary festival,” a new, generalized, permanent version of the Paris Commune of 1871. Given that real life, as the situationists understood it, was not a structure of any sort, but a “situation,” a “sum of possibilities,” a series of moments apprehended in particular times and places, no one could know what form the exemplary act might take. It might be as dramatic and public as the Watts riots of 1965, or as modest and secret as the right graffiti on the right wall, at the right time, in the right place.

Writing in Internationale Situationniste, the critical theorists, agitators, and parodists of the group attracted fans, especially among university students. In the spring of 1966, a small group of them won control of the student union at the University of Strasbourg; their aim was to find out how much trouble they could cause with the union’s $500,000 annual budget, to expose student government as an agency of repression, and then to destroy it. The cabal made contact with the Situationist International at its Paris Headquarters, and began collaboration. Then the fall term began.