Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them. At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points.
- Attila Kotányi at the Fifth Conference of the SI, 1961

The SI located itself within but against culture. This symposium asks whether such a position is tenable, and what possibility might there be for Situationist aesthetics after all. Do cultural phenomena such as punk, or the current psychogeography industry, for example, work as or against Situationist aesthetics? Is it possible to identify art works and/or practices indebted to the SI that do not recuperate its politics but fortify and develop them?

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
· the work of Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International
· the work of artists, writers, thinkers or film-makers proximate to or influenced by the SI
· critiques of the SI
· (post-)Situationist theory now
· détournement, plagiarism, and recuperation
· spectacular and anti-spectacular aesthetics
· the uses and abuses of psychogeography
· punk and art writing

Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words for papers or presentations of 20 minutes to Sam Cooper at situ.aesthetics@gmail.com by 16th March 2012. For further information: situationist-aesthetics.blogspot.com.

the poem as it doesnt exist yet
vacillates happily between
shore and sure
                       both known
for reliability
however its important
 to bear in mind and body
 on our backs the sand up
  straight confidence to
  imitate the ever shifting
  sands that somehow manage
   to stay in one place

saint magic maker
   joking until proven true
    o its really perfect
      aubrey bobby rhyme
        name combo decade
           say it with
             flowers dont
                do justice
                   to such
                      unspeakably
                          real things
                             as still crazy
                               after all these
                                   married years
                                      making fun
                                         of sacred
                                            sic civil
                                               happily
                                                  ever
                                                     after
                                                        laughter
                                                           april
                                                    institution
                                                     and due time

tessa cut in front
someone sometimes
such a job title
isnt formal let
interprative &
financials of
all experiences
and lacking that
i might prefer to
  give the honorific
to any one or all for
using language  xxxxxxx
xxxxxx to communicate
otherwise we would
be standing naked
  in eden arugi g
    with god disguised
      as a serpent xxxxxx
        xxxxxxxxxxxx perfect
         circle of xxxxxxxxx
           getting what we
             wanted using words

flying
birds cough
or dinosaurs
as high as why
do you think they
have that last and
final syllable all
over abover the earth
law and well my own
private scientology
aircraft carrier pigeons
pawns of space drama
Heinlein and Hubbard