The New Delirium

Overlooked this year, perhaps as a result of Guy Debord's passing, is
the fact that 1997 marks a double anniversary–forty years since the
founding of the Situationist International in 1957 and twenty-five years
since its dissolution in 1972. A brief flurry of activity in 1989
re-focused attention on the group: an exhibition at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston "On the Passage of a few people through a
rather brief moment in time: the Situationist International" coincided
with the re-printing of the Situationist International Anthology, edited
and translated by Ken Knabb.

This year also marks the publication in print of one of the first
serious anthologies of net theory, Digital Delirium, (Saint Martin's
Press, New York,) a compendium of critical and fictional writing edited
by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. The Krokers are the editors of the Web
'zine, C-Theory, (http://www.ctheory.com,) where much of Digital
Delirium first appeared.

Many of the essays and statements collected in the Situationist
Anthology were originally printed in the Situationist's own journal,
Internationale Situationiste, a kind of proto-'zine, including "The
Situationists and Automation" (Jorn, 1958,) "Theory of the D