It was created by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman rejoined by Jean-Louis Brau and Serge Berna as a schism from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group.
The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls and self-proclaimed failures.
[3] In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved notoriety, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.
The schism developed when the 'left-wing' of the Letterist group disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris in October 1952.
[4] Although the LI had in fact already been covertly formed by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman in June 1952, even before the Chaplin intervention and the public split from Isou, it was not formally established until 7 December 1952.
During their wanderings in the Summer of 1953, an "illiterate Kabyle" suggested to them the term "Psychogeography", to designate what they saw as a pattern of emotive force-fields that would permeate a city.
Among their most important texts on these matters were Debord's "Theory of the Dérive" (published in the Belgian surrealist magazine Les Lèvres Nues, no.
9, November 1956), and Ivan Chtcheglov's "Formulary for a New Urbanism" (written October 1953, but not published until June 1958 in the first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste).
Another important notion developed by the LI, was that of détournement, a technique of reutilising plagiarised material (literary, artistic, cinematic, etc.)
In addition to the central Parisian group, an Algerian section of the LI was established in April 1953 by Hadj Mohamed Dahou, Cheik Ben Dhine and Ait Diafer.
This conference had been organised by Asger Jorn and Pinot-Gallizio of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB), and important links between the two groups were consolidated.
Besides the Charlie Chaplin protest, some of the more noteworthy/startling activities of the LI include: Although pre-dating the formation of the LI (but directly involving Serge Berna, and inspiring the others), one might also mention: An extract from a letter of Gil Wolman to Jean-Louis Brau, of 20 July 1953, gives a clear impression of what the group and their associates tended to get up to from day to day: I am back!
Several others also passed through the LI during its five years of existence, including André-Frank Conord, Jacques Fillon, Abdelhafid Khatib, Henry de Béarn and Gaëtan M. Langlais.
Debord recalled her fondly in many of his later films and writings, and she herself (as Eliane Brau) produced a book on the Situationists in 1968, Le situationnisme ou la nouvelle internationale.
All of these texts, together with a few other miscellaneous tracts, are reprinted in Documents Relatifs A La Fondation De L'Internationale Situationniste (Editions Allia, 1985).
Michèle Bernstein's novels, Tous les chevaux du roi (1960) and La Nuit (1961), present fictionalised accounts of her life with Debord during this period.
Patrick Straram's Les bouteilles se couchent was a semi-fictionalised contemporary account of the scene, written in 1953 but lost until recently: it was published by Editions Allia in 2006.
In October 2010, an unpublished text from the LI has just been released that recalls the adventures of the letterists between 1945 and February 1953 : Visages de l'avant-garde (Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, éditeur, 2010).