BUREAU PREHISTORY
(Publications of three early
San Francisco Bay Area situationist groups)
The Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous (CEM) (January-July 1970) had seven members: Isaac Cronin, Bill Davis, Stanley Ginsburg, Dan Hammer, Kat Harrison, Paul Mann, and Wendy Mann. (Ken Knabb and Ron Rothbart were not members, but significantly interacted with the group.)
1044 (July-November 1970) had two members: Ken Knabb and Ron Rothbart.
Contradiction (December 1970-September 1972) had six members: John Adams, Isaac Cronin, Dan Hammer, Ken Knabb, Michael Lucas, and Ron Rothbart.
In summer 1973 I collected copies of all the publications of these three groups for deposit in several libraries (in Berkeley, New York, London, and Amsterdam). Over the next three decades I also circulated approximately 250 photocopy dossiers of the entire collection (Bureau Prehistory, 90 pp). I am no longer reprinting and distributing that dossier since all of these publications are now online at this website (see below). For more information on these three groups, including a few documents not included here, see Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State and Inventory of the Ken Knabb Papers at Yale.
Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous (1970)
In Honor of the Arrival of the Weathermen [critique of sacrificial militantism]
Billy Graham Presents [re the Chicago 8]
Fragmentary Opposition Is Like the Teeth of a Cogwheel
The Dance of Revolution
Is This Our Fate? [intervention in suburbia]
The End of CPE
You Are Wandering...
Godard in Berkeley [newspaper account of a CEM disruption]
Address to Women’s Liberation
Gloria and Monica [pornographic comic]
“Great Moments in the Void” Trading Cards
On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel [pamphlet on tactics]
CEM additions to On the Poverty of Student Life
1044 (1970)
Do We Need Snyder for Poet-Priest? [disruption of a Gary Snyder poetry reading]
In This Theater...
“Hello, Men!” [balloon to paste on sexually manipulative ads]
Riot and Representation: The Significance of the Chicano Riot [pamphlet falsely signed “by Herbert Marcuse”]
Pamphlet Fake, Marcuse Says [newspaper article]
Ode on the Absence of Real Poetry Here This Afternoon
A Critique of “On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel” by One of Its Authors
What Subversion Really Is
Contradiction (1970-1972)
Bureaucratic Comix [re uprising in Poland]
Open Letter to John Zerzan, Anti-Bureaucrat of the S.F. Social Services Employees Union
“According to the Situationists . . .” [statement of Contradiction’s general perspectives: virtually identical to the 1965 SI statement]
Wildcat Comics [re San Francisco cable car strike]
Still Out of Order [re telephone strike]
Open Letter to Good Times
Methods for the Communalization of Confusion [critique of “Anti-Mass”]
Critique of the New Left Movement [unpublished drafts]:
The Movement in General
Antifascism and the Cybernetic Welfare State
Yippies and Weathermen
Communes and Collectives
Bookchinism
Women’s Liberation
On the Poverty of Hip Life [unpublished draft]