All the King’s Horses

Michèle Bernstein’s novel, `All the King’s Horses’ (1960), is one of the odder and more elusive, entertaining, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. At the instigation of her first husband, Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to help swell the Situationist International’s coffers. When she objected to the idea of practicing a “dead art,” Debord suggested that it would be instead be détournement–the Situationist reuse of media toward different, subversive, ends.