Potlatch was a journal published by the International Lettriste (IL), an international art collective working in Paris in the early fifties. The group together with the later International Situationist (IS) became publicly known and widely acclaimed after 1989 (and the end of the Cold War), which is not an accident as I argue, epitomizing for many almost ironically, a form of a ‘radical critique of the late capitalism,’ and the model for a contemporary critical art practice in the globalization era. However, the IL activity although conceived and executed as a highly sophisticated tactical game, was entirely informed by and dependent on the Cold War discursive mechanisms.

The magazine’s 29 issues, published from June 1954 through November 1957 represent a potent testimony to this. Potlatch, one of the forms of a gift economy based on a reciprocity of exchange, (anthropologically examined by Marcel Mauss in the early twenties and then in the late forties at the outset of the Cold War reintroduced as a critical device, by Georges Bataille in his writings on general economy), offered a name for IL magazine, underscoring among other things, an ever increasing lack of communication and exchange and rise of hostilities around the world and in Europe more particularly.

In my paper, I explore the Potlatch and different ways its symbolical economies epitomized the IL’s utopian project of a ‘revolutionary critique of the society’ and a creation of a ‘new form of exchange’ within a given Cold War historical and political context, while further problematizing the existing avant-garde legacy.