Situationist International

A new human force, which the existing framework will not be able to tame, is growing day by day with the irresistible development of technology and dissatisfaction with its possible uses in our meaningless social life.

Alienation and oppression in society cannot be accommodated in any of their forms, but only rejected outright along with society itself. All real progress obviously depends on a revolutionary solution to the multifaceted crisis of the present.

What are the prospects for organisation in a society that will genuinely ‘reorganise production on the basis of a free association of producers’? The automation of production and the socialisation of vital goods will increasingly reduce work as an external necessity and finally give complete freedom to the individual. Thus, freed from all economic responsibility, freed from all debts and guilt towards the past and other people, the human being will dispose of a new added value, impossible to calculate in money terms because it cannot be reduced to the measurement of paid work: the value of play, of a freely constructed life. The exercise of this playful creation is the guarantee of the freedom of each and every one, within the framework of that equality which is guaranteed by the absence of exploitation of one man by another. The freedom to play means man's creative autonomy, transcending the old division between imposed work and passive leisure.

The Church once burned alleged witches to suppress the primitive playful tendencies preserved in popular festivals. In today's dominant society, which mass-produces pseudo-games devoid of participation, genuine artistic activity is inevitably classified as criminal. It is semi-clandestine. It appears in the form of scandal.

What, in fact, is the situation? The need is for the realization of a higher game, more precisely a stimulus to this game known as human existence. Revolutionary players from all countries can unite in the International Situationist to begin to emerge from the prehistoric phase of daily living. From now on, we propose an autonomous organisation of the producers of the new culture, independent of the political and trade union organisations that currently exist, because we deny them the capacity to organise anything other than the arrangement of the existing order.

The most urgent objective we set for this organisation, as it emerges from its initial experimental phase for its first public campaign, is to take over UNESCO. The global bureaucratisation of art and culture as a whole is a new phenomenon that reflects the deep relationship between the world's coexisting social systems, based on the eclectic preservation and reproduction of the past. The response of revolutionary artists to these new conditions must be a new type of action. Since the very existence of this directorial concentration of culture, located in a single building, favours a takeover by means of a putsch, and since the institution is completely devoid of any possibility of meaningful use outside our subversive perspective, we find ourselves justified, before our contemporaries, in seizing this apparatus. And we shall do it. We are determined to take control of UNESCO, even if only for a short time, because we are sure that we will quickly accomplish something there that will remain the most significant achievement in illuminating a long period of demands.

What should be the main characteristics of the new culture, especially in comparison with ancient art?

In contrast to spectacle, Situationist culture introduces total participation.

In contrast to preserved art, it is an organisation of the moment as it is experienced, directly.

In contrast to fragmented art, it will be a global practice involving all usable elements. It naturally tends towards collective and undoubtedly anonymous production (at least insofar as, since the works are not stored as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave a mark). Its experiments propose, at a minimum, a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic, unified urbanism, capable of spreading across the entire planet and then to all habitable planets.

In contrast to unilateral art, Situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Artists – along with all visible culture – have become entirely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But even before this impasse brought about by capitalism, art was essentially unilateral, without response. It will move beyond t this era of primitive enclosedness and attain total communication. As everyone becomes an artist at a higher level, that is, inseparably a producer and consumer of total cultural creation, we will witness the rapid dissolution of the linear criterion of novelty. With everyone being, so to speak, a Situationist, we will witness a multidimensional growth of trends, experiences and ‘schools’, all radically different, and this no longer in succession but simultaneously.

We are now inaugurating what will historically be the last of the professions. The role of a situationist, amateur-professional, anti-specialist, will remain a form of specialization until the moment of economic and mental abundance when everyone will become an ‘artist’ in a sense that artists have not yet attained: the construction of their own lives. However, the last profession in history is so close to the society without permanent division of labour that when it appears within the International Situationist it is generally denied the characteristics of a profession.

To those who do not understand us well, we say with unyielding contempt: ‘The Situationists, whom you may think you can judge, will judge you sooner or later. We are waiting for you at the turning point, which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of deprivation in all its forms. These are our goals, and they will be the future goals of humanity.’

17 May 1960