Tuesday 16 December 2008

for emma Goldman 3

2 comments:

troylloyd said...

CREATING SITUATIONS AS A METHOD OF REGAINING FREE LIFE
The radical transformation of life that was sought by all the avant-garde movements was supposed to be achieved by means of interventions in the everyday world whose rich variety was the sole guarantee that expropriated life could be regained. In the founding manifesto of the SI—the “Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions de l’organisation et de l’action de la tendance situationniste internationale,” authored by Guy Debord in 1957—this is already stated as the ultimate goal of all the movement’s activities.
For the Situationists, the reality of every human life took concrete form in everyday life. The life that had been lost, because expropriated, in the spectacle could only be regained in lived subjectivity. The Situationists thus assumed that a revolution that did not fundamentally transform the daily reality of every individual would merely produce a new form of rule and expropriation. Their goal was rather to liberate everyday life by constructing situations independent of the established structures and mechanized processes of real life.

This liberation of everyday life from its functional compulsions and its becoming magical again in the free play of ever new situations represented a rejection of every form of “politics” that had existed up to that point, including every emancipatory “politics,” in which an avant-garde knew the “correct” path, which merely had to be taught to the “masses.” The actionist disturbance, radicalization, misappropriation, reevaluation, and playful staging of concrete, everyday situations were intended to yank the consciousness of the people involved from the saturated deep sleep of the “spectacle” and permanently revolutionize it.

mike di tomasso said...

libreration