DISINFORMATION

The Avant-garde is Undesirable

1. The avant-garde of today that does not reiterate accepted mystifications is nevertheless socially repressed. The movement society desires is the one that it can buy up — it is the pseudo-avant-garde.
2. To those who create new values, the life of today appears to be an illusion, a fragment. If the avant-garde puts into question the meaning of life and wishes to put to practical use its conclusions, it finds itself cut-off from all possibilities and sealed-off from society.
3. The aesthetic debris of the avant-garde (pictures, film, poetry, etc.) have become both desirable and ineffectual. What is undesirable is the complete reorganization of the conditions of life such that the basis of society is altered.
4. Once the products of the avant-garde have been neutralized aesthetically and brought upon the market, its issues — directed as always at realization through all of life — must be split up, talked to death and side-tracked. We protest in the name of the avant-garde past and present, and in the names of all the isolated and dissatisfied artists, against this cultural necrophilia; we call on all creative powers to boycott such discussions.
5. Modern culture has no substance, possesses no strength capable of mounting a real resistance to the resolutions of the avant-garde.
6. We, the creators of new values, are no longer shouted down by the protectors of culture, but are assigned designations in specialised fields, and our demands are thus made to appear ridiculous.
7. In this society, artists are expected to take over the role of the Court Fools of the past, expected to take payment for providing society with the delusion that there is a special kind of cultural freedom.
8. Social snobbery would prescribe for the avant-garde a particular place, which it can't leave without giving up its respectability.
9. The very life of the artist is the leavening agent in the rising of a new society from our withering European culture. This is not a process that should be stopped; it should be sped up!
10. European culture is a sick, pregnant, old hag who is going to die. Should we try to save the mother or the child? Some would try to rescue the mother, even if it meant killing the child. The avant-garde has decided: the mother must die so that the child may live!
11. Yesterday's avant-garde is old hat. The problem with the artistic, political left today is one of truth: "A Truth only lives to be ten years old" (Ibsen).
12. Artists and intellectuals! Support the Situationist movement, for it chases after no Utopias. It is the only movement that will relieve the condition of contemporary culture.
13. The duty of the avant-garde consists solely and utterly in enforcing its recognition before its discipline and its program have become watered down — and this is precisely what the Situationist International intends to do.

This style, which includes a critique of itself, must express the domination of the present critique over its entire past. Dialectical theory’s mode of exposition reveals the negative spirit within it. “Truth is not like some finished product in which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that made it” (Hegel). This theoretical consciousness of a movement whose traces must remain visible within it is manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts and by the détournement of all the achievements of earlier critical efforts. Hegel’s practice of reversing the genitive was an expression of historical revolutions, though that expression was confined to the form of thought. The young Marx, inspired by Feuerbach’s systematic reversal of subject and predicate, achieved the most effective use of this insurrectional style, which answers “the philosophy of poverty” with “the poverty of philosophy.” Détournement reradicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus transformed into lies. Kierkegaard already used it deliberately, though he also denounced it: “But despite all your twists and turns, just as jam always returns to the pantry, you always end up introducing some little phrase which is not your own, and which awakens disturbing recollections” (Philosophical Fragments). As he acknowledged elsewhere in the same book, this use of détournement requires maintaining one’s distance from whatever has been turned into an official truth: “One further remark regarding your many complaints that I introduced borrowed expressions into my exposition. I do not deny that I did so. It was in fact done deliberately. In the next section of this work, if I ever write such a section, I intend to call this topic by its true name and to clothe the problem in its historical attire.”

(leaflets, announcements over microphones, comic strips, songs, graffiti, balloons on paintings in the Sorbonne, announcements in theaters during films or while disrupting them, balloons on subway billboards, before making love, after making love, in elevators, each time you raise your glass in a bar):

OCCUPY THE FACTORIES
POWER TO THE WORKERS COUNCILS
ABOLISH CLASS SOCIETY
DOWN WITH SPECTACLE-COMMODITY SOCIETY
ABOLISH ALIENATION
TERMINATE THE UNIVERSITY
HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST

THE SOCIETY THAT has all the technical means to alter the biological bases of existence throughout the Earth is also the society that, by means of the same separated technical-scientific development, disposes of all means of control and mathematically sound prediction to measure in advance exactly what degree of decomposition of the human milieu can be produced by the growth of the alienated productive forces of class society. Identical calculations are being made with reference to how long this growth can last, depending upon an optimum prolongation or not. Whether it is a question of the chemical pollution of the air we breathe or of the adulteration of foodstuffs, of the irreversible accumulation of radioactivity by the industrial use of nuclear energy, or of the deterioration of the water cycle from the subterranean springs to the oceans, or of the urban leprosy that is continuing to spread out in place of what were once the town and the countryside, or of the "population explosion," of the increase in suicides and mental illnesses, or of the threshold approached by noise pollution — everywhere, partial awareness of the impossibility of going any further (which is more or less urgent and more or less mortal according to the individual case), constitute a picture of general degradation and general powerlessness, insofar as they are specialized scientific conclusions that merely remain juxtaposed. This woeful overview of the map of alienation just before its engulfment is naturally accomplished in the fashion that the territory itself was constructed: by separate sectors. No doubt these awarenesses of the fragmentary are forced to recognize from now on, through the unfortunate accordance of all their observations, that every efficient short-term modification of a determined point collides with the totality of the forces at work and can ultimately lead to a more decisive loss. However, such a science, the servant of the mode of production and limitations of the thought that it has produced, cannot conceive of a true reversal of the course of things. It does not know how to think strategically, which nobody asks it to do anyway; no more does it possess the practical means of intervening in it. It can only talk about its expiration, and about the best palliatives that would postpone this expiration if they were firmly applied. Thus, this science shows to the most ridiculous degree the uselessness of knowledge without means of use and the nullity of nondialectical thought in an era carried away by the movement of historical time. Thus, the old slogan "Revolution or Death" is no longer the lyrical expression of consciousness in revolt; it is the last word of the scientific thought of our century. But this word can only be spoken by others, and not by that old scientific thought of the commodity, which reveals the insufficiently rational bases of its development at a moment when all its applications are deployed in the strength of a fully irrational social practice. It is the thought of separation, which has only been able to increase our material mastery through the methodological paths of separation, and which in the end recovers this separation accomplished in the society of the spectacle and its self-destruction.

Material liberation is a precondition of the liberation of human history, and it can only be judged by that yardstick. Any conception of a minimum level of development to be reached in one place or another must depend, precisely, upon the nature of the liberatory project chosen, and hence upon who has done the choosing -- the autonomous masses or the specialists in power. Those who accept the definition of some particular group of managers as to what is indispensible may perhaps be freed from want in respect to the things those managers opt to produce, but they will certainly never be freed from those managers themselves. The most modern and unanticipated forms of hierarchy can only be costly remakes of the old world of passivity, impotence and slavery, no matter how great the material force that society possesses in the abstract; such forms can only represent the opposite of mankind's sovereignty over its environment and its history [...] The alternative before us does not consist merely in a choice between real life and a realm of survival that has nothing to lose but its modernized chains: it also appears within the realm of survival itself, in the shape of the ever worsening problems that the masters of mere survival are unable to solve. (Internationale situationniste, No. 8, January 1963.)

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is
hypnotized by production and conveniences sewage system, elevator,
bathroom, washing machine.

This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has
overshot its ultimate goal--the liberation of man from material
cares--and become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Presented
with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of
all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become
essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing
to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by
carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being
one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be
founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately
associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space....

The perfection of suicide is ambiguity.

(Mostly taken from the Situationist International archives / Debord, and other various sources)