Wark - The beach beneath the street : the everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist International

A giant inflatable dog turd broke loose from its moorings outside the Paul Klee Center in Switzerland and brought down power lines before coming to a halt in the grounds of a childrens home. The Paul McCarthy sculpture, the size of a house, reached a maximum altitude of 200 meters. Other civilizations had their chosen forms: from the Obelisk of Luxor to Michelangelos David. The futurist poet Marinetti found his crashed motor car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but he might have balked at flying dog shit. In the twenty-first century, the insomnia of reason does not breed monsters, but pets. No wonder there are no longer any gods, when what is expected of them is that they descend from Mount Olympus with plastic baggies and clean up.

We are bored with this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spectacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We dont buy it. Its time to start scheming on how to leave the twenty-first century. The pessimists are right. Things cant go on as they are. The optimists are also right. Another world is possible. The means are at our disposal. Our species-being is as a builder of worlds.

Sometimes, to go forward, one has to go back. Back to the scene of the crime. Back to the moment when the situation seemed open, before the gun went off, before the race of champions started. This is a story about a small band of artists and writers whose habits were bohemian at best, delinquent at worst, who set off with no formal training and equipped with little besides their wits, to change the world. As Guy

Where does one find this kind of ambition now? These days artists are happy to settle for a little notoriety, a good dealer, and a retrospective. Art has renounced the desire to give form to the world. Having ceased to be modern, and finding it too pass to be postmodern, art is now merely contemporary, which seems to mean nothing more than yesterdays art at todays prices.

In the United States the academy spread its investments, placing a few bets on women and people of color. The best of thoseSusan Buck-Morss, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Donna Harawayat least appreciate the double bind of speaking for difference within the heart of the empire of indifference. At best theory, like art, turns in on itself, living on through commentary, investing in its own death on credit. At worst it rattles the chains of old ghosts, as if a conference on the idea of communism could still shock the bourgeois. As if there were still a bourgeois literate enough to shock. As if it were ever the idea that shocked them, rather than the practice.

Beneath the pavement, the beach. Its a now well-worn slogan from the MayJune events in Paris, 1968, at the moment when two kinds of critique seemed to come together. One was communist, and demanded equality. The other was bohemian, and demanded difference. The former gets erased from historical memory, as if one of the worlds great general strikes never happened. The latter is rendered in a language that makes it seem benign, banal even. As if all that was What is lost is the combined power of a critique of both wage labor and of everyday life, expressed in acts. What has escaped the institutionalization of high theory is the possibility of