MANIFESTO REVIEW: Dreaming of Avant-Garde Acceleration
A Dog and Pony Show MANIFESTO REVIEW of the Situationist Internationale (1960)
Note from ringleader: Welcome back to dog and pony show’s MANIFESTO REVIEW, the premiere reflecting pool for all the world’s disparate / unhinged / misunderstood / psychotic genius expressed in the form of manifesto, that is, the published declaration of purpose, principles, and/or plans of an individual or group.
I’m proud to announce that this is a republication, as this piece was originally featured in Raw Egg Nationalist’s MAN’S WORLD MAGAZINE ISSUE 11. Once you’ve read this piece, be sure to check it out in that issue alongside all the other excellent work at mansworldmag.online
It’s been a quite a while since the last piece where we looked at Uncle Ted’s “Industrial Society and its Future,” check that out down below if you haven’t.1 Now, without further ado, let’s take a look at the Situation.2
I had a dream that just this week, data centers and cell towers across the US were bombed simultaneously. For the past 3 days Youtube has been hacked to only play videos of the towers buckling stitched together with clips of young people dressed in all white wearing geodesic paper masks made to look like low poly 3D renders of famous faces: Mona Lisa, Napoleon, Marx, the Laughing Cavalier, Poe, etc. Old red and blue lensed 3D glasses are taped over the masks. The youth are shown casually walking up to highly visible spots in public places across America and gluing up posters that read:
They all use the clean, mid-century Cooper Black font, with varied color combinations of the text and background using red, white, and blue, as well as simple black and white. No one has a clue what's going on. Fox is blaming ANTIFA, and CNN is pointing the finger at incels, MAGA, and white nationalist types. The only arrest made in association with the group have turned out to be homeless people that were given a 20mg of Adderall crushed up in a coffee with 5 sugars in it and a $5 dollar bill defaced in thick tip permanent marker with "LEGAL SPENDER" written on both sides. They say they were promised $100 more for wearing the get-up and putting up a stack of posters.
Because of the data center bombings, social media is intermittent, but when it can be accessed, people find it plastered with AI powered bots spewing mish-mashed quotations from Mein Kampf, the most recent Hillary Clinton autobiography, the script of Shrek, and threads pulled from black twitter. “And Donkey exclaimed: 'We gon take back the dignigity of our people that was stolen from us!’” At first, college campuses are eerily quiet, but once the letters SI begin to pop up everywhere, professors begin having hushed conversations and glancing over their shoulders to see SI sprawled on every whiteboard each day to be erased, SI chalked on sidewalks to be washed away in the night, SI carved into bathroom stalls, SI stickered on every wall.
Social media is inundated with more video clips of the masked youth waving upside down American flags on fire in open fields and wood clearings set to background music of bright shoegazey guitar rock with chorus pedals instead of distortion. The lyrics are the same slogans being postered and more like them interspersed with SI alternately pronounced as “see” and “S I.” See S I See S I See S I See S I See, all sung with Beach Boys style harmonies. Occasionally, they sing-song even pithier lines in French and German like “je suis un morse” and “du bist sehr einfach” or “vous êtes un corps” and “der kreig ist dada.”
Waking up to the Situation
I woke up thinking that were we to ever see a Situationist Internationale-esque movement in America in 20xx, it could look something like my fever dream: a large-scale accelerationist blitzkrieg rooted in a rejection of consumerism, the left-right divide, alienation of the individual, and concentration/homogenization of art and culture. If you haven’t heard of Situationist Internationale (SI) it was an international group based in France that lasted from 1957 to 1972. You may have heard of one of its founders, Guy Debord (1931-1994) and his 1967 book “The Society of the Spectacle,” which is practically a long-form SI manifesto. However, SI also published a very short manifesto in 1960 that gives an interesting glimpse into the group.
SI’s manifesto introduces beliefs and goals that occupy a fascinating intersection of reactionary art, politics, and philosophy. Everything I have read about the group evinces an intrinsically avant-garde praxis that appears less defined by political ideology as by reactionary aesthetic feeling sprouting from the various and sundry strains of 20th century postbellum occidental surrealism and existentialism. As wordy as that description may be, it’s nothing paired against the group’s own cryptic and voluble writing that somehow treads the line of laying it down so the hogs can pick it up while still evoking the spirit of the late-great comedic genius Norm MacDonald on my shoulder with his angel wings and all concluding, “sounds like a bunch of communist gobbledygook to me.”
And yes, when you look up SI they’re classified as “anarcho or libertarian marxist,” which is certainly reasonable to say except that it doesn’t mean a damned thing. So, let’s look at what the SI really thought, in their own words.
SI’s manifesto asks rhetorically, “So what really is the situation?” SI tells us that “the situation” is the “realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by human presence. The revolutionary gamesters of all countries can be united in the SI to commence the emergence from the prehistory of daily life.” This prehistory of daily life is perhaps better understood to us today as the “4HL” the drudgery of wage slavery where the average worker is sentenced to work from 9AM-5PM which, once you add transit, responsibilities, and sleep, leaves only about a “four-hour life” where one is free to pursue their own interests.
As best as I can discern, like the ostensible goals of the marxist, SI’s main driving force was its discontent with the alienation, materialism, and persistent lack of basic necessities brought about by the modern world. So yes, while the way SI talked about drudgery of such a society does share many marxist talking points, especially dealing with the organization of production and capitalism, it nevertheless appears that SI took legitimate issue with the way marxism framed “the game.” Whereas marxists operated within the dominant framework which is impotent to fundamental change, SI sought to completely upend the framework with sheer creative brute force, seeking the “[t]he liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, [in order to] supersede[] the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.”
The situationist viewed himself as an artist first rather than a worker, activist, organizer, or “political creature” as the marxist does. The situationist was more existential, more primordial; he took issue with capitalism and the modern world, not because it is inequitable per se, but first and foremost because it simply is not natural. In this way, the situationist was exponentially more reactionary than the marxist ever could be. The marxist seeks power first and foremost—sure, power for the people, workers, oppressed, etc. ad nauseum, but power, nevertheless. The situationist sought culture first and foremost, decentralized culture at that, which they proclaimed would necessarily lead to greater liberty, abundance, unity, and freedom.
The Failed? Situationist Internationale Plot to take over U.N.E.S.C.O.
SI looked upon concentration of power and bureaucracy with disfavor and set its sights directly on what it perceived to be one of the world’s worst perpetrators: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In its manifesto, SI vowed to take over UNESCO in order to use its concentrated power to advance its own revolutionary interests. Unfortunately, we see here already a poor hypocrisy of principle that has proven unkind to SI’s goals in practice. It’s the age-old tale of revolution: very rarely—if ever—has any revolution resulted in a true decentralization of power. Did this inconsistency lead to SI’s mere impotence itself, or has SI’s playbook been co-opted by its opponents? SI’s stated objectives once they accomplished a takeover of UNESCO reveal a roadmap to determine whether they bore any fruit.
SI described the principles of their new culture as:
Against the spectacle, the realized situationist culture introduces total participation.
Against preserved art, it is the organization of the directly lived moment.
Against particularized art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behavior and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets.
Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists — with all culture visible — have been completely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication.
Ultimately, within this culture “at a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation.” Enabled by an abundance of necessities and freedom from “the spectacle” of mass media, people would be free to be individuals that engage in lives of active participation, creating and engaging with the world in an organic and real way. Much of this dialogue may resonate with those of us in the growing dissident movement of the 21st century, wherever their particular beliefs may be grounded.
Though, as I read more about SI, I also cannot shake the sense that much of their thinking seems to have been co-opted by those in power. Those who pull the strings of mass media, industry, and government seem to have a deep understanding of humanity’s need to create and participate (and how to pervert that need). Consumer technology’s development over the last half-century is rooted in that individual engagement. The internet, smartphone, and social media have given every living person with access to them an ability to engage in ways that the ancients would have rightly considered godlike. Yet this digital opium has in so many ways made people dumber, more dependent, and less engaged in real life or their own lives at all, opting instead for vicarious existence through mass media, both corporate and individual (which in so many instances is practically indiscernible). We are more in the clutches of “the spectacle” than we ever have been.
So, what is the rest of SI’s story? Clearly, if they did somehow infiltrate UNESCO and subvert it to further their goals, then our present reality shows that whatever truth some of their thinking had, it has resulted in putrid rot, not utopian artistic and cultural renaissance. As an agency of the United Nations, UNESCO is a major arm of worldwide global homogenization, and the globohomo project has only accelerated at breakneck pace. Oddly enough, there is a two-degree separation between SI and UNESCO: just one year after SI published its manifesto, the Frenchman René Gabriel Eugene Maheu (1905-1975) became UNESCO’s Director-General and held the position until 1974. Maheu was a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) who first developed the concept of “situation” in the 1940s that Debord and the rest of SI would cultivate. Under Maheu’s tenure, UNESCO launched the “Man and the Biosphere Programme” in 1971. MAB was the first globohomo “sustainable development” program and thus the forerunner of Agenda 21 and 2030.
However, Sartre and DeBord did have some major differences in their thinking and SI, if it believed nothing else, believed in decentralization, so it appears less likely that SI had any serious involvement in the globohomo program and more likely that those who did, such as Maheu, would know how to out-subvert the avant-garde situationist subverters. The powers behind the globohomo world order are more aware of “the spectacle” and how to use it for control now than ever.
Curtain Call
SI ended its manifesto with a promise:
To those who don't understand us properly, we say with an irreducible scorn: “The situationists of which you believe yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you. We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity.”
Yes, it sounds like typical communist gobbledygook to Norm and me as well, but the situationist scorn for centralization, alienation, and meaningless artificial spectacle still rings true. Yet, we must not let scorn be our driving force, or we too will become a footnote to eventually be erased from history. Instead, our continued dissent against our 21st century Leviathan must be animated by a “total participation” of seeking and stewarding virtue, truth, and obedience to God and His natural order. These were the ancient aims of our forefathers, and all those who are opposed to these ancient aims are our enemies. As long as we keep our focus on these aims, we can and should employ any and all tactics that inspire hearts and minds to our cause. Situationist Internationale’s subversive avant-garde accelerationism is a worthwhile study for today’s dissident as we turn dreams of victory over our enemies into a reality of a better world.
Postscript: Thank you for reading and supporting dog and pony show. My publication in Man’s World is only the beginning. It’s been great to hear the feedback so far on this piece; most people hadn’t heard of SI, which I am pleased to have shined a light on. There’s plenty more meat to that bone, so I may write more on the group and Guy Debord in the future. For now, I am interested in what YOU are most interested in. If you’ve read this far, please take the time to vote on what you want to read next:
https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html