Critique of Hedonist Situationism. Birthday speech for three years of Shituationism

Dear readers,

To create situations was a dream of immediate social contact instead of alienated daily life. But the competition of isolated individuals means some feel free in their identity and others get lost in the process. To dissolve the identities into post-individual collectivity is not the only negation of these competitive processes. There also remains a space between, not collaborating and not competing, to denounce the idea of productivity and to claim an agile association, with itself as the only aim. To have a collaborative existence not for having a profit, but for having existences and collaborations outside the idea of profit.

Also this image brings up the idea of deviance, to act outside the norm can be an act of claiming comfort, even if the act itself seemed to aim at finding adventure. People who are bored seek entertainment, and will find lots of it without deviant behavior in culture industry. But people who feel uncomfortable with this will find their comfort in deviant communities, something that seems adventurous. The initial decision was not so much to seek adventure, but more one of seeking social comfort.

Sharing a space and feeling a status between alone and together, to help each other without aiming at reward or even any action in trade, to feel close without having the feeling to loose oneself – in the sense of opening up completely – or without asking for others to open up completely – which is in any ways a strange and illusionist idea – , to deny the idea of absolute understanding, and to reclaim the idea of communication from those that think that free communication is possible under the doctrine of market competition.

But the autonomy is not the small community, it lies in other ways of communication. So this can happen at mass events, or in a painting, in a song or in a book.  The spectacle of situationist comfort is shit. We only do shit on a pile of shit to get out of the shit. The only progress that is inside this process, is one that aims at social modes changing towards a reconcilitation of global equality and diversity. Because this only opens the space for what we cannot yet imagine: freedom.

The luxury of relative safety and free time that parts of the world population have, means being able to choose to work on the education wich enables the transformation and to build up autonomy als strengthening of freedom, not as exclusive collective, not for oneself, but as an open and therefore deviant form. Limited to material things this could be basically everything, from means of production, to commons (freely available anti-commodities), from spaces and means of communication to infohubs or libraries, etc., the principle matters. The subsequent challenge is of course to not only think this on the level of subculture, but to bring the ruthless criticism of the state and the idea of democratic coordination of production and supply into line (not thought as global centralist state directed economy obviously, but more creative ways please), only possible as a movement through the existing, a real transformation and not smashing everything and going backwards to previous forms of the social.

The cyberpunks on the various collaborative networks are flooding the audience with texts, movies, songs, images, a vast wave of media. Working all the time under fake identities to give away anticommodities of a little countercultureindustry. With that fulfilling the idealist idea of the free and useful citizens. Only through the nature of these efforts being collective and collaborative, this theater of autonomy could be kept running, serving as a good example to all little self-managed projects out there that with a little circle of friends you can reach everything you can imagine. Nothing else though.

The game of creating a strong collective representation that immediately represents itself is programmed to fail in a society that only uses representations to mark the value of exchangeability. The punk image of a gang that somehow evades the mainstream norms and holds up the now conservative ideas of elite and underground is a joke that had to choke itself. It is working with the idea of an everchanging collective project that would remain the same all the time in order to avoid to spoil the fans. This planned contradiction of the ultimate hype is not scandalous anymore when the whole web turns to the noncontradictive targeted creation of hypes.

What the cyberpunk groups had caricatured since decades was only about to become the online model of creating static ideas that represent dynamic change. The cybergangs were constructed never to end, because as a project, a channel, it was not aiming for something and therefore it couldn’t fail. Other media collectives of today, opposed to this, want to start because they realize that pictured dynamics has to be the key feature of a successful industrial media product.

Virtual hedonist activism and its traditions have to be overturned. The shituationists were from the beginning willing to transform from a hobby club to a working group as soon as they could. The shituationist strike, the giving up of daily posts, was just our way to understand that we remained a hobby club. But the perspective is, no more blogging for the sake of blogging, instead networking with other collectives, writers, artists, clubs, musicians and thinkers. Refuse the entertainment, it’s about finding enlightment in thought processes themselves and not in what forms they have been given for representation. But basically we want food not fame. We understand the cynicism of all our failures: bloggers don’t be afraid of loosing your digital ego, you can have a shiny artist identity instead. We just try to keep our irony and blasphemy to our own metaphors, and evaluate the tactic from time to time.

We are boring, you are all bored. This makes us enthuastic loosing winners on the forefronts of life: working for nothing but the ephemeral idiotic body- and mindless total creation of our lifes, failing and even more failing in creating the whole life, failing as the idiots that we are by stepping over a border no one should even step on in their own interest.

Thank you, and may only love tear us apart again.

this birthday speech was sampled from some of the texts i wrote in the last year.
read last years birthday text here (with a lot of pics and stories)
a group picture of some shituationists in 2011:

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