[D66] Fwd: social choreography: steve valk and the situationists

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    lead article: social choreography: steve valk and the situationists
    <http://choreograph.net/articles/lead-article-social-choreography-steve-valk-and-the-situationists>


      BY ALAN N. SHAPIRO

    We have to change the world. That’s what we think. Change society.
    Change life. Do it for freedom. Get us out of this prison. We know
    one thing: this change is possible. All that remains is to figure
    out how to do it. (1)

With these words written in 1957, Guy Debord founded the Situationist 
International, a radical group of creators searching for new forms of 
action in art and politics. The practice of*social choreography*recently 
initiated by Steve Valk carries the promise of/changer le monde/once 
again to the threshold of the*crossing from dream to reality*. Two 
events organized by Valk lead to an appraisal of what has been achieved 
and what remains to be done in conceptualizing an effective contemporary 
project of concrete utopia. In/Smallclub: Goldcoast/(2001), Valk worked 
with artist-activists from Frankfurt’sTATTheater to organize 
“wanderings” of groups of individuals for several hours through the 
Bockenheim section of the city. The idea for these walking adventures 
was adapted from the Situationist notion of/le derive/or collectively 
“drifting” through urban spaces.

In the conference-event-happening/Framemakers: Choreography as an 
Aesthetics of Change/ <http://www.daghdha.ie/007/001.htm>, Valk 
collaborated with Jeffrey Gormly, Michael Klien and the Limerick-based 
Daghdha Dance Company to pay tribute to – yet also radicalize – William 
Forsythe’s “postmodern” choreography of the*plasticity of the body*. 
What the predominant “body movement paradigm” in our society relegates 
to the status of autistic or nonfunctional behavior attains a space of 
legitimacy on the stage in the incredible suppleness that Forsythe’s 
special inspirational remaking of the dancer’s body allows her to 
express. But the*ambition of social choreography is to extend this 
paradigm shift from the dancer’s body to a new radical flexibility of 
the social body*. Valk and his associates brought together dancers, 
cultural theorists and new media artists to discuss and enact 
the*potentialities of choreography as a socially active force*.

But the presence at the conference of technology entrepreneur James 
Stevens hinted metaphorically at the decisive step that Steve Valk’s 
amazingly original enterprise must still take if it is truly going to 
change the world, and it must take nothing less than that as its 
goal.*To achieve real change, social choreography must intervene in the 
heart of capitalist society*, not remain in the separate sphere of 
culture, which has long been designed as the safe place for authorized 
challenge, creativity, and pseudo-revolt. The technology corporation is 
today “where the action is” in the dynamics of the present, and social 
choreography can be brought under the umbrella of a radical technology 
corporation that will “change all the rules” in every aspect of its 
operations.

    *Report*: Louis Althusser,/Eléments d’autocritique/(1974).
    *Update*May 2010: Alan N. Shapiro,/Autocritique/, self-criticism.
    I have lived these last few years under an illusion. (BTW, what is
    the difference between an illusion and a delusion? Certainly Freud
    did not get this right.) I had a conversation with Jean Baudrillard
    in July 2004 about the subject of/changer le monde/. This impossible
    exchange with a great thinker led me to the idea of making a new
    interpretation of Marxism and Buddhism as the everyday life practice
    of utopia within a technology company. I wrote up this idea in the
    essay “Play Don’t Work in a Pragmatic-Utopian High-Tech
    Enterprise”:choreograph.net. This was a very successful essay, and I
    have received a lot of positive feedback about it, especially
    regarding the vision of the future of work that it articulates (/the
    future of an illusion/).
    However, the dream of the radical anarcho-Marxist
    technology-media-ecology-design company – with its principles of
    friendship, individual freedom, play, creativity, and diversity of
    activities – is only an idea! It is not a reality. To actually try
    to do something like that in practice would amount to madness./La
    folie/. Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Since (almost) everyone
    else who is operating in business is doing so in accordance with
    business-as-usual capitalist principles, he who would attempt to
    “change all the rules” – and do everything differently in a utopian
    way would be immediately confronted with a whole series of
    impossible-to-solve problems. One wants to reinvent everything, yet
    at the same time integrate all of this new stuff with the
    productivity and viability of a functioning business. One would be
    entering a black hole of the absurdly unattainable. Only a madman or
    “the idiot of the family” would try it. Of course, Jean-Paul Sartre
    concerned himself at great length with such family idiots (Gustave
    Flaubert), and Michel Foucault reflected profoundly on the meaning
    of madness and its binary exclusion for the narrow rationalism of
    modern European society. Sartre and Foucault,BTW, are at the very
    heart of our science, of the human sciences of the West. And as the
    Dalai Lama says: develop the heart.AAR(at any rate), Social
    Choreography should be left alone to stand on its own two feet. It
    should be de-coupled from any imperatives put on it to throw in with
    the New Technology Company that does not exist./La société
    technologique utopique n’a pas eu lieu./We have to change the world.
    That’s what we think. Change society. Change life. Do it for
    freedom. Get us out of this prison. We know one thing: this change
    is possible. All that remains is to figure out how to do it.
    On the other hand, the software architecture, design and code of the
    New Computer Science:link is very real – based as it is on
    mathematics that nobody else has – and investors are coming closer.
    So what the fuck are you gonna do, Alan? What would Captain Kirk do?
    What would Casey Stengel do? What would Steve McQueen in/The
    Cincinnati Kid/do? Live to fight another day.

*The Wandering Spectacle*
If I wager on red or black in 
roulette,/pair/or/impair/,/manque/or/passe/, I have a nearly even chance 
of victory or defeat, of gaining an amount equal to my stake, or of 
sacrificing the money that I have set down, leaving aside the house 
advantage that the 37th number, the zero, affords to the gaming 
establishment. The only nonpositive number on the wheel of chance is 
neither red nor black, neither/pair/nor/impair/,/manque/nor/passe/. When 
this lowest degree comes up, my squandered chips are positioned by an 
employee onto a narrow line between further acquisition and forfeiture, 
and the issue is deferred. But the two essential outcomes, being up or 
down, getting ahead or falling back, kicking ass or getting kicked, 
winning a bundle or crapping out, steamrolling or biting the dust, would 
clearly seem to be two separate and distinct modalities, entirely 
unrelated stations of existence into one of which I discretely cross 
over following the croupier’s throw and my subsequent instantaneous 
visual recognition of which compartment the ball has come to rest in. 
Seehere 
<http://choreograph.net/articles/a-proposal-for-developing-quantum-computing-in-software>for 
more in depth discussions of this.

I have placed my bet on red, the dishlike device is spinning, my palms 
are sweating, my pulse is racing, the small metallic orb goes ’round and 
’round, is deflected, and collides into several ridges. If the silver 
ball tumbles down into the slot of a red number, I will taste the rush 
of triumph and of easy street, otherwise the bitterness of destruction 
and of hard knocks. The tiny sphere bounces back up from the first 
pocket with which it flirts and lands disadvantageously. A small piece 
of my hide is ripped away from me. The two results, winning and losing, 
and the differing circumstances which they respectively bring about, are 
seemingly divided and dissociated one from another. But this is only an 
appearance.*There is a certain system, a level of shared reality, to 
which both winning and losing belong*. It is*a dimension which 
illuminates what they have in common and which precedes either of them 
and makes them both possible*. It is*a system of participation*, call it 
obsessional neurosis or addiction, call it the game or seductive play, 
to which I assent. I consent to having my mood, my emotional or 
psychological state, suddenly affected by an arbitrary change in fortune 
or in exterior events. There are other intimate couplings analogous to 
the pairing between gain and loss: pleasure and pain, love and hate, 
sado and maso, yin and yang. A gambler who begins to comprehend 
the*intricate intermingling*between winning and losing might strive to 
achieve sovereign indifference towards the value of money, to espy 
the*secret flow of the game itself*– and if one were to think in this 
way about the*game of life*, one might become enlightened – or risk 
being swallowed up by the consequences of his fluctuations and losses.

Like winning and losing, the two key ideas of the Situationists, an 
avant-garde artistic and radical leftist political movement which 
thrived in Paris, London, and northern California in the mid-20th 
century, are like a perpetual Möbius strip which appears at all points 
to have two sides but really has one. The two crucial Situationist ideas 
–*wandering and the spectacle*– have often been regarded as 
contradictory and at odds with each other. Wandering or/le derive/, 
which literally means “the drift,” is connected with the early Parisian 
Situationists of the 1950s, who were influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and 
Lettrism, with the collage art of the Dutch painter Asger Jorn, and with 
the utopian theories of city planners Constant Nieuwenhuys and the 
Algerian Abdelhafid Khatib(2). The/dérive/, a group technique of 
transient passage through varied ambiences, evokes*activity, creativity, 
and cultural optimism*;*new encounters and the exploration of 
territory*; and psycho-geographical defamiliarization. It*conjures up 
free association and the rediscovery of fascination*; the construction 
of stimulating “situations;” and*an adventurous playing with 
architecture and urban space*.

The notion of “the society of the spectacle” was first elaborated in Guy 
Debord’s 1967 text/La Société du spectacle/, and it attained prominence 
during the French student uprisings and workers’ factory and office 
occupations of May 1968(3). The spectacle denotes a certain critique of 
consumerism, the mass media, simulations, and “commodity fetishism”(4).

It implies a degree of resignation and cultural pessimism faced with the 
widespread domination of images over reality, and in the wake of 
prevailing contemporary social phenomena such as television, 
advertising, cybernetics, and organized leisure time./Everything that 
was directly lived has moved away into a representation,/wrote Debord. 
The generalized reduction of the citizen to spectator status and the 
alienation of the worker from the product of his labor are developments 
which the Situationist International saw as common to the advanced 
capitalist countries of the West and the state socialism of the 
East.*The spectacle is the dominion of the mode of mere survival, of 
economics as separating category, ruling over life itself and the 
festival of culture*. It is/the sun which never sets over the empire of 
modern passivity/(5). But*in the active critique and transformation of 
everyday life*, as in the system of red and black in roulette, 
the*concepts of wandering*(or the/dérive/)*and the spectacle are 
revealed as being deeply inter-connected and non-separated from each other*.

    Report:SCHMALCLUBGoldküste 25.05.2001.
    Drifting and rambling along the Gold Coast of Bockenheim,
    Frankfurt./Pflasterstrand. Sous le pavé, la plage/. The search for
    the beach under the cobblestones. Locomotion without a goal. The
    hunters of marvels. A sixth-story dentist’s office overlooking city
    rooftops. Traffic signs of vehicular circulation superimposed onto a
    park’s greenery. Claustrophobic towers. Touring map distributed in a
    travel agency with its entry point at the site of the travel office
    itself. A ride on a yellow Post Office bicycle, on a movable garage
    ladder, or through the Palmengarten on a mini-train. Dance studio.
    Quickie stay in an inviting hotel room. Wait tables or wash up in a
    restaurant’s kitchen. Meet an astrologer or other assorted
    celebrity. Get a touch-up at a hair salon or a passport photo. Stop
    in at the Institute for the Scientific Study of Dreams. Carrying
    handy companionship /*wandering spectacle*of constant cell phone
    communications directly in one’s vocal folds and ear. Arrive or/be
    received/at the stationary destination of Telekom’s seamless
    cylindricality, looking outwards or homewards with views towards
    everywhere, as in an inverted panopticon…

Our habitual relationships to physical space and our reasons for 
movement and action within the urban environment are largely determined 
by the functional and utilitarian patterns of work, daily errands and 
commissions, and leisure activities. In the/dérive/or meandering,*one 
instead lets oneself be spontaneously seduced by the attractions of the 
terrain*, and essays*to make an interpretive stand-up reading of the 
city*. Wandering must be wrested back from its consumerist meaning (as 
in the German word/wandern/) of hiking or walking on foot. On the Gold 
Coast, you*rove and experiment, study your surroundings, you follow your 
instincts, and delve concretely into where you are and exactly how you 
are living*. To dérive is to/notice the way in which certain areas, 
streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and 
desires/(6).

As you accelerate your wandering,*you start to proactively turn upside 
down the designated purpose of given locations and to make more 
conscious and free use of ambiences*. You begin to discern 
the/psycho-geographical contours, currents, fixed points, and 
vortexes/which influence, encourage, or discourage entries, exits, and 
flows into and out of specific prescribed zones of the city(7).

The permanent circulation of automobile traffic, semiotic messages, 
commodities commerce, and shopping everywhere is the ceaseless 
organization of universal isolation, the unremitting production 
of/lonely crowds/, and the antinomy of encounter./Spectacles compensate 
for the participation that is no longer possible/. For Guy Debord, the 
spectacle is the incessant auto-justifying and self-legitimating speech 
of the established society./The spectacle is the dominant order’s 
uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue/(8). As 
designer lifestyles get manufactured as palettes of niche products, the 
spectacle also becomes a system of separation from one’s own life, an 
integrated complex of specialization and fragmentation into widely 
separated instances of social existence. But*the spectacle is 
instantiated, brought into renewed being at each moment by its 
actors*.*We partake in the spectacle, and we can change it*.*There is 
nothing outside of the spectacle and that is good*. Digital 
technologies, online interactive networks, and “reality TV” have not in 
themselves dismantled or altered the spectacle. Technophoric claims 
along such lines tend to miss the point.*It is not about taking the side 
of wandering or of the spectacle*. They are not in opposition.*They have 
always been, and will always be, intertwined elements in a continuum*, 
like winning and losing.*We are always in process*in the wandering 
spectacle, and the urgent question is precisely*how do we choose to live 
our relationship to that*, as consumers or as creators. As the 
physicist-philosopher Hans-Peter Dürr says, we must change our 
conception of what human beings are from/Homo economicus/(Economic 
human) to*an idea of a Creative human*.

    *Report: Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change*
    (Written in the style of R.D. Laing and David Cooper’s book-length
    commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s/Saint Genet/and/Critique of
    Dialectical Reason/):

    The milestone first Framemakers conference of May-June 2005 –
    organized by Michael Klien, Jeffrey Gormly and Steve Valk of Daghdha
    Dance Company, Limerick, Ireland – is documented in the
    book/Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change/(2008).

    Framemakers/is an ongoing enquiry into a world understood in terms
    of relations, order, and ecologies. Daghdha Dance Company hosts a
    new kind of thinking space, one that invites citizens to enquire
    into the deeper structures and dynamics that bind our worlds, in
    which we have our being, together/. Framemakers/expands a metaphor,
    a new understanding of choreography as a creative act setting
    humans, actions, ideas, and thoughts in relation to one another, to
    create or reveal order, and channel energies/. Framemakers/is a new
    perceptual space where pattern emerges, a new thought in/an ecology
    of minds/, a growing body of knowledge about a
    multi/inter/infra-disciplinary pattern language/.(9)

    Pattern languages began in the late 1970s in the field of
    architecture with Christopher Alexander. They have since then spread
    to fields like Object-Oriented software design, progressive
    pedagogy, and user interface interaction.

    Framemakers/is a symposium, a series of social choreographies, a
    theatre congress, a thinktank, a new kind of performative speaking,
    a raw thinking circle, a social dreaming matrix, a collection of
    interviews, and now a book of recommendations/. (10)

    /Framemakers/became a succession of seminal-iconic events enacting
    (/mettre en scène/) what I call/The Illusion beyond Art/: events
    which took place in Limerick and Dublin between 2005 and 2008.

*The Illusion beyond Art*: Society has designated a certain activity as 
the officially sanctioned pursuit of creativity and social critique, and 
this is called Art. This role assignment implies, as a consequence, that 
the rest of Society is exempt from the enterprise of creativity and 
questioning. Museums, cultural centres, and theatres are the appointed 
locations where Art takes place. They host this separate sphere. But 
Society should not have any separate spheres. Neither politics nor 
economics nor engineering nor death nor madness should be a separate 
sphere. To call oneself an Artist is to automatically engage in a kind 
of posturing. I am creative. You are not. I am critical. You are not. 
But the great creators of the past wrote or painted or composed because 
they had to. They did it out of existential and biographical necessity 
(see Sartre on Mallarmé, Genet, and Flaubert; see Derrida on Artaud, 
Bataille, and Jabès). They did not call themselves Artists, because a 
great creation is a Singularity. This Singularity has nothing to do with 
any other creation. It is not comparable or exchangeable with other 
creations in any system or nexus of equivalence. Only art historians and 
curators have the idea of Art as category. What is most interesting 
about an Artwork is the Illusion that is at its heart, an Illusion that 
paradoxically makes us see the real more distinctly and vividly. This 
Illusion is not some fanciful fiction oppposed to reality (Baudrillard), 
but is a necessary Illusion inherent in the world itself, an Illusion 
embedded in reality. It is*an embodiment and not a representation*.*The 
Illusion beyond Art is a choreography of the dreamed-of radical 
flexibility of the social body*, beyond the sleepwalking society of 
discipline-control-self-surveillance, belonging to the collective 
cultural unconscious.

Peter Harries-Jones, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at York 
University in Toronto, with whom I had the privilege of breaking bread 
several times in Limerick, writes ofGregory Bateson’s Spirited Culture 
of Refusal 
<http://choreograph.net/articles/gregory-batesons-spirited-culture-of-refusal>Perhaps 
our leading Bateson scholar, Harries-Jones is the author of the awesome 
book-length study/A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and 
Gregory Bateson/(11). For Harries-Jones, Bateson was the originator of 
an “unnamed” new 21st century science that is related to cybernetics and 
is grounded in an/ecological epistemology/or/recursive epistemology/. As 
Harries-Jones explains in his contribution to the/Framemakers/book

    Bateson used the term ‘epistemology’ to characterize this exercise
    of human imagination about how the relationship of people to their
    environment entered into the dynamics of environmental change. Yet
    it was not until the convention on global climate change in 1997
    (the Kyoto Accord), 17 years after his death, that this epistemology
    became acceptable.(12)

James Lovelock is another proponent of*cybernetic epistemology*who 
became more celebrated than Bateson with his series of books on our 
planet Gaia as a living organism of unfathomable complexity (for 
example, his 2006 book/The Revenge of Gaia/) (13).*Interdisciplinarity 
is at the heart of the new 21st century science that it is our task to 
develop*, and Harries-Jones importantly explains that*it is the embodied 
metaphor of/choreography/that is the driving spirit of the 
scientific/paradigm shift/largely inspired by Bateson*:

    Bateson was*a choreographer of ideas*. He recognized that whatever
    the merits of his case for reform of science, it would have to be
    supported by art, poetry, parables and stories if it were to appeal
    to human imagination. I have often wondered, especially since
    meeting with Framemakers, how a choreography of Bateson’s ideas,
    drawn from his own life, could itself be presented as a sort of
    parable to be staged or danced. For example, as a young
    anthropologist in Bali, Bateson investigated how the people on Bali
    danced their ideas. After his Bali research, he [just like the
    founders of Gestalt Therapy Frederick Perls, Laura Perls, Ralph F.
    Hefferline, and Paul Goodman] maintained an interest in
    ‘proprioception’ or the way in which bodily movement forms and
    alters sensibility, and ideas about sensibility. (14)

In his essayMedical Perception and the Blind Spot 
<http://choreograph.net/articles/lead-article-toward-a-systemic-medicine-combining-old-observations-with-modern-concepts>Georg 
Ivanovas, a medical doctor specializing in homeopathy and balneology, 
and a psychotherapist specializing in Gestalt and systemic 
psychotherapy, writes brilliantly about the implications of quantum 
physics for holistic mind-body medicine.

    *In physics there exists a clear concept in how the process of
    observing influences the outcome*. For medicine a comparable theory
    of perception has never been formulated. There still prevails a kind
    of naïve naturalism maintaining that health, disease and therapeutic
    interventions can be judged objectively. (15)

Ivanovas argues that there is always an unobserved blind spot in any 
medical or psychotherapeutic perception. The allegedly objective 
scientific approach or paradigm applied to an observed process relies 
on/explanatory principles/which are never actually defined within a 
closed-circuit linguistic system of self-legitimating and self-contained 
redundancy. The labelling of phenomena by the knowledge system of naming 
relies on reconciled signifiers that are not, in turn, signifieds of yet 
more signifiers, and so on ad infinitum. The invoked pseudo-principles 
are the system’s closure points, the limits to the free play of 
discourse. Whereas homeopathic, traditional Chinese, and quantum 
medicine emphasize*networks in and of the body*and 
the*singularity/individuality*of the patient’s circumstances, within 
mainstream Western medicine/where diagnosis and therapy are mainly based 
on statistics, individuality is rather regarded as a nuisance/(16).

    This lack of interest in the individual impressed me already at
    university. When we were first presented a psychotic patient hearing
    voices, we wanted to know more about these voices, what they said,
    what they meant in the context of the patient, and so on. But all
    discussion was interrupted. It was sufficient for the diagnosis and
    the therapy that he heard voices. Everything else was mysticism.
    This is how poor observers are educated. (17)

Another possible mistake of contemporary Western medicine is that a 
disease or infection is rarely left to take its own course to the end. 
Everything is treated in an interventionist way with drugs, cortisone (a 
steroid hormone), or antibiotics. Antibiotics, for example, only 
suppress an infection; they don’t cure it. According to the World Health 
Organization, 46% of the world’s population is chronically ill (as of 
2005), and this will increase to 60% by the year 2020 (18). As in 
Baudrillard’s famous description of the precession of/simulation and 
simulacra/, our medical science provides*a partial map that precedes a 
nearly unknown territory*.

*R.I.C.E. – Agentur für soziale Choreographie*
Steve Valk’s organization, currently most active in Frankfurt am Main, 
Germany, is called R.I.C.E., which stands for, alternatively,*Radical 
Ideas for the Creative Enterprise*,*Research Institute for Cybernetic 
Epistemology*,*Real Institute of Civic Engagement*,*Recovery of 
Intuitive Creative Experience*, or*Reality-Informed Catalytic Events*. 
In his published conversation with Michael Klien in the/Framemakers 
book/entitledSocial Dreaming, Social Choreography 
<http://choreograph.net/articles/lead-article-social-dreaming-social-choreography>Valk 
refers explicitly to the ideas of Guy Debord and Joseph Beuys:

    One can go back to the Situationists, who wanted to abolish the
    notion of art as a separate sphere, a specialized activity. They saw
    the*social realm as a realm of creativity*, a utopian topography
    which habours vital and socially transformative possibilities. Beuys
    is another figure of historical importance. In the 22 years that I
    have lived and worked in the arts in Germany, Beuys has rarely ever
    been mentioned, even though so much of the work that I was involved
    in, in places like Ballett Frankfurt, was conceptually close and
    begging for comparison. We transformed a traditional state theatre
    structure into*a new kind of creative civic interface*whose flexible
    interior design was done entirely in matted felt, Beuys’ favorite
    material. Thousands of people*came in, performed, participated*. No
    one mentioned Beuys or his ideas(19).

*New perception shapes new worlds*. R.I.C.E. is an agency for Social 
Choreography. It engages withthe dramaturgy of everyday life 
<http://choreograph.net/raw/a-note-on-applied-dramaturgy>. R.I.C.E. 
explores*the mutually transformative effects which the world as we 
perceive it, and the activities through which we shape it, have on each 
other*.*Which thought patterns leave their mark on our consciousness? 
How does that inscription find expression in our actions? What form do 
we thereby give to the world around us?*To explore these questions, 
R.I.C.E. does projects in Frankfurt, Germany; Limerick, Ireland; 
andHelsinki <http://choreograph.net/raw?thread=uni>, Finland. The heart 
of the agency is Steve Valk, chief dramaturg of the Daghdha Dance 
Company, and Berit Mohr, theatre studies academician. Grouped around 
them is a network of partners from all areas of society. Working closely 
with R.I.C.E. is the*ID_Frankfurt / Independent 
Dance*collective,*kindling feeling and movement to rouse the social body 
back to life*.

*The social body as a dancing body*
R.I.C.E. has its roots in Frankfurt am Main. The first ideas leading to 
today’s work were formulated between 1999 and 2004 at theTATTheatre, 
through the cooperative work with William Forsythe and the Ballett 
Frankfurt. With the choreographer Michael Klien and the Daghdha Dance 
Company in Ireland, Steve Valk further developed these approaches. 
R.I.C.E. was created in 2006. The goal: the possibilities of 
exploring*choreography as an/aesthetics of change/*. In order to do 
that, R.I.C.E. draws together participants from public and private life, 
brings commercial and cultural organizations side by side and into a 
network, and deconstructively synthesizes differing knowledge and 
differing experiences issuing from the most varied sectors of society.

*To give absolute authority to the present*
R.I.C.E. thinks, dreams and choreographs novel social settings and 
situations. R.I.C.E.’s ambition is to reach deeper layers of the 
collective consciousness (a term originated by the French founder of 
modern sociology Émile Durkheim) and individual consciousness. The 
agency wants to generate increasing awareness about the*shared contexts 
in which we as individuals and as a society move – and that we design 
together*.

    *Badiou:*We are in a new phase of emancipatory politics.
    *DIEZEIT*: What is that?
    *Badiou:*The revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries
    are over and are not coming back. The Proletariat. The Party.
    Strategies and tactics. This whole edifice has collapsed, and we
    must reconstruct emancipation from scratch. We are in the same
    situation as the early Marx:CAPITALis in command. The problems of
    society are escalating. But no tendency towards catastrophe is in
    sight. One must seek out. Far away from the State.
    *DIEZEIT*, German weekly cultural newspaper, December 1,
    2009,/Interview with the Philosopher Alain Badiou/

    That’s why*we will have to gamble on the invention of new models
    that create a societal surplus value*, that*seek out the connections
    and cooperations among areas of society which are still demarcated
    from each other*. We will bet on new models which*generate hybrid
    forms*, and which will*emanate from disparate thinking and living
    worlds*.
    Adrienne Goehler,/Liquefactions: Roads and Detours from the Welfare
    State to the Culture Society/(20)

The problem with our Western societies today is the*immense gap between 
creativity and ordinary daily life*. We have high culture, universities, 
and churches. But these*institutions operate without real 
interconnectivity to routine everyday existence*. They are the 
officially designated sites where intelligence, drama, beauty, 
awareness, and spiritual flexibility are allowed to happen, and are 
alleged to be happening. To experience*Art*, one goes to the gallery, 
museum or theatre. To acquire*Knowledge*, one goes to the lecture hall 
or enters the bookstore*where one places one’s trust in publishers’ 
judgments of what constitutes critical thinking, wisdom or science*. The 
“ghettoized” condition of Art and Academia is a symptom of 
the*fundamental separation between ideas and reality that defines our 
impoverished collective quality of life*.

While professionals of culture, politics and the media congratulate 
themselves for their “valuable contributions,” the masses (/les masses, 
les multitudes/) of people go about the business of their daily lives 
without any really useful information or dialogue to help them. They are 
processed – like lab mice on a treadmill – through the 
neuro-disciplinary society of work, consumerism, 
simulated-fake-pseudo-communication, real-time advertising images around 
the clock, clunky logistics, and inconvenient transport. They spend ever 
longer hours at the office, the factory, or the school. They are in 
transit for hours in a commuter train. They wait anxiously in the queue 
in the state employment agency or to be cared for by a doctor in a 
hospital. They eat in a fast food restaurant. They inspect endless 
aisles of commodities at the supermarket or the chain drug store. They 
spend money compulsively at the shopping mall or the sports betting parlor.

In these mundane quotidian situations, people are essentially bored, 
restless, passive, frustrated, and alienated. They live in fear of 
deteriorating economic circumstances. They try to find meaning and 
purpose, but are stifled. They may be on the edge of violence or 
self-destruction. They must deal with the boss, with difficult 
co-workers, with self-important teachers, with rivals and bullies. 
Intelligence, creativity and the exploration of new ways of seeing must 
be jacked out of their segregated cultural spaces and brought to bear on 
these real life scenarios.

The heart and soul of the Situationist International was its idea of 
the*critique and transformation of everyday life*. It is time to renew 
that historical project.

*Social Choreography changes the relationship between Artist, Art, 
Audience, Participant, Experience, Artefact, and Society*. One is 
tempted to say: Social Choreography changes everything. But what exactly 
does that mean?

*We cannot change the world. But we can talk about changing the world*. 
And we shall do so with every means available to us.*With every language 
available to us*. By hook or by crook.

Science fiction is never about the future, predictions of the future, or 
the ‘accuracy’ of those predictions. Science fiction is about the 
present,*the reality of the present*that dominant ways of thinking 
prevent us from seeing.

I close my eyes and recall my conversation with Jean Baudrillard in July 
2004. I cannot hold back these tears for his illness and death. But 
surely he would want me to hold them back and to keep fighting.

 From the potential future of/changer le monde/, Jean, we are separated 
by the chasm of chaos. No one predicted the fall of the Soviet Union or 
the World Trade Center.

Of/changer le monde, je m’en fiche/(I don’t give a flying fuck). But 
talking about changing the world: that I can do, I want to do, and I 
will do.

Flow my tears, the policeman said.

And pouring down my cheeks they came, in buckets, not to be lost in the 
rain.

NOTES
1 Guy Debord,/Rapport sur la construction des situations… suivi de Les 
Situationnistes et les nouvelles formes d’action dans la politique ou 
l’art/(originally published in 1957) (Éditions mille et une nuits, 2006).
2 Simon Sadler,/The Situationist City/(Cambridge, MA: TheMITPress, 1998).
3 Guy Debord,/La Société du spectacle/(Paris: Éditions Buchet-Chastel, 
1967).
4 See Sadie Plant,/The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist 
International in a Postmodern Age/(London: Routledge, 1992). See also 
Anselm Jappe,/Guy Debord/(translated from the French by Donald 
Nicholson-Smith, with a Foreword by T.J. Clark and a New Afterword by 
the Author) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
5 Debord,/La Société du spectacle/.
6 Guy Debord, “La théorie du dérive” in/Internationale situationniste 
#2/, December 1958.
7 Guy-Ernest Debord, “Exercice de la psychogéographie,”/Potlatch/, no.2 
(Paris, June 1954).
8 Debord,/La Société du spectacle/.
9 Jeffrey Gormly, ed.,/Framemakers: Choreography As an Aesthetics of 
Change/(Limerick, Ireland: Daghdha Dance Company, 2008); pp.8-9.
10 Ibid; p.9.
11 Peter Harries-Jones,/A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and 
Gregory Bateson/(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
12 Gormly, ed.,/Framemakers: Choreography As an Aesthetics of Change/; 
pp.29-30.
13 James Lovelock,/The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back 
and How We Can Still Save Humanity/(London: Allen Lane, 2006).
14 Gormly, ed.,/Framemakers: Choreography As an Aesthetics of Change/; 
pp.32-33; Frederick Perls, Ralph F. Hefferline, and Paul 
Goodman,/Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human 
Personality/(London: Souvenir Press, 1951).
15 Gormly, ed.,/Framemakers: Choreography As an Aesthetics of Change/; 
p.129.
16 Ibid.; p.135.
17 Ibid.
18WHO– “Chronisch Kranke: Neue Betreuungskonzepte gesucht,“ 
www.medizinauskunft.de/artikel/service/politik/18_10_chronisch_krank.php.
19 Gormly, ed.,/Framemakers: Choreography As an Aesthetics of Change/; 
p.148.
20 Adrienne Goehler,/Verflüssigungen: Wege und Umwege vom Sozialstaat 
zur Kulturgesellschaft/(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006).


        PUBLISHED 18 DECEMBER 12



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