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B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
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The Situationists and Automation(excerpts)
Yet automation is now at the heart of the problem of the socialist domination of production and of the preponderance of leisure time over labor time. The question of automation is the one most pregnant with positive and negative possibilities. [...] Automation thus contains two opposing perspectives: it deprives the individual of any possibility of adding anything personal to automated production, which is a fixation of progress; and at the same time it saves human energy by massively liberating it from reproductive and uncreative activities. The value of automation thus depends on projects that supersede it and open the way for the expression of human energies on a higher plane. [...] The new leisure time appears as an empty space that present-day society can imagine filling only by multiplying the pseudoplay of ridiculous hobbies. But this leisure time is also the basis on which can be built the most magnificent cultural construction that has ever been imagined. [...] Automation can develop rapidly only once it has established as a goal a perspective contrary to its own establishment, and only if it is known how to realize such a general perspective in the process of the development of automation. [...] Pierre Drouin (Le Monde, 5 January 1957), seeing the extension of hobbies as fulfilling the potentialities that workers cannot express in their professional activity, concludes that “a creator lies dormant” in each person. This old banality is today of vital importance if one relates it to the actual material possibilities of our time. The sleeping creator must be awakened, and that waking state can be termed “situationist.” The idea of standardization is an effort to reduce and simplify the greatest number of human needs to the greatest equality. It is up to us whether this standardization will open up domains of experience more interesting than those it closes. Depending on the outcome, we may arrive at a total degradation of human life or at the possibility of continually discovering new desires. But these new desires will not appear by themselves in the oppressive context of our world. There must be a collective action to detect, express and fulfill them. ASGER JORN Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology). No copyright. |
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