The dialectic of history is such that the Situationist International's theoretical victory is already forcing its adversaries to disguise themselves as situationists. The increasing likelihood of the confirmation of some of the simplest and least recent of our theses leads many people to appropriate aspects of one or another of them without acknowledgment . We are not, of course, concerned here with obtaining recognition and personal credit for priority. As participation becomes increasingly impossible, the second-rate specialists of modern art demand the participation of everyone.
Free play confined within the terrain of artistic dissolution is only the cooption of free play.
Drugs, alcohol and eroticism are often involved. In contrast, the situations defined by the SI can be constructed only on a foundation of material and spiritual richness. People urge us to present trivial projects that would be useful and convincing. In any case, if we were to oblige them, they would immediately turn these projects against us, either by holding them up as proofs of our utopianism or by rushing to disseminate watered-down versions of them. We are obviously in a good position to discover, a few years ahead of other people, all the potential gimmicks of the present extreme cultural decomposition.