The academy, Wark warns in a maverick passage, is merely a factory for “the production of new dead masters.” The philosophies on offer today are “no more than the routine spasms of an era out of love with itself.” In one sense, then, the situationist message is simple: refuse what you’re given. Refuse high theory, and turn your life into a test site for new forms of thought: “low theory,” premised on the knowledge of the world’s broken promises. Low theory’s scene is the street, a field lab for concrete enactments. Here, defrocked and freed from its context, theory becomes an engine for the execution of situations: of tactics and practices. Thought is put to work in the world, and philosophy grasped again as what it always was: “a ruthless criticism of all that exists.” (via Bookslut | The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark)
