Wark 2011

Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. London: Verso, 2011.

"The Letterist International are ethnographers of their own difference, cartographers of an attitude to life. This life did not lie outside the modern, Western one, but inside, in the fissures of its cities. It did not yearn for a primitive life from before history, but rather for one that was to come after it. In the life of the Saint-Germain delinquents' tribe could be found particles of the future, not the past, and not from some colonial Donogoo Tonka but from the very epicenter of what history had wrought: the colonization of everyday life at the heart of empire." (22)

"That is the challenge of the derive. The breakaway Letterist International created a new practice, a new way of being in the world, out of which to derive a new kind of practice. Strikingly, both capital and labor accept the division between work time and leiusre time. Capital extends or intensifies the working day; labor struggles to shorten it, and within it to resist speed-ups and other attempts by capital to extract more value from it. Perhaps it is this shared fixation on productive time that will draw both capital and labor towards the middle-class cultural norm." (25)