Innovation is Dead

“ Whatever fortunes our activity might have known, it was Potlatch alone that filled the void in the cultural ideas of an era — that gaping hole in the middle of the 1950’s. It is already certain that history will see it not as a witness to the fidelity of the modern spirit during the reign of reactionary parody, but as a document of the experimental research that would be the central concern of the future. But this future is now — it is the game of every one of our lives. The real success that may be attributed to Potlatch is in its serving to unite the situationist movement on a new and greater field of operations.

Potlatch took its name from the North American Indian word for a pre-commercial form of circulation of goods, founded on the reciprocity of sumptuous gifts. The non-salable goods which such a free bulletin could distribute were desires and unedited problems; and it was their profundity for others that constituted a gift in return.”

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DEBORD, Guy (1959). «The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now», Potlatch, no 30, July 15. Translated from the French by Reuben Keehan.

About the site where this translation is hosted: «NOT BORED! is an autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal.»

Potlatch, as a circulation ritual (studied by Marcel Mauss), can be used to offer a different understanding of communication process. See Bataille (1933), Debord (1954) et Baudrillard (1972).

(via skandalon)