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  Jack London
War of the Classes



PREFACE
When I was a youngster I was looked upon as a weird sort of creature, because, forsooth, I was a socialist. Reporters from local papers interviewed me, and the interviews, when published, were pathological studies of a strange and abnormal specimen of man. At that time (nine or ten years ago), because I made a stand in my native town for municipal ownership of public utilities, I was branded a "red-shirt," a "dynamiter," and an "anarchist"; and really decent fellows, who liked me very well, drew the line at my appearing in public with their sisters.

But the times changed. There came a day when I heard, in my native town, a Republican mayor publicly proclaim that "municipal ownership was a fixed American policy." And in that day I found myself picking up in the world. No longer did the pathologist study me, while the really decent fellows did not mind in the least the propinquity of myself and their sisters in the public eye. My political and sociological ideas were ascribed to the vagaries of youth, and good-natured elderly men patronized me and told me that I would grow up some day and become an unusually intelligent member of the community. Also they told me that my views were biassed by my empty pockets, and that some day, when I had gathered to me a few dollars, my views would be wholly different,--in short, that my views would be their views.

And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,--still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable. Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few philosophical ideas, Germanic in their origin, I was an interesting and pleasing personality.

Through all this experience I noted one thing. It was not I that changed, but the community. In fact, my socialistic views grew solider and more pronounced. I repeat, it was the community that changed, and to my chagrin I discovered that the community changed to such purpose that it was not above stealing my thunder. The community branded me a "red-shirt" because I stood for municipal ownership; a little later it applauded its mayor when he proclaimed municipal ownership to be a fixed American policy. He stole my thunder, and the community applauded the theft. And today the community is able to come around and give me points on municipal ownership.

What happened to me has been in no wise different from what has happened to the socialist movement as a whole in the United States. In the bourgeois mind socialism has changed from a terrible disease to a youthful vagary, and later on had its thunder stolen by the two old parties,--socialism, like a meek and thrifty workingman, being exploited became respectable.

Only dangerous things are abhorrent. The thing that is not dangerous is always respectable. And so with socialism in the United States. For several years it has been very respectable,--a sweet and beautiful Utopian dream, in the bourgeois mind, yet a dream, only a dream. During this period, which has just ended, socialism was tolerated because it was impossible and non-menacing. Much of its thunder had been stolen, and the workingmen had been made happy with full dinner-pails. There was nothing to fear. The kind old world spun on, coupons were clipped, and larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers. Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind.

Then came the presidential election of 1904. Like a bolt out of a clear sky was the socialist vote of 435,000,--an increase of nearly 400 per cent in four years, the largest third-party vote, with one exception, since the Civil War. Socialism had shown that it was a very live and growing revolutionary force, and all its old menace revived. I am afraid that neither it nor I are any longer respectable. The capitalist press of the country confirms me in my opinion, and herewith I give a few post-election utterances of the capitalist press:-

"The Democratic party of the constitution is dead. The Social- Democratic party of continental Europe, preaching discontent and class hatred, assailing law, property, and personal rights, and insinuating confiscation and plunder, is here."--Chicago Chronicle.

"That over forty thousand votes should have been cast in this city to make such a person as Eugene V. Debs the President of the United States is about the worst kind of advertising that Chicago could receive."--Chicago Inter-Ocean.

"We cannot blink the fact that socialism is making rapid growth in this country, where, of all others, there would seem to be less inspiration for it."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

"Upon the hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms--great, far-sweeping reforms--are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or stand before the world responsible for our system of government being changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages must cease, or socialism will seize another lever to lift itself into power."--The Chicago New World.

"Scarcely any phase of the election is more sinisterly interesting than the increase in the socialist vote. Before election we said that we could not afford to give aid and comfort to the socialists in any manner. . . It (socialism) must be fought in all its phases, in its every manifestation."--San Francisco Argonaut.

And far be it from me to deny that socialism is a menace. It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever occurred in the history of the world. It presents a new spectacle to the astonished world,--that of an ORGANIZED, INTERNATIONAL, REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT. In the bourgeois mind a class struggle is a terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what socialism is,--a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless workers and the propertied masters of workers. It is the prime preachment of socialism that the struggle is a class struggle. The working class, in the process of social evolution, (in the very nature of things), is bound to revolt from the sway of the capitalist class and to overthrow the capitalist class. This is the menace of socialism, and in affirming it and in tallying myself an adherent of it, I accept my own consequent unrespectability.

As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace, vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor its politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles the dry bones of dead and buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy phrases, such as, "Men are not born equal and never can be;" "It is Utopian and impossible;" "Abstinence should be rewarded;" "Man will first have to be born again;" "Cooperative colonies have always failed;" and "What if we do divide up? in ten years there would be rich and poor men such as there are today."

It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this socialism that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the writer that the socialistic studies in this volume may in some slight degree enlighten a few capitalistic minds. The capitalist must learn, first and for always, that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for renunciation and sacrifice, and with conscience, stern and awful, at times blazingly imperious, demanding the right,--the right, nothing more nor less than the right.

JACK LONDON. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA. January 12, 1905.
 

READ THE CLASS STRUGGLE HERE  http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/london_war_classes.html

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Tom VagueThe Boy Scout's Guide
to the
Situationist International
 

The Effect The S.I. Had On Paris '68 And All That, Through The Angry Brigade And King Mob To The Sex Pistols

 

DEFINITIONS:

Constructed Situation: a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and game of events.

Situationist: having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International.

Situationism: a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by anti- situationists.

Psychogeography: the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour on individuals.

Psychogeographical: relating to psychogeography. That which manifests the geographical environment's direct emotional effects.

Psychogeographer: schoolteacher who hacks up his pupils...Sorry! One who explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomena.

Derive: a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through various ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous deriving.

Unitary Urbanism: the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour.

Detournement: short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, detournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.

Culture: the reflection and prefiguration of the possibilities of organization of everyday life in a given historical moment; a complex of aesthetics, feelings and mores through which a collectively reacts on the life that is objectively determined by it's economy. (We are defining this term only in the perspective of the creation of values, not in that of the teaching of them.

Decomposition: the process in which the traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves as a result of the emergence of superior means of dominating nature which enable and require superior cultural constructions. We can distinguish between an active phase of the decomposition and effective demolition of the old superstructure - which came to an end around 1930 - and a phase of repetition which has prevailed since then. The delay in the transition from decomposition to new constructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of capitalism.

You'll find the term 'Situationist' liberally sprinkled throughout contemporary agit-prop/pop culture. A lot of people name drop it but what it actually means and where it comes from is never properly explained and mapped out for people. This particular effort is going to be no exception to that. However "Situationist" is most definitely not some arty term that Malcolm Mclaren dreamed up to con people. It goes back many years before Talky Malky's reign of terror and had already been used to far greater effect.

The term came to the attention of certain sectors of the British populus, 5 years before Malcolm Mclaren borrowed some situationist ideas for the Sex Pistols, when on the night or January 12th, 1971 the country, and more specifically the house of Robert Carr, Ted Heath's Secretary of State for Employment, was rocked by two bomb explosions. Old Blighty had, of course, already felt the anti-imperialist anger of the I.R.A. in a similar way. But this was different. The IRA used bomb attacks for very specific purposes; troops out and home rule. The Carr Bombing was undoubtedly connected with Carr's controversial industrial relations bill, but the people responsible were not part of any traditional revolutionary group. All Special Branch had to go on was a communiqué from an organization calling itself "drumroll." "The Angry Brigade- Robert Carr got it tonight. We're getting closer."

Special Branch had heard or them before, but always dismissed them as (relatively) harmless anarchistic cranks. After the Carr Bombing they took them rather more seriously, asking themselves if this was the beginning of something big - the Revolution that people had been predicting throughout the 60's? Special Branch informants and files on political groups were useless. In fact the only real clue they had was a list of targets included in an earlier communiqué: "Embassies, High Pigs, Spectacles, Judges, Property." The third from last term "Spectacles" intrigued one enterprising Special Branch sergeant, who started visiting Liberatarian bookshops and sifting through underground magazines and literature.

The enterprising Special Branch sergeant found that the word Spectacle was a popular slogan, used by a Paris based group known as Situationists, to describe capitalism, the state, the whole shooting match. Owing as much to the Surrealists and Dada as Marx and Bakunin, the Situationists starting point was that the original working class movement had been crushed, by the Bourgeoisie in the West and by the Bolsheviks in the East; Working class organizations, such as Trade Unions and Leftist political parties had sold out to World Capitalism; And furthermore, capitalism could now appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely, in the form of harmless ideologies to be used against the working class which they were supposed to represent.

Unlike the Special Branch sergeant, Malcolm Mclaren obviously did'nt do his homework properly (Or maybe, schoolboy prankster that he is, he did'nt care about the exam results as long as he became a personality cult). However in 1957 the soon to be Situationists did not accept this as the way things would remain, not if they had anything to do with it. In opposition to this process they formed 'the Situationist International': a group consisting mostly of artists, intellectuals and the like (it has to be said), which set out to develop a new way of interpreting society as a whole. (Prior to the S.I. the Lettrists, who predated Punk by almost 30 years sporting trousers painted with slogans).

On the surface the Situationists appear as extremely cynical fatalists. They began by condemning as redundant and articulately destroying anything that came before them. Everything from the Surrealists and the Beat Generation fell in their wake. Yet they had a fundamental, utopian belief that the bad days will end. Their criteria was basically, "if we explain how the nightmare works, everyone will wake up!" An inevitable optimism absent, by the very fact of their existence, from traditional political groups: who always operate on the premise that people are too thick to decide for themselves.

This was how (and why) leading Situationist, Guy Debord formulated his theory of The Spectacle. He argued, in their journal ('Internationale Situationniste') that through computers, television, rapid transport systems and other forms of advanced technology capitalism controlled the very conditions of existence. Hence the World we see is not the Real World but the World we are conditioned to see: THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (the name of Debord's book). The Spectacle's audience is the lumpen proletariat, the bourgeoisie, even the bosses now merely look at the Show: Real Life: thinking about it as spectators, not actually participating or experiencing it.

Debord saw the end result as Alienation. Separation of person from person; crowds or strangers, laughing and crying together but ultimately isolated from everybody and everything. The Spectacle makes spectators of us all, because we've been conned into substituting material things for Real experiences. However, Debord felt this feeling of alienation could eventually break the stranglehold of the Spectacular society. People were already rebelling against being kept apart by mass culture/ commodity/ consumer society. In the early 60s thousands of young americans questioned their role in middle morality America and dropped out in the anonymous tenements of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. In 1965, in the Watts suburb of Los Angeles, thousands of black kids burnt down their schools and factories.

To Debord these unconscious revolts against the Spectacle were evidence of it's vulnerability. It wasn't as invincible as it seemed. But before the Spectacle could be overcome it's safety net, Recouperation, had to be dealt with: to survive Spectacular Society has to have strict social control. This is retained, without much fuss, by it's ability to recouperate a potentially revolutionary situation. By changing chameleonlike it can resist an attack, creating new roles, cultural forms and encouraging participation in the construction of the world of your own alienation into the bargain.

For example alternative lifestyles can be turned into commodities. The Haight- Ashbury hippies were eventually packaged off into commodity culture, as, of course, the London punk rockers were a decade later. And, with a lifestyle safely recouperated, after a certain amount of time it can be dusted off and sold back to people, inducing a yearning for the past. The Spectacle had gone that whole step further. For those bored with the possession of mere things, it was now capable of packaging even the possession of experiences: package holidays, community schemes, pop culture.

Spectacular Society is made complete by the recuperation of the environment in which all this must be experienced: The Recouperators realized that people would no longer accept the damage the growth of the Spectacle: heavy industry: was doing to their physical surroundings: the world. Hence environmental recuperation or "Urbanism." This consists of replacing disordered urban-sprawl with more manageable structures; factory-towns, new-towns, shopping-malls, super-markets. Huge areas designed solely for the purpose of work and the creation of profit, with total disregard for the needs or the people forced to service it. The workers kept apart in 'new architecture, traditionally reserved to satisfy the ruling class...for the first time, directly aimed at the poor: 'Dwelling Unit, Sweet Dwelling Unit.' Rabbit hutches designed soullessly to isolate and instill formal misery.

The Situationists' answer to "Urbanism" 'was the reconstruction or the entire environment, according to the needs of the people that inhabit it. Their answer to modern society was to be nothing short of the "REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE" (the title of the companion book to 'The Society Of The Spectacle' by Raoul Vaneigem). Unlike traditional revolutionary groups, the Situationists were not concerned with the improvement of existing society, or reforming it. They were interested in destroying it completely and pulling something new and better in it's place. No half measures. No gestures. No immediate solution.

The Situationist programme began where art ended. They argued that mechanization and automation had potentially eliminated the need for all forms of traditional labour: leaving a gaping hole, now known as leisure time. Rather than fill this hole with 'Specialist Art', the Situationists wanted a new type of creativity to come out of it, which would be inseparable from everyday life. This new environment has to be brought about by the 'construction of situations'. Never an easy one to grasp that. Basically it's confronting the Spectacle with it's own irrelevance;

"To make the World a sensuous extension of man rather than have man remain an instrument of an alien world, is the goal of the Situationist Revolution. For us the reconstruction of Life and the rebuilding of the World are one and the same desire. To achieve this the tactics of subversion have to be extended from schools, factories, universities, to confront the Spectacle directly. Rapid transport systems, shopping centers, museums, as well as the various new forms of culture and the Media, must be considered as targets for scandalous activity."

Areas For Scandalous Activity; Strasbourg University, 1966.

So by appropriating a bit of Marx, a bit of anarchist practice, plenty of Dadaism (Situationist practice owes more to Groucho Marx than Karl), even some Rimbaud, and by refusing absolutely to have anything to do with traditional hierarchies and the transfer of power from one ruling elite to another, the Situationists were ready to become a social force. By the mid-60's they were looking around for opportunities to intervene in existing radical situations; in order to speed up the inevitable collapse of the Spectacular Society.

Their first major opportunity arose in 1966 at Strasbourg University; a notoriously inactive careerist student body but with a leftist student union. 5 Pro-situ students infiltrated the union and set about scandalizing the authorities. They formed an anarchist appreciation society, appropriated union funds for situationist inspired flyposters and invited the SI to write a critique of the university and society in general. The resulting pamphlet, "On The Poverty Of Student Life (Ten Days That Shook The University)" was designed to wind up the apathetic students by confronting them with their subservience to the Family and the State. And it was none too subtle about it;

"The whole of (the Student's) life is beyond his control, and for all he sees of the World he might as well be on another planet...Every student likes to feel he is a bohemian at heart; but the student bohemian clings to his false and degraded version of individual revolt. His rent-a-crowd militancy for the latest good cause is an aspect of his real impotence...he does have marginal freedoms; a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian control of the Spectacle; his flexible working hours permit adventure and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom scares him to death: he feels safer in the straightjacketed space-time of the Lecture Hall and the weekly essay. He is quite happy with this open prison organized for his benefit...The Real poverty of his Everyday Life finds it's immediate phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities...he is obliged to discover modern culture as an admiring spectator...he thinks he is avant-garde if he's seen the latest Godard or 'participated' in the latest 'happening'. He discovers modernity as fast as the market can provide it: for him every rehash of ideas is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and 'difficult' texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstore. Unfortunately, he cannot read, so he devours them with his gaze.'"

The pamphlet went on to dismiss the university as "The Society for the propagation of ignorance...high culture with the rhythm of the production line...With out exception the lecturers are cretins...bourgeois culture is dead...all the university does is make production-line specialists. But on the positive side, it pointed out that away from student life, in the Real World, working class kids were already rebelling against the boredom of everyday life;

"...the 'delinquents' of the world use violence to express their rejection of society and its sterile options. But their refusal is an abstract one: it gives them no chance of actually escaping the contradictions of the system. They are it's products - negative, spontaneous, but none the less exploitable. All the experiments of the new social order produce them: they are the first side- effects of the new urbanism; or the disintegration of all values; or the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the growing control of every aspect of everyday life by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the economic survival of a family unit which has lost all significance.

"The 'young thug' despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle offers him - but NOW, with no down payment. This is the essential contradiction of the delinquent's existence. He may try for a real freedom in the use of his time, in an individual assertiveness, even in the construction of a kind of community. But the contradiction remains, and kills (on the fringe old society, where poverty reigns, the gang develops it's own hierarchy, which can only fulfill itself in a war with other gangs, isolating each group and each individual within the group). In the end the contradiction proves unbearable. Either the lure of the product world proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to do his honest day's work: to this end a whole sector of production is devoted specifically to his recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars, scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him to the land of the consumer. Or else he is forced to attack the laws of the market itself either in the primary sense, by stealing, or by a move towards a conscious revolutionary critique of commodity society. For the delinquent only two futures are possible: revolutionary Consciousness, or blind obedience on the shop floor."

However existing student rebels, such as The Dutch Provos, the British 'Committee of 100' and the Berkeley students got the thumbs down: Basically for fighting the symptoms (Nuclear Arms/ the Vietnam war/ Racism/ Censorship) not the disease: And specifically for their tendency to sympathize with western society's apparent enemies; China especially whose cultural revolution pamphlet considered "a pseudo-revolt directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times." (it did begrudgingly have a good word for the Committee of 100's "Spies for Peace" scandal: where, in 1963 the anti-nuke movement invaded secret fallout shelters reserved for the British government.)

Summing up, "On the Poverty..." outlined the solution as confronting the present social system with the negative forces it produces;

"We must destroy the Spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of the commodity society...We must abolish the pseudo-needs and false desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve it's power."

Using appropriated union funds, 10,000 copies of the pamphlet were printed and handed out at the official ceremony, to mark the beginning of the Strasbourg academic year. There was an immediate outcry. The local, national, and international press condemned it as incitement to violence, which of course it unashamedly was. The Rector of the University said they should be in a lunatic asylum. The students responsible were expelled and the student union closed by court order.

The presiding Judge pronounced; "The accused have never denied the charge of misusing the funds of the student union. Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay some 650 pounds for the printing of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature inspired by the 'International Situationniste'. These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One only has to read what the accused have written, for it is obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world, rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion and a worldwide proletarian revolution with 'Unlicensed pleasure' as it's only goal.

"In view of their basically anarchist character, these theories and propaganda are eminently noxious. Their wide diffusion in both student circles and among the general public, by the local, national and foreign press, are a threat to the morality, the studies, the reputation and thus the very future of the students of the University of Strasbourg."

Areas For Scandalous Activity; Paris '68 And All That.

"This work is part of a subversive current of which the last has not yet been heard. It's significance should escape no one! In any case, as time will show, no one is going to escape its implications!"

-Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution Of Everyday Life"



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The Strange Respectability of the Situationist City in the Society of the Spectacle

Article (PDF Available) https://tinyurl.com/y9dk38cv

in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 

26(1):153-165 · March 2002  

DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.00369

Erik Swyngedouw
The University of Manchester

Abstract
This article critically discusses the recent growing interest in and regained 'respectability' of the Situationist International and related urban cultural, architectural and political movements. It engages particularly with the present reinvention of the Situationist Movement and argues that the rediscovery of the 'Situationist City' celebrates an intellectualized, aestheticized and de-politicized version that is particularly oblivious to the political and revolutionary theories and programmatic emancipatory urban agenda that underpinned the Situationist movement. We shall argue that this aestheticized reappropriation of selected parts of the Situationist legacy reinforces exactly what the Situationists actively criticized and tried to undermine. At the same time, intellectual and cultural attention is diverted away from the active urban reconstructions that try to confront the totalizing presence of the spectacle and breathe the spirit that Guy Debord and his friends pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s. We shall attempt to connect this rediscovery of the 'Situationist City' and the urban imaginations of the time to the theoretical and political insights, particularly those of Guy Debord, that developed in tandem with their concern with the production of a new way of living, one that revolved squarely around recapturing the urban. Finally, the enduring relevance of Debord's work and insights is explored in the context of recent debates and events. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

Volker Eick. Neoliberalism and Urban Space


In the following[1] I introduce the concept of neoliberalism or neoliberalization as it has been deployed by the Regulation School and others within the field of political economy. I relate this to globalization and the urban environment, and more particularly to the changing role and the growing importance of cities. That is a crucial aspect, because ever since the 1980s cities have played an increasingly important role under and for contemporary neoliberal globalization. I then proceed with some questions regarding activism and the neoliberal glocalization, as I think the term glocalization is a more appropriate term to describe contemporary worldwide processes affecting cities.


Neoliberalism and Neoliberalization: Globalization as Glocalization
What is neoliberalism and how does it differ from its predecessor liberalism? Neoliberalism is understood here in a broad sense as a principle, originally derived from the work of the 18th and 19th century classical liberal scholars including Smith, Hume, and Locke among others. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were the most prominent scholars of the 20th century to revive these ideas in their purest form but it was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that the ideas became guiding principles for the social policy of Western Europe and North America. To better understand neoliberal ideology it would be useful if we first outline the main principles of liberalism adopted later by neoliberalism.



Neoliberalism, as the prefix suggests, is based on the Liberalism of 17th century (and onwards) related to names, among others, such as Smith, Hume, Locke; followed by, in the 20th century, scholars such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (Harvey, 2005). Its main principles are
individual autonomy;
the market as the most effective/efficient instrument for distribution of goods and social wealth;
a non-interventionist state since the nation state is perceived as the obstacle against individual autonomy and market efficiency.


Neoliberalism is not »a hermetically sealed monolithic structure« (Peck/Tickell, 2007) in the sense of an ideology to be applied as a monolithic set of principles but rather should be treated as »actually existing neoliberalism« (Brenner/Theodore, 2002), that is a broad range of actual practices which are producing neoliberalism or even neoliberalisms. Neoliberalization is understood here as a process that describes an ideological and political project against the Keynesian Fordist Welfare State emerging in the early 1950s to the 1960s. In more detail:
The first principle is that (neo)liberalism is premised on individual autonomy and even though classical liberal theories differ in a number of ways yet they are relatively unified in situating this principle at the core of any liberal society. The second important principle of (neo)liberalism is that the market is enforced as the most efficient and normatively ideal way to distribute goods and to solve social problems. And third, the state is viewed as the potential impediment to both the individual autonomy and the market efficiency and should thus be as non-interventionist as possible. So we have the individual, we have the market, and we have the state – the individual is in the centre, the market is the most efficient thing and the state in this ideology should be non-interventionist as much as possible.



Nevertheless, neoliberalism does not imply the vanishing of the nation state but rather its »hollowing out« if I refer to the term used by Bob Jessop. This means that the nation state would delegate or transfer some of its responsibilities to the local level – and to the institutions and organizations above the national level such as the IMF, the G8, the European Union, and so forth.

To describe it from a different angle, neoliberalism in action is not based on the vanishing of the state – instead it is the practical »hollowing out« of the nation state, i.e. glocalization, and subsequently, the growing importance of scales above and below the nation state; neoliberalism has nothing to do with a non-interventionist state – instead it involves, among other processes, devolution and decentralization orchestrated by the (local) state; vice versa, neoliberalism is not a solely market-led society – instead it is sustained, among other organizing principles, through governance, public-private partnerships, pluralization of stakeholders; finally, neoliberalism is not a purely ideological project – but in practice, entails »neo-Schumpeterian« economic policies such as a supply-side orientation, privatization, competitiveness, (re)commodification, deregulation, and workfare. In other words, neoliberalism does not necessitate a non-interventionist state but instead a state, be it a local state or a national state, which is decentralizing, reorganizing itself into different scales where it then promotes the concept of neoliberalism. And neoliberalism does not suggest a solely market-led society; instead it requires governance, public-private-partnerships, and pluralization which do not necessarily mean that the state is becoming more democratic but that there are more stakeholders than before. And finally, in reality neoliberalism is not a purely ideological project. Instead, it entails the so-called »neo-Schumpeterian« (Bob Jessop) economic policies such as supply-side orientation, competitiveness, deregulation, privatization, (re)commodification and finally workfare, which is currently a very prominent, let’s say, ›reform‹ in Germany.

A segment of critical scholarship on neoliberalism is particularly concerned with the understanding of neoliberalism stemming from the shift of focus from its ideology toward its actually existing praxis. In other words, those scholars are interested less in the intellectual lineages of liberal thought than in the way that such ideas filter through theory to practice. Moreover, there are diverse geographical scales on which neoliberalism unfolds and one of these scales is, of course, the urban.

One particularly useful concept in the literature is the notion that ›the actually existing neoliberalism‹ is more of a highly contingent process than a final product – as it is often framed within the neoliberal ideology. Some colleagues of mine, like Nik Theodore, have described this process as a dialectical one, in a sense that it is constituted by the conflicting tendencies towards destruction of structures already in existence and construction of new ones. Neoliberal destruction discloses in the removal of the so-called Keynesian (referring to John Maynard Keynes) amenities such as public housing, public space and the like, of policies such as redistributed welfare and food stamps in the case of the US, and of institutions such as the labor unions in the UK, the US department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the like. And finally, this process subverts established Keynesian agreements; among them, to name just two, the Fordist labor arrangements enabling continuous negotiations between the unions and the companies that the state would oversee, and second, the federal government’s redistributions to the Länder in the German case (or states in general), to municipalities and cities. In many countries the amount of money redistributed from the national to the local scale is now decreasing or has become a much more complicated issue. On the other hand, neoliberalization implies the establishment of new institutions and practices or the co-optation of the existing ones with the ultimate goal of reproducing neoliberalism in the future. That might lead to government business consortia, to legislative amendments, for example initiating workfare policies, or to different types of public-private partnerships.

Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have depicted this evolution in a slightly more, if you will, linear way, arguing that neoliberalism consists of three phases: a proto phase, a roll-back phase and finally, a roll-out phase. Whereas proto neoliberalism refers to the theoretical stage of initiating neoliberalization, the two subsequent phases encompass the development of neoliberalism as praxis. During the roll-back phase that is reactive in its essence, Keynesian policies and formations are dissolved to make way for the second pragmatic phase of the neoliberalization, the roll-out phase that involves proactive neoliberal practices and ideas.

I would like to highlight two of the concepts listed above, the »employment relations« (specific for the proto phase) and the »de-unionization« (occurring in the roll-back phase). If we consider what happened in the 1980s in the UK, then we could clearly discern an aggressive attack against the unions including the use of police mobilization. In that sense, it was not merely a political or ideological fight but moreover, it was a de-unionization campaign with the ultimate goal to destroy the unions altogether, even though that is too strong a statement to which I will come back later. Whereas in the roll-back phase the power of the unions was destroyed, in the roll-out phase the »flexibility« approach was adopted so that corporations could change working hours, decrease wages, and try to shift any negotiations into dictates.

The second example might be »social policy« in regard to which the roll-back would relate to the decrease of welfare money, whereas the roll-out brought into play a new concept coined in the US as »workfare.« Within its regulatory framework, people were still entitled to unemployment benefits and welfare benefits BUT under the condition they have to work and the work they are forced to accept does not need to correspond to their professional skills or work experiences. The dictate behind this concept is: If you want to be supported by the state because you ran out of work, you ought to take any job we offer you. That is an entirely new concept that was never in operation before; therefore, we can say, it was rolled out under neoliberalism.

Globally, scholars like Bob Jessop suggested that this restructuring of the Keynesian urban policy had the aggregate effect of hollowing out the nation state, decreasing its role as an institutional buffer between localities and the global economy. With the reduction of the national interventions, for example in housing, local infrastructure (like water-conduit or sewerage), in welfare, etc., localities are forced to either finance such spheres of action and intervention themselves or abandon them entirely.

Erik Swyngedouw (1997, 2004) deems this larger process as glocalization, as a simultaneous shift – upwards, to the global economy and its institutions and downwards – to the local level. The regulatory power previously held or exercised by the nation state, therefore, vanishes. Given its geographically and temporally contingent nature however, this process affected different national contexts in different ways, so that under neoliberalism cities or countries do not necessarily become identical or even similar. The aggressive roll-back of the welfare state took place first in the US, preceding similar developments in Canada, in the UK, and even in Germany. And in all countries, one can think of examples of the roll-back phase being incomplete within some sectors and relatively complete within others. The roll-back phase, or the destruction of the Keynesian interventions, and the roll-out phase or the implementation of more proactive neoliberal policies are thus highly contingent, incremental, uneven, and to a large extent incomplete. The depicted policy landscape is highly segmented in terms of geography and in terms of social policy and concentrations of remaining Keynesian amenities such as public housing. In the German case public housing still exists alongside roll-out liberal policies such as workfare. This kind of policies might be enforced in some countries and not in others, or even within one country they might be more advanced in one city compared to another.

Thus, while it is useful to suggest that policies in North America and Europe are increasingly dominated by a unified, relatively simple set of ideas concerning the individual autonomy, the role of the state, and the role of the market, the institutional manifestation of neoliberalism as another relatively simple set of ideas is apparently highly uneven between and within countries, mainly due to the different ways through which these ideas are processed into policies.

Yet, Smith (1996) argues that for a better understanding of the neoliberal transformation of cities it would be useful to substitute the term neoliberalism with the more specific term »revanchist urbanism« that he coined. One of the most well known examples of »revanchist urbanism« is the policy of the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani – the »Mussolini of Manhattan« as he has once been entitled by the New York Times – of tracking down the »homeless people who had invaded New York« (his, Giuliani’s, own words). Such policies are worldwide distributed under different headings such as the concept of fixing Broken Windows or the so-called Zero Tolerance approach – in the meantime, Smith (2007) developed the concept of »urban revanchism« further to the global level (»global revanchism«) under the headline of ›the war on terror‹.


And finally, David Harvey summarized the nature of the neoliberalization process in the following fashion:
»We can […] interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. […] I argue that the second of these objectives has in practice dominated. Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has […] primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal« (Harvey, 2005: 19, emphasize in original).



Harvey, in another paper, goes on,

»We can […] examine the history of neoliberalism either as an utopian project providing a theoretical template for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project concerned both to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and the restoration of class power. […] I argue that the last of these objectives has dominated. Neoliberalism has not proven good at revitalizing global capital accumulation but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring class power. As a consequence, the theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has worked more as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever had to be done to restore class power: The principles of neoliberalism are quickly abandoned whenever they conflict with this class project« (Harvey, 2006: 149).

So Bob Jessop, in particular, develops the argument that as neoliberalism plays out differently in time and space, one might think about neoliberalism in different forms, all of them attempting to adjust and to sustain capitalism – although the latter may seem a contradiction in itself. Therefore, he came out with four different forms, which should be perceived as idealized forms to be used as analytical tools rather than as indispensably existing forms of neoliberalism.

Before explicating these forms, I will briefly explain what is at stake when we talk about Bob Jessop’s term of a »Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regime«. Bob Jessop used the term »SWPN« to suggest, first and foremost, that one important feature of neoliberalization was the »creative destruction« that Schumpeter mentioned, namely the way capitalism constantly invents itself by destroying its old manifestations and by replacing them with new realms of accumulation, new forms of regulation, new institutions and so forth.

Workfare signalizes a profound change in the employment system characteristic for the welfare state in the sense that it allows for welfare benefits only if those who are unemployed and capable of working, indeed do work, no matter if they do community work, low-wage work or even unpaid work. In the US for example, undertaking community work is even a precondition for having access to public housing, what in Europe would be defined as social housing or subsidized housing, and similar patterns apply for the UK. Within the US system of social welfare even young mothers are obliged to work in order to receive benefits. In addition, if they are younger than 18 they either have to be married or if not they have to stay at their parents’ home in order to receive benefits. With this Welfare Reform – into operation since 1996 and popularized by the former US-president, Bill Clinton as »ending welfare as we know it« – another law came into force, limiting the maximum time one is allowed to get welfare benefits to five years. In Germany, and that refers to the unevenness of the worldwide neoliberal project that I have been talking about, the respective workfare regime only started in 2004 when the so-called Hartz laws were passed. Not only did that law introduce the workfare principle stipulating work-readiness as the precondition for receiving welfare benefits but it also endowed employment officers with the power to deny or to grant access to housing based on the apartment size and the monthly rent. That means if you are unemployed you get social benefits from the state but the state also has to pay for your housing; so if the employment office – in this case the so-called JobCenter for long-term unemployed – decides that your flat is too large or too expensive it can and will make you move out. In other words, unemployed people could be forced to move into cheaper, hence more remote areas, mainly in the outskirts of the cities. So here again the direct link between neoliberalization and the city becomes apparent.

The term ›post-national‹ refers to the situation in which the nation state is no longer the only decisive entity to rule over the wide range of policy fields but is bound to the decisions or at least suggestions made by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G8, and other global agencies.


And finally, the term ›regime‹ instead of ›state‹ clarifies that it is no longer the nation state alone who decides what policy steps need to be taken; instead, various private stakeholders ranging from companies, non-profit organizations, voluntary organizations, special policy bodies (development agencies, foundations, etc.) take part in the decision-making on different scales – supra-national, national, regional, local and even neighborhood levels. One widely known form of decision-making is the public-private partnerships and, referring to the urban in particular, one might think of shopping malls, sports stadiums, railway stations, and the like, all of which are mass private property developments – and want to have a say in urban development and urban management. And one might also think of the concept of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that has already been established in the late 1960s in the US and from there transmitted through the UK to continental Europe. BIDs according to Christian Parenti (1999: 96-97) can be described as »private, self-taxing urban micro states, that do everything from cleaning the streets, to guide tours, to float bonds, and arrest beggars.« BIDs are deployed by the urban business elites and, as Parenti goes on, they »embody all the power and privileges of the state, yet bear none of the responsibilities and limitations of democratic government.« A BID is a body of business members representing the business elite of the city, basically in downtown, and deciding what is to happen in the public space (for an overview see Töpfer et al., 2007).
So let us go briefly through the four forms of neoliberalism as outlined by Bob Jessop:



So neoliberalism in its purest form was first developed in Chile in 1973 under the guidance of the liberal Chicago Boys (see Harvey 2005) after the proto-neoliberalizing phase. Currently we can observe the re-emergence of such purest form within the political economy of Iraq where, among other conflicts, due to the struggles for control over the oil resources, for example, unions as well as strikes are not allowed – let alone the mass killings that include »Iraqi residents of Fallujah slaughtered by US marines with globally banned phosphorus bombs and agent orange, Iraqi women raped and killed by the same US units«, as Neil Smith (2007) recently puts it. So the purest form of neoliberalism is very often interlinked to what David Harvey (2006) calls »accumulation by dispossession« and if we look at the US foreign policy we will see that war as well often goes hand in hand with it.

One variation of this purest form of neoliberalism is what Bob Jessop defines as neostatism which we might discern in France – and once the elections there are over we will know better how it plays out. It probably will stir up a very different kind of neoliberalization processes than those we know by now (a current – November 2007 – look into the news shows us ›neoliberalism Sarkozy-style‹ with its special aggression against the unorganized and organized working class, and his appealing attempt to be as provocative as possible on the globalized world market and its respective governments).

The third form of neoliberalism is neocorporatism which might apply to Germany in some respects but obviously no longer with regards to its last characteristic, the high taxation to finance social investment. This used to be a topic of high importance in Germany but not anymore whereas the rebalancing of competition and cooperation or the widening range of private, public and other ›stakeholders‹ are currently still very important issues in Germany.

And finally, we have neocommunitarianism which from my point of view turns out to be a flanking mechanism within the game of roll-back neoliberalism from the late 1980s up to the early 1990s. And I think that this holds true especially on the city scale, at least in Western Europe where basically every country has programs aiming at social stabilization, social integration, empowerment, self-responsibility, self-reliance and support. The effect of those agendas, especially in the so-called disadvantaged areas, is that urban space is now policed by programs such as the New Deal for the Communities in the UK, the Socially Integrated City program in Germany, or the Big Cities program in The Netherlands.

It are those programs that are of some relevance for urban activism and research as they are aiming at, as I will show later, to ›define‹, ›integrate‹, ›absorb‹, and ›control‹ not only ›the‹ community but also create a specific kind of ›activism‹ that easily can lead to atavism and aspiration – not experienced before in the northern countries. Such programs aim at ›defining out resistance‹ as they are trying to ›designing out crime‹.

Another program that I want to mention in this context, even though it is not focused on the ›disadvantaged areas‹ but on the so-called remote areas, is the Broedplaatsen [speak: bru:d-pla:t-sun] program also in The Netherlands. By contrast to the above mentioned programs, it aims at attracting new developers for waterfront development by encouraging the so-called young urban creative class to move in. And what inevitably comes to one’s mind here is Richard Florida’s book on »The Rise of the Creative Class« which is not even worth the paper it is printed on. So, for a given period of time, land is handed over to the creative class (reduced or even no rent, subsidies by the city of Amsterdam) and once the area becomes attractive due to these pioneers of gentrification, as I would like to call them, it will be taken over either by the state or the city municipality and sold to the urban elites. So in this development process cities are taking advantage of artists, architects, urban planners and generally speaking, of their creativity and making it profitable.


The Urban: a truly contested terrain
Let us come back now to the global and the local scale. What we are experiencing – and the term of some importance here is Location! Location! Location! – is a growing international, national, inter-regional, inter and inner urban competition. By this, globalization and localization are merging to what has been called ›glocalization‹.
In as much as the nation state loses importance in the decision-making process, it has in the neoliberalizing process evolved responsibilities to the local level, local scale. Today nation states and state policies are increasingly outplayed on this local level due to the intensified competition among cities that unfolds on different scales – in the case of Central European countries, cities like Vienna, Budapest and Berlin are heavily competing with each other to become the locations of big international companies and of the strongest headquarter economies, the chief labor force and so forth. The same struggles take place among the world or the so-called global cities which are competing for hosting the leading companies, channeling capitals through their respective stock exchanges, and introducing the most current technologies, the most suitable examples being obviously London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and São Paolo.



At the very same time, this means that if a city is striving to become a global city as in the case of Berlin, the urban government should make sure that the city centre, being the shop window or the business card of the city, is in good shape and is not stained by the presence of drug-addicts, homeless people, and other ›undesirables‹. To achieve such a goal the city ought to behave like a company and become highly competitive; this includes the management of all the outcomes or devastations due to the neoliberalization process. Another part of it is aiming at making such outcomes (homelessness, poverty, unemployment, etc.) less noticeable, or even invisible. Which at the very same time means that the urban forms of government have become entrepreneurialized – with a strong emphasis on economic efficiency and low taxes (for the corporations, of course), but also on individual responsibility, morality, and duties (for the working class and the urban poor, of course).

So the most important goal of today’s urban policy is to mobilize the city space as an arena of market-oriented economic growth. Roll-out neoliberalism has established some flanking mechanisms and modes of crisis displacement such as local economic development policies and community based programs to elevate social exclusion and it has introduced new forms of coordination and inter-organizational networking among previously distinct spheres of local state intervention, so that ultimately, social, political, and even ecological criteria have become intertwined and at the same time redefined in an attempt to promote economic competitiveness. Social infrastructures, political culture, and ecological foundations of the city are being transformed into an economic asset. Already with the deregulation and the dismantling of the welfare state in the 1980s, the conditions of the urban conflict began to change dramatically. Distributive policies were increasingly replaced by measures of reinforcing urban competitiveness; as a consequence socio-spatial polarization intensified whereas wealth and economic opportunities became more unevenly distributed.

During the roll-out phase of neoliberalism in the 1990s, new discourses on reforms (dealing with welfare dependency, community regeneration, social capital, and the like) and new institutions and modes of delivery such as integrated area development, civic engagement, public-private-partnerships, urban regeneration, and social welfare emerged. So there are a huge number of non-state actors involved today in all those fields of activity originating from the early 1990s which was determined as the starting point of the roll-out phase of neoliberalism by scholars such as Adam Tickell, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore. Even though you may find, especially in the more advanced capitalist countries such as the US and the UK, that already in the mid or late 1980s such programs came into existence. These new discourses and partnering programs reinforce but also instrumentalize communities and other social networks and in this sense create and maintain the competitive and revitalized urban growth machine. Moreover, such developments eroded the foundations upon which generalized resistance might be built and as a consequence, spaces of contestation became limited. Borrowing here from Margit Mayer, there are at least four frontiers along which activist mobilization is still concentrated challenging, in one way or another, the neoliberalization of the urban governance process.


»Within the Fordist growth model, municipal policies had focused on expanding the urban infrastructure and managing large-scale urban renewal. In contrast, the growth-first approach to urban development, with which many cities reacted to the decline of inner-city middle-class population and business commitment, put social investment and redistribution second. This public sector austerity went hand in hand with a limited urban policy repertoire, emphasizing place promotion, supply side intervention, central-city makeovers, i.e. the rebuilding and expansion of down-towns into up-scale, attractive service centers or world-class conference and hospitality destinations.
With so-called mega-events, cities began to engage in subsidizing zero-sum competition, not only via large-scale projects (such as waterfront redevelopment schemes, train station make-overs, or efforts to attract expositions, conventions, Olympics, etc.), but also via theme-enhanced urban entertainment centers. Succeeding in this competition depends to a large extent on the packaging and sale of urban place images, which have therefore become as important as the measures to keep the downtowns and event spaces clean and free of ›undesirables‹ and ›dangerous elements‹ (such as the youth, homeless, beggars, prostitutes, and other potential ›disrupters‹). Such ›undesirable‹ groups have not only been relocated to marginal areas, where they could be fenced off as a wild zone, but urban renaissance initiatives have also been ambivalent about urban diversity: where cultural diversity can be marketed for cultural consumption, it may very well be promoted – at the same time as social controls limiting diversity are promoted« (Mayer, 2007: 94, emphasis in original)



According to Mayer (2007), the first frontier challenges the growth politics that have come to dominate the municipal repertoire. In resistance to growth politics various movements emerged that fight the new downtown developments, contest the incongruity patterns of investment and disinvestment transforming city centers, and resist the entrepreneurial ways in which cities market themselves and compete on regional and global scales. A local example that we came across yesterday and now comes to my mind is the »The Bronze Soldier« monument, obviously strongly impregnated with ideology that in the contemporary situation of tensions between the ethnical Estonians and the Russians living in Estonia triggers a clash of interpretations. In my view this monument is constructed to commemorate the defeat of fascist Germany and hence, the Soviet victory which also makes it a powerful symbol of the already rejected Soviet dominance and oppression. It is not quite clear what is the rationale behind tearing down the monument. Is it meant as an end of history? Is it meant as a symbolic encroachment on Russians? And in my view it may well be the case that such an ideological reading of its destruction is only disguising essentially different motivations. If we relate this to the agenda of redeveloping cities it might turn out that the destruction is not about Russophobia or about ending history but about someone having the economic power to appropriate this inner city space for establishing a shopping mall, a new hotel or some other commercial enterprise. That would ultimately erode or at least substantially redefine its function of a major plaza. And yesterday it looked to me as a vivid public place – it was around 9 o’clock in the evening and there were a lot of people around, some of them bringing flowers, some of them taking pictures – unlike all the other inner city places where basically nobody was around except the police and a private security company’s van. So it seems a really interesting place to investigate how activism deals with the restructuring of urban spaces.

The second frontier are poor neighborhoods which have long been the turf of community based or neighborhood orientated activism but, at least on the EU level, it has been increasingly incorporated within, or even absorbed by, the frameworks of territorially oriented programs such as the programs I mentioned – the New Deal for the Communities in the UK, the Socially Integrated City program in Germany, and the Big Cities program in The Netherlands.

The third frontier stirs up mobilization against the neoliberalization of social and labor market policies, against the dismantling of the welfare state and pro social and environmental justice – and all those issues came to the forefront of urban activism over the last decade. Social justice in particular became the realm of many advocacy NGOs and workers’ right organizations, many of which in more and more countries appear to converge into a new type of broad coalitions. Through all those social movements the old-style unionizing gets fresh blood but also becomes more open and that is especially promising in the US context but also in some parts of (Western) Europe as it might lead to broader coalitions’ building. One widely known example is the constant negotiation process carried out between Attac and parts of the unions which try to confront the new workfare policies and the immense growth of the low wage labor sectors.

And finally, the forth frontier is contested by the so-called anti-globalization movement which in my mind is a very incorrect term because none of those organizations is confronting globalization per se but rather the kind of neoliberal globalization that is taking shape today. The interesting aspect of the anti-neoliberal globalization movements during the last five to ten years is their discovery of the local level as an important ground for their successful operation. So these movements are increasingly focused on localities at the scale where global neoliberalization touches down, to make itself tangible and where global issues become localized. That happens especially in Europe where networks that are part of this trans-national movement are accommodating their repertoires and goals of the global protest to the local issues at stake. And they are often working in collaboration with the social justice alliances characteristic of this fourth frontier.

»During high Fordism, neither labor regulation nor welfare provision were regarded as tasks of the third sector, rather, the sphere of civil society was seen as detached from that of the labor market and the institutions regulating it; it was seen as an unpoliticized sphere of associational activity. During the early phase of neoliberalism, urban zones of concentrated poverty and exclusion were ignored, but with its roll-out phase, such areas have become penetrated by a panoply of programs addressing crime, welfare dependency, worklessness, and other manifestations of social breakdown. The neoliberal approach to (re)regulating the labor market and the social sphere is through territorializing strategies, which seek to govern in and through ›communities‹. At the same time, neoliberal urban governance seeks to ›economize‹ formerly neglected social zones, turning them into fields for entrepreneurial calculations« (Mayer, 2007: 97, emphasis in original).

To sum up, I will go back to the question what are the reasons and the incentives for the growing importance of cities? First, the hollowing out of the nation state leads to a transfer of its responsibilities to the local level. A number of scholars describe this shift of responsibilities as a concept of »governing at a distance« that stems out of this so-called process of devolution of the nation state. Of course, this does not leave the city completely independent in its decision-making; its autonomy from the nation state differs in extent from country to country and yet the respective nation state has a say in the urban policies. When it comes to global cities the headquarter economy is the key to their growing importance which is apparent in the data on financial transactions, global distribution of goods and even global distribution of people. If we take an extremely rich and powerful city like Los Angeles the data reveals that it is the third largest economy in the world (to be more precise, this is the case for California) but at the very same time it has a huge amount of urban poor who make this kind of global city work – so it is one of the poorest cities as well. Such cities are overloaded with new technologies that acknowledge and enable this process and ultimately, facilitate the fine-tuning of the urban economy. So these cities are dominated by profit optimizing economic arenas and business friendly entities supplemented by workfare regimes. This coupling is a decisive factor for the transformation of a city into an entrepreneurial city, for its operation as an entrepreneur. It means that the city policy is no longer conditioned on elections and other kinds of public decision-making but is rather run like a company with a limited number of CEOs who decide on what will be the city policies for the next years or months. That leads to revanchist city politics, Zero Tolerance, gentrification, return of the middle classes, pluralization of policing, and emergence of gated communities (Eick et al. 2007).


The growing importance of cities can be interpreted as a process fuelled by the »hollowing-out« of the nation state, an attempt of national governments to »govern at a distance« (devolution), the growing importance of centrality (while, at the same time, space-time compression becomes even more important) as can be seen by a headquarter economy in which global cities are key. New technologies – especially transport and communication – have to be seen as important as an enabler for this process; finally, cities allow for a fine-tuning of the economies.
These processes lead to cities interpreted (solely) as economical arenas that have to be economically efficient and business-friendly; processes leading to the ›entrepreneurial city‹ and cities as entrepreneurs, organized along the lines of workfare regimes, controlled by ›revanchist‹ city politics (zero tolerance, gentrification, return of the middle classes, pluralization of policing), and phenomena such as gated communities.




Neoliberal Crime Policies: ›pluralization‹ of policing
Let us refer to the example of neoliberal crime policies. Never before has crime prevention been such an important topic as it is under neoliberalism (Eick et al., 2007). It is no longer the case that the main task of the police is to persecute crime but moreover, it is now to prevent crime in its very possibility. That leads to complicated crime prevention measures (not even related to crime) such as the Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) orders in the UK that restricted tremendously the activities allowed in public space. For example, you are no longer allowed to wear sweaters and a hood in some shopping malls in the UK, because it is recognized as a dress code of youngsters who are troublemakers. An example from the US is the so-called »three strikes and you are out« concept: Let’s say you are using public transport but you did not buy a ticket, so then if they catch you that will be your first strike. Then you get into trouble with your girlfriend or boyfriend and beat her or him up and got by the police, so this might be the second strike. And because you are so angry that you have been caught for the second time, you forget to buy a ticket again and then if you get caught again this will be your strike number three – which leads to imprisonment with a lifelong sentence. In California, three years ago, that regulation was changed to »one strike and you are out« in regard to people who live in public housing.



The second example of neoliberal crime prevention policies is linked to socio-spatial orientation. In this regard the new development is the introduction of numerous special police units aiming at specific areas and/or targeting specific groups within the city space (see Eick et al. 2007).

The actors involved in policing are more and more diversified – what Adam Crawford and Stuart Lister (2004), citing the London police, call »the extended policing family« – and include state police, federal police, financial police or customs (that has specific domestic functions in Germany), the so-called civil society kind of policing (civil wardens, militias, neighborhood watch schemes, etc.), commercial police (rent-a-cop, detectives, bodyguards, bouncers, plant security and mercenaries, given that we still have several on-going wars). And all these employees of the state, »civil society«, and commercial police units are wearing different kinds of uniforms or so-called uniforms (see Eick, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a).


The third aspect of neoliberal crime prevention policies is the new penology. Its objectives and effects are evident already in the incredibly high numbers of prisoners today that are rising in parallel with the processes of neoliberalization. There are new forms of cooperation and technological prevention/tracing such as CCTV and Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFID) which were invented initially to facilitate tracing goods all over the world. For those of you who are football fans, it may be interesting to know that in the next international football tournament RFID tags will be placed inside the footballs so that the audience could know with absolute certainty if the ball stroke a goal or not. Implementation of such RFID tags into human bodies is under way in the US – and some discotheques even offer this as a VIP special guest service.[2]
It is obvious that policing strategies and tactics, tendencies of militarization as well as those of ›community-rization‹ have an impact on research and activism as have new technologies such as surveillance technologies mentioned above.




Capitalist Challenges: activism, atavism, aspiration
What are the challenges for research and activism, though? A (meaningful) critique has always been a proxy persons’ politics as it goes with the perception of ›undesirables‹ as being voiceless and helpless – the homeless worldwide might be an intriguing example, and the ›integration‹ of them into the labor market a disturbing kind of ›empowerment‹ (Eick, 2006a). Another challenge is obviously the attempt to create a ›career‹ for oneself, either by turning into a professional or by taking ›advantage‹ out of political work for one’s own purposes – a debate being present, for example, within the (basically German) urban movement of Inner!City!Action!-groups (Grell et al., 1998; Grothe, 2005). Another confrontation for researchers as for activists is the urban elite’s quest for integrating, co-opting, and assimilating of critical researchers and activists – the specificity here lies in the danger of promoting enhanced neoliberalism. One well-know example with respect to gentrification processes are the so-called ›pioneers of gentrification‹ such as students and artists taking advantage of, for instance, state- or city-subsidies (e.g. temporary use of vacant space for lower rents; Broedplaatsen concept in Amsterdam; Lower Eastside Manhattan/New York City). As Iris Marion Young (1990), among others, has shown, for the sake of a just, or »unoppressive city« one always has to fight against economic exploitation, marginalization of individuals and social groups, the production of powerlessness by state and non-state entities, discrimination and exclusion of ›non-norm‹ individuals and groups, the execution and threat of state violence, and, finally, the calibration traceability. One of the broadest challenges in addition lies in the (missing) capacity to find a ›language‹ to understand each other – especially when it comes to coalition-building (Abramsky, 2001; Doderer, 2003).



There are other issues that come to mind if one refers to research and activism. One concerns the question to whom to talk and with whom to work. The plethora of (new) social movements shows the different strategies and tactics applied to reach one’s goals. A current coalition, for example, against the massive surveillance measures brought into place by the German government see a coalition ranging from the comparatively conservative Liberal Party (Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP) to militant autonomous and anti-imperialistic groups,iii whereas the two latter groups seldom go for coalition-building. Other coalitions, including religious sects, can be observed within the, falsely named, anti-globalization movement. Coalition-building might be framed by the respective aims of researchers and activists. Doing research on right-wing militias or police might be as challenging in terms of being pocketed by the research subject/object, Rigakos’ book on the Toronto-based rent-a-cop company Intelligarde might be a good example (Rigakos, 2007) as might be the experience of Steve Herbert whose research on policing strategies found an abrupt halt since his findings did not comply with the expectations of the police (Herbert, 2006; personal communication). More generally, coalition-building as activism are framed by attempts of a concrete change of and progress in a given matter, or by an attempt to go for more ›symbolic‹ politics – the ›big critique‹. Dangers exist, especially in but not limited to, groups claiming to be ›avantgardist‹ – therefore, such groups might encounter the trap of self-referentiality.

Finally, as mentioned above, the (non)anticipated role of arts, ›alternative‹ lifestyles (and ›progressive‹ politics) in gentrification processes (e.g. Inner!City!Action!) might even lead to unintended consequences. A typical (non-asked) question might be: Is the use of vacant or ›sleeping‹ space a meaningful/substantial/material intervention/issue, or not? What further political means, goals, activities are necessary to succeed in making the city more just? Italy’s Centro Sociale (Social Centers) might be perceived as a convincing answer to such challenges as they are – in the majority of cases – are to work together with the neighboring community. Of course, this raises further questions: Who is ›the neighborhood‹, the community? What are their/it wants? What are those of the researchers and activists?

It is here, where Nikolas Rose’s statement has its specific meaning for activists and scholars alike – as such crime prevention measures and technologies mentioned above are linked with a discourse of ›community‹ and new methods of (urban) governance. Between the lines, one can read here about the respective challenges that come with ›community‹ in a contested terrain:

»[The current neoliberal programs] attempt to ›empower‹ the inhabitants of particular inner-city locales by constituting those who reside in a certain locality as ›a‹ community, by seeking out ›community groups‹ who can claim to speak ›in the name of community‹ and by linking them in new ways into the political apparatus in order to enact program[ ]s which seek to regenerate the economic and human fabric of an area by re-activating in ›the community‹ these ›natural‹ virtues which it has temporarily lost« (Rose, 1996: 336, accentuation in original).

Activism, atavism, and aspiration are confronted with – and are part of – community, crime, and capitalism. The city, from its very beginning, remains contested terrain. Could be worse…
Three Forms of Neoliberalization
(proto, roll-back, roll-out) ROLL-BACK
[destructive/deregulatory] ROLL-OUT
[creative/re-regulatory]
Mode of intervention State withdrawal Governance
Market regulation ›Deregulation‹ Experimental re-regulation
Political style Ideological conviction Pragmatic learning
Change agents Vanguardist politicians Technopolis
Front line Economic policy Institutionally embedded
Taxation Selective givebacks Systemic regression
Monetary policy ›Cold-bath‹ monetarism Prudence
Public expenditure Cuts Fiscal responsibility
Labour-market regime Mass unemployment Full employability
Employment relations De-Unionization Flexibility
Social policy Retrenchment Workfare
Financial regulation Liberalization Standards and codes
Development ethos Structural adjustment Social capital
Sources: Jessop (2002); Peck/Tickell (2007).





Four Forms of Neoliberalism

[in an attempt to ›sustain‹ the neoliberal project]


Neoliberalism


Neostatism


Neocorporatism


Neocommunitarianism

»Schumpeterian Workfare Post-National Regimes/SWPN« (Bob Jessop)



»Adjusting Neoliberalism«


Neoliberalism


Liberalization – promoting free competition


Deregulation – reducing the role of the law and the state


Privatization – selling off the public sector


Market proxies in the residual public sector


Internationalization – free inward and outward flows


Lower direct taxes – increasing consumer choice



»Adjusting Neoliberalism«


Neostatism


From state control to regulated competition


Guiding national strategy rather than planning top-down


Auditing the performance of the private and public sectors


Public-Private Partnerships under state guidance


Neo-Mercantilist protection of core economy


Expanding the role of new collective resources



»Adjusting Neoliberalism«


Neocorporatism


Rebalancing competition and cooperation


Decentralized »regulated self-regulation«


Widening the range of private, public, and other »stakeholders«


Expanding the role of Public-Private Partnerships


Protecting the core economic sectors in an open economy


High taxation to finance social investment



»Adjusting Neoliberalism«


Neocommunitarianism


Deliberalization – limiting free competition


Empowerment – enhancing the role of the third sector


Socialization – expanding social economy


Emphasis on social use-value and social cohesion


Fair trade instead of free trade; »think global, act local«


Redirecting taxes – citizen’s wage, carer’s allowances



Neoliberal crime policies


(crime) prevention


(socio) spatial orientation

(special police units aiming at specific spaces and targeting groups of »undesirables«)


new penology

(»punitive state«, intensified incarceration rates)


new forms of cooperation

(›police-private partnerships‹ with rent-a-cops, non-profit organizations, ›third parties‹ [e.g. insurances, airline companies], other state entities)


techno prevention/tracing

(CCTV, RFID, GIS, GPS, On-line email surveillance etc.)





Pluralization of Policing:

Selected state and non-state (in)security and (dis)order personnel


State

›Civil society‹

Commercial
State police Nonprofits Rent-a-cops
Federal police Civil wardens Detectives
Financial police (customs) Militias Body-guards
Municipal order service Neighborhood watch Bouncers
Security watch Security partners Plant security
Order partnerships Voluntary police service
German Employees (rounded off):State police: 265,000; federal police: 40,000; customs: 4,000 (clandestine employment) Source: Eick (2007b)



Abramsky, Kolya (Ed.) 2001. Restructuring and Resistance. Diverse Voices of Struggle in Western Europe. London: resresrev@yahoo.com.
Brenner, Neil/Nik Theodore (Eds.) 2002. Spaces of Neoliberalism. Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crawford, Adam/Stuart Lister 2004. The Extended Policing Family. Visible Patrols in Residential Areas. Leeds: University of Leeds.
Doderer, Yvonne P. 2003. Urbane Praktiken. Strategien und Raumproduktionen feministischer Frauenöffentlichkeit. Münster: Monsenstein und Vannerdat.
Eick, Volker 2006a. »Contested Territory…« Controlling Urban Spaces – New Actors in New Places. In: Trialog, 89/2, pp. 4-8.
Eick, Volker 2006b. Preventive Urban Discipline: Rent-a-cops and the Neoliberal Glocalization in Germany. In: Social Justice, 33/3, pp. 66-84.
Eick, Volker 2007a. »Space Patrols«. The New Peace-keeping Functions of Nonprofits. Contesting Neoliberalization or the Urban Poor? In: Helga Leitner/Jamie Peck/Eric Sheppard (Eds.), Contesting Neoliberalism. Urban Frontiers. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 266-290.
Eick, Volker 2007b. »Krauts und Crowds«: Bericht vom Rand der neoliberalen Dienstleistungseripherie. In: Volker Eick/Jens Sambale/Eric Töpfer (Eds., 2007a), Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 55-82.
Eick, Volker/Jens Sambale/Eric Töpfer (Eds.) 2007. Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik. transcript Verlag: Bielefeld.
Garland, David 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Grell, Britta/Jens Sambale/Dominik Veith 1998. Inner!City!Action! – Crowd Control. Interdictory Space and the Fight for Socio-spatial Justice. In: INURA (Eds.), Possible Urban Worlds. Urban Strategies at the End of the 20th Century. Basel et al.: Biskhäuser, pp. 208-214.
Grothe, Nicole 2005. InnenStadtAktion. Kunst oder Politik? Künstlerische Praxis in der neoliberalen Stadt. Bielefeld: transcript.
Harvey, David 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, David 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, David 2006. Neo-liberalism as Creative Destruction. In: Geografiska Annala, 88 B(2), pp. 145-158.
Herbert, Steve 2006. Citizens, Cops, and Power. Recognizing the Limits of Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jessop, Bob 2002. Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-theoretical Perspective. In: Neil Brenner/Nik Theodore (Eds.), Spaces of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 105-125.
Jessop, Bob/Ngai-Ling Sum 2006. The Regulation Approach and Beyond. Putting Capitalist Economies In Their Place. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Mayer, Margit 2007. Contesting the Neoliberalization of Urban Governance. In: Helga Leitner/Jamie Peck/Eric Sheppard (Hg.), Contesting Neoliberalism. Urban Frontiers. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 90-115.
Parenti, Christian 1999. Lockdown America. Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York: Verso.
Peck, Jamie/Adam Tickell 2002. Neoliberalizing Space. In: Neil Brenner/Nik Theodore (Eds.), Spaces of Neoliberalism. Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 33-57.
Peck, Jamie/Adam Tickell 2007. Conceptualizing Neoliberalism, Thinking Thatcherism. In: Helga Leitner/Jamie Peck/Eric Sheppard (Eds.), Contesting Neoliberalism. Urban Frontiers. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 26-50.
Rigakos, George 2007. Polizei konsumieren. Beobachtungen aus Kanada. In: Volker Eick/Jens Sambale/Eric Töpfer (Eds., 2007a), Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 39-54.
Rose, Nikolas 1996. The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government. In: Economy and Society, 5/3, pp. 327-256
Smith, Neil 1990. Uneven Development. Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Neil 1996. The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge.
Smith, Neil 2007. Revenge and Renewal: Retribution in City Renaissance. Revanchist Planet: Urban Regeneration and the Axis of Co-Evilism (Rächen und Renovieren: Vergeltung bei der Renaissance der Stadt). In: Volker Eick/Jens Sambale/Eric Töpfer (Eds., 2007a), Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 375-394.
Swyngedouw, Erik 1997. Neither Global nor Local: “Glocalisation” and the Politics of Scale. In: Kevin Cox (Ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local. New York: Guilford, pp. 137-166.
Swyngedouw, Erik 2000. Authoritarian Governance, Power, and the Politics of Rescaling. In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18/1, pp. 63-76.
Swyngedouw, Erik 2004. Globalisation or “Glocalisation”? Networks, Territories and Rescaling. In: Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17/1, pp. 25-48.
Töpfer, Eric/Volker Eick/Jens Sambale 2007. BIDs – ein neues Instrument für Containment und Ausgrenzung? Erfahrungen aus Nordamerika und Großbritannien. In: ProKla. Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, 149/4 (37. Jg.), in print.
Young, Iris Marion 1990. The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference. In: Linda J. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge.+



[[3]]See for an overview: http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/index.php?lang=en [28.11.2007].[[3]]
(↵ returns to text)


The paper is a slightly revised version of key note I gave at the 4th annual Urban Studies Days in Tallinn/Estonia, April 25, 2007. I am thanking the organizers for the invitation, and I am thankful to Elitza Stanoeva for her support on this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.↵
See, for further examples, http://www.spychips.com/, http://www.nocards.org/.↵
Volker Eick
Neoliberalism and Urban Space






http://ehituskunst.ee/volker-eick-neoliberalism-and-urban-space/?lang=en

© 2013 Ehi

Alan Prohm. L’Urbanisme n’existe pas. Situationist Critique and Radical Practice

http://ehituskunst.ee/alan-prohm-lurbanisme-nexiste-pas-situationist-critique-and-radical-practice/?lang=en

If you know a little about the Situationist International (SI) it’s obvious why, of all manifestations of the cultural avant-garde, this one holds a special fascination for young architects and urban planners. When you learn a little more — and this is neither forbidden nor encouraged – it is equally clear why few if any established practitioners show interest in the movement, or could be taken seriously if they did.

Today, Situationist ideas are popular, and certain key terms of the SI critique are so apt to current realities, they strike many as self-evident. To the young, urban, wired and socially astute of today, terms like “dérive”, “psychogeography”, “separation”, “spectacle” and “détournement” not only ring familiar on first hearing, but they (or close equivalents) are in many cases already in active everyday use. Artists, cultural activists, architects, urbanists, art historians, critical theorists, sociologists, media designers, experimental film makers, advertisers, PR agents[1] and military strategists[2] all have reason to know parts of the situationist project. And the “art” parts of that project in particular have recently enjoyed the cachet of a serious radical chic in art and design spheres. How could they fail to? The story of the SI presents us the picture of a hip, smart, truly bohemian avant-garde in still recent times, culturally closer and easier to identify with for many than what happened in Zurich or Berlin or Paris in the 1910’s and 20’s. And thanks to increasing up-take of the situationist “thing” among academic theorists and art historians, the movement behind this chic has now also been institutionally legitimated, and authorized as a “real” avant-garde. So, if you liked Dada and Surrealism, you’ll love the SI.

The cultural “arrival” of the SI is not in question. But what is noticeable about this popularity are its limits, and how similarly so many sectors of the cultural mind draw these limits in their framing of the SI phenomenon. What most reliably falls outside this framing, of course, is the true scale and seriousness of the situationists’ radical commitment.

From the beginning,” writes Debord in 1971, near the end of the situationist project, “the situationist project was a revolutionary program”[3].

Now, you can call a given cultural phenomenon “revolutionary”, or “radical”, and keep doing so for a long time without ever having to either affirm or to repudiate what those words really must mean when applied to some of the most interesting cases. The ambiloquence of how the label “avant-garde” gets applied in arts discourse centers precisely on the difference between referring to a formal or conceptual radicality, revolutionary in artworld and artmarket terms exclusively, and referring to a concrete, social-political radicality, the revolutionary human commitment to transforming everyday life by altering the conditions that determine how it is organized. When considering the SI, it is artificial to try separating a cultural-intellectual radicality off from the social-political radicality. A biasing of the former over the latter is out of balance, and ignores the project’s defining trajectory and the manifest consistency and coherence of its guiding principles.

If you like the Situationist International, in other words, you like a group of cultural actors who were certain of “the impossibility of the continuation of the functioning of capitalism”[4]. Who were dedicated to provoking a crisis in society through sustained attack on the false “idea of happiness”[5] that keeps people participating in the losing game of capital. Who were organized, literally and tactically, to assist where possible in fomenting real revolution, and worked hard to push the situation that presented itself in May ’68 over the edge into a permanent revolution in which

autonomous collective action would triumph over hierarchical domination and passive compliance in every sector of governance, industry and society.

WHAT CAN THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT DO NOW?
EVERYTHING
WHAT BECOMES OF IT IN THE HANDS OF THE PARTIES AND UNIONS?
NOTHING
WHAT DOES IT WANT? REALIZATION OF THE CLASSLESS SOCIETY THROUGH THE POWER OF THE WORKERS’ COUNCILS
council for the maintenance of the occupations[6]

Launch Trajectory of the Situationist Project
The situationists emerged out of a small but potent ferment of avant-gardist activity in post-WWII Paris. In fact the SI was the third stage in a noisy scramble to reestablish the project of radical avant-gardism after the decline of Surrealism, whose practices the horror of international fascism and industrial genocide had rendered ridiculous and irrelevant. The first stage of this scramble was the founding of Lettrism, by a Romanian Jewish immigrant, Isidore Isou, who arrived in Paris in 1945, at what must have seemed an impossibly inappropriate time for babbling nonsense poetry in the cafés to shock the bourgeoisie. But the goal Isou had set was a serious one, and as Lettrism took root it became clear that radical critique and condemnation of contemporary society was no less relevant after the war than it had been before it, especially in view of the survival of the underlying political economy that had made the war possible in the first place. In particular Lettrism aimed to get back to a purer strand of avant-gardist negativity represented by Dada, before the critical force of that negativity was diluted in the magical thinking and obscurantism of later Surrealism.

Focusing on sound poetry, collage and experimental film-making, the Lettrists took aim at the values of bourgeois society using the media and imagery of pop culture and channeling the energy of youth rebellion. By the early 1950’s Lettrism had attracted a number of young poets and artists who understood the challenge of resuming Dada-styled radicalism in the unlikely context of a rising peace-time prosperity. A number of them, Serge Berna, Gil Wolman and Guy Debord included, took this challenge seriously enough to begin applying the Dada critique to Lettrism itself, ultimately judging it guilty of merely wanting to carve out its own safe niche within the commodity art economy. In 1952 these and other “ultra-Lettrists” broke away to form the “Lettrist International” (LI), re-radicalizing the movement Isou had started and excluding him along with the rest of the backward faction. The LI commenced a sustained period of self-critique, carried out particularly in the mimeographed pages of their newsletter Potlatch[7] and of the Belgian review Les Lèvres Nues[8], where they recommitted themselves to the Dada principle of repudiating artistic practice in favor of direct action within the sphere of everyday life. They reasserted the difference between formal radicalism and social radicalism, and dedicated themselves to searching out a mode of cultural engagement capable of remaining undistracted in its focus on the concrete goal of changing life.

Poetry has exhausted the last of its formal prestige. Beyond aesthetics it resides wholly in the power of men over their own adventures. Poetry is read on people’s faces. So it is urgent to create new faces. Poetry is in the form of cities. So we will construct stunning new ones. The new beauty will be SITUATIONAL, that is provisional and lived. (Potlatch 23; translations mine)

The most elegant games of the intellect mean nothing to us. Political economy, love and urbanism are the means we must control for the resolution of a problem that is first of all ethical.

Nothing can excuse life from being absolutely impassioning.

We know how this is done. (Potlatch 11)

Urbanism and architecture, which had featured more peripherally in the programs of earlier avant-garde movements[9], quickly emerged as a primary focus for the LI. It answered the urgency they felt to eliminate gaps between creative action and everyday life. It realized an intuition implicit in the Dada call to overcome art, namely that as artistic action moved to escape its own limits, it would spread over into every other sector of life as a possible field of recuperative engagement. At the time the ultra-Lettrists were rededicating themselves to engaging the practice of life directly, urbanism was the biggest genre-label they knew for integrating the arts and crafts in a superior constructive activity. At the start, “Unitary Urbanism” had meant precisely urbanism as an all-container for artistic production; “the use of all arts and techniques as means contributing to the composition of a unified milieu” (SI, 22). It was a directive with roots in the arts and crafts movement, in nouveau style and early Bauhaus. A totality of the crafts of ambience and of the furnishing of everyday life[10], a creative, resistant functionalism, an “Imaginist Bauhaus”[11] in Jorn’s hopeful phrase. But this rogue constructivism came blended with a romantic spirit left over from surrealism. Its dream was to claim the city as canvas for a new kind of art and a new kind of life, a new dimensionality of art and life occupying the full environmental surround with the spirit and artifacts of creative exploration and play. In the language of Ivan Chtcheglov’s seminal “Formulary for a New Urbanism”:

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams….Architecture will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. …experimentation with patterns of behavior with cities specifically established for this purpose….buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces, events past, present and to come. (SI 2)

Engaging the city as a poetic project came naturally to the founders of the SI, in that it was largely what they were doing already. As chronicled in Debord and Jorn’s lyrical détournement work Mémoires[12], the first years of the LI were a left-bank bohemian romance which those who lived it would never forget. It was the concrete, uncompromising adolescent romance that would anchor a twenty-year run of engaged utopian radicalism. And Paris was both the setting of this romance and the most glamorous co-star. The city mattered because living mattered, and those who would become the Situationists sensed, more minutely than most, how the possibilities of that living were conditioned by the urban surround.

It was not as professionals that they approached these questions, but as jobless delinquents, poets, lovers, cynics and drunks. The dérive, a mode of observational drifting countless artists have by now integrated into their practice[13], and countless planning and urban studies programs[14] into their pedagogies, began as little more than dead time in the stumble of vagrants from bar to bar. And psychogeography, the art-science whose very name seems to promise a permanent human refutation of alienation in the urban field, emerged out of no more experience or authority than the standard dissatisfaction of youth. “We are bored in the city!” reads the first sentence of Chtcheglov’s “Formulary”, and thus of the whole project of a Situationist urbanism. The accomplishment of the SI as a movement was that they never got over that boredom, and they never ceased to hold the organization of urban society responsible.

Their blaming the city for their boredom led to their analysis of separation as a condition imposed by urbanism, and to their understanding of urbanism as a branch of the spectacle mobilized to enforce separation. From the days of their first intentional dérives, they had had this critique of the late-modernist urbanism they saw unfolding around them. As they mapped out the ambience potentials around chance encounters or surprise events, they saw a systematic dismantling of all chances as Paris succumbed to its modernisation a la Corbusier[15]. In the negative space of the most intensely lived years of their lives, they discerned the outlines of a society moving programmatically to eliminate the conditions of that intensity. As the collective authors concluded in their article, “The Skyscrapers by the Roots”, in issue 5 of Potlatch:

So that’s the programme: life cut up forever into closed-off sectors, into surveilled societies; the end of possibilities for insurrection and encounter; automatic resignation. (Potlatch 22)

And it was with this observation that the SI committed itself to urbanism as suitable program for a revolutionary avant-garde.

The Negativity of Situationist UrbanismIf you are researching your possibilities in the field of architecture and urban design, or looking for new, more human ways of engaging the urban field as an artist or architect, situationist writings and practices have a lot to offer. The situationists’ brand of urbanism brings inspiring concepts of play, chance, ambiance, encounter, mobility and freedom to the design of the urban field. Consider some of the “Rational Embellishments to the City of Paris” published in issue 23 of Potlatch (October, 1955)[16]:

By a particular arrangement of fire-escapes and the installation of railings where needed open the roofs of Paris to promenading.

Or,

Equip the street lamps of every street with light switches, letting the public control the lighting.

Or, on the largest scale that this creative planning would assume for the Situationists, Constant’s vast envisioning of a rhizomic network urbanity called New Babylon. Constant was, with Asger Jorn, from the COBRA/Imaginist Bauhaus contingent present at the founding of the SI. The only situationist structure ever built was the highly modular and transformable gypsy camp he designed for a community in Alba, Italy, on the occasion of the SI’s inception (Sadler 37). But the countless drawings, maps and models created to visualize this New Babylon—more idea of life than city, more city than theory of urban form—constitute the most palpable expression of what an urban society (dis-)organized along situationist lines would look like. Of course, it is only one possible version, but Constant’s vision captures a lot. It seeks to host in an infinitely modifiable urban infrastructure, completely superimposed as a new layer over existing cities and terrain, scaffolding for a movable feast of psychogeographical experiences and lifestyles, based on those the situationists were tasting on dérive in various places, and recording in a number of psychogeographical maps and reports they published in their journals.[17] Without Constant’s New Babylon, these maps and reports and a handful of lyrical suggestions would be the only existing proof-of-concept of situationist urbanism. With it, the situationist idea becomes one of the grand utopian city visions of modern times.[18]

An important number of architects and urban planning offices have gravitated to the range of concepts and challenges presented by the situationist project. Sadler makes a good list of them in the conclusion to his famous study, The Situationist City, many considered authoritative:

…the situationist fallout scattered so widely, and so thinly: onto Team 10, onto Ralph Rumney’s “Palace” exhibition at the ICA in 1959; onto Italian radical design; onto the environments and happenings movement; onto Archigram, thence to the Architectural Association in London, and so onto, for example, Richard Rogers, Bernard Tschumi, Nigel Coates, and the NATO Group; and even into the art-historical syllabus itself, through the agency of British situationist-turned-historian T.J.Clark. (Sadler 163)

I could add others such as Lars Spuybroek[19], Chora[20] under Raoul Bunschoten, the An Architektur[21] collective in Berlin, Stephen Read’s Spacelab[22] at Delft, Stalker[23] in Rome and Park Fiction in Hamburg[24]. At the same time, a seemingly constantly regenerated pool of artists, designers and students every year is drawn into some fascination with this group of colorful, anti-establishment hipsters out to change the world. If it is a serious option within the real professional arrangements of a spatial design or planning career, who wouldn’t want to devote themselves to changing the world, using the latest practices and techniques of psychogeography, defined by Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (SI 5)? What self-respecting architect or urbanist would not insist this is what they were doing already?

But much of the steady or fad-like interest we see people taking in the SI’s ideas can only be maintained in polite society in ignorance of the greater bulk of situationist activity and production, which does not manifest in drawings or maps or scale models. For the situationists were nothing if not consistent in their repudiations, and just as surely as they repudiated art as inadequate to the revolution they were after, ceasing to make hypergraphic collage or discrepant film works, they eventually repudiated creative urbanist art and city design for the same reasons. However, this fact has been even less observed by fans and scholars of the movement than the fact of their repudiation of art. This is important to establish, that just as it is relevant for interested artists today to know that situationist thinking would probably have rejected the kind of art they themselves are doing, partly under situationist inspiration, it should be obvious to any interested architects or urbanists that situationist urban theory, especially in its late phase, is antithetical to design activity, where the fundamental conditions of political-economy supporting that activity are not overthrown.

It is important to see that when the situationists (lettrists at the time) took urbanism into their avant-garde practice, they did so on what was for them a trajectory out of poetry and into revolutionary action. You can see this chronicled in the successive issues of their journals, and in the composition of the group from year to year, but it is already conscious from early on. After the SI was founded, as Constant was evolving New Babylon, Debord was focusing on making contacts with other groups and theorists (one example, Socialisme ou Barbarie), broadening the SI analysis and sharpening the edge of its revolutionary theory[25]. At a certain point, as this analysis of current conditions advanced, doing urbanism became seen as in fundamental conflict with the project of changing life, and it was repudiated.

The concepts and practices of Unitary Urbanism had been central for the situationists already from the first years of the Lettrist International. The pages of Potlach from 1954 onward give coherent and eloquent testimony to the birth and establishment of this as an avant-garde program, just as the first five issues of L’Internationale Situationniste document the phase of the situationist project under Constant and characterized by his constructive idealism. Constant’s New Babylon was developed from the gypsy camp of 1956 onward as the constructive dimension of the situationist project. In1958 Constant and Debord established the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism in Amsterdam. This Amsterdam Declaration lays out a program for the Bureau; item 4 establishes urbanism within the project: “The minimum programme of the S.I. is the experimentation with complete decors, which should extend to a unitary urbanism, and research into new behaviors in relation to these decors” (IS #2, IS 63). And in item five we get a statement of how urbanist activity is to be understood: “Unitary urbanism is defined in the complex and permanent activity which, consciously, recreates man’s environment according to the most evolved conceptions in all fields. (my italics)”

Unitary Urbanism was featured in similar terms in what is perhaps the key founding document of the SI, Debord’s “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action” (1957). But there the project of urbanism is framed not with reference to the profession, but very consistently within the legacy of avant-garde activity and self-criticism in the Dada tradition. The move into urbanism is explained as the latest in a generational process of clarification and radicalization that must be constantly renewed. In Debord’s document, the possible role of urban critique and creativity within the situationist project comes only after a lengthy and exhaustive accounting of the group’s attitude and position in regards to all important previous phases of the avant-garde, and a recommitting to the radical refusal of artistic practice. Architecture and urbanism here appear as the answer to avant-garde critique of lettrist art practice, as the domain “outside” art, finally to be claimed by artists in the name of transforming everyday life.

But, as Constant and Debord saw it, this focus was not singular. Rather it figures as one side of a binary between which the real core enigmatic aim of the situationist project, the “construction of situations” can be pursued. Urbanism is important because of the purchase it gives on the construction of something much more ephemeral, and closer to the radical human possibilities of transformation. The mission Debord ascribes to this urbanism is formulated in the foundational Report as “systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: “the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it” (SI 22)[26]. And, as the actual tasks to be performed by a radical urbanist practice, he identifies the two main modes of psychogeographical research: “active observation of present-day urban agglomerations and development of hypotheses on the structure of a situationist city” (23).

A critical urbanist practice on this model was undertaken for the effectiveness it promised in creating ambiances and in preparing the conditions for undefined “situations” that might contain a transformative social potential. But, at least for Debord, the true value and potential of this practice must be seen as still unproven. Psychogeographical research and the “unitary” design program it promises to inform are for Debord in 1957 still at the stage of testing their hypotheses:

The progress of psychogeography depends to a great extent on the statistical extension of its methods of observation, but above all on experimentation by means of concrete interventions in urbanism. Before this stage is attained we cannot be certain of the objective truth of the initial psychogeographical findings. But even if these findings should turn out to be false, they would still be false solutions to what is nevertheless a real problem.

The problem (call it alienation, or spectacle-market capitalism) was never in doubt for the situationists, but within a couple of years the results of their experimenting and hypothesizing, together with the natural evolution of their (principally Debord’s) critical analysis, it became obvious that positive, constructive unitary urbanism was itself just such a false solution. As a result of debates with Debord, Constant quit the SI in 1960. Attila Kotanyi joined in the same year and replaced Constant as head of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism, which was moved from Amsterdam to Brussels and commenced an intensive critique of the profession and of prior SI activities. Issue 6 of the Internationale Situationniste is cumulatively the most concerted document of situationist anti-urbanist critique. It reclaims the term unitary urbanism(which I will spell with a lower-case “u”), and rededicates it to radical, revolutionary critique. It represents the mature stage of psychogeographic theory where that term comes to mean not so much a heuristic to support design practice as a comprehensive political-economic theory. The term “psychogeographic materialism” even appears around this time, to express this refocusing, and to project the notion of a theory of urbanism that concludes the untenability of urbanist practice. Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem begin from this point in framing their new “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism” in 1961. It is the first sentence of that text that declares: “L’urbanisme n’existe pas”. “Urbanism does not exist, it is merely an ideology in Marx’s sense” (IS 214).

In an editorial note to that decisive 6th issue, the collective authors show the retrospective consistency they see in repudiating constructive urbanism, referring back to the 3rd issue to quote themselves saying “The situationists have always said, ‘unitary urbanism is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism’” (IS 203). The editorial committee argues that even a very critical design practice at this stage of political-economic development remains a hopelessly separated activity, whatever avant-garde intentions it may express. It can be radical in its conception, but because of its containment within a spectacular economy (whether of professional planning or experimental art) it will remain unable to act on “real life”. Real life as a value, as a sphere, however vaguely that must be defined, is for everyone by definition the total, the “unity” sought in “unitary urbanism”. But the search to restore that unity to practice and to life has no prospects within this separation, and it is the fundamental economy of urbanism to produce separation. This is perhaps the central tenet of the new basic program Kotanyi and Vaneigem write for the Bureau in its late phase:

The whole of urban planning can be understood only as a society’s field of publicity-propaganda, i.e. as the organization of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.[27]

Over the SI’s first five years, their understanding of urbanism had deepened, and their analysis of conditioning factors in the environment shifted from formal and aesthetic levels to the level of spectacle formation and control, the level at which the effective conditioning is happening. They became interested in the city, less as an interrupted funhouse, and more as a behavior of capital, And in this analysis they came to see urbanism as an equal arm of the spectacle, with information media the other. In the “Elementary Program” it read:

Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece.

In Raoul Vaneigem’s “Commentaries Against Urbanism” in the same issue, it read:

Urbanism and information are complementary in capitalist and “anti-capitalist” societies; they organize the silence. (IS 232)

This insight, into thespectacular function of urban design, ushered in a new phase of the situationist project, considered its maturity. Debord dates this phase from 1962, and calls it the second, the first corresponding to years 1957-62 and “centered on the overcoming of art”[28]. In another perspective, though, the pre-SI years from 1952-1957, would be seen as the first phase, during which art and design activities continued, though under serious self-criticism. The mature phase fulfills intuitions and determinations from the previous two phases, but distinguishes itself from them in asserting definitively that urbanism too, like art, has proven itself unable to fulfill the SI’s basic ambition as an avant-garde movement – to change life, radically understood – and that it must therefore be set aside in favor of revolutionary theory and direct action. This phase culminated in May ’68 when this next stage of hypothesizing could be put to the test.

For the method of experimental utopia to truly correspond to its project, it must obviously embrace the totality, that is, its implementation will not lead to a “new urbanism”, but to a new usage of life, a new revolutionary praxis. (IS 205).

In consciousness of the nature of spectacle-consumer society, the core focus of situationist concern shifted from the side of “situation” that corresponds to the concrete built surround, to the side that corresponds to the behaviors situations produce and that produce situations. With the maturing of this perspective on radical practice, the notion itself of a situation jumps orbits to a higher state. The vague body of potentials lurking around a blind corner in an unknown neighborhood concentrate all their promise and appeal into the specific objective promise of revolutionary potential. Situation as in: “Governor, we have a situation”. A moment in which exceptional events or insurrectionary behavior have opened a concrete chance for radical change.

With this view of their mission, urbanist thinking and production assume new job descriptions and new assignments. Where the unitary urbanist was once expected to carry out “active observation of present-day urban agglomerations and development of hypotheses on the structure of a situationist city” (23), consistent practice now would require slightly different things. For example, observation of contemporary revolutionary struggles and their modes of organization around the world, and production of theory and propaganda as practical action shaping a revolutionary situation locally or abroad. Kotanyi and Vaneigem assert this propaganda function as a task of the new Bureau: “distanciation from the urban spectacle”:

Our first task is to permit people to cease identifying with the environment and model behaviors…We must support the diffusion of distrust toward those airy colorful kindergartens that constitute, in the East as in the West, the new dormitory towns. Only awakening will pose the question of a conscious construction of the urban milieu. (IS 215).

Understanding urbanism’s role in an urbanity leveraged endemically against autonomous human community and the self-management of voluntary and democratic groups, depends on understanding how urbanism functions in production of the spectacle. For urbanism is not just a branch of spectacular communication (communication without response), it is also the soil out of which the spectacle is born. Debord and the 3rd phase unitary urbanists viewed the city as representing a particular phase in the historical process of capitalization. This phase corresponds approximately to Lefebvre’s stage of “urban society”[29], characterized by “complete urbanization”. At this stage, industrialization reaches a limit in extension (geographic advance) that it will then surpass intensively (as capitalization). But the process itself of urbanization has generated contradictions which it requires a new level of production to resolve. This contradiction is the one produced by the coming together of ever-larger populations in an ultimately exploitative process whose functioning effectively requires separation, among society and within individuals. When it reaches this stage, capitalist urbanization begins generating the spectacle automatically, as an attendant need of continued production. And, however abstract and ethereal the spectacle may appear as a force, the physical reality of urbanisation’s contradictions will always require that the separation be operated also at the concrete level of the organization of territory:

167 This sociey which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation.

…

171 If all the technical forces of capitalism must be understood as tools for the making of separations, in the case of urbanism we are dealing with the equipment at the basis of these technical forces, with the treatment of the ground that suits their deployment.

172 Urbanism is the modern fulfillment of the uninterrupted task which safeguards class power: the preservation of the atomization of workers who had been dangerously brought together by urban conditions of production… (Spectacle)

With this analysis, to be against urbanism means being against preserving “the atomization of workers…brought together by urban conditions of production”. For the situationists it also meant, more directly, committing to act against that atomization, theoretically and practically, wherever it worked. Theoretically, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s more accessible Treatise on Living for the Use of the Young Generation sought to explain the mechanisms of separation and the basic strategies of resistance. And practically the group began tolook to the possibilities of direct action as the best expression of its urban analysis and urban theory, which by this point had become indistinguishable from revolutionary theory.

The situationists had long been observing resistance struggles around the world, especially Algeria, which was in the thick of labyrinthine urban warfare between rebels and French colonists. Similarly they watched the race struggles in the United States, and looked for moments where the rage at racial oppressed might connect with rage at the oppression of everyday life. Issue 10 of Internationale Situationniste featured a long piece entitled “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Market Economy”, with a press photo from the looting and burning in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The caption read: “Critique de l’urbanisme (Supermarket a Los Angeles, August 1965)”.

So, when in 1968 students and then workers began to stand up and occupy the schools and factories that ran their lives, members of the SI worked hard to make sure that the exceptional situation would be understood as one of wide open possibilities for overturning the status quo and reorganizing society (urbanized, industrialized, capitalized) through spontaneous and consensual creation. In Paris, they manned the presses and the day and night debate forum of the Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations, from which the action taken by Sorbonne students was fanning out into the social fabric of France.[30] Regionally, they networked as they could to encourage further occupations and the radicalization of demands. And internationally they reached out to every affiliated group they could think of, many of them involved in dramatic times also in their countries, in the hopes that the spark would catch, and spread world-wide.

For a short time, the situationist lived the possibility, rare in history, of putting the hypotheses of an anarchic revolutionary utopianism to the test, and with it, the potentials of a “situationist” urban theory at both its most critical and its most constructive. For, with a certain threshold crossed, the design of cities and the making of art could once again become honorable activities, in the context of a dis-alienated society of radical self-determination, organized around democratic work-place councils.

Failing its revolutionary potentials, May ’68 would be the culmination of the situationist project, and the great last test of its urban theory. A final phase of the movement, from ‘68 and to 1972 when Debord disbanded it, was spent interpreting the results. This task history continues.

Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping search for a new way of life is the only aspect still impassioning. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved blatantly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest detachment. (Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955; SI 5)

Pouvoir au conseils ouvriers! (Power to the workers’ councils! Street graffiti attributed to the Situationist Internationale, Paris, May ’68.)

Situationist Journals
Potlatch: Bulletin d’information du groupe français de l’Internationale lettrise 1954-1957, 1996.Paris: Éditions Allia.

Les Lèvres nues 1954/1958, 1998. Paris: Éditions Allia.

Internationale Situationniste 1958-1969, 1997. Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard.

Knabb, Ken (ed., tr.) 1981.Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Online Sources
Situationist International Text Library: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/all/

Situationist International Online: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/

Notbored.org: http://www.notbored.org/SI.html

Single-Author Works
Chtcheglov, Ivan2006. Écrits retrouvés. Paris: Éditions Allia.

Debord, Guy 2004. Mémoires. Structures portantes d’Asger Jorn. Paris: Éditions Allia.

Debord, Guy1983. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red. Also, free online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4

Debord, Guy1992. Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Gallimard.

Jorn, Asger 2001(1957). Pour la forme: Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts.Paris: Éditions Allia.

Vaneigem, Raoul 1992 (1967). Traité du savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes génerations. Paris: Gallimard. Also, free online at http://arikel.free.fr/aides/vaneigem/

Vienet, René 1992 (1968). Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68Tr RichardParry, Helen Potter. New York: Autonomedia.

About the SI
Baumeister, Biene & Zwi Negator 2005.Situationistiche Revolutionstheorie, Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag.

Dumontier, Pascal 1990. Les situationnistes et mai ’68 : théories et pratique de la révolution (1966-1972). Paris: Gérard Lebovici (coll. Champs libres).

Donné, Boris 2004. Pour Mémoires: un essai d’élucidation des mémoires de Guy Debord. Paris: Éditions Allia.

Marcus, Greil1990. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Sadler, Simon 1999. The Situationist City. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wigley, Mark 1999. Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyperarchitecture of Desire. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

situationists at goteborg

WHAT CAN THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT DO NOW? EVERYTHING WHAT BECOMES OF IT IN THE HANDS OF THE PARTIES AND UNIONS? NOTHING WHAT DOES IT WANT? REALIZATION OF THE CLASSLESS SOCIETY THROUGH THE POWER OF THE WORKERS’ COUNCILS council for the maintenance of the occupations

poverty of student life

may 68 street scene

lettrist call

geopolitics of hibernation

constant new babylon

constant labyrinth

claude lorraine

[[3]]“L’étage suivante”, Internationale Situationniste No. 7, Paris: 1962, p. 47. Also, IS, p. 287.

   (↵ returns to text)

1. Consider the famous Bush aide’s comment to Ron Suskind in 2004, expressing imperial contempt for the “reality-based community”: Suskind, Ron. “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush“, The New York Times Magazine, 2004–10-17↵
2. cf. Eyal Weizman “The Art of War”, Frieze Magazine, May 2006, http://www.frieze.com/magazine.asp; on Israeli Defense Forces using Guy Debord to theorize urban combat strategy in the Occupied Territories↵
3. ↵
4. Guy Debord, “Sick Planet”, 1971, http://piratecinema.org/textz/guy_debord_the_sick_planet.html; unless otherwise noted, translations are mine↵
5. cf. Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”, (SI 6)↵
6. Text of a poster printed and distributed in May ’68 by the situationist-oriented Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations. (Viénet 84)↵
7. Fully reprinted as Potlatch 1954/1957.Paris: Éditions Allia, 1996↵
8. Fully reprinted as Les Lèvres nues 1954/1958. Paris: Éditions Allia, 1998↵
9. In Futurism there was Sant’Elia; see his “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture” (1914) http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/architecture.html. In Dada there was Johannes Baader with his Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama (1920); http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/dada_files/baader_plasto.html. And, just next-door to Dada, Kurt Schwitters with his perennial Merzbau (1920-36)↵
10. For more on the Situationist International in relation to art and design history, see my translation essay ‘“Form and Structure” Reframed: a New “On the Cult of the New in our Century”’, in Crayon 5, eds Andrew Levy and Roberto Harisson, New York, Forthcoming Spring 2008↵
11. For Jorn’s ideas on Design, Architecture and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, see Asger Jorn, Pour la forme: Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts (1957). My translation essay above is of/on an essay from this collection↵
12. Also see the indispensable interpretive text Pour Mémoires: un essai d’élucidation des mémoires de Guy Debord, by Boris Donné. An excellent introduction to the Situationist story, as is Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century↵
13. For an excellent overview of walking and dérive-based art practices, see Francesco Carer, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, Barcelona: Ediciones Gili, 2005↵
14. For one example, see the first-day program of TU Delft’s 2006 “Urban Body” workshop in Madrid, run by Delft’s Spacelab and Stalker from Rome : http://www.bk.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=f67525b5-a5e3-44bb-bd84-897818034e62&lang=en (accessed 16.1.08)↵
15. For an early, pre-Situationist denunciation of Le Corbusier, see “Les gratte-ciel par les racines” in number 5 of Potlatch (Potlach 21-22)↵
16. “Projet d’embellissements rationels de la ville de Paris”, Potlatch No. 23, 13 October 1955 (Potlatch 110-111)↵
17. Cf. Ivan Chtcheglov’s “Introduction au continent contrescarpe” from 1954 (Écrits 30-31) or Ralph Rumney’s “Psychogeographic Map of Venice” from 1957 (Sadler 79) or Abdelhafid Khatib’s “Essai de description psychogéographique des Halles”, IS #2 1958 (IS 45), or Debord’s maps, “Psychogeographic Guide to Paris” (1956) and “Naked City: Illustration of the Hypothesis of Moving Plates in Psychogéography” (1957)↵
18. Mark Wigley’s book is the most thorough monograph on Constant: Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1999)↵
19. E.g. his ParisBrain plan for La Defense: http://www.noxarch.com/flash_content/flash_content.html. Also, Las Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004↵
20. http://www.chora.org/1990/chora%20xiamen.html; also Chora and Raoul Bunschoten, Urban Flotsam, Uitgeverij: 010 Publishers, 2000↵
21. http://www.anarchitektur.com/; see also their Camp for Oppositional Architecture (2004,2006), http://www.oppositionalarchitecture.com↵
22. http://www.spacelab.tudelft.nl/↵
23. http://www.stalkerlab.it/↵
24. If you count them as a planning office, and you should; Park Fiction at http://www.parkfiction.org/↵
25. For the most thorough examinations of the situationists’ revolutionary theory to date, see Pascal Dumontier, Les situationnistes et mai ’68 : théories et pratique de la révolution (1966-1972), Paris: Gérard Lebovici (coll. Champs libres), 1990, and Biene Baumeister and Zwi Negator, Situationistiche Revolutionstheorie, Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 2005↵
26. Ken Knabb’s translation as published in the Situationist International Anthology has several important sections excised to shorten the text. The complete text is available from the Situationist International Online website: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html↵
27. Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism”, in Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. (Originally, Internationale Situationniste No. 6, Paris: 1961.)↵
28. This comes in the first items of Debord’s text “La question de l’organization pour l’I.S.” (1968); IS 680-681↵
29. cf. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, chapter 1tr. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003↵
30. For a contemporary situationist account of the SI’s involvement in the events of May ’68, see Vienet’s Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68↵