It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
IMAGE: ASST. PROF. BARIŞ YILDIZ, KOÇ UNIVERSITY, ISTANBUL, 2022.view more
CREDIT: KOÇ UNIVERSITY
Our ways of coming together and transporting goods and services are changing drastically with huge implications for cities, their residents, and the environment day by day. But even so, the current city logistics (CL) paradigm does not consider the mobility of goods a social need but a business problem. Current trends therefore limit our capacity to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities brought by this profound change.
Asst. Prof. Barış Yıldız from Koç University Department of Industrial Engineering recently received a Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project tackling the issue with a new perspective. It is the first ERC project focused on logistics.
“GoodMobility: A New Perspective on City Logistics: Concepts, Theory, and Models for Designing and Managing Logistics as a Service” proposes to replace techno-business-centric smart thinking with network-centric wise logistics. While designing the future of urban logistics, the project will consider public value as its priority and follow three main objectives.
Firstly, the public value will be constructed as a measurement system to assess and guide CL planning and management. Principles, models, and tools for logistics as a service (LaaS) infrastructure design will be developed as a second step. The third objective will be to develop a theoretical framework and models for the operating procedures of LaaS, introducing the logistics markets to ensure efficiency and reliability and secure public value in matching logistics demand and supply.
GoodMobility envisions laying the foundations of a new theory of CL with significant scientific and practical implications. It aims to realize new transportation technologies and business models that have not been considered before, in a way that will maximize social benefit, with public-private partnerships. The project aims to deliver products and services that will increase the innovation capacity and quality of life of cities to the residents in a much faster, more economical, and environmentally friendly manner. The novel ideas, concepts, and methodologies will open new research perspectives in transport and logistics with far-reaching social, economic, and environmental consequences.
Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of ...
View PDF. Revisiting Guy Debord and the Situationist International ... For the early SI, “psychogeography”—the “study of the precise laws and specific ...
2 Guy Debord, 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' in Knabb, SI Anthology, pp. 5-8 (p. 5). For examples of psychogeographical analyses of urban ...
Psychogeographic Committee of London at the launch of the SI was expelled a bit later for failing to complete his psychogeographical report of Venice on ...
Then, we continue to explore psychogeography within the theories of Situationist. International (SI) where the term psychogeography is theorised and put ...
pdf. (accessed 22 January 2021). Brace C and Johns-Putra A (2010) Recovering inspiration in the spaces of creative writing. Transactions of the. Institute of ...
An analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets made by people in London and San Francisco explores specific events and types of locations that are associated with different emotions. Panote Siriaraya of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 1, 2023.
A growing body of research examines social media posts and location data to explore human behavior and emotions; for instance, to compare levels of happiness between geographic regions. However, much of that work has been limited to larger geographic scales and is focused on just one emotion at a time, or on a general assessment of positive versus negative emotion.
Siriaraya and colleagues now demonstrate how human emotional expression can be explored at a finer-grained level using Tweets and information on specific buildings, businesses, and other locations of interest from the public platform Open Street Map. They used computational tools known as neural networks to analyze nearly 2 million Tweets made by more than 200,000 people in London and San Francisco, identifying when and where people expressed anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, or trust.
The analysis showed that different location types were associated with expression of different emotions. For instance, in both cities, tweets made in train stations, bridges, and other transportation sites tended to express less joy and more disgust. Tweets from hotels and restaurants showed higher levels of joy. Additionally, proximity to certain sites—and not just being within the sites—was associated with a difference in expressed emotions.
Specific events appeared associated with higher levels of specific emotions; for instance, San Francisco users displayed their highest levels of anger, disgust, and sadness on the day of the 2017 Women’s March, and London users showed high levels of fear and sadness during two local terrorism attacks. New Year’s Eve coincided with high levels of joy in both cities.
The researchers caution against overgeneralizing their results; for instance, the study only included Tweets in English. Nonetheless, they could help pave the way to additional fine-grained research to inform such fields as urban planning and tourism.
The authors add: “Our study highlights how it is possible to portray the characteristics of fine-grained emotions at a detailed spatial and temporal level throughout the whole city, using publicly available data sources.”
Citation: Siriaraya P, Zhang Y, Kawai Y, Jeszenszky P, Jatowt A (2023) A city-wide examination of fine-grained human emotions through social media analysis. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0279749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279749
Author Countries: Japan, Switzerland, Austria
Funding: This work was partially supported by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Program (MIC/SCOPE) #171507010 (https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/joho_tsusin/scope/) and the Japan society for the promotion of science KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16H01722, 17H01822, 22K12274 and 22K19837 (https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/index.html). Apart from these, there was no additional external funding received for this study.
Grid cells not only help us navigate our own paths in a complex environment, but also help us analyse the movements of other people, scientists from the University of Vienna have now shown for the first time. Their new study in Nature Communications also suggests an explanation for a mechanism that could lead to disorientation in dementia patients.
Whether you are making your way through a crowded pedestrian zone or striving towards the goal in a team game, in both situations it is important to think not only about your own movements but also those of others. These navigation and orientation processes are carried out by brain cells that register our current position, where we are coming from, where we are moving towards and in which direction we are looking. Through their joint activity, they create a "map" of our surroundings. A special type of these cells are the so-called grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, a small brain region in the middle temporal lobe. They function like the brain's own GPS, because they not only represent our position in space, but can also put it in relation to other points in the same space.
Whether these grid cells are also involved in mapping the movements of other individuals on this map was the question that the scientists led by Isabella Wagner and Claus Lamm from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna addressed. For this purpose, the scientists tested participants that either navigated themselves in a virtual environment, or observed the movements of another person while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
They found that the brain activity recorded while watching others was comparable to the activity of grid cells. In addition, the team was able to show that this activity was part of a larger network of brain regions that are associated with navigation processes. Interestingly, however, it turned out that the better a subject was at following the path of others, the less active this network was. "We interpret this as greater efficiency of the grid cells, which might make it less necessary to engage the larger brain network," Wagner explains.
The results of the study thus suggest that grid cells belong to a larger network of brain regions that, among other aspects, coordinates navigation processes. However, this network is particularly affected by ageing processes and especially by dementia. Wagner explains: "The function of grid cells decreases with age and dementia. As a result, people can no longer find their way around and their orientation is impaired." The group's further research is now dedicated to the question of whether grid cells are also involved in recognising other people - an aspect that is often impaired in advanced dementia.
How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.
As a founding member of the avant-garde movement Situationist International, an international movement of artists, writers and poets who aimed to break down the barriers between culture and everyday life, Debord wanted a revolutionary approach to architecture that was less functional and more open to exploration.
The reimagining of the city proposed by psychogeography has its roots in dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination. Tristam Hillier’s paintings such as La Route des Alpes 1937 could be described as an early example of the concept.
Psychogeography gained popularity in the 1990s when artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller began using the idea to create works based on exploring locations by walking.
If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth,
psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking
earth, mind and foot.
Cover of Guy Debord's 1957 “Psychogeographic guide of Paris." The territory is fragmented and depicts only the emotional connections of different places.
By: Karen O'Rourke
“Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it,” says the writer and psychogeographer Wilfried Hou Je Bek. “This has as much to do with the space as with our hardwired instincts to determine if it is safe.”
Graphy comes from the Greek graphein (to write), a decidedly polysemic word. If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth (geos), what about psychogeographers? The Latin prefix psyche (breath) adds a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot. Psychogeographic writing can be thought of as an alternative way of reading the city. Wilfried Hou Je Bek calls it “the city-space cut-up.” Just as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin cut and reorganized newspaper texts to reveal their implicit content, so too psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways.
This article is adapted from Karen O’Rourke’s book
Although the various practices gathered under the umbrella of psychogeography are ancient, the term itself was first used by members of the Lettrist International, a Paris-based collective of radical artists and cultural theorists that was active in the early 1950s. They described it as “a science of relations and ambiances” they were developing “to give play in the society of others [le jeu de société; literally, “the parlor game”] its true meaning: a society founded upon play. Nothing is more serious. Amusement is the royal privilege that must be made available to everyone.”
Writing in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues, Guy-Ernest Debord attributes the term to an “illiterate Kabyle.” Its vagueness appealed to the loosely organized group that adopted it to describe its various activities. Because geography deals with the impact of natural forces (such as climate and soil composition) “on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world,” wrote Debord, psychogeography should examine the “specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” To accomplish this ambitious investigation, he and his friends recommended drifting:
The practice of de-familiarization and the choice of encounters, the sense of incompleteness and ephemerality, the love of speed transposed onto the plane of the mind, together with inventiveness and forgetting are among the elements of an ethics of drifting we have already begun to test in the poverty of the cities of our time.
Contemporary practitioners take their cue from Debord, who proposed one of psychogeography’s first genealogies. It began with Giovanni Piranesi’s labyrinthine stairways and gathered Claude Lorrain, Jack the Ripper (“probably psycho-geographical in love”), Edgar Allan Poe, and André Breton (deemed “naively psycho-geographical in encounters”), among others.
Each psychogeographer has his own list: Ralph Rumney’s included “Renaissance architect Serlio, French garden designer Le Nôtre, and all builders of grottoes, follies and mazes”; Iain Sinclair turns to William Blake, “the Godfather of Psychogeography”; Rebecca Solnit makes a case for satirist John Gay, the author of “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” (1716); Wilfried Hou Je Bek singles out Horace Walpole, who, over a period of 30 years, transformed his Tudor mansion into a Gothic castle “meticulously designed to provoke a vast array of sensations in its visitors”; Merlin Coverly cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for the way it depicts the seamy underside of the city as reflecting dark corners of the human psyche.
“On Saturday evenings,” wrote opium-eater and peripatetic Thomas de Quincey, “I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance.”
Among the precursors found on nearly every list is opium-eater and peripatetic Thomas de Quincey: “On Saturday evenings,” wrote de Quincey, “I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance” in search of an occult “Northwest Passage” allowing one to cross London unhampered. The Figure of the Flâneur
Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur is often cited as a model for today’s run of psychogeographer. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” and epitomized by Baudelaire’s painter friend Constantin Guys, the flâneur was something of a dandy who ambled through the Paris arcades while ordinary people scurried to work all around him. Free from the pressures of the workaday world, he sought the random encounters that the city streets were always ready to offer.
Guys, “the painter of modern life,” was a man of the world whose domain was the crowd, “just as the air is the bird’s and water that of the fish.” He desired nothing more than to merge with the throng and to dwell in “the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite,” Baudelaire wrote in an essay on the painter. The crowd was “[a]n enormous reservoir of electricity” that gave him the opportunity “to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen by the world” to the extent that the man himself has become a mirror, “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness,” “an ego thirsting for the nonego and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.” Baudelaire completes this portrait in “The Crowds,” one of the prose poems that comprise “Le Spleen de Paris” (“Paris Spleen”): “It is not given to everyone to be able to bathe in the multitude: enjoyment of the crowd is an art” that requires “a taste for dressing up and masque, a hatred for domesticity and a passion for travel. The solitary and thoughtful stroller derives a singular intoxication from this universal communion.”
In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin reappropriated Baudelaire’s dandy for his own purposes, contrasting “the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd” with “the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of the gentleman of leisure.” He claimed that “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them” as a way of protesting against “the division of labor which makes people into specialists.”
In the tradition of Restif de la Bretonne, who wandered through Paris on the eve of the French Revolution (“Les nuits de Paris,” 1788–1794), Benjamin’s contemporaries Louis Aragon (“Paris Peasant,” 1925), André Breton (“Nadja,” 1928), and Philippe Soupault (“Last Nights of Paris,” 1928) put to paper their citywide ramblings. Like Baudelaire, they celebrated the inadvertent poetry of shop window displays, fleeting glances, elusive women, chance encounters, and mysterious pursuits.
Drifting for members of the Lettrist International did not mean only walking. The adventure began during a transportation strike in the summer of 1953 on the platform at the Gare de Lyon, where the group was trying agit-prop. Failing to rally any of the stranded passengers to the strikers’ cause, Guy Debord, Jean-Michel Mension, and their friends sauntered out of the station (or were they chased out?) and began flagging down cars. Hitchhiking nonstop through Paris, they changed their destinations to fit that of the drivers. Their goal, as Debord noted facetiously, was to add to the confusion.
Later, this “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” was accomplished on foot and by taxi, “depending on whether the goal [was] to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself.” In “Dérive by the Mile,” Michèle Bernstein, a novelist and a founding member of the Situationist International, argued in favor of replacing private transport in Paris with large numbers of low-cost taxis, which would be more conducive to recreational drifting. As they travel varying distances in a set time and follow an essentially random itinerary, taxis combine freedom of movement with automatic disorientation.
The situationists prided themselves on detecting the “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.”
Conversely, walking was better for close-up views that focus on the environment at hand. The situationists prided themselves on detecting the “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres,” as Debord wrote in “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” It is a subjective science. When Guy Debord describes the urban ambiances that he and fellow lettrist Gil J. Wolman gathered while drifting through the north of Paris, his judgments are peremptory: Here he sees a “repulsive petit-bourgeois landscape”; there he deems a staircase leading to a network of alleys to be “annoyingly picturesque”; farther on, he consecrates “the impressive rotunda by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux” as the center of an “important psycho-geographic hub” because it is “a virtual ruin left in an incredible state of abandonment, whose charm is singularly enhanced by the curve of the elevated subway line that passes by at close distance.”
A drift could last as long as the drifters wanted it to — a whole day or, as Debord suggests in his “Theory of the Drift,” the time between two periods of sleep:
The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-drift of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
It comprised both restless movement and alcohol-fueled talk. Speaking in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo in September 2003, Jean-Michel Mension described those early drifts as leading frequently from one neighborhood bar to another. It was not usually a solitary pursuit. Debord’s and Wolman’s drift began at 10 a.m. and finished at an unspecified time in the evening when the two drifters abruptly decided to put an end to it. On the way, they made a number of “stops — sometimes long, sometimes brief — at various bars patronized by the bargemen” on the right bank of the canal Saint-Denis, before arriving in a Spanish bar known as the Tavern of the Rebels.
In recent decades, for poachers and protesters, artists, activists and drifters, walking has emerged as a means of reclaiming public space. From the Paris suburbs to London’s ring road, pedestrians are reappearing (or springing up) in spaces dedicated to automobile traffic. For many of them walking is a process of self-education.
Remaking the World?
What is psychogeography’s legacy? In its diverse forms, it embodies the desire to renew language, social life, and oneself. For contemporary psychogeographers, the drift is purposeful; it can reveal the city’s underlying structure. Iain Sinclair aims for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “alert reverie,” a kind of double presence that is both in the here and now and in the imagination:
Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, trampling asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to assert itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin de siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy — but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything.
In “Theory of the Drift,” Debord proposed the idea of a “possible rendezvous” as a means of “behavioral disorientation.” Here, a person is given an appointment at a particular time and place but has no idea if someone will be there to meet him or who that person is. Not knowing what to expect, he will study his surroundings and start conversations with passers-by: “He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the ‘possible rendezvous.’ In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn.”
Courting the unexpected is often combined with the unabashed apology of subjectivity. Stewart Home, the English artist and writer who in 1992 revived the London Psychogeographical Association, states: “For me photography is most alluring when both the person behind the lens and what is being photographed self-consciously manifest their subjectivity. Traveling across ‘Britain’ to discover ‘America’ is only one of the many ways in which such subjectivity might remake the world in both photographic and material form. . . . The psychogeographer . . . knows that the world cannot be recorded, it can only be remade.” “Remaking the world” is usually done in smoke-filled cafés. If these debates rarely lead to concrete action, what about walking?
Karen O’Rourke is an artist and emeritus professor at Jean Monnet University Saint-Etienne, France, and the author of “Walking and Mapping,” from which this article is adapted. Her work explores the relationship between art practice and the concepts of network, archive and territory.
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"
no copyright 2001 textz.com - no rights reserved no copyright 2001 sami.is.free.fr - no rights reserved
