PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

How the brain navigates cities: We seem to be wired to calculate not the shortest path but the 'pointiest' one

by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

An MIT study suggests our brains are not optimized to calculate the shortest

 possible route when navigating on foot. In this figure, pedestrian paths are

 shown in red while the shortest path is in blue. Credit: MIT

Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, when you're walking along city streets, a straight line may not be possible. How do you decide which way to go?

A new MIT study suggests that our brains are actually not optimized to calculate the so-called "shortest path" when navigating on foot. Based on a dataset of more than 14,000 people going about their daily lives, the MIT team found that instead, pedestrians appear to choose paths that seem to point most directly toward their destination, even if those routes end up being longer. They call this the "pointiest path."

This strategy, known as vector-based navigation, has also been seen in studies of animals, from insects to primates. The MIT team suggests vector-based navigation, which requires less brainpower than actually calculating the shortest route, may have evolved to let the brain devote more power to other tasks.

"There appears to be a tradeoff that allows computational power in our brain to be used for other things—30,000 years ago, to avoid a lion, or now, to avoid a perilious SUV," says Carlo Ratti, a professor of urban technologies in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Senseable City Laboratory. "Vector-based navigation does not produce the shortest path, but it's close enough to the shortest path, and it's very simple to compute it."

Ratti is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Computational Science. Christian Bongiorno, an associate professor at Université Paris-Saclay and a member of MIT's Senseable City Laboratory, is the study's lead author. Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science at MIT and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is also an author of the paper. A preprint version of this study was posted to arXiv.org earlier this year.

Vector-based navigation

Twenty years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, Ratti walked the route between his residential college and his departmental office nearly every day. One day, he realized that he was actually taking two different routes—one on to the way to the office and a slightly different one on the way back.

"Surely one route was more efficient than the other, but I had drifted into adapting two, one for each direction," Ratti says. "I was consistently inconsistent, a small but frustrating realization for a student devoting his life to rational thinking."

At the Senseable City Laboratory, one of Ratti's research interests is using large datasets from mobile devices to study how people behave in urban environments. Several years ago, the lab acquired a dataset of anonymized GPS signals from cell phones of pedestrians as they walked through Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, over a period of one year. Ratti thought that these data, which included more than 550,000 paths taken by more than 14,000 people, could help to answer the question of how people choose their routes when navigating a city on foot.

The research team's analysis of the data showed that instead of choosing the shortest routes, pedestrians chose routes that were slightly longer but minimized their angular deviation from the destination. That is, they choose paths that allow them to more directly face their endpoint as they start the route, even if a path that began by heading more to the left or right might actually end up being shorter.

"Instead of calculating minimal distances, we found that the most predictive model was not one that found the shortest path, but instead one that tried to minimize angular displacement—pointing directly toward the destination as much as possible, even if traveling at larger angles would actually be more efficient," says Paolo Santi, a principal research scientist in the Senseable City Lab and at the Italian National Research Council, and a corresponding author of the paper. "We have proposed to call this the pointiest path."

This was true for pedestrians in Boston and Cambridge, which have a convoluted network of streets, and in San Francisco, which has a grid-style street layout. In both cities, the researchers also observed that people tended to choose different routes when making a round trip between two destinations, just as Ratti did back in his graduate school days.

"When we make decisions based on angle to destination, the street network will lead you to an asymmetrical path," Ratti says. "Based on thousands of walkers, it is very clear that I am not the only one: Human beings are not optimal navigators."

Moving around in the world

Studies of animal behavior and brain activity, particularly in the hippocampus, have also suggested that the brain's navigation strategies are based on calculating vectors. This type of navigation is very different from the computer algorithms used by your smartphone or GPS device, which can calculate the shortest route between any two points nearly flawlessly, based on the maps stored in their memory.

Without access to those kinds of maps, the animal brain has had to come up with alternative strategies to navigate between locations, Tenenbaum says.

"You can't have a detailed, distance-based map downloaded into the brain, so how else are you going to do it? The more natural thing might be use information that's more available to us from our experience," he says. "Thinking in terms of points of reference, landmarks, and angles is a very natural way to build algorithms for mapping and navigating space based on what you learn from your own experience moving around in the world."

"As smartphone and portable electronics increasingly couple human and artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the computational mechanisms used by our brain and how they relate to those used by machines," Ratti says.Communicating vehicles could ease through intersections more efficiently

More information: Paolo Santi, Vector-based pedestrian navigation in cities, Nature Computational Science (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00130-y. www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00130-y

Journal information: Nature Computational Science 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY  USA

 Black cemeteries reflect history of segregation

Duration: 02:26

Black cemeteries are scattered throughout the U.S., reflecting a deep past of cemetery segregation. Many Black Americans excluded from white-owned cemeteries built their own burial spaces. Their descendants are working to preserve the history. (April 29)

The Long Walk of the Situationist International

“The situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize anyone, anywhere — without re­straint, without the pull of alliances, and without self-satisfaction. And they were bent on turning that criticism into event.”

by GREIL MARCUS
MARCH 18, 2020



The Long Walk of the Situationist International: How Extreme Was It
VLS, October 11, 1982

— 1 —


I first became intrigued with the Situ­ationist International in 1979, when I strug­gled through “Le Bruit et la Fureur,” one of the anonymous lead articles in the first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste. The writer reviewed the exploits of artistic rebels in the postwar West as if such matters had real political consequences, and then said this: “The rotten egg smell exuded by the idea of God envelops the mystical cretins of the American ‘Beat Generation,’ and is not even entirely absent from the declarations of the Angry Young Men… They have simply come to change their opinions about a few social conventions without even noticing the whole change of terrain of all cultural activ­ity so evident in every avant-garde tendency of this century. The Angry Young Men are in fact particularly reactionary in their attribution of a privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature: they are defending a mystification that was denounced in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater counterrevolutionary significance than that of the British Crown.”

Mystical cretins… finally, I thought (for­getting the date of the publication before me), someone has cut through the suburban cul-de-sac that passed for cultural rebellion in the 1950s. But this wasn’t “finally” — it was 1958, in a sober, carefully printed magazine (oddly illustrated with captionless photos of women in bathing suits), in an article that concluded: “If we are not surrealists it is because we don’t want to be bored… Decrepit surrealism, raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking perspective but far from lacking a cause — boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.”

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Strange stuff — almost mystifying for an American — but there was a power in the prose that was even more seductive than the hard-nosed dismissal of the Beat generation. This was the situationist style — what one commentator called “a rather irritating form of hermetic terrorism,” a judgment situ­ationist Raoul Vaneigem would quote with approval. Over the next decade it never really changed, but only became more seductive and more hard-nosed, because it discovered more seductive and hard-nosed opponents. Beginning with the notion that modern life was boring and therefore wrong, the situationists sought out every manifestation of alienation and domination and every man­ifestation of the opposition produced by al­ienation and domination. They turned out original analyses of the former (whether it was the Kennedy-era fallout shelter program in “The Geopolitics of Hibernation” — what a title! — or the Chinese cultural revolution in “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China”) and mercilessly criticized the timidity and limits of the latter. In every case they tried to link specifics to a totality — why was the world struggling to turn itself inside out, and how could it be made to do so? What were the real sources of revolution in postwar society, and how were they different from any that had come before?

The Situationist International Antho­logy contains pre-SI documents, 250 pages of material from the situationist journal, May 1968 documents, two filmscripts, and far more, stretching from 1953, four years before the Situationist International was formed, to 1971, a year before its formal dissolution. It is exhilarating to read this book — to confront a group that was determined to make enemies, burn bridges, deny itself the rewards of cele­brity, to find and maintain its own voice in a world where, it seemed, all other voices of cultural or political resistance were either cravenly compromised or so lacking in consciousness they did not even recognize their compromises.


— 2 —

The attack on the Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men — in 1958, it is worth remembering, considered in the English-­speaking world the very summa of “anti­-Establishment” negation — was an opening round in a struggle the situationists thought was already going on, and a move toward a situation they meant to construct. “Our ideas are in everyone’s mind,” they would say more than once over the next 10 years. They meant that their ideas for a different world were in everyone’s mind as desires, but not yet as ideas. Their project was to expose the empti­ness of everyday life in the modern world and to make the link between desire and idea real. They meant to make that link so real it would be acted upon by almost everyone, since in the modern world, in the affluent capitalist West and the bureaucratic state-capitalist East, the split between desire and idea was part of almost everyone’s life.

Throughout the next decade, the situationists argued that the alienation which in the 19th century was rooted in production had, in the 20th century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to de­fine happiness and to suppress all other pos­sibilities of freedom and selfhood. Lenin had written that under communism everyone would become an employee of the state; that was no less capitalism than the Western ver­sion, in which everyone was first and fore­most a member of an economy based in com­modities. The cutting edge of the present-day contradiction — that place where the way of life almost everyone took for granted grated most harshly against what life promised and what it delivered — was as much leisure as work. This meant the concepts behind “cul­ture” were as much at stake as the ideas behind industry.

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Culture, the situationists thought, was “the Northwest Passage” to a superseding of the dominant society. This was where they started; this was the significance of their attack on the Beat generation. It was a means to a far more powerful attack on the nature of modern society itself: on the division of labor, the fragmentation of work and thought, the manner in which the material success of mod­ern life had leaped over all questions of the quality of life, in which “the struggle against poverty… [had] overshot its ultimate goal, the liberation of man from material cares,” and produced a world in which, “faced with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”

I have presented a bare outline of the situationist perspective, but perhaps more important for a reader in 1982 is the use the situationists made of that perspective. Un­like many with whom they shared certain notions — Norman Mailer, the Marxist soci­ologist Henri Lefebvre, the gauchiste review Socialisme ou Barbarie — the situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize anyone, anywhere — without re­straint, without the pull of alliances, and without self-satisfaction. And they were bent on turning that criticism into events.


— 3 —

The situationists thought of themselves as avant-garde revolutionaries, linked as clearly to dada as to Marx. One could trace them back to Saint-Just — the 22-year-old who ar­rived in Paris in 1789 with a blasphemous epic poem, Organt (an account of the raping of nuns and of endless sexual adventures), and became the coldest, most romantic, most brilliant, most tragic administrator of the Terror. Prosecutor of Louis XVI, he gave his head to the same guillotine a year later.

More directly, situationist thinking began in Paris in the early 1950s, when Guy Debord and a few other members of the Lettrist International — a group, known mostly to itself, which had split off from the Lettrists, a tiny, postwar neodada movement of anti-­art intellectuals and students — devoted themselves to dérives: to drifting through the city for days, weeks, even months at a time, looking for what they called the city’s psychogeography. They meant to find signs of what lettrist Ivan Chtcheglov called “forgot­ten desires” — images of play, eccentricity, secret rebellion, creativity, and negation. That led them into the Paris catacombs, where they sometimes spent the night. They looked for images of refusal, or for images society had itself refused, hidden, sup­pressed, or “recuperated” — images of refusal, nihilism, or freedom that society had taken back into itself, co-opted or rehabilitated, isolated or discredited. Rooted in similar but intellectually (and physically!) far more lim­ited surrealist expeditions of the 1920s, the dérives were a search, Guy Debord would write many years later, for the “supersession of art.” They were an attempt to fashion a new version of daily life — a new version of how people organized their wishes, pains, fears, hopes, ambitions, limits, social rela­tionships, and identities, a process that ordi­narily took place without consciousness.

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The few members of the grandiosely named Lettrist International wanted to re­shape daily life according to the desires dis­covered and affirmed by modern art. Dada, at the Cabaret Voltaire “a laboratory for the rehabilitation of everyday life” in which art as art was denounced and scattered, “wanted to suppress art without realizing it,” Debord wrote in 1967, in his book The Society of the Spectacle. “Surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it.” In other words, dada wanted to kill off the claim that art was superior to life and leave art for dead. Sur­realism wanted to turn the impulses that led one to create art into a recreation of life, but it also wanted to maintain the production of art works. Thus surrealism ended up as just another debilitated, gallery-bound art move­ment, a fate dada avoided at the price of being almost completely ignored. The Let­trist International thought art had to be both suppressed as separate, special activity, and turned into life. That was the meaning of supersession, and that was the meaning of a group giving itself up to the pull of the city. It was also the meaning of the LI’s attack on art as art. Debord produced a film without images; with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, he created a book “ ‘composed entirely of prefabricated elements,’ in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are in­variably uncompleted.” Not only was the book impossible to “read,” it featured a sand­paper jacket, so that when placed in a book­shelf it would eat other books.



In 1952, at the Ritz, the LI broke up a Charlie Chaplin press conference, part of the huge publicity campaign for Limelight. “We believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they present themselves in the name of freedom,” they explained. “The provocative tone of our leaflet was an attack against a unanimous, servile enthusiasm.” (Pro­vocative was perhaps not the word. “No More Flat Feet,” the leaflet Debord and others scattered in the Ritz, read: “Because you [Chaplin] identified yourself with the weak and the oppressed, to attack you was to strike the weak and the oppressed, but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could al­ready discern the policeman’s night­stick…”) The lettrist radicals practiced graffiti on the walls of Paris (one of their favorite mottoes, “Never work!,” would show up 15 years later during May 1968, and 13 years after that in Bow Wow Wow’s “W.O.R.K.,” written by Malcolm McLaren). They painted slogans on their ties, shoes, and pants, hoping to walk the streets as living examples of détournement — the diversion of an element of culture or everyday life (in this case, simply clothes) to a new and displacing purpose. The band “lived on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a role of pure consumption” — not of commodities, but “of time.”


From On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time, Debord’s 1959 film on the group:


Voice 1: That which was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, fit into the tastes and illusions of an era carried away with it.

Voice 2: The appearance of events we have not made, that others have made against us, obliges us from now on to be aware of the passage of time, its results, the trans­formation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity; there is no more should-be; being is so consumed that it has ceased to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?

Voice 3: That which should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. Once again the fatigue of so many nights passed in the same way. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.

Voice 1: Really hard to drink more.

This was the search for that Northwest Passage, that unmarked alleyway from the world as it appeared to the world as it had never been, but which the art of the 20th century had promised it could be: a promise shaped in countless images of freedom to experiment with life and of freedom from the banality and tyranny of bourgeois order and bureaucratic rule. Debord and the others tried to practice, he said, “a systematic ques­tioning of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness.” “Our movement was not a literary school, a revitalization of expression, a mod­ernism,” a Lettrist International publication stated in 1955, after some years of the pure consumption of time, various manifestos, numerous jail sentences for drug possession and drunk driving, suicide attempts, and all­-night arguments. “We have the advantage of no longer expecting anything from known activities, known individuals, and known in­stitutions.”

They tried to practice a radical decondi­tioning: to demystify their environment and the expectations they had brought to it, to escape the possibility that they would them­selves recuperate their own gestures of re­fusal. The formation of the Situationist In­ternational — at first, in 1957, including 15 or 20 painters, writers, and architects from Eng­land, France, Algeria, Denmark, Holland, It­aly, and Germany — was based on the recog­nition that such a project, no matter bow poorly defined or mysterious, was either a revolutionary project or it was nothing. It was a recognition that the experiments of the dérives, the attempts to discover lost intima­tions of real life behind the perfectly com­posed face of modern society, had to be trans­formed into a general contestation of that society, or else dissolve in bohemian solipsism.

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— 4 —


Born in Paris in 1931, Guy Debord was from beginning to end at the center of the Situationist International, and the editor of its journal. The Society of the Spectacle, the concise and remarkably cant-free (or cant­-destroying, for that seems to be its effect) book of theory he published after 10 years of situationist activity, begins with these lines: “In societies where modern conditions of pro­duction prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Every­thing that was lived has moved away into a representation.” Determined to destroy the claims of 20th-century social organization, Debord was echoing the first sentence of Capital: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails ap­pears as an ‘immense collection of com­modities.’ ” To complain, as French Marxist critics did, that Debord misses Marx’s quali­fication, “appears as,” is to miss Debord’s own apparent qualification, “presents itself as” — and to miss the point of situationist writing altogether. Debord’s qualification turned out not to be a qualification at all, but rather the basis of a theory in which a society organized as appearance can be disrupted on the field of appearance.

Debord argued that the commodity — now transmuted into “spectacle,” or seemingly natural, autonomous images communicated as the facts of life — had taken over the social function once fulfilled by religion and myth, and that appearances were now inseparable from the essential processes of alienation and domination in modern society. In 1651, the cover of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan presented the manifestation of a nascent bour­geois domination: a picture of a gigantic sov­ereign being, whose body — the body politic­ — was made up of countless faceless citizens. This was presented as an entirely positive image, as a utopia. In 1967, International Situationniste #11 printed an almost identical image, “Portrait of Alienation”: countless Chinese performing a card trick which pro­duced the gigantic face of Mao Zedong.

If society is organized around consump­tion, one participates in social life as a con­sumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, con­templation rather than thinking, and a deg­radation of life into materialism. It is no matter that in advanced societies, material survival is not at issue (except for those who are kept poor in order to represent poverty and reassure the rest of the population that they should be satisfied). The “standard of survival,” like its twin, the “standard of boredom,” is raised but the nature of the standard does not change. Desires are de­graded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. A project precisely the op­posite of that of modern art, from Lautréa­mont and Rimbaud to dada and surrealism, is

The spectacle is not merely advertising, or propaganda, or television. It is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, “is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images.” In 1928 in One-Way Street, writing about German inflation, Walter Benjamin anticipated the argument: “The free­dom of conversation is being lost. If it was earlier a matter of course to take interest in one’s partner, this is now replaced by inquiry into the price of his shoes or his umbrella. Irresistibly intruding upon any convivial ex­change is the theme of the conditions of life, of money. What this theme involves is not so much the concerns and sorrows of individu­als, in which they might be able to help one another, as the overall picture. It is as if one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the events on the stage whether one wanted to or not, had to make them again and again, willingly or unwillingly, the subject of one’s thought and speech.” Raoul Vaneigem de­fined the terrain of values such a situation produced: “Rozanov’s definition of nihilism is the best: ‘The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around… No more coats and no more home.’ ” “The spectator feels at home nowhere,” Debord wrote, “because the spectacle is everywhere.”


The spectacle is “the diplomatic represen­tation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned” — which is to say where all other expression makes no sense, appears as babble (this may be the ironic, protesting meaning of dada phonetic poems, in which words were reduced to sounds, and of lettrist poetry, in which sounds were re­duced to letters). The spectacle says “nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’ ” (In a crisis, or when the “standard of survival” falls, as in our own day, hierarchic society retreats, but main­tains its hegemony, the closing of questions. The spectacle “no longer promises any­thing,” Debord wrote in 1979, in a new pref­ace to the fourth Italian edition of his book. “It simply says, ‘It is so.’ ”) The spectacle organizes ordinary life (consider the following in terms of making love): “The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the con­templated object is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him.”

Debord summed it up this way: “The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy” — by spectacle­ — “leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing.” We are twice removed from where we want to be, the situationists argued — yet each day still seems like a natu­ral fact.

— 5 —

This was the situationists’ account of what they, and everyone else, were up against. It was an argument from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, an argument that the “spectacle-commodity society,” within which one could make only meaningless choices and against which one could seemingly not intervene, had suc­ceeded in producing fundamental contradic­tions between what people accepted and what, in ways they could not understand, they wanted.

This was the precise opposite of social science, developed at precisely the time when the ideology of the end of ideology was con­quering the universities of the West. It was an argument about consciousness and false consciousness, not as the primary cause of domination but as its primary battleground.


If capitalism had shifted the terms of its organization from production to consump­tion, and its means of control from economic misery to false consciousness, then the task of would-be revolutionaries was to bring about a recognition of the life already lived by almost everyone. Foreclosing the construc­tion of one’s own life, advanced capitalism had made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary. Here again, the discovery of the source of revolution in what “modern art [had] sought and promise” served as the axis of the argument. Modern art, one could read in Internationale Situationniste #8, in January of 1963, had “made a clean sweep of all the values and rules of everyday behav­ior,” of unquestioned order and the “unani­mous, servile enthusiasm” Debord and his friends had thrown up at Chaplin; but that clean sweep had been isolated in museums. Modern revolutionary impulses had been separated from the world, but “just as in the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy” — out of Marx’s dic­tum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it — now one had to look to the demands of art.

At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, workers discussed matters that had previously been the exclusive province of philosophers — suggesting the possibility that philosophy could be realized in daily life. In the 20th century, with “survival” conquered as fact but maintained as ideology, the same logic meant that just as artists constructed a version of life in words, paint, or stone, men and women could themselves begin to con­struct their own lives out of desire. This desire, in scattered and barely noticed ways, was shaping the 20th century, or the super­seding of it (“Ours is the best effort so far toward getting out of the twentieth century,” an anonymous situationist wrote in 1963, in one of the most striking lines in the 12 issues of Internationale Situationniste). It was the desire more hidden, more overwhelmed and confused by spectacle, than any other. It had shaped the lettrist adventures. It was the Northwest Passage. If the spectacle was “both the result and the project of the exist­ing mode of production,” then the construc­tion of life as artists constructed art — in terms of what one made of friendship, love, sex, work, play, and suffering — was under­stood by the situationists as both the result and the project of revolution.


— 6 —


To pursue this revolution, it was neces­sary to take all the partial and isolated inci­dents of resistance and refusal of things as they were, and then link them. It was neces­sary to discover and speak the language of these incidents, to do for signs of life what the Lettrist International had tried to do for the city’s signs of “forgotten desires.” This de­manded a theory of exemplary acts. Society was organized as appearance, and could be contested on the field of appearance; what mattered was the puncturing of ap­pearance — speech and action against the spectacle that was, suddenly, not babble, but understood. The situationist project, in this sense, was a quest for a new language of action. That quest resulted in the urgent, daring tone of even the lengthiest, most sol­emn essays in Internationale Situationniste — the sense of minds engaged, quickened be­yond rhetoric, by emerging social contradic­tions — and it resulted in such outrages as a six-word analysis of a leading French soci­ologist. (“M. GEORGES LAPASSADE,” announced almost a full page of I.S. #9, “EST UN CON.”) It led as well to a style of absurdity and play, and to an affirmation that contestation was fun: a good way to live. The situationists delighted in the discovery that dialectics caused society to produce not just contradictions but also endless self parodies. Their journal was filled with them — my favorite is a reproduction of an ad for the Peace o’ Mind Fallout Shelter Com­pany. And the comics that illustrated I.S. led to détournement of the putative heroes of everyday life. Characters out of Steve Canyon and True Romance were given new balloons, and made to speak passionately of revolution, alienation, and the lie of culture — as if even the most unlikely people actually cared about such things. In the pages of I.S., a kiss suggested not marriage but fantasies of liberation: a sigh for the Paris Commune.

The theory of exemplary acts and the quest for a new language of action also brought the situationists’ pursuit of ex­tremism into play. I.S #10, March 1966, on the Watts riots: “…all those who went so far as to recognize the ‘apparent justifications’ of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks… all those ‘theorists’ and ‘spokesmen’ of interna­tional Left, or rather of its nothingness, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets for plunder)… But who has defended the rioters of Los Angeles in the terms they deserve? We will.” The article continued: “The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle, ‘To each according to his false needs’… [but] real desires begin to be expressed in festival, in the potlatch of destruction… For the first time it is not poverty but material abundance which must be dominated [and of course it was the rela­tive “affluence” of the Watts rioters, at least as compared to black Americans in Harlem, that so mystified the observers of this first outbreak of violent black rage]… Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.”


“The task of being more extremist than the SI falls to the SI itself,” the situationists said; that was the basis of the group’s con­tinuation. The situationists looked for ex­emplary acts which might reveal to spec­tators that that was all they were. They cited, celebrated, and analyzed incidents which dramatized the contradictions of modern so­ciety, and contained suggestions of what forms a real contestation of that society might take. Such acts included the Watts riots; the resistance of students and workers to the Chinese cultural revolution (a struggle, the situationists wrote, of “the official owners of the ideology against the majority of the owners of the apparatus of the economy and the state”); the burning of the Koran in the streets of Baghdad in 1959; the exposure of a site meant to house part of the British government in the event of nuclear war; the “kidnapping” of art works by Caracas stu­dents, who used them to demand the release of political prisoners; the Free Speech Move­ment in Berkeley in 1964; the situationist-­inspired disruption of classes taught by French cyberneticians in 1966 at Strasbourg, and by sociologists at Nanterre in 1967 and 1968; and the subversion of Berlin actor Wolfgang Neuss, who in 1963 “perpetrated a most suggestive act of sabotage… by placing a notice in the paper Der Abend giving away the identity of the killer in a television serial that had been keeping the masses in suspense for weeks.”


Some of these actions led nowhere; some, like the assaults on the cyberneticians and sociologists, led to May 1968, where the idea of general contestation on the plane of ap­pearances was realized.

The situationist idea was to prevent the recuperation of such incidents by making theory out of them. Once the speech of the spectacle no longer held a monopoly, it would be heard as babble — as mystification ex­posed. Those who took part in wildcat strikes or practiced cultural sabotage, the situationists argued, acted out of boredom, rage, disgust — out of an inchoate but inescapable perception that they were not free and, worse, could not form a real image of free­dom. Yet there were tentative images of free­dom being shaped, which, if made into theory, could allow people to understand and maintain their own actions. Out of this, a real image of freedom would appear, and it would dominate: the state and society would begin to dissolve. Resistance to that dissolution would be stillborn, because workers, soldiers, and bureaucrats would act on new possi­bilities of freedom no less than anyone else­ — they would join in a general wildcat strike that would end only when society was reconstructed on new terms. When the theory matched the pieces of practice from which the theory was derived, the world would change.

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— 7 —

The situationist program — as opposed to the situationist project, the situationist practice — came down to Lautréamont and work­ers’ councils. On one side, the avant-garde saint of negation, who had written that poetry “must be made by all”; on the other, the self-starting, self-managing organs of di­rect democracy that had appeared in almost every revolutionary moment of the 20th cen­tury, bypassing the state and allowing for complete participation (the soviets of Petro­grad in 1905 and 1917, the German Räte of 1919, the anarchist collectives of Barcelona in 1936, the Hungarian councils of 1956). Be­tween those poles, the situationists thought, one would find the liberation of everyday life, the part of experience that was omitted from the history books.

These were the situationist touchstones — and, oddly, they were left unexamined. The situationists’ use of workers’ councils re­minds me of those moments in D.W. Grif­fith’s Abraham Lincoln when, stumped by how to get out of a scene, he simply had Walter Huston gaze heavenward and utter the magic words, “The Union!” It is true that the direct democracy of workers’ councils — ­where anyone was allowed to speak, where representation was kept to a minimum and delegates were recallable at any moment — was anathema both to the Bolsheviks and to the Right. It may also have been only the crisis of a revolutionary situation that pro­duced the energy necessary to sustain council politics. The situationists wrote that no one had tried to find out how people had actually lived during those brief moments when revo­lutionary contestation had found its form — a form that would shape the new society — but they did not try either. They spoke endlessly about “everyday life,” but ignored work that examined it both politically and in its smallest details (James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, the books of the Annale school, Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and A Berlin Chronicle, the writing of Larissa Reissner, a Pravda correspondent who covered Weimar Germany), and pro­duced nothing to match it.

But if Lautréamont, workers’ councils, and everyday life were more signposts than true elements of a theory, they worked as signposts. The very distance of such images from the world as it was conventionally un­derstood helped expose what that the world con­cealed. What appeared between the signposts of Lautréamont and workers’ councils was the possibility of critique.

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Pursued without compromise or self-censorship, that critique liberated the situ­ationists from the reassurances of ideology as surely as the experiments of the Lettrist In­ternational had liberated its members from the seductions of the bourgeois art world. It opened up a space of freedom, and was a necessary preface to the new language of action the situationists were after. A single example will do: the situationist analysis of Vietnam, published in I.S. #11 in March 1967 — almost frightening in its prescience, and perhaps even more frightening in its clarity.


“It is obviously impossible to seek, at the moment, a revolutionary solution to the Vietnam war,” said the anonymous writer. “It is first of all necessary to put an end to the American aggression in order to allow the real social struggle in Vietnam to develop in a natural way; that is to say, to allow the Vietnamese workers and peasants to re­discover their enemies at home; the bureau­cracy of the North and all the propertied and ruling strata of the South. The withdrawal of the Americans will mean that the Stalinist bureaucracy will immediately seize control of the whole country: this is the unavoidable conclusion. Because the invaders cannot in­definitely sustain their aggression; ever since Talleyrand it has been a commonplace that one can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. The point, therefore, is not to give unconditional (or even conditional) support to the Vietcong, but to struggle consistently and without any concessions against Ameri­can imperialism… The Vietnam war is rooted in America and it is from there that it must be rooted out.” This was a long way from the situationists’ rejection of the Beat generation, but the road had been a straight one.

If the situationists were fooled, it was only by themselves; they were not fooled by the world. They understood, as no one else of their time did, why major events — May 1968, the Free Speech Movement, or, for that mat­ter, Malcolm McLaren’s experiment with what Simon Frith has called the politiciza­tion of consumption — arise out of what are, seemingly, the most trivial provocations and the most banal repressions. They understood why the smallest incidents can lead, with astonishing speed, to a reopening of all ques­tions. Specific, localized explanations tied to economic crises and political contexts never work, because the reason such events de­veloped as they did was what the situationists said it was: people were bored, they were not free, they did not know how to say so. Given the chance, they would say so. People could not form a real image of freedom, and they would seize any opportunity that made the construction of such an image possible.

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— 8 —


Leaving the 20th Century, edited and translated by former British situationist Christopher Gray, published only in the UK and long out of print, was until Ken Knabb’s book the best representation of situationist writing in English, and it was not good. Translations were messy and inaccurate, the selection of articles erratic and confusing, the commentary often mushy.

With the exception of a good edition of The Society of the Spectacle put out by Black & Red of Detroit in 1977, other situ­ationist work in English was far worse. A few pieces — “The Decline and Fall of the Specta­cle-Commodity Society” (on Watts), “On the Poverty of Student Life” (the SI’s most fa­mous publication, which caused a scandal in France in 1966 and prefigured the May 1968 revolt), “The Beginning of an Era” (on May 1968) — appeared as smudgy, sometimes gruesomely typeset and translated pamphlets. Most were put out by the short­-lived British or American sections of the SI, or by small situationist-inspired groups in New York or Berkeley.

The situationist journal, and the situ­ationist books as they were originally pub­lished in Paris, could not have been more different. Wonderfully illustrated with photos, comics, reproductions of advertise­ments, drawings, and maps, Internationale Situationniste had an elegant, straight­forward design: flat, cool, and direct. It made a simple point: what we have written is meant seriously and should be read seriously.

The Situationist International Anthology does not present the complete text of the situationist journal, and it has no illustrations. But the translations are clear and readable — sometimes too literal, sometimes inspired. Entirely self-published, the anthology is a better job of book-making than most of the books published today by com­mercial houses. There are virtually no typos; it is well indexed, briefly but usefully an­notated, and the design, binding, and print­ing are all first class.

In other words, Knabb has, unlike most other publishers of situationist material in English, taken the material seriously, and allowed it to speak with something like its original authority. One can follow the devel­opment of a group of writers which devoted itself to living up to one of its original prescriptions: “The task of an avant-garde is to keep abreast of reality.”

The situationist journal was never copyrighted. Rather, it bore this legend: “All the texts published in International Situationniste may be freely reproduced, trans­lated, or adapted, even without indication of origin.” Knabb’s book carries an equivalent notation.

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William S. Burroughs Talks With Tennessee Williams
by THE VILLAGE VOICE ARCHIVES

— 9 —


The role of the Situationist International, its members wrote, was not to act as any sort of vanguard party. The situationists “had to know how to wait,” and to be ready to disap­pear in a common festival of revolt. Their job was not to “build” the SI, as the job of a Trotskyist or Bolshevik militant is to build his or her organization, trimming all thoughts and all pronouncements to that goal, careful not to offend anyone who might be seduced or recruited. Their job was to think and speak as clearly as possible — not to get people to listen to speeches, they said, but to get people to think for themselves.

Rather than expanding their group, the situationists worked to make it smaller, ex­pelling careerist, backsliding, or art-as-poli­tics (as opposed to politics-as-art) members almost from the day the group was formed. By the time of the May 1968 revolt, the Situationist International was composed mostly of Parisians hardly more numerous­ — perhaps less numerous — than those who walked the streets as the Lettrist Interna­tional. Behind them they had 11 numbers of their journal, more than a decade of fitting theory to fragments of practice, and the scan­dals of Strasbourg and Nanterre, both of which gained them a far wider audience than they had ever had before. And so, in May, they made a difference. They defined the mood and the spirit of the event: almost all of the most memorable graffiti from that explosion came, as inspiration or simply quota­tion, from situationist books and essays. “Those who talk about revolution and class struggle, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints,” ran one apparently spontaneous slogan, in fact a quote from Raoul Vaneigem, “such people have corpses in their mouths.”

At the liberated Sorbonne and later in their own Council for Maintaining the Oc­cupations, the situationists struggled against reformism, working to define the most radi­cal possibilities of the May revolt — “[This] is now a revolutionary movement,” read their “Address to All Workers” of May 30, 1968, “a movement which lacks nothing but the con­sciousness of what it has already done in order to triumph” — which meant, in the end, that the situationists would leave behind the most radical definition of the failure of that revolt. It was an event the situationists had constructed, in the pages of their journal, long before it took place. One can look back to January 1963 and read in I.S. #8: “We will only organize the detonation.”

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— 10 —


What to make of this strange mix of post-surrealist ideas about art, Marxian concepts of alienation, an attempt to recover a forgot­ten revolutionary tradition, millenarianism, and plain refusal of the world combined with a desire to smash it? Nothing, perhaps. The Situationist International cannot even be justified by piggy-backing it onto official his­tory, onto May 1968, not because that revolt failed, but because it disappeared. If 300 books on May 1968 were published within a year of the event, as I.S. #12 trumpeted, how many were published in the years to follow? If the situationist idea of general contestation was realized in May 1968, the idea also re­alized its limits. The theory of the exemplary act — and May was one great, complex, momentarily controlling exemplary act —­ may have gone as far as such a theory or such an act can go.

What one can make of the material in the Situationist International Anthology is perhaps this: out of the goals and the perspectives the situationists defined for themselves came a critique so strong it forces one to try to understand its sources and its shape, no matter how much of it one might see through. In an attack on the Situationist International published in 1978, Jean Barrot wrote that it had wound up “being used as literature.” This is undoubtedly true, and it is as well a rather bizarre dismissal of the way in which people might use literature. “An author who teaches a writer nothing,” Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Author as Pro­ducer,” “teaches nobody anything. The de­termining factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.” The fact is that the writing in the Situationist International Anthology makes almost all present-day political and aesthetic thinking seem cowardly, self-protecting, careerist, and satisfied. The book is a means to the recovery of ambition.
















FROM HIS PHENOMENAL BOOK ON THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL, 
ANARCHY AND PUNK



Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century,
Twentieth Anniversary Edition
https://www.pdfdrive.com/lipstick-traces-a-secret-history-of-the-twentieth-century-twentieth-anniversary-edition-e165956022.htm

[PDF] 
GREIL MARCUS Preface from Lipstick Traces - Sites at Penn ...
https://sites.psu.edu › punk › files › 2016/05 › Marcus-Preface_to_Lipstick...
GREIL MARCUS. Preface from Lipstick Traces (1989). From inside a London tea room, 

two well-dressed women look with mild disdain at a figure in the rain ...

“Creeping through time…” (1989 interview re: 'Lipstick Traces ...
https://greilmarcus.net › 2018/10/26 › creeping-through-time-1989-intervi...
Oct 26, 2018 - ... of Midnight, 1989, feat. GM discussing Lipstick Traces. ... This entry was posted in Interviews with Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces. Bookmark the .


LIPSTICK TRACES: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, THE SOUNDTRACK
03.15.2011


If I had to sit down and compile a list of my top favorite books—which would be difficult for me to do—there would most assuredly be a spot in the top fifty for Greil Marcus’s sprawling, idiosyncratic and essential, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.

This book is about a single serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called Anarchy in the U.K. was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock ‘n’ roll band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten, the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals.

Lipstick Traces, well, traces the critique of capitalism from the Dada art movement through the Situationist International and the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, through to the Sex Pistols and the punk rock explosion. In other words, it is the hidden history of the artistic opposition to capitalist society. It was heavily influenced by the revolutionary avant-garde punk zine “Vague” (a parody of Vogue, if that’s not obvious). I was reading “Vague” from my late teens—I still have most issues—and it had a great deal to do with shaping how I see the world. Marcus cribbed a lot from Tom Vague for Lipstick Traces, which is not to take anything away from Greil Marcus at all, but to simply give credit where its due.

Although I can recall a lot of criticism that was leveled at Lipstick Traces by reviewers when it first came out, the book’s thesis was, in my opinion, on pretty firm ground. It has certainly stood the test of time and has remained in print to this day. I’m told that it’s often used in college courses, which is unsurprising. A twentieth anniversary edition of Lipstick Traces was published by Harvard Press in 2009

But what many ardent admirers of the book don’t know, it that Rough Trade released a companion “soundtrack” CD to Lipstick Traces that came out in 1993. Like the book, it’s always had pride of place in my vast collection of “stuff.” The CD was rarely encountered in a world prior to Amazon.com (there’s not even a listing for it on Amazon today, either) but now, thanks to the fine folks at Ubuweb, these rare audio documents, lovingly assembled by Marcus, can be heard again. The selection runs the gamut of weird old hillbilly folk, doo-wop, to punk rock from the Slits, Buzzcocks. Gang of Four, The Adverts, Kleenex/Liliput, The Raincoats, The Mekons, a recording of the audience at a Clash gig, and best of all, the blistering mutant be-bop of Essential Logic’s “Wake Up.” Interspersed between the music is spoken word material from French philosopher Guy Debord, Triatan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and even Marie Osmond reciting a brain-damaged version of Hugo Ball’s nonsense poem “Karawane” that must be heard to be believed.

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
Greil Marcus
Published 1989
Art
Greil Marcus, author of "Mystery Train", widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. 'I am an antichrist!' shouted singer Johnny Rotten - where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise. This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands - demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life - seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris-based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; and, the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in the U.K.", and "God Save the Queen". Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, "Lipstick Traces" is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, "Lipstick Traces" tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

A Review «LIPSTICK TRACES: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century» by Greil Marcus
Article (PDF Available) · April 1989 

Kevin Anthony Brown
5.17
City University of New York

Abstract 

The title here, taken from the 1962 hit lyrics "Lipstick traces/On a cigarette," aptly sums up Marcus' (Village Voice columnist; Mystery Train, 1975) paradoxical project--which amounts to fashioning a text on the enduring aspects of the "hidden history" of modernism as revealed in that imprint of the ephemeral, pop music.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338912438_A_Review_LIPSTICK_TRACES_A_Secret_History_of_the_Twentieth_Century_by_Greil_Marcus


Below, Benny Spellman: “Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette)”

B  I  B  L  I  O  T  H  E  Q  U  E ~ V  I  R  T  U  E  L  L  E

 
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

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↵