WHAT IS SITUATIONISM? A READER STEWART HOME ED.

https://www.academia.edu/39692391/Home_-_WHAT_IS_SITUATIONISM_A_READER

What is the Legacy of the Situationist International to the Critical Understanding of the Modern Urban Environment?

Charlie Hawksfield

In this way the Heygate estate was ahead of the game, its maze of walkways and tunnels
create a mesh of weaving paths around the estate and under the Elephant and Castle roundabout.

They are playful and irrational, some curve gracefully up to the first floor level (see figure 3)
others jut out of the blocks over the street like exterior staircases. In the tunnels under the traffic, artwork has been scrawled crudely on the walls, with the dripping ceilings and the roar of traffic. They fit neatly into the Situationist’s Unitary Urbanism model.
Constant wrote in Another City for Another Life- “we envisage covered cities in which
the layout of roads and separate buildings will be replaced by a continuous spatial construction elevated above the ground, including clusters of dwellings as well as public spaces” (Constant 1959). This is exactly what Tim Tinker had in mind when he designed the car parks, walkways and public spaces. He made the street obsolete, created unconventional elevated spaces connected by imaginative routes. I think Constant especially would have loved aspects of the Heygate estate (from certain angles it even looks like some of his designs for New Babylon).

These small innovations make the Heygate different from the French modernism of Le
Corbusier. Yes the blocks are built for household comfort, and the architecture is unbelievably ugly, but there is a sense of play here, and the galleries, walkways and tunnels should have set up lively social interactions. So where did it all go wrong?

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONIST+INTERNATIONAL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SI

Reactivating the City: Kibeho, Black Lives Matter, and the Situationist Derive ...

https://muse.jhu.edu › article

by E Diamond - ‎2018 - ‎Related articles

Oct 20, 2018 - For the situationists, postwar capitalism—or the "spectacle"—induced habits of ... The Internationale situationniste détourned a variety of pop culture ... from black and white leaders over the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965.

Situationism's failure to confront race and colonialism ...

https://conversations.e-flux.com › situationisms-failure-to-confront-race-an...

Dec 1, 2015 - Especially given its contrast with the Situationists' open and vocal defense of ... “The Watts Riot, 1985: The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity ... An online version can be found here: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.

Palm Sunday April Fools Day

How appropriate that the Divine Fool is celebrated today both because it is April Fools Day and Palm Sunday.

Radical Theologin Harvey Cox wrote a whole book on the divine fool.

The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (1969),

One of the Protestants who has addressed festivals is Harvey Cox who argued that human beings are “essentially festive and ritual creatures” (1969, 8; cf. Browning 1980). As homo festivus and homo fantasia, human beings express festivity and fantasy through festival as a form of “theatre of the body.” Cox argues that with the march of secularization and the continued rejection of festivity “Christianity has often adjusted too quickly to the categories of modernity” (Ibid. 15), and with this, important facets of what it means to be human are neglected. As a result, Cox believes that there is a real need for Christianity in the West to develop a theology of festivity

An article from that book was published back in the early Seventies in Playboy, I read it for the articles back then, which included an illustration one rarely sees; Jesus Laughing.

And, what else, the symbol of Christ that best symbolizes this theology is "Christ the Harlequin" (as in The Parable, New York World's Fair 1966), who personifies festivity and fantasy in an age that has almost lost both.

Perhaps because as a divine fool he was high.

The Feast of Fools, known also as the festum fatuorum, festum stultorum, festum hypodiaconorum, or fête des fous , are the varying names given to popular medievalfestivals regularly celebrated by the clergy and laity from the fifth century until the sixteenth century in several countries of Europe, principally France, but also Spain, Germany, England, and Scotland. A similar celebration was the Feast of Asses.

The central idea seems always to have been a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position. In the view of some, this makes the medieval festival a successor to the Roman Saturnalia.

In the medieval version the young people, who played the chief parts, chose from among their own number a mock pope, archbishop, bishop, or abbot to reign as Lord of Misrule. Participants would then "consecrate" him with many ridiculous ceremonies in the chief church of the place, giving names such as Archbishop of Dolts, Abbot of Unreason, Boy Bishop, or Pope of Fools. The protagonist could be a boy bishop or subdeacon, while at the Abbey of St Gall in the tenth century, a student each December 13 enacted the part of the abbot. In any case the parody tipped dangerously towards the profane. The ceremonies often mocked the performance of the highest offices of the church, while other persons, dressed in different kinds of masks and disguises, engaged in songs and dances and practiced all manner of revelry within the church building.

I highly recommend Harvey Cox's work which in many ways compliments Bakhtin's work on the subversive nature of the Carnival and the role playing of the Fool.

"The carnival was not only liberating because for that short period the church and state had little or no control over the lives of the revellers—although Terry Eagleton points out this would probably be 'licensed' transgression at best—but its true liberating potential can be seen in the fact that set rules and beliefs were not immune to ridicule or reconception at carnival time; it 'cleared the ground' for new ideas to enter into public discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that the European Renaissance itself was made possible by the spirit of free thinking and impiety that the carnivals engendered."

The Carnivale and Feast of Fools became recuperated in post Renaissance society as comedie della art, and play festivals like the Fringe, which exists world wide and is a popular summer festival here in Edmonton, reflect the same anarchic festivus that one would see at carnival or the earlier Fool's Feasts.

And we see the modern Carnival not only during Mardi Gras but with Feast of Fools that is the Burning Man festival. As pointed out in this article by John Morehead, whose blog is well worth perusing for it's writings on alternative religious movements..

"Burn, Baby, Burn, Christendom Inferno: Burning Man and the Festive Immolation of Christendom Culture and Modernity"

Second and related to the context of counter-modernity and counter-Christendom, Burning Man expresses itself within a cultural context that exhibits a decidedly post-modern and post-Christendom approach to spirituality. Christianity continues to play a significant role in American culture, and may have been the dominant religion in America and the Western world in the past, but in recent decades there has been a “declining influence of religion – particularly Christianity” (Heelas & Woodhead 2005, 1). This has come about through a secularization of the West which in turn has led to a spiritual re-enchantment[1] process. This re-enchantment involves the preference for spirituality rather than religion, and is characterized by an emphasis upon an individualized, subjective, and eclectic spiritual quest. In this environment of the post-modern spirituality seeker, Christianity is perceived negatively as a dogmatic institution rather than a vibrant spirituality whose adherents have often failed to live up to the moralizing they present to the culture. In reaction, many Burning Man participants have either rejected Christianity outright, or consider it of no consequence as a viable option in creating a spirituality suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century

---

[1] Christopher Partridge explores the ramifications of the re-enchantment thesis in The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1 (London & New York: T & T Clark International, 2004).

Since the play is the thing, we can see that since the earliest days of Christendom the Easter pageant played a significant role in society, as we know by way of the York Guilds which in a gift economy share their surpluses by holding feasts and a two week series of plays, it comes full circle, with the sacrificed god being the fool king.

If the power of the King/Church/State lay in divine right, the power of the people lay in the fool king whom they crowned. It is why in the movie Andre Rublev, about the icon painter, the opening scene has a village fool crucified for making fun of the priests. It too was produced in 1969 when Cox published his book.

Only by learning to laugh at the hopelessness around us can we touch the hem of hope. Christ the clown signifies our playful appreciation of the past and our comic refusal to accept the spectre of inevitability in the future. He is the incarnation of festivity and fantasy. (Harvey Cox 1969, 142)

Jesus as Fool, is a subversion on the classic church iconography of the slain and resurrected lord. For as Harliquen, fool, clown, he is life giver, alive, part of the meme of a living humanity. Not an icon but a living force. For the truth of his sacrifice is that life goes on.

Thus the religious heresies originating in Gnosticism that arose during the transition from the Catholic and Orthodox Empires to Protest-ism were about this spirit.

What if it is possible to awaken to a profound state of oneness and love, which the Gnostic Christians symbolized by the enigmatic figure of the laughing Jesus?

What the sacrifice originally meant was ironically the end of sacrifice. Which is why the religion of Christianity began with Agape feasts hidden away in caves and grotos, where all could be equal. The slave religion was about the end of sacrifice, the end of all sacrifice, not only of animals, but of people and of freedom.

Godspell: A Musical Based on the Gospel According to St Matthew (1973)

The portrayal of Jesus as a clown may have been offensive to some, however this reviewer found it to be refreshing, the clown communicates joy while communicating the seriousness of the gospel message. He reminds us that the gospel is a message of great joy and humility, love and peace, of triumph and victory. However in saying that there are some aspects that don't fit with our understanding, for instance the betrayal scene, Jesus kisses Judas. Then it does finish with a question hanging over it, that being, why no resurrection scene? Or maybe there was, perhaps the grand finale represents the risen Jesus, carried lifted high into the crowded streets, it gives a sense of inclusiveness, that somehow Jesus lives on in each one of us.

Jesus the fool returns again and again as a radical revolutionary icon for popular spirituality and its heresies, in opposition to the institutions of Christianity.

THE ENIGMA OF SANCTITY
	1950

Still, theologian Harvey Cox saw the Sixties' counterculture as a reclamation of facets of humanity eclipsed by the rise of technological society — essentially, Rossellini's jester side of man. In his book the Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity & Fantasy, Cox idenfied certain aspects of the youth revolt - the recovery of celebration and imagination — not just with a hunger for for wholeness, but vital to both psychological health and, significantly, to being able to have compassion for the oppressed of the world. A capacity for being able to imaginatively "put themselves in other shoes" was prerequisite for the developed nations to be able to have understanding and compassion for those oppressed and different than themselves.

Here we see why Rossellini takes this "jester side" so seriously and so centrally: his offering of St. Francis as a model for conflict-weary Europe isn't a simple-minded Utopian vision, a rejection of private property and reduction to begging (that begs the question "begging from whom?"), but a recovery of that sense of play and imaginative identification with others that makes people more valuable than efficiency, and the "abnormality" of the Other less prone to threaten and result in conflict. The mere existence of the jester is a check on the hubris of power in both ruler and system. In his book, Cox cites an essay by Leszek Kolakowski titled, "The Priest and the Jester":

The philosophy of the jester is a philosophy which in every epoch denounces as doubtful what appears as unshakeable; it points out the contradictions in what seems evident and incontestable; it ridicules common sense into the absurd — in other words, it undertakes the daily toil of the jester's profession along with the inevitable risk of appearing ludicrous.

The jester is the quintessence of the carnival spirit, and just as the jester's cap is pants worn on the head, carnival turns upside-down the values by which the world is typically run. Carnival mocks the pretensions of permanence and power, defies the illusions of the masses. No wonder the faith of Francis has been described as a "carnivalized" Christianity: his topsy-turvy insistence that Perfect Joy is found in suffering, his irrational love for everything and everybody, his scandalous rejection of all the world holds dear — power, property, status, etc. Technically, of course, this is Christianity, for which the adjective "carnivalized" is required only when it forgets its own scandalous identity. Yet the upsidedowness of a faith whose God is born in a stable, the meek inherit the earth, and whose secrets are given to children and fools is all too easily domesticated, and even the court of Christ himself would seem to require its own jester.

was more than a juggler. He was also a poet, singer, all-around entertainer. The Indeed, Francis referred to himself as "the jester of God," and the Italian title of Rossellini's film is Francesco, giullare di Dio — "Francis, God's Jester". The Italian term refers to a French one, jongleur — whence comes "juggler" — but the jongleurjongleur was in fact more earthy than the troubadour: the Latin joculator means "joker", and Francis's joculatores Domini ("ministrels of God") were renowed for putting on a good show when they pulled into a town to preach. Francis's name and terms point to France, home to a Medieval love cult which, though eventually declared heretical and wiped out, left a deep and permanent mark on European culture. So much of what we know as "love in the Western world" finds its source in this flamboyantly romantic vision, including the veneration of an ideal lady — whether Dante and his Beatrice, or St. Francis and his "Lady Poverty."

Today there is the reinvention of the feast of fools, not only in the neo-pagan movement, or the Burning Man festival but in the far left as well. Paul Goodman and other Marxist Freudians talked about humans being playful, that the alienation of work under capitalism was that it meant that it was labour, as in slavery, drudgery rather than fun, playfulness. A Little Eros For Valentine's Day

Since Cox wrote his book in the sixties, the search for this human playful utopia continues.

I was involved with one utopia called Minnesota Experimental City. It was in an era when in the United States there was a lot of utopian thinking. Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City, was an all time best seller that told us that as soon as we get rid of symbol and myth, get enough guitar players and good architects and civil rights workers, the Kingdom will have come.4 Three years later he was back with a better book called The Feast of Fools.5 These were written just before New York burned and Detroit burned and Watts burned, just before the U.S. committed troops to Vietnam, just before everything went bad. But we were building Minnesota Experimental City. Fifty-eight corporations put up four million dollars for our study. Buckminster Fuller – Mr. Twenty-First Century – was on the panel; Harrison Brown (Lyndon Baines Johnson’s doctor, head of the Mayo Clinic); and then they salted it with a few humanists who would ask the human questions.

We were to build a city – utopia – of two hundred and fifty thousand people. It had to be at least seventy-five miles from any other urban centre. It would be built around a branch of the University of Minnesota; 3M and all the other big firms would have a base there. We thought through everything. It’s cold up there, how are you going to play tennis all year, and how are you going to keep people from arthritis cramps? Well, Buckinster Fuller said, "nothing to it, we build a one mile square plastic dome." How do we get on with pollution? Well, we owe you a ride on an elevator in a building, so we owe you horizontal transportation in our Minnesota Experimental City. You get to the edge, and we’ll take care of you from there.

Situationism was a game of revolution and revolutionaries at play in the Sixties. So it makes sense that the recuperation of their radical politics should, like the surrealists before them, end on the stage. For once the world of 1968 was their stage today they are the play.

The meta-play is an example of Reflectionism through performance. Professor Steve Mann of the University of Toronto, who invented EyeTap to literally mediate monocultural reality, proposes: ﾅReflectionism as a new philosophical framework for questioning social values. The Reflectionist philosophy borrows from the Situationist movement in art and, in particular, an aspect of the Situationist movement called d￩tournement, in which artists often appropriate tools of the "oppressor" and then resituate these tools in a disturbing and disorienting fashion. Reflectionism attempts to take this tradition one step further, not only by appropriating the tools of the oppressor, but by turning those same tools against the oppressor as well. I coined the term "Reflectionism" because of the "mirrorlike" symmetry that is its end goal and because the goal is also to induce deep thought ("reflection") through the construction of this mirror. Reflectionism allows society to confront itself or to see its own absurdity. The participants of the meta-play who do not wish to see themselves in the mirror (thus confronting themselves) quickly turn away, but are left with the lingering image of grotesque ugliness, which will haunt them until a profound internal resolution is reached. Drawing upon traditional folly, but appearing in a disenchanted post-modern society, the concept of The Fool is resurrected, challenging and satirizing oppressors in order to cause reflection on their positions, attitudes, and worldviews. Harvey Cox describes the Foolﾒs perennial message in his 1969 The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy: It is the eternal message of The Fool, who takes the stage whenever greed, arrogance, authority, pride and sycophancy lay claim to the public headspace. These are the acts of real fools, without which The Fool would be useless and mute. The Fool is a looking-glass. She is male and female, he is human and animal, they are one moment immersed in the workaday routine and the next overturning the norms of daily life. When we play The Fool, we are The Other, strangers who are in this world but not entirely of it. The ancient term Narrenfreiheit means "freedom of the fool." That freedom reminds us that in a moment of ecstasy we can sweep away the illusion of so much of what we endure. The Fool breaks the trail; the revolutionaries follow. Those who participate, reflect, and achieve the ﾓmoment of ecstasy,ﾔ will soon realise that playing the Fool is not only one of the most satisfying and liberating experiences they will ever encounter, but is also an urgent direct action to reclaim the public headspace. To counter the oppressive and ubiquitous corporate monoculture that is so prevalent in late capitalist society, culture jamming through performance may well be the only solution to cause reflection, hence shattering a dystopic corporate reality. The idea will, I sincerely hope, spread like a virus until such a time whereby all human beings are free to express and play without fear of reprisal, are free from oppression and exploitation of all sorts, and are truly equal to one another.

See:

Jesus

Gnostic

Paganism

April Fools

Judas the Obscure

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Another Prehistoric Woman

My Favorite Muslim

Antinominalist Anarchism

Marxism and Religion

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
religion, Harvey Cox, Bakhtin, Jesus, Christianity, clown, Marx, feast of fools, gnosticism, fool, Christians, carnival, religion, April Fools Day, Easter, Palm Sunday, Burning Man, Harliquen

TOUT! FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY PRESS 1968-73

Tout! in context 1968-1973: French radical press at the crossroads of far left, new movements and counter-culture

Manus McGrogan

More Info: PhD 2010

Abstract

With this thesis on the aftermath of 1968 in France, I have recreated the moment and environment of the libertarian paper Tout!

Usually associated in historiography with the birth of the gay liberation movement in France, my initial research revealed its influence as more penetrative and revealing of the diverse left and new, counter cultural movements of the early 1970s. I sought the testimony of former militants, writers and artists to uncover historical detail and motivations, and consulted relevant textual archives, aiming to situate and examine the paper within a number of interrelated contexts.

Results showed the paper‟s historical touchstones of scurrilous Revolutionary papers and 19th/20th

caricature typified by L’Assiette au Beurre.

The parallel paths of Dada, surrealism and situationism, and the Marxist legacy of the Russian Revolution, foreshadowed the blend of cultural and political in Tout!May „68 was the crucible of militant, festive currents and speech, a time of rupture and reorientation for the various activists later at Tout!, the paper Action and posters of the Beaux-Arts inspiring new forms of agit-prop. In the aftermath of 1968, Mao-libertarian current Vive La Révolution converged with an ex-Trotskyist, faculty-based group seeking cultural revolution. Figureheads Roland Castroand Guy Hocquenghem oversaw the merger of these groups and outlooks, coinciding with the launch of Tout! as a „mass‟ paper. With anew look and "new political attitude‟, influenced by Italian radicals and the US underground, Tout! challenged all forms of authority in Pompidou‟s France, climaxing with the eruption of gay liberation in no.12. It was Tout! ‟s role in promoting„autonomous‟ gender, sexual and youth movements that led to the disaggregation of Vive la Révolution, and despite successful sales the paper came to a sudden end in the summer of 1971.Like the rest of the far left, Vive La Révolution and Tout!suffered State repression, but evolved from a „proletarian‟ Marxist critique of capitalism to attack the life routine of work, school and the family, judging the political Right and the Parti Communiste Français as equally reactionary.The paper testified to the importance of international, indeed transnational activities of the far left in the early 1970s. It provided a formidable impulse for the gay liberation movement FHAR,and foreshadowed the first feminist paper Le Torchon Brûle. As such it was a crucial press conduit for American radical left forms and practices, spearheading a shift from gauchisme

to the growing counterculture. Tout! exemplified a brief, intense and fast-changing moment in French subcultural history and set new trends in left political journalism for the 1970

THE SITUATIONIST CITY & BEACH BENEATH THE STREETS

https://www.academia.edu/7980761/The_Situationist_City_MIT_Press_1998_

The Varieties of Capitalist Experience

Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York: Routledge, 2013

Simon Sadler

During the formative years of today’s senior architects and educators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the architectural discipline faced seismic developments in political economy and culture. Architectural education was drawn to the way that the New Left (led out, from Paris, by situationists) and counterculture (led out by hippies in the West of the US) located political consciousness close to architecture’s disciplinary heart in design, aesthetics, and everyday life. After 1968, partly in response to counterculture, architecture schools reconsidered the making of the architect and architectural culture, yet the discipline also prevented design from becoming the instrument of total revolution that the counterculture demanded. The cleft between capitalism and counterculture, in which architecture was wedged by the late 1960s, instead prompted the discipline to reassert its relative autonomy from political economy and assimilate counterculture.

Publication Date: 2013

Publication Name: Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York: Routledge

The Beach Beneath the Street

2011

McKenzie Wark

A fresh history of the Situationist International by the author of A Hacker Manifesto.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.

McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.

Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can ...

The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

Publication Date: 2011

Beneath the Street, a Preface

Ben Brucato

"This ‘interactive commentary’ is a hybrid of a review of The Beach Beneath the Street and an interview with its author, Mckenzie Wark. His book profiles the beginnings of the Situationist International in 1957 through an organizational split in 1962. Outside of the tradition of past histories of the Situationists, Wark avoids the stories of ‘great men’ and their works. Instead, his book charts an intellectual history of the movement and characters heretofore marginalized. In conversation with Wark, we find the motivation behind his attention toward the Situationists, their relevance to his body of work, and to our political moment. Much of current Marxist theory retains the totalitarian legacy of Lenin and Mao; the Situationists offer an alternative pathway for distinctly critical and libertarian theory. While contemporary cultural theorists have maintained the prominence of Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault, Wark aims for renewed attention to Lefebvre, Jorn, and Debord.

Review of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach beneath the Street 

by Anthony Hayes

 McKenzie Wark’s

The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of theSituationist International

 is full of factual errors, a few of which I have drawn attention to in the review below. However the most appalling aspect of the book is in terms of its interpretative logic. Wark disguises his opinion by making historical figures act as his mouthpiece, whether that is Asger Jorn, Alexander Trocchi or even Guy Debord at times. Wark offers nothing new in terms of commentary and also pointedly fails to make good his promise of demonstrating the ‘contemporary resonance’ of aspects of the SI’s activity. The book is a poor introduction to the SI and anyone seeking such from it should instead seek out the writings of the SI themselves—most of them are available in English translation at the following sites:

Bureau of Public Secrets, NotBored! and Situationist International Online. The problem that people who are not familiar with preservationists face in reading Wark is that Wark’s substantive position is to be discovered in what he does not say and

leaves out  in order to fashion an account favourable to his barely concealed bias, in this case the boring old chestnut of favouring the so-called ‘artistic’ SI.

Utopia and/or Spectacle: Rethinking Urban Interventions Through the Legacy of Modernism and the Situationist City

Architectural Theory Review, 2011

Lara Schrijver

The Situationist International introduced the creative, psychological, desiring individual as a counterweight to the utopian schemes of the modernist city. The resistance formulated throughout situationist principles underlies many contemporary activist urban practices. Nevertheless, the situationist approach to the city incorporated an affirmation of utopian thought. This totalizing aspect of modernist thought, still present in contemporary discourse, constrains our understanding of the potential of micro-interventions in the city. Although the “right to the city” may be crucial to reclaiming an active engagement with our urban environment, this paper discusses some limitations of situationist ideas, arguing that current urban practice requires a new discourse beyond the by now well-known frame of resistance and negation.

More Info: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Architectural Theory Review on 13 December, 2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2011.621545

Journal Name: Architectural Theory Review

Publication Date: 2011

Publication Name: Architectural Theory Review

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SI

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONISM

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=SITUATIONIST+INTERNATIONAL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=ANARCHISM

CrimethInc.'s Lifestyle Anarchism: Is it Revolutionary or Just a Petty-Bourgeois Prank? 

(Anarchist Studies Network Conference 2008)

Peter Seyferth


CrimethInc.’s Lifestyle Anarchism: Is it Revolutionary or just a Petty Bourgeois Prank?
By Peter Seyferth

CrimethInc. is a youthful group of anarchists with roots in Situationism and subcultures like punk rock. In their aesthetically outstanding publications they advocate dropping out of school or work and adopting an ecstatic, fun-seeking, petty criminal counter-cultural lifestyle that they claim is anarchistic and revolutionary.

CrimethInc. has been attacked by several anarchists (mostly adherents of syndicalist or insurrectionist lifestyles) for different reasons: According to those critics, CrimethInc. is a bunch of arrogant, privileged, white middle-class kids. Therefore CrimethInc. has no class analysis or “real theory” and does not understand or explain capitalism fully. They are much too simplistic and reduce society to the tension between having fun and being bored, while they should reduce it to class antagonism. They also ignore the central role of white supremacy. Consequently, CrimethInc. initiates actions that are not only useless (like Food Not Bombs or squatting) and non-threatening to capitalism and the state (because counter-cultures validate the dominant culture), but that are in fact dependent on capitalism’s oppression of non-whites and the poor, and that are hence directed against revolution. What CrimethInc. should do, according to the critics, is to provide serious revolutionary information (about school and workplace unions, about solidarity with struggling communities, about building social centers, and about supporting prisoners and asylum seekers etc.) and to engage in physical attacks on the system (e.g. bombing police stations).

For the most part, these criticisms are reactions to CrimethInc.’s introductory book Days of War Nights of Love (2000). Since then, many books, journals, papers, pamphlets, and other publications have been released by the CrimethInc. collective. In those works they defend their perspective and present it as part of a broader, more inclusive approach to revolution: There is not one objectively right way to overthrow capitalism, but there are many—and this is a strength rather than weakness. The CrimethInc. authors offer an “admittedly cursory analysis of class and declassing” in which they call desertion and refusal “the essence of resistance,” especially since unemployment rates are constantly increasing and workplace organization is further loosing relevance. In numerous “How to…” articles they give most of the serious revolutionary information requested by their critics. Issues of race and gender are dealt with, struggles abroad are given attention to.

In my contribution to the panel and/or publication I will analyze most of the CrimethInc. publications to date. I will concentrate primarily on the possible range of prefigurative politics in fields like class/classlessness, gender, race, and other dividing lines—and how useful CrimethInc.’s recommended “recipes” are. What would one have to add to this joyous and playful lifestyle to make it more threatening and thus revolutionary? To this question I hope I can offer answers that are at least worthy of discussion.

Location: Loughborough University, UK
Event Date: Sep 6, 2008

LIKE ADBUSTERS CRIMETHINC. IS A CONSUMER CULTURE REVOLT THE ANARCHISM OF BREAKING STARBUCKS WINDOWS THE DAY AFTER YOU
WENT FOR AN AMERICANO 

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=ANARCHY

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=ANARCHISM

SITUATIONISM AS POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY

Spectacular Infrastructure: Madrid’s Pandemic Hospital between Public Spectacle and Speculation

By Janina Kehr

Lectu

February 2, 2021

This article is part of the series: The Hospital Multiple

On a fresh autumn day in 2019, under Madrid’s deep-blue sky, I went for a morning coffee with Ernesto, an infectious-disease physician working in one of Spain’s largest public university hospitals, located in the city center. At the time, I was doing fieldwork on the consequences of Spain’s austerity policies for public healthcare in Madrid. Before passing through the hospital gates, which open onto a busy two-lane street filled with busses, taxis, and delivery vans, we passed by a colorful sign in the hospital gardens that stated: “We are building the hospital of the future.”

When I asked Ernesto who would be paying for the hospital extension, given the lack of money in Madrid’s health service, he answered dryly: “The regional government is paying for the new building; it’s public money, well-spent here. But then there is the whole construction industry and new jobs are being created – that’s good PR. You know, this construction of a new building allows the hospital management to make highly symbolic announcements. What doesn’t interest them are the little things, the day-to-day (el día a día).”

Change of setting, nine months and one global pandemic later.

Just after the first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, on June 8, 2020, the president of the Autonomous Community of Madrid announced the imminent construction of a brand-new “emergency hospital” (hospital de emergencias) in the city at an overall cost of 50 million euros,[1] which Madrid’s inhabitants simply call “the pandemic hospital”. By then, the COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in almost half a million cases and 30,000 COVID deaths in Spain.[2] Madrid had been the epicenter of the disease. A few weeks later, 14 companies and four architectural firms had been contracted in an economic emergency procedure[3] that legally suspended the ordinary rules of public contracting.[4] Construction has been in full swing ever since, and, on December 1, 2020, the president of the Autonomous Community officially opened the hospital, baptized as the “Hospital Enfermera Isabel Zendal”,[5] despite it still largely being a construction site.

“Hospital Enfermera Isabel Zendal” (Photo by Miguel Salas Capapey)

During the inauguration ceremony, the president announced: “Today is a day of hope and excitement. … Madrid and Spain can count on a new, world-class center without precedent in Spain and Europe.”[6] The 40,000 square meters of the hospital, once fully completed, are to be equipped with approximately 1,000 beds and will host four modular pavilions for patient treatment and centralized equipment storage. The regional government affirmed that the hospital is capable of responding “to any type of epidemic/pandemic in the future.”[7]

Yet, despite these extremely positive statements the hospital has been highly contested. During its inauguration, unionists, concerned citizens and health professionals assembled before its gates to protest the opening. The protesters could be heard chanting “It’s not a hospital, it’s a set” (No es un hospital, es un decorado),[8] and in media interviews construction workers stated “It’s not a hospital, it’s a construction site” (No es un hospital, es un solar).[9] In my contribution, I propose thinking of this as-yet-unfinished hospital as a speculative infrastructure that gives material form to a spectacle of care. I thereby intend to reflect on what this spectacular hospital infrastructure might teach us about hospitals as such; that is, “hospitals as they are diversely built, inhabited, maintained, worked in, transformed, destroyed, closed, imagined, experienced or judged by different people and their realities” (Chabrol and Kehr 2020).

Hospital ethnography, in its narrow definition as ethnographic fieldwork inside a hospital, was not an option for me when researching the new pandemic hospital, for two main reasons: it is still currently a construction site, and I was unable to travel to Spain due to COVID-19. My argument therefore relies mostly on written sources, such as media reports, Twitter conversations or press releases related to the building process, and on regular email and telephone conversations with health professionals in Madrid. While my contribution thus remains silent on such “classical” topics of hospital ethnography as clinical practices or patient experiences, political, legal and economic challenges come to the fore, which I have already investigated ethnographically in Spanish medical institutions. Such difficulties linger in hospitals all over the world, but are oftentimes overshadowed by the primacy of day-to-day practices of medical treatment and illness experience. Through a focus on the public health context, the construction process and the multiple criticisms of a hospital-in-the-making, I explicitly foreground these latently lingering more-than-medical issues. I thereby try to show the extent to which hospitals are not only “affective infrastructures” (Street 2012) where “ordinary medicine” (Kaufman 2015) takes place, but also spectacular infrastructures where spectacles of care and speculation are rendered possible through specific affective, economic and legal regimes. Modern medicine functions within these regimes in Spain today.

A Spectacle of Care

The hospital Isabel Zendal, with its storehous-like appearance, was modeled on the “hospital de IFEMA”: a temporary field hospital set up in one of the buildings on the site of Madrid’s international fair at the height of the COVID-19 epidemic in mid-March 2020. Set up within days, this improvised infrastructure was often referred to in media and government reports as a “miracle hospital” (hospital de milagro). Four thousand patients were treated there between March and April 2020.[10] For government representatives, the IFEMA hospital has become the symbol of “society’s and the government’s fight against the virus”,[11] not unlike the makeshift hospitals in Wuhan. The first pictures of the IFEMA field hospital were indeed spectacular: hundreds of new hospital beds meticulously aligned, storage areas with thousands of boxes of personal protective equipment, temporary hospital rooms awaiting large numbers of patients so as to alleviate Madrid’s collapsing public hospitals.[12] These pictures stood as a visual symbol of order, material upscaling and medical command during the chaotic uncertainties of an evolving epidemic.

The new permanent emergency hospital, according to the Madrid government, will aim to replicate “IFEMA’s success”. It is built to be “flexible” and “quickly upscalable”, “multipurpose, based on sectorizable wards … so that only the necessary parts can be staffed”.[13] Equipped with the “most advanced” medical technologies, it is advertised as a “reference center”, capable of “adapting to any functional plan”.[14] Once finished, it will host “50 ICU and intermediate care stations, diagnostic imaging areas, a laboratory, as well as a space for research, training and development, and a center for the simulation of new therapeutic solutions for pandemics”.[15]

But while excavators, cranes and constructions workers have built new hospital walls, arranged beds and installed the latest computer systems in next to no time, there is, to date, no solid plan regarding who will actually work inside the hospital. Recent media articles have reported that it might be staffed with “voluntary personnel” from Madrid’s existing public hospitals and primary care centers,[16] but professional unions have for now refused.[17] Instead, a wave of indignation continues to sweep the community of healthcare professionals in the region, some of whom regard the pandemic hospital as a nonsensical project. Many in Madrid indeed see the new hospital as a structure unnecessary and overpublicized.[18] According to the major newspaper El Pais, rather than being an efficient public health solution to the ongoing pandemic, the hospital exhibits “a great fondness for bricks”, with a “bias towards the building, the beds, what you can see and feel”.[19] Professional organizations, such as an independent nursing association, made similar comments on Twitter: “There are plenty of bricks left over but not enough professionals (sobran ladrillos, faltan profesionales)”. The term brick, ladrillo in Spanish, has long been a symbol of the country’s speculative construction industry, which contributed to the 2008 housing and mortgage crisis and subsequent recession in Spain (Ravelli 2013). Severe austerity measures in healthcare followed, which are partly responsible for the considerable strain on the public health system in Madrid that we are witnessing today (Kehr 2019).

To recap: a new hospital is being built by the regional government, without the support of health professionals or a plan to staff it. The goal of the construction, as health professionals’ vocal critiques reveal, thus seems to be neither pandemic control nor medical care. Rather, the government has literally constructed a spectacle of care with bricks, in which “the goal is nothing, development is everything”, to borrow the words of Guy Debord from his work The Society of the Spectacle (2005, 10). By constructing this emergency hospital, by showcasing plans, cranes and the construction site, by communicating about beds and ventilators, the building of the new hospital infrastructure has become a goal in itself. It is also “a reflection of the ruling economic order” (Debord 2005, 10) in Spain, its health system included, where political promises of care rely on economic speculation with bricks. In Madrid in particular, it also illustrates how far hospitals have become deeply entangled with national real-estate.

Construction projects like this make nationalist promises of care that perpetuate a long-standing hospitalocentric vision of healthcare in the country (Perdiguero-Gil and Comelles 2019). Already in the 1960s, new social security laws materialized in the building of hospitals in the form of “sanitary cities” (cuidades sanitarias) by Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who ruled until 1975. This happened in all major Spanish cities from 1964 onwards (Pieltáin Álvarez-Arenas 2003, 78). Thus, hospitalocentrism was but one facet of a technocratic infrastructural building programme in totalitarian Spain that also included dams and motorways, and in which engineers and architects were held in high esteem (Camprubí 2014; Swyngedouw 2015). Such infrastructural projects and their nationalist specters are reappearing once more in Madrid’s new hospital of speculation. Visiting the construction site in October 2020, the president of the Autonomous Community of Madrid said: “This is a Spanish brand and shows how our engineers and architects are the best”.[20] The pandemic hospital, much like IFEMA before it, is thus not only a highly symbolic, sovereign spectacle of control during the uncertainties of a global pandemic that has left deep scars and a profound sense of helplessness in the lives of many Spaniards. It is also an act of political and economic speculation with care for the nation. In this hospitalocentric exercise, where spectacle and speculation meet, there is little space for the difficulties of ordinary, day-to-day medicine and its “little things”, as Ernesto would say.

Day-to-day Medicine

Day-to-day medicine in Madrid, be it in public hospitals or in primary care settings, is indeed much less spectacular than the newly built emergency hospital. Usually, public hospitals and primary healthcare centers are staffed by health professionals who are either civil servants or, increasingly, public employees on fixed-term contracts. Spain established a national public health system in 1986, a decade after the democratic transition, that is tax-funded and universal in access. The country’s autonomous communities have a high level of sovereignty in the organization and financing of medical personnel and infrastructure. In the Madrid Autonomous Community, the public health system is one of the most drained in the country today: hospital services and primary care centers have been on the brink of collapse since the onset of the pandemic, with wards overpopulated, staff exhausted and medical supplies out of stock. Currently, primary care physicians attend to from 40 to 80 patients a day; in hospitals, staff on sick leave or vacation are habitually not replaced; hospitals – their facades, pipes and elevators – are literally crumbling.

This crisis of maintenance, resources and workforce is genuinely not new, though. It has been going on for a decade, due to the implementation of austerity measures which have left hospital services at a structural limit in terms of beds and personnel, primary care centers severely underfunded, and professionals in increasingly precarious situations.[21] Almost 3,000 hospital beds have been closed in Madrid during the last 10 years, that is three times the number of 1,000 new beds promised with the emergency hospital, and there are 3,200 fewer healthcare employees in the region than 10 years ago.[22] Bea – a friend, fellow medical anthropologist and primary healthcare physician – recently told me of her frustration about her medical everyday: “One of the issues now is that primary healthcare is collapsing without anybody paying attention to it … . The workload is unbearable.” Since our email exchange, she has quit her work in primary care, like others in the small but active #YoRenuncio (“I resign”) movement.[23]

To those familiar with this unglamorous medical “day-to-day”, as Ernesto called it, that “nobody is paying attention to” as Bea said, the government’s investment in a new hospital amounts to “selling smoke”, vender humo, which means making a false promise. I often heard the expression vender humo during fieldwork when I talked with health professionals or patients about proposed investments in relation to promised healthcare infrastructures, for example the rebuilding of the famous Spanish hospital La Paz from scratch at a cost of 350 million euros in 2018.[24] “Selling smoke”, here, describes spectacles of care, through which the government sporadically invests in spectacular infrastructures, like hospitals, thereby obscuring the ordinary conditions of medical practice. In this sense, spectacles of care are a communicative play with people’s expectations of care and, currently, epidemic anxieties, that veils the steady dismantling of public health services and the ever tighter management of staff and maintenance that has been ongoing for at least a decade. The expression vender humo expresses well the double movement of obscuring the material and experiential difficulties of ordinary medicine, while selling promises of care through spectacular infrastructures.

Speculation

Let me say a few more words about the location of the new hospital, which is not accidental. The hospital is situated in the far north of the city, in Valdebebas. This large urban development area is bordered by motorways, the international airport hub Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas, and the Ciudad Real Madrid, the training complex of the world-famous football club. The hospital construction is an intrinsic part of the urban development project of this business and public service area, surrounded by major traffic junctions. Only recently the president of the Autonomous Community declared that very soon “all Madrid residents and all Spaniards can enjoy a new public hospital next to an airport, in a matchless location”.[25]

Forms of emergency contracting in healthcare, be it the construction of hospitals or the provision of personal protective equipment, were rendered possible in pandemic Madrid through the royal pandemic emergency law and, as far as the hospital construction is concerned, the regional 2001 land law’s special clauses on “exceptional public interest”. The latter permitted the government to obtain permission to build the hospital on communal land in Valdebebas through a shortened real-estate procedure as provided for “in art. 161 of the Land Law (Ley de Suelo)”.[26] Also, faced with the COVID-19 emergency, as stated in the aforementioned new Royal Decree 7/2020 of March 12, contract adjudications for construction firms have been speeded up: the call for tender on the hospital project was much quicker than public contracting procedures usually are and was severely limited in terms of transparency and corporate responsibility, as contracts were adjudicated “by hand”[27] – that is through individual decisions. Also, payments from public funds are regularly made in advance to private companies, that is even before the agreed assignments have been executed.[28]

This legal regime thus allowed for the rapid spending of public money on the emergency hospital in the first place, without public or professional deliberation. Around 100 million euros or more of public capital, that is at least double the amount announced at the beginning of construction,[29] thereby flowed into private firms within a matter of weeks. All this happened while primary healthcare has been gradually collapsing in the region, while hospital wards that had been built in the 2000s remain closed (see below), and while the regional public health service lost 3,000 healthcare workers within 10 years. Most of the 14 firms commissioned to build the hospital are large Spanish enterprises that operate globally, such as Ferrovial Servicios, Dragados and Sacyr Infraestructuras, to name just three major ones that are listed on the Stock Exchange. Unlike smaller firms, they have been able to make rapid offers for tender because of their large reserves of machines, materials and a quickly employable and exploitable workforce. All of the firms were also already operating within the public health system in Madrid. Ferrovial Servicios is in charge of hospital cleaning for some of Madrid’s major public hospitals, which have been in the eye of the storm during the pandemic, like La Paz and 12 de Octubre.[30] Dragados, a firm owned by the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Perez, has constructed the latest airport terminal, Terminal 4, nearby. The firm also built Madrid’s forensic institute, commonly known as “The Donut”, which was used as a morgue for hundreds of corpses during the first wave of the pandemic, and around which the new hospital is being constructed. Sacyr Infraestructuras was involved in the construction of the twelve public–private partnership hospitals in the 2000s,[31] during the years before the financial crisis, and during the height of the pandemic in March 2020 was quickly providing ICU beds at a high cost for the repurposed library areas in the public hospital where Ernesto works.[32]

“The Donut” (Photo by Miguel Salas Capapey)

Spectacular Infrastructure

New hospitals are the paradigmatic infrastructures of a speculative healthcare economy, which operates through a double market of value. Care is performed through public spectacle by building expensive new infrastructure with public investment, while maintenance as well as ordinary medicine remain structurally under-resourced through a shortage of staff and funds. In Spain, public investment in spectacular infrastructures heavily relies on real-estate development, which itself is a form of capitalist power. David Harvey has shown that, “command over space … is always a crucial form of social power”, that is “both expansive (the power to do and to create) and coercive (the power to deny, prevent and, if necessary, to destroy). But the effect is to redistribute wealth and redirect capital flows to the benefit of the imperialist or hegemonic power at the expense of everyone else” (David Harvey cited in Korcheck 2015, 100). With the emergency hospital, the government has built a spectacular infrastructure, thereby creating a spectacle of care. At the same time, sufficient means for the existing landscape of public healthcare are continually denied, and ordinary medicine, or rather its unglamorous facets, have slowly been ruined over more than a decade. In pandemic Madrid, public healthcare materializes in a tiring everyday, for patients, families and healthcare staff. But it also materializes in the mode of “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007), where ever more public money is transferred into private hands, especially in times of crises.

Publicly funded hospitals figure uneasily here. They are speculative infrastructures, precisely because they are spectacular ones. As in most other places in the world, hospitals are the flagship sites of modern medicine; they are “affective infrastructures” (Street 2012) that deeply matter to people. Hospitals indeed perform what many Spaniards think of proudly as spectacular work. But there is more to the spectacular. Hospitals are also prone to being advertised in political spectacle in Debord’s sense, much more than the other building blocks of medicine, like primary care. “There is lots of money in hospitals, also because they are high profile electorally speaking”, one of my interlocutors, a hospital physician and local politician, told me during fieldwork in 2018. “There are things that sell and things that don’t”, she went on. “So, the things that sell are the hospital things. Some of them are indeed truly amazing: a child that has undergone transplant surgery and has survived, for example.” Hospitals are spectacular infrastructures in the sense that the spectacularized facets of modern biomedicine open up profitable possibilities of public spectacles of care. This co-presence of spectacular work and public spectacle makes hospitals prime sites of economic speculation.

In Spain particularly, public hospitals are those sites within the country’s crumbling national health system in which medical care is as much an everyday reality as speculation and capital accumulation, which run economically, politically and historically deep. Some hospital projects share traits – albeit only very partially – with the thousands of private housing development projects now lying in ruins (Korcheck 2015) that became world famous during the 2008 financial crisis and the bursting of the real-estate bubble in Spain. For many healthcare professionals in Madrid, the erection of the new emergency hospital conjures specters of the 2000s, when twelve hospitals were created as public–private partnerships, some of which are understaffed to this day, some with empty wings, where promises of care were ultimately not kept.

The investment in new public hospitals is without doubt important. They have a central care function in contemporary societies that most people would not want to miss out on. But hospitals are also objects of political spectacle and economic speculation, an aspect that cannot be written out of them. Hospitals are not situated outside capitalism and speculative finance, even if publicly funded. Hospitals are but one of capitalism’s ambivalent nodes, where capital accumulation and different economic and social values intersect. This does not impede precious forms of medical care, but shows the extent to which hospitals are spectacular infrastructures that are multiply meaningful and valuable, in medical as well as monetary, political and affective terms.

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Janina Kehr holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology. Her research encompasses infectious diseases, global health, medicine and the economy. Currently she is writing up work on public health infrastructures and practices of care at the intersection of debt economies, state bureaucracies and peoples’ experiences in austerity Spain. Twitter: @janinakehr

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Tomás Sanchez Criado and Fanny Chabrol for commenting on earlier versions of this text, Julene Knox for precious English language edits and Miguel Salas Capapey for continuing conversations and the photos of the yet unfinished hospital he generously took for this contribution.

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Notes

[1] https://www.comunidad.madrid/noticias/2020/06/08/diaz-ayuso-anuncia-hospital-emergencias-comunidad-madrid-estara-valdebebas

[2] Data retrieved from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on September 7, 2020 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea

[3] https://www.redaccionmedica.com/autonomias/madrid/las-empresas-construir-hospital-emergencias-madrid-7260

[4] https://hayderecho.expansion.com/2020/05/19/el-mal-uso-y-los-abusos-en-la-contratacion-de-emergencia-para-salir-corriendo-y-no-parar/

[5] The hospital is named after the public health nurse Isabel Zendal, who in 1803 became the first woman to accompany a smallpox vaccination expedition in the Spanish overseas colonies. On the expedition, children were used as human vessels to transport the live smallpox vaccine. For a historical account see (Mark and Rigau-Pérez 2009).

[6] https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/madrid-officials-unveil-pandemic-hospital-opponents-claim-political-stunt/

[7] https://www.comunidad.madrid/noticias/2020/06/08/diaz-ayuso-anuncia-hospital-emergencias-comunidad-madrid-estara-valdebebas

[8] https://carabanchel.net/un-hospital-sin-sanitarios-sin-camas-sin-quirofanos-sin-pacientes-que-sigue-el-modelo-carcelario-videos/

[9] https://twitter.com/jesussantosalc/status/1333686329104871425?s=20

[10] https://www.expansion.com/sociedad/2020/05/01/5eabd07ee5fdeacf758b45ab.html

[11] https://tinyurl.com/y5hfw4ed

[12] https://www.publico.es/photonews/ifema-feria-hospital-campana-cuestion.html

[13] https://www.comunidad.madrid/noticias/2020/06/08/diaz-ayuso-anuncia-hospital-emergencias-comunidad-madrid-estara-valdebebas

[14] https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/avanzan-las-obras-del-nuevo-hospital-de-emergencias-de-la-comunidad-de-madrid_1_6088244.html

[15] https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/avanzan-las-obras-del-nuevo-hospital-de-emergencias-de-la-comunidad-de-madrid_1_6088244.html

[16] https://www.larazon.es/salud/20200921/x32kzxzzkfg5dbt365o7tqpp7y.html

[17] https://www.elsaltodiario.com/sanidad-publica/sindicatos-nuevo-hospital-ayuso-valdebebas-tumba-sermas

[18] https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-06-12/un-hospital-para-pandemias-mas-mediatico-que-necesario.html

[19] https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-06-12/un-hospital-para-pandemias-mas-mediatico-que-necesario.html

[20] https://www.comunidad.madrid/noticias/2020/10/23/nuevo-hospital-emergencias-enfermera-isabel-zendal-ya-alcanza-90-su-construccion

[21] https://www.elsaltodiario.com/sanidad-publica/graficos-diez-anos-privatizaciones-recortes-comunidad-madrid

[22] https://www.publico.es/sociedad/comunidad-madrid-falta-trabajadores-camas-hospitales-madrilenos-crecen-listas-espera.html

[23] See her Twitter feed from October 24, 2020 on the reasons for quitting: https://twitter.com/bearagonm/status/1319928792656338946

[24] https://www.comunidad.madrid/hospital/lapaz/ciudadanos/diseno-nuevo-hospital-paz

[25] https://www.comunidad.madrid/noticias/2020/10/23/nuevo-hospital-emergencias-enfermera-isabel-zendal-ya-alcanza-90-su-construccion

[26] https://hospitecnia.com/noticias/nuevo-hospital-emergencias-comunidad-madrid/

[27] https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-07-07/la-otra-cara-del-nuevo-hospital-de-pandemias-de-ayuso.html

[28] For a critique of the emergency contracting procedures, see https://hayderecho.expansion.com/2020/05/19/el-mal-uso-y-los-abusos-en-la-contratacion-de-emergencia-para-salir-corriendo-y-no-parar/

[29] https://www.20minutos.es/noticia/4445407/0/el-hospital-de-pandemias-de-madrid-costara-el-doble-de-lo-presupuestado-tras-ampliar-su-superficie/

[30] https://www.elboletin.com/noticia/171036/sanidad/ferrovial-se-hace-con-la-limpieza-de-seis-hospitales-de-madrid-tras-tirar-los-precios.html

[31] https://www.abc.es/espana/madrid/abci-aguirre-anuncia-construccion-ocho-hospitales-comunidad-madrid-200403220300-962582383087_noticia.html?ref=https:%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

[32] http://www.sacyr.com/es_en/Channel/News-Channel/news/featuresnews/2020/Comunicacion/20200420_Acciones%20COVID.aspx

Works Cited

Camprubí, Lino. 2014. Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chabrol, Fanny & Janina Kehr. 2020. “The Hospital Multiple: Introduction”. Somatosphere (blog). http://somatosphere.net/2020/hospital-multiple-introduction.html/.

Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press.

Kaufman, Sharon R. 2015. Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kehr, Janina. 2019. “Se plaindre des soins dans l’Espagne de l’austérité”. Mouvements 98 (2): 32–42.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Korcheck, Kathy. 2015. “Speculative Ruins: Photographic Interrogations of the Spanish Economic Crisis”. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 19: 91–110.

Mark, Catherine, and José G. Rigau-Pérez. 2009. “The World’s First Immunization Campaign: The Spanish Smallpox Vaccine Expedition, 1803–1813”. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83 (1): 63–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.0.0173.

Perdiguero-Gil, Enrique, and Josep Comelles. 2019. “The Defence of Health: The Debates on Health Reform in 1970s Spain”. Dynamis (Granada, Spain) 39 (March): 45–72. https://doi.org/10.30827/dynamis.v39i1.8666.

Pieltáin Álvarez-Arenas, Alberto. 2003.”Los hospitales de Franco: la versión autóctona de una arquitectura moderna”. Phd, E.T.S. Arquitectura (UPM). Barcelona, Cataluña, España. http://oa.upm.es/4331/.

Ravelli, Quentin. 2013. “Le charme du ladrillo: une histoire de briques au cœur de la crise espagnole”. Vacarme 63: 142–61. https://doi.org/10.3917/vaca.063.0142.

Street, Alice. 2012. “Affective Infrastructure: Hospital Landscapes of Hope and Failure”. Space and Culture 15 (1): 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331211426061.

Swyngedouw, E. (Erik). 2015. Liquid Power: Water and Contested Modernities in Spain, 1898–2010. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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