Simon Sadler's The Situationist City and AnseIm Jappe's Guy Debord
Wolin, Richard
Richard Wolin THE SITUATIONIST CITY by Simon Sadler MIT Press, 1999 233 pp $18.95 paper GUY DEBORD by Anselm Jappe; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith; foreword by T J. Clark University of...
...It no longer projects into the sky but houses within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise...
...Baudelaire's flaneur, immortalized in The Flowers of Evil, seems to be another of its precursors...
...It's as though the spectacle itself has won over those who were once its most voluble critics...
...His latest book, Heidegger's Children: Philosophy, National Socialism, and German Jewish Identity, is forthcoming in 2001 from Princeton University Press...
...ANSELM JAPPE's Guy Debord offers a useful account of Debord's iconoclastic career as well as a lucid survey of his main ideas...
...Why, one wonders, did they wait so long...
...The spectacle thus accounted for the commodification of life outside of the workplace, the sphere of "free" or "leisure time...
...Lukacs's discussion of Marx's notion of "commodity fetishism" as well as his watershed account of the "reification of consciousness" provided Situationist thought with much-needed theoretical depth...
...The end result of Debord's Marxist sabbatical was the 1967 publication of Society of the Spectacle...
...By the early 1960s Debord had reached the conclusion that a cultural revolution, predicated on drifting and psychogeography, was insufficient in order to "change life...
...One such blueprint, "The Naked City," graces the cover of The Situationist City...
...This interpretation, its origins and implications for contemporary urban space, are at the heart of Simon Sadler's timely and insightful study, The Situationist City...
...An important point of departure for Letterist-Situationist thought was the prominence of capitalist-driven consumerism in French postwar society and the concomitant surrender of the capacity for qualitative (that is, non-commodified) experience...
...In an era justifiably disillusioned with the claims of "totality," Debord's uncritical embrace of such ideas has a distinctly antiquated ring...
...If you want, let's have a discussion...
...124 n DISSENT / Spring 2000...
...In a cletournement of Marx's Capital, the first sentence of Debord's book declares, "The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles...
...And, as Jappe admits, aspects of Debord's political thought remained beholden to some of the more questionable components of HegelianMarxist epistemology, such as Lukacs's romantic conception of the proletariat as the totalizing "identical subject-object" of history...
...In the early 1950s Debord met Romanian exile Isidore Isou, with whom he would cofound the Letterist International...
...In this way, Debord sought to extend Marx's theory of alienation to the realities of affluent, postwar consumer society...
...Jappe complains, with some justification, that as the May events recede in memory, commentators have tended to eulogize Debord as a literary stylist and neglect his contributions as a political thinker...
...In opposition to the capitalist hegemony of "instrumental reason," the Situationists sought to promote the principles of randomness and play...
...In the course of their experimental sketches and musings, Debord and his colleagues—Ivan Ctcheglov, Gil Wolman, Michele Bernstein (Debord's wife), the architectural futurist Constant, and the Danish painter Asger Jorn—developed a radical interpretation of the modern metropolis...
...It was meant to spur practitioners off the beaten track (in the case of Paris, away from the "grand boulevards") and in search of neglected, forlorn, or magical haunts as yet unsullied by the heavy hand of developers and planners...
...Jappe, rightly, suggests that this self-understanding "bespeaks a certain megalomania, a loss of contact with reality...
...To facilitate drifting, the Situationists produced so-called "psychogeographic maps...
...The spectacle is the material reconstruction of religious illusion," observes Debord...
...As the screen oscillated between totally blank white and black backgrounds, choice quotations and theoretical tidbits punctuated interminable stretches of silence...
...Debord's concept of the "spectacle" is undoubtedly his most profound and lasting contribution to cultural criticism...
...In a prescient 1953 text, Ctcheglov outlined the Letterist approach to urbanism: DISSENT / Spring 2000 n I2I BOOKS A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization...
...Because once vibrant movements like surrealism had become canonical and thereby lost their critical edge, the Letterist watchword became "the suppression of art...
...Yet how this autogestionniste model might be transposed to the radically altered conditions of postindustrial society, where factories were closing en masse and proletarians were vastly outnumbered by state employees and white-collar workers, was a problem Debord never addressed...
...Although there is much to admire about the Situationists' resolute anarchist gestures of defiance—in a manner highly suggestive of Marcuse's commendation of the surrealist "Great Refusal"—to translate this perspective into a form of collective political practice would be foolish, if not impossible...
...Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation...
...The same year Isou's group had, a la the surrealists, provoked a scandal at the Notre Dame cathedral when one of their number dressed up as a priest, mounted the pulpit, and announced the death of God...
...This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal—the liberation of man from cares—and become an obsessive image hanging over the present...
...HOWEVER significant were Debord's activities as a cultural theorist and filmmaker— and they remain significant indeed— during the 1960s he and his Situationist cohorts attained legendary repute as the masterminds behind the May '68 student uprising...
...Debord's own post-'68 writings are brimming with allusions to the world-historical, revolutionary importance of Situationist doctrines and ideas...
...Therein lies the essential paradox of Situationist urbanism, for myths cannot be "built...
...The practice of derive or drifting, developed jointly by Ctcheglov and Debord during the 1950s, helped define the Situationist critique of the modern city...
...Finally, Debord's espousal of avant-garde cultural practice, coupled with a distinctly workerist political orientation, remains, to say the least, extremely contradictory...
...Although Debord is probably best known as the co-founder of the Situationist International, during the 1950s he was an animating presence among a number of innovative and prophetic avant-garde cultural groupings such as Potlatch (a Letterist journal) and the ImagMist Bauhaus...
...Yet many of the criticisms one might raise concerning the Situationists' cultural theory also hold for their political views...
...The Situationist notion of "unitary urbanism," along with Constant's inspired designs for a "New Babylon" (recently featured in a stunning exhibit, "Another City for Another Life," at the Drawing Center in Soho), sought to supplant modernist rationalism with an ethos of re-enchantment—that is, ultimately, BOOKS with a new myth...
...By March 1968 the revolt had spread to the University of Nanterre outside of Paris and then to the Sorbonne, at which point the entire Latin Quarter became a battleground between students and the French riot police...
...Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences—sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine...
...Isou had first come to Debord's attention at the 1950 Cannes festival, where the Romanian showed, to a chorus of hoots and whistles, his Treatise on Slobber and Eternity—a film devoid of images that consisted of dissociated monologues and smatterings of onomatopoetic poetry...
...Drawing upon a pan-European constituency, these groups took critical aim at the disasters wrought by commodification, technology, urban planning, and the architectural brutality of the International Style...
...The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond...
...Following in Isou's footsteps, in 1952 Debord showed his first film, Howlings in Favor of Sade...
...Many of these ideas he no doubt appropriated from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group led by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort...
...The new prefabricated cities clearly exemplify the totalitarian tendency of modern capitalism's organization of life: the isolated inhabitants...
...He immersed himself in the study of Marxist thought and fell under the influence of Georg Lukacs's Hegelian-Marxist masterpiece History and Class Consciousness, which had been translated into French in the early 1960s...
...Instead it betrays a complacently celebratory character...
...And by creating an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires...
...Films are no longer possible," declared a voice during the opening sequence...
...It was enough that they dented the traditional esotericism of the intelligentsia, at a time when the American critic Clement Greenberg still held modernism's international stage with his insistence that popular culture was little short of despicable...
...Business as usual in the French capital ground to a halt...
...His death, at age sixty-two, brought to a conclusion one of the stranger episodes of postwar French politics, cinema, and letters...
...In part, the Situationists promoted the drift as a mechanism of disruption: relying on the surrealist glorification of chance, it was intended to challenge the stultifying monotony of modern urban experience...
...With the triumph of a consumer society, people in the modern world are left virtually without a thought they can legitimately call their own...
...In the Paris Manuscripts Marx had shown how, under capitalism, the economy becomes an autonomous power, indifferent to the needs of the men and women who serve it...
...In one such procedure, Debord and his associates would take a map of Paris in hand and, with the aid of scissors, arbitrarily reconstitute the city's geography...
...Their texts bear comparison with kindred American works of cultural criticism during the postwar period by Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society), and Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities...
...The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions," observes Debord, "can contribute to 122 • DISSENT / Spring 2000 clarifying certain wanderings [derives] that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences...
...Thus, the Situationists objected vigorously to Le Corbusier's disenchanted notion of modern architecture as a functionalist "machine for living in...
...In other words: it is difficult, if not impossible, to derive a set of constructive principles out of a program based on "the suppression of art...
...RICHARD WOLIN will teach European history at the Graduate Center for the City University of New York, starting in the fall...
...Debord went on to recount the story of a friend who thoroughly enjoyed a tour of Germany's Harz Mountains while following a map of London...
...It has become essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones...
...And with the Grenelle DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 123 BOOKS accords, the French political class and the communist-controlled labor unions struck a deal to compel the workers to abandon their strikes and return to work...
...separation perfected within the interior of man...
...The theory of the "drift" recommends a course of aimless wandering in order to counteract the corporate colonization of urban life...
...As the Situationists came of age during the 1950s, the utopian promise of the modern movement had taken a dystopian turn...
...Whereas for Marx and Lukacs the effects of reification (literally: "to turn into a thing") had been largely confined to the workplace, Debord's theory of the "spectacle" sought to show how, under the omnipresent pressures of advertising and the modern mass media, its effects were diffused throughout society as a whole...
...see their lives reduced to the pure triviality of the repetitive combined with the obligatory absorption of an equally repetitive spectacle...
...At this point, De Gaulle allegedly fled to Germany and contemplated summoning troops...
...The audience put an end to the spectacle after twenty minutes...
...foreword by T J. Clark University of California Press, 1999 188 pp $17.95 paper 0 N NOVEMBER 3o, 1994, Parisian dailies reported the suicide of Guy Debord...
...By now, of course, Debord's path-breaking insights have degenerated into a series of cultural left banalities and clichés...
...In Society of the Spectacle Debord carried this argument a step further...
...Cinema is dead...
...As Debord noted astutely in 1961: The introduction of technology into everyday life—ultimately taking place within the framework of bureaucratized capitalism—certainly tends rather to reduce people's independence and creativity...
...On the whole, however, this contemporary discourse sorely lacks Debord's radically disaffected and hypercritical edge...
...Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit...
...It might be seen as an ambulatory variant of the surrealist technique of "automatic writing...
...But the practice of drifting also contained a constructive element...
...Yet Sadler wonders, when all is said and done, how effective their critique really was: "Whether these ideas stood up to scrutiny was never really an issue for the avant-garde...
...As Sadler shows in The Situationist City, the Situationists' experimental approach to the problems of modern urbanism often prefigure the innovations that would succeed modernism: postmodern and deconstructive architecture...
...Between May 27 and 30 France experienced a power vacuum—no one was in control...
...In May the cause of the student radicals was taken up by striking workers at a local Renault plant and Sud-Aviation...
...Whereas in Capital Marx defined "commodity fetishism" as "a definite relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things," with the society of the spectacle, quantity had been transformed into quality: as Debord observes, "it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images...
...Under the influence of the council communist tradition, Debord became an advocate of worker self-management...
...His back against the wall, De Gaulle promised new elections...
...In 1966 the student union at the University of Strasbourg distributed the inflammatory Situationist pamphlet "On the Poverty of Student Life," which university authorities sought indelicately to suppress...
...Hence, whereas Jappe's criticisms of the posthumous "aestheticization" of Debord's legacy are apposite, today the practical value of Situationist political thought seems limited...
...Frustrated by the stagnation and immobility of postwar Europe, the Letterists sought to reenact the provocations of the interwar avant-garde in order to facilitate the renewal of culture—and, thereby, the renewal of life...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
