The Situationists - Fifty Years On
Future City - the excellent new architecture exhibition at the Barbican, takes its leave from a point of extreme ambiguity: the double-edged Situationist critique of modernity and modernism, as it found expression through their more positive visions - specifically Guy Debord's psychogeography and Constant Nieuwenhuys' New Babylon. This former, the ur-philosophical praxis of urbanism. This latter, the incipient effort towards a concrete application model. No doubt, by this curatorial decision a certain ghost is invoked, a certain spectre established - specifically, in the anxious place of a kind of spiritual guiding star, for most of what later twentieth century architecture tried to invent and discover.
Is this the right spectre? Clearly, other choices also were possible. Experimental utopianism twists and turns through the graveyard of history - from the avenging angel of the Communist Manifesto, to the millions living who never died of fascist future Berlin, perhaps even possibly the fevered, invisible architecture of Daniel Paul Schreber.
Nonetheless, assigning the origin here to the Situationists is a smart move: it presents something crucial, and presents it clearly. Namely, the insight already had by Hegel: that the essence of pure (mis)perception is nothing to do with particular, subjective positions distorting things from the outside, but rather relates to a line of spectacular ambivalence, which is already internal to the objective movement of history itself.
After all - who really were the Situationists? Amongst other identities, nothing if not for Hegelians, but then just like in noir, this point rebounds back - who were they really working for? What were they really fighting for? This strange combination of Bolshevism, Anarchism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Urbanism - Lautreamont to the right of them, and Lenin to their left? The likelyhood is that they did not know themselves - despite the fact that they, and especially Debord, saw almost everything else with truly stunning clarity - for instance, Debord's 1988 mature masterpiece Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is more deeply penetrating on the question of the state control mechanisms of the "War on Terror" than any account published since.
Hal Foster today claims an art-critical context for the Situationist legacy - and on the basis affirms The Society of the Spectacle as one of the great singular masterpieces of twentieth century art-critical literature. This assertion is not ridiculous, but rather ironic and tragic. Debord himself dismissed art criticism a mere second-degree spectacle, and remained terrified throughout his career of his work being recuperated by it.
Marx already knew that although men make their own histories, they cannot choose their circumstances. This same point extends to legacies, and influence also - that which is assimilated, the idea succesfully passed on to a new generation. Clearly, some of what Debord and the Situationists passed on was not what they would have wanted to pass on - indeed, was reactionary, even harmful. As the anarchist magazine Freedom put it in 1975, 'Situationism seems to have “caught on” in the U.S.A., particularly in California, that playground of the ideologies...The American situationists seem to be repeating the pattern of mutual exclusion and criticism as occurred in Europe, and to be employing a fairly impenetrable Hegelian vocabulary.'
The deepest irony of all here is that Debord himself expressly and repeatedly rejected the very idea of "Situationism" - as he understood it, this was 'a meaningless term improperly derived from [the idea of a situationist]. 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 antisituationists.'
[This post kicks off the different maps new month-long special series of posts on architecture and related matters emerging out of the current "Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 - 2006" exhibition now being shown at the London Barbican - who should send me a check for my trouble immediately. Zizek at Birkbeck is now over - those still with Slovenian-shaped monkeys on their backs are advised to check-out Padraig's excellent photo-montage transcription of "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" at Subject Barred.]
Is this the right spectre? Clearly, other choices also were possible. Experimental utopianism twists and turns through the graveyard of history - from the avenging angel of the Communist Manifesto, to the millions living who never died of fascist future Berlin, perhaps even possibly the fevered, invisible architecture of Daniel Paul Schreber.
Nonetheless, assigning the origin here to the Situationists is a smart move: it presents something crucial, and presents it clearly. Namely, the insight already had by Hegel: that the essence of pure (mis)perception is nothing to do with particular, subjective positions distorting things from the outside, but rather relates to a line of spectacular ambivalence, which is already internal to the objective movement of history itself.
After all - who really were the Situationists? Amongst other identities, nothing if not for Hegelians, but then just like in noir, this point rebounds back - who were they really working for? What were they really fighting for? This strange combination of Bolshevism, Anarchism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Urbanism - Lautreamont to the right of them, and Lenin to their left? The likelyhood is that they did not know themselves - despite the fact that they, and especially Debord, saw almost everything else with truly stunning clarity - for instance, Debord's 1988 mature masterpiece Comments on the Society of the Spectacle is more deeply penetrating on the question of the state control mechanisms of the "War on Terror" than any account published since.
Hal Foster today claims an art-critical context for the Situationist legacy - and on the basis affirms The Society of the Spectacle as one of the great singular masterpieces of twentieth century art-critical literature. This assertion is not ridiculous, but rather ironic and tragic. Debord himself dismissed art criticism a mere second-degree spectacle, and remained terrified throughout his career of his work being recuperated by it.
Marx already knew that although men make their own histories, they cannot choose their circumstances. This same point extends to legacies, and influence also - that which is assimilated, the idea succesfully passed on to a new generation. Clearly, some of what Debord and the Situationists passed on was not what they would have wanted to pass on - indeed, was reactionary, even harmful. As the anarchist magazine Freedom put it in 1975, 'Situationism seems to have “caught on” in the U.S.A., particularly in California, that playground of the ideologies...The American situationists seem to be repeating the pattern of mutual exclusion and criticism as occurred in Europe, and to be employing a fairly impenetrable Hegelian vocabulary.'
The deepest irony of all here is that Debord himself expressly and repeatedly rejected the very idea of "Situationism" - as he understood it, this was 'a meaningless term improperly derived from [the idea of a situationist]. 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 antisituationists.'
[This post kicks off the different maps new month-long special series of posts on architecture and related matters emerging out of the current "Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 - 2006" exhibition now being shown at the London Barbican - who should send me a check for my trouble immediately. Zizek at Birkbeck is now over - those still with Slovenian-shaped monkeys on their backs are advised to check-out Padraig's excellent photo-montage transcription of "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" at Subject Barred.]
1 Comments:
Daniel, if you haven't already I recommend two bottles of wine and second-hand copies of The Tribe and The Consul (by Mension and Rumney, I forget who did which), recollections of time spent with Debord. Not a ton in them beyond colorful debauch - Debord would have hated it - but no one did colorful debauch like Debord did. Intoxication seems to me to be undertheorized in theories of psychogeography, though certainly not underpracticed (which, if there's going to be an imbalance, is precisely the imbalance to have).
Post a Comment
<< Home