50 Years of Recuperat ion

of the S ituat ionist International

McKenzie Wark

A copub l ication of t h e Buel l Center I FORuM Project and Princeton Architectural Press

This book is copub l ished by

The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of A merican Architecture 1172 A m sterdam Avenue Colu m bia Un iversity New York, New York 10027

Princeton Arch itectural Press 37 East Seve nth Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, cal l 1.800.722.6657

Visit our website at www.papress.com

©2008 Princeton Arch itectural Press and The Trustees of Co lum bia U n iversity in the City of New York Text © 2008 McKenzie Wark Printed and bound in China 1 1 10 09 08 4 3 2 1 First edit ion

All r ig hts reserved . N o part of this book may be used or reproduced i n any manner without written permission from the p u b l isher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attem pt has been made to identify owners of copyrig ht. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent edit ions.

Li brary of Congress Cataloging- in­Publ ication Data Wark, McKenzie, 1961-Fifty years of recu peration of the Situation ist International / McKenzie Wark.

p. cm. - (FORuM project) ISBN 978-1-56898-789-7 ( hardcover : alk. paper) 1. I nternationale situati onniste-History. 2. Arts, Modern-20th century. 3. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)-Hi story-20th century. I. Tem ple Hoyne Buell Center forthe Study of American Arch itecture. I I . Title. I I I . Title: 50 years of recuperation.

NX456.5.158W37 2008 700.9'045-dc22

2008005447

For The Temple Hoyne Buel l Center

Series editor: Joan Ockman Executive editor: Sara Goldsmith Editorial assistant: Sharif Khalje Copy editor: Stephanie Salomon Designer: Dexter Sin ister, New York

For Princeton Arch itectural Press

Production editor: Linda Lee

Special thanks to Nettie Alj ian, Sara Bader,

Dorothy Ball, N icola Bednarek, Janet Behn ing , Becca Casbon, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Wendy Ful ler, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, Ai leen Kwu n , Nancy Ekl u n d Later, Laurie Manfra, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Jennifer Thompson, Arnoud Verhaeghe, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Arch itectural Press-Kevin C. L i p pert, pUbl isher

McKenzie Wark wishes to thank Eyebeam (New York) for the honorary fellows h i p dur ing which th is text was produced. A project of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.

50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist I nternational i s the th i rd volume in a series of books related to the FORuM Project, ded icated to explor ing the relat ionsh ip of arch itectural form to po l itics and urban life. FORuM is a program of The Temple Hoyne Buell Center forthe Study of American Arch itecture at Columbia U niversity.

Project conceptualization: Joan Ockman and Pier Vittorio A u reli Project coordination: Sara Goldsmith and Diana Martinez

Contents

4

Spectac les of D is i nteg rat ion

6

Myths of Exempt ion

8

Recuperat ion Perfected

12

Exper i mental Behav ior

15

The Derive Genera l i zed

21

Un itary Urban ism

27

Situat ion ist A rch itecture

33 Permanent P l ay

40

The Detournement of Detournement

45

Notes

48

Cred its

49

I l l ustrat ions

Spectac les of D is i nteg ration

1,2 Who cou ld have guessed that when the flood came i t wou ld

come i n s low motion, over fo rty decades rather than forty

n ig hts? As the po lar i ce sheets un ravel and p l unge i nto the

waters, those who have so m ismanaged the fate of a l l th i ngs

c l i ng to the i r pr i vate arks . The an ima ls , one by one, wi l l be

saved , if at a l l , as gene seq uences.

For those who wanted to see the p review for th is b lockbu ster

com ing attraction , there was the short story of the p res ident

and the trop ica l storm. When the storm breached the levees

and sank a fabled southern c i ty, the p res ident deigned to v is i t

and s how h i s concern, as p rotocol requ i res. Only he d id not

set foot there. Rather, upon leav ing h is vacation home, he had

h i s personal jet detou r over the sodden earth en route back

to h i s other house. This was in order to p roduce the requ i s ite

photog raph i c opportu n ity, of the p resident peer ing out the

wi ndow with a look of compassionate conservat ism, wh i le below

pr i vate arm ies of goons with g u n s secured val uable property,

and the homeless were left to make a spectac le of the i r own

m i sery, fans without t ickets i n the stad i u m of the endgame.

One cou ld go on, but what's the use? Where to start;

where to end? These are ti mes when one shou ld d i s pense

contempt o n l y with the g reatest economy, because of the

g reat number of th i ngs that deserve it.1 And yet who even

offers to d i s pense i t? The newspapers are devo lv i ng, bit by b it,

i nto shopp ing g u ides. The "qual ity" magaz i nes a re j ust coded

i nvestment ad v ice. One turns with hope to the b logosphere,

on ly to fi nd that it mostly j ust m i m ics the very med ia to wh ich

it c la ims to be an alternative. Alternative tu rns out j ust to

mean cheaper.

This scenar io wou ld seem l i ke the best i mag i nable for a

writer. What wr iter does not secretly want such a corrupt and

venal wor l d as material? In a b l unted age, the scr ibe with one

good butter kn ife d i pped in sp it has the cutting edge. And yet

such wr iters hard ly seem to have appeared among us. Hence

the req u i rement of a p rel i m i nary i nq u i ry into the causes of

the dec l i ne of the qua l ity of merci less p rose.

4

At least th ree wor lds of perception, affect ion, and concept ion

must be in good working o rde-r for cr i t ica l thought to touch

the total ity of th ings. These are the wor l ds of journa l i sm , art,

and the academy. Cr it ical thought takes its d i stance f rom these

th ree wor lds as much as f rom the b i g wor l d beyond them,

but for that la rger d i stance to p rove usefu l , c r it ical thought

has to mark itself off from the c loser targets of journa l i sm, art,

and the academy. I n b r ief, these three wor lds have fa i led to

afford the cond it ions for the i r own negation.

What are we to think of Amer ican jou rna l i sm? That it wou ld

be a good i dea. It ceased to ex i st when the ru l ing powers

d i scovered it more effic ient, and more affordable to ru le w ithout

it. This p roved easier than anyone i mag ined. It was j ust a matter

of tu rning the r i g i d r u les of product ion of A merican jou rnal i st ic

p rose against themselves. No story can be considered complete

unti l its reporter has heard from both s i des. S o by the s i mp le

exped ient of manufactur ing a "s ide" convenient to the i r

interests, and putt ing enough money beh ind it, the ru l ing powers

have ensured that they wi II have the i r interests "covered "

at least fifty percent of the ti me. A l l one needs is a think tank­

so named because it is where th inkers a re pa id not to.

At the extreme oppos ite end of the cu ltural scale f rom

the cheap truth of the p ress are the bespoke contr i vances of

the art wor ld. Rather than news you can use, art specia l i zes

in a venerable uselessness. This uselessness bestows on

art a certa in autonomy f rom the g r i m deal ings in shopworn

s l ogans and infoporn that character ize a l l other doma ins of

the spectacle. Or so it once seemed . If j ou rnal ism finds itself

recru ited to the reta i l ing of interested"fab les, art finds itself

recru ited into the p rototyp ing of fasc inating consumab les.

As the economy comes more and more to c i rcu late i mages of

th ings rather than the th ings themselves, art is deta i led with

the task of at l ast mak ing interesting i mages of what these

nonexistent th ings are not.

Meanwhi le, in the academy, the talent for h i stor ica l c r i t i c i sm

has fa l len into d i suse. The schoo ls no l onger to lerate it. C r it ical

theory has become hypocr it ical theory. If there was a wrong tu rn,

it bears the name Lou i s Althusser. He leg i t imated a carve-up of

5

the rea l m of appearances that conformed a l l too neatly to the

ex ist ing d i sc ipl inary a rrangement. Henceforth , the economic ,

the pol it i cal, and the ideo log i cal (or cu ltural) were to be

treated as "relatively autonomous" domai ns , each with its

own spec i a l i zed cadre of scholars.

And thus the critical fo rce of h i stor ica l thoug ht was

separated i nto var ious spec i al izat ions and absorbed back i nto

bus iness as usual with i n the spectacle. Hav ing renounced the

criti c i sm of the wor ld , the wor ld-in the form of journa l i sm , art,

and the academy-can safely i g nore it. The marg ins outs ide

the s pectacular wor ld that once harbored a g l i m mer of negation

have been all but forec losed. What rema ins i s profess iona l i zed

anesthes ia, mourn ing commun ities, d i scourse c l ubs , legacy

fet ish i sts. Some ages betray a deep respect for the i r criti ca l

th i n kers. To Socrates, they offered hem loc k; to Jesus, the cross.

These days i t's Zo loft, a co lumn-or tenu re.

The restorat ion of criti cal thought i s a b i g project, then.

Before we can take three steps forward we have to take two

steps back. Back to the scene of the c r i me, or at least to one

of them. To Par is i n the 1950s, when the fateful turn toward

the i nstitutiona l i zation of cr i t ical thought was j ust about to be

made. Back to the last best attempt to found a cr it ica l thought

i n and agai nst i ts i nstitut ional forms of journa l i sm, art, and

the academy.

Myths of Exemption

3-10 The Si tuation ist International was founded by th ree women

and s i x men in J u l y 1957 in the l ittle L igu r ian town of Cosio

d ' Arrosc ia. Al l that remains of th i s fab led event are a series

of sti r r i ng documents and some photographs , casua l but

made with an arti st's eye, by found i ng member Ra lph Rum ney.

He would not remain a member for long . The Situat ion ist

I nternational d i sso lved i tself i n 1972. In i ts fifteen years of

ex i stence, on l y 72 people were ever members of it.

Its roots-so the myth goes-l ie i n the Par i s of the ear l y '50s,

and a l itt le group that called i tself the Internationale Lettr i ste.

6

A few adventu rers found each other i n that lost quarter of Par is ,

the best-made labyr inth for reta i n i ng wanderer? There they

fou nd, i n their peregr i nations, the portents of the dec l i ne and

fa l l of th is wor ld. Among th is prov is iona l mi cro-soc iety were

those you could define on ly by what they weren't. Deserters,

lost c h i ldren , and the g ir ls who had run away from home and the

reformatory. P rofess iona ls a l l-of no profess ion . What starts

badly can, tha n kfu l ly, never improve.

The modern poets led them there. They were the happy

few who felt it was necessary to carry out poetry's prog ram i n

rea l ity. There cou ld be n o more poetry or a rt. They had to find

someth ing better. Here revo lt declared itself i ndependent of

any part icu lar cause. They engaged i n a systematic quest ion i ng

of a l l the di vers ions and labors o f society, a total c rit ique of its

idea of happ i ness, expressed in acts. They were at war with the

whole wor ld , but l i g htheartedly. Their task was a prod ig ious

i nactiv ity. The only causes they supported they had to define

for themselves.

The hard part was to convey through these apparent ly

del i r ious proposa ls a suffic ient degree of ser ious seduct ion .

To accomp l i sh th i s they resorted to an adroit use of currently

popu lar means of commun icati on . The i r p l an was to flood the

market with a mass of des i res whose rea l i zat ion i s not beyond

our present means but on ly beyond the capacity of the old

soc ia l organ i zat ion .

Their l itt le group was on the marg i n s of the economy,

tendi ng toward a role of p u re consumption , and above a l l the

free consumption of t i me. A few encou nters were l i ke s igna ls

emanat ing from a more i ntense l i fe, a l i fe not yet found.

The atmosphere of a few p laces gave them i nti mations of the

future powers of an arch itecture it wou ld be necessary to

create as the amb ience for less mediocre games.

When f reedom is practi ced i n a c losed c irc le, it fades i nto

a dream and becomes a mere representation of itself. Others

would l ater promote var ious theories and com m it assorted

art ist ic deeds. B ut when one has the opportun i ty to take part i n

such an adventure as this , and has avo ided a l l the spectacu lar

crashes that can befa l l one, then one is not i n an easy posit ion .

7

They circled the nig ht, consumed by fire. They had to discover

how to live the days after such a fi ne beginning and with such a discovery: that obedience is dead.

Recu peration Perfected

Although the Situationist International achieved a certain

mythic resonance in ava nt-garde circles, and was later identified

with the events of May '68 in Paris, it did not become part of

what one might call official international cultural exchange

until the end of the '80s, when the Pompidou Center mounted a

retrospective that toured London and Boston . This was also the

year Greil Marcus published Lipstick Traces, which placed the

Situationists less in art history than in the history of oppositional

popular culture, which for Marcus passed through Dada and the

Situationists and on to punk.2

Since 1987 there has been, if not a flood, then at least a steady

rain of publications.3 The effect of these has been to fix the

value of the Situationists in international cultural exchange by

recuperating them to one or another of the following kinds of

cultural value. After 1989 it became obvious that the Situationists

were part of the context for post-punk music, as the sleeve n otes

for the reissues rarely fail to mention .4 (Although given that

punks have turned out to be as boring as hippies, it mig ht be

time to investigate the c uriou s collusion between Situationist

practices and certain phenomena in the rave scen e.) Meanwhile

various attempts have been made to write them into art history.5

The writings of the Situationists' one consistent presence, G u y

Debord , now have recognized literary value.6 His film works are

now available in a boxed see The architectural legacy of the

Situationists is now also extensively documented.s There is a

consistent attempt to make the Situationists precursors to one

or other species of contemporary leftism.9 Last, they play some

c urious roles in contemporary philosophy.lO

My own interest is slightly different. Rather than see the

Situationists through the pris m of one or another specialized

branch of knowledge, I prefer to see them through the pris m of

8

those g roups who atte mpted to conti n u e their legacy and to

overcome it. I 'm i nte rested in those who, like me, read Debord's

Society of the Spectac l e a t a n impressionab le age, and decided

thereafter to do someth i ng with it, even i f we were not su re

what. These g roups, active in the '80s and '90s, are not the

same as the " pro-Situ" g roups that cou ld be found in the '70s,

who tended to m i m ic S ituat ionist s logans and p ractices and

were prone i n particu la r to exorb itant cataracts of dogma and

bo isterous bouts of mutual rec r i mination .11 Interesting ly, whi le

the S ituationists presented their p roject as beyond both art

and politics, the p ro-Situ g roups retu rn , n ot to convent iona l art

practices, but to equal l y convent iona l polit ics. The g roups that

i nte rest me at least attempt to re imag ine the Situation i st p roject

beyond both art and pol it i cs, f ree to th i n k strategica l l y about

interven i ng in and agai nst other spheres.12

So for me the i nterest ing th i ngs are not so much the

works of scholarsh i p about the Situat ion i sts as the attempts

to p l under the treasu res of th is mater ia l for contemporary

pu rposes. The S ituation i sts created the theory and pract ice

of detournement, of sam p l i ng past cu ltu ra l p rod ucts and

i nteg rat ing them i nto new creat ions , and hence the reverentia l

q u otat ion of S ituati on ist texts or art is a lways necessa r i l y

outside of the sp i r i t of the th i ng. Hence my attraction to works

by the Bernadette Corporat ion , DJ Rabbi, DJ Spooky, C rit ica l 11 A rt Ensemb le, the Associatio n for the A dvancement of I l l ega l

Knowledge, the Luther B l i ssett P roject, the Neo ist A l l i ance,

and the Radica l S oftware G roup. These d ifferent outfits, 12

i n the i r var ious ways, treat the S ituat ion i st I nternationa l as

common property. They appropr iate f rom it as they see fit,

in prec ise ly the manner of the "l ite rary commun ism" that

the Situat ion ists themse lves advocated.13 My i nterest i n the

S ituat ion ists i s in part a pro legomenon to an account of such

g roups. My own act ivit ies have a lways been c loser to th is

approac h , and have a lways had a d ifficu lt but f ru i tf u l re lat ion

to S ituation ist mater ia l .14

Of cou rse, these approaches are no less acts of recuperation

than any other. Recuperat ion began from the very moment the Situation i st I nternational was fou nded. It's what lends an

9

arrest ing po ig nancy to Rumn ey's photographs. On Debord's

account at least, the organ i zat ion was d i sso lved p rec ise ly

because its recu perat ion was by 1972 a lready comp lete. By then

the S ituat ion ist Internat iona l had become custod ian not of its

own past act iv ity but mere ly of its i mage. It had become mere ly

a col l ective ce lebr ity, part of the spectacu lar consumption of

"rad ica l ch ic ." Too many e lements of its work were not mere l y

coopted but coopted against it. Hav ing i nvaded the spectac le ,

the spectac le i nvaded it i n retu rn . It was no longer a secret

enemy of spectacu lar soci ety, but a known one. Its theory

became ideo logy, mere contemp lat ion. "Contemp lat ion of the

S ituat ion ist I nternat iona l is mere l y a supp lementary a l ienat ion

of a l i enated society.,,15

To rea l ly wr ite, you have to read; to read, you have to l i ve.

The recuperator i s unab le to l i ve. "Ti me scares h i m because it

i s made up of qua l itat i ve leaps, i rrevers ib le cho ices and once

in a l ifet ime opportun it ies. The [recuperator] d i sgu i ses t ime

to h imse l f as a mere un iform space th rough wh ich he wi l l p ick

h is way, go ing f rom one m istake to another, one fa i l i ng to the

next, growing constant ly r icher.,,16 The very least we can do now

is to recuperate in an i nterest ing way. A first step m ig ht be to

recogn i ze that the S ituation ists' var ious practices cannot be

cut up with i n the i nte l l ectual d i v i s ion of labor and sti l l make any

sense. Recuperat ion must be a l l o r noth i ng .

construction of situations

u n itary urbanism

(per im ental behavior

derive psychogeogr3phy

permanent play ______ detournement of prefabricated aesthetic elements

1 0

architecture

As out l i ned i n the d iag ram prese nted on the 1957 poster 13

"New Theater of Operat ions for C u lture," the Situat ion ist

I nternat ional 's concepts and practices form a un ity.17 Start ing

on the l eft, we can take the bas ic attitude to be experimental

behavior. Of wh ich on l y one expression i s the derive, or u rban

d r ift. This poses the q uestion of what othe r k i nds of exper imental

behavior one m ight i nvent. Such exper iments lead to the practice

of permanent play. Th is p layfu l ness, where it concerns the raw

mater ia l of ex ist ing cu ltu re, leads to the p ract ice of detournement;

where it concerns bu i lt env i ronments, to psychogeography,

or the subject ive amb ience of part icu la r spaces and t i mes.

Both are reappropr iat ion of an a l ienated wor l d , subject ing it to

act ion i n the present.

Taken togethe r, detournement and psychogeography imp l y 14

a unitary urbanism, of whi ch on l y a component or support i s a

S ituat ion ist arch itectu re. Un itary u rban ism appears more as the

com b i ned p rod uct of what detournement can a l ready achieve i n

more ephemera l med ia, a n d what psychogeography i m pl i es it

cou ld do with who le env i ronme nts. Which b r i ngs us to the top of

the d i agram, its h i ghest amb it ion, the construction of situations.

The one th i ng the S ituat ion ist I nternat iona l never ach ieved was

the construction of s i tuations, a lthough it is poss i b l e some of

the a lternative fact ions of ex-members it s pawned may have

come cl ose.

To explore some of these i nter lock ing concepts, I turn now

to some i nter lock ing b iograph ies that pass th rough the offic ia l

S ituat ion ist Internat ional and someti mes beyond it. With in

any structu re, even a large ly imag i nary one l i ke the S ituat ion ist

International , there i s a lways a network. Th i nk ing about such

networks ca l l s for a somewhat d i fferent approach to h istory and

thought f rom either the b iog raphy of i n d i v i d ua ls or the h i sto ry

of i nstitut ions . B ut then re i mag i n i ng what is l iv i ng rather than

what i s dead in the S ituat ion ist a rchive might cal l for some

new approaches. Howard Slater: " H i stor iog raphy is one th ing

when it i s a h istory i n the abstract that seeks to fi nd or ig ins and

f rom these or ig i ns reassume the reproduct ion of those a l ready

outmoded soc ia l re lat ions., ,18 B ut another h isto r iography can

exi st, and perhaps it cou ld in a certa i n sense be a Situat ion ist one.

1 1

Exper i menta l Behavior

15 G i useppe Ga l l i z io (1902-64}-Pi not to h is f r iends-was, by h i s

own accou nt, an "archaeo log ist, botan i st, chem ist, parfumier,

parti san, k i ng of the gyps ies.,,19 And one cou ld add: an i nventor

of both performance art and the i nsta l lation. It was he , togethe r

w ith Asger Jorn, who brought togethe r the Congress of Free

A rt ists in 1956 in Ga l l i z i o 's hometown of A l ba. Th is was

the event that l a i d the g roundwork for the formation of the

Situat ion ist Inte rnational the fol low ing year in Cosio, where he

wou l d become a found i ng member. Th is who le com i n g together

he descr i bed as a "chem ica l reaction ," for wh ich Debord 's

group was the cata l yst.

Gal l i z io 's approach was cons i stently exper i mental . H e saw

rat iona l i sm as a k ind of case-by-case j ustifi cation for ex i st ing

relations of power, a casuistry, a lways a rg u i n g about wheth e r

someth i ng is beautifu l o r ug ly, good o r bad, a b l e or unab le

to create anyth i ng i nterest ing . For Ga l l i z i o anyth i n g i nterest ing

wou l d be outs ide the grasp of such categor ies. H e took a i m at

"an e l ite capab le of l y i ng in order to be r i ght a l l the t ime and n ot

for the sake of reason ." Judg ing leg i t imates power as va l uat ion,

not creat ion . Aga i nst which he offered "the Esperanto of color

or sound or shape"-f1ows of sensation ava i l ab le to anyone.20

For Ga l l i z i o the mater ia ls and practices of an expe r imenta l

comportment are ava i lab le to everyone: "the masses have

understood and a l ready the b reath lessness of a new poet ic

moment i s anx ious ly beat ing at the doors of peop le bored by the

t i red ideals fabr icated by the self- r ighteous i ncomprehens ion

of the myster ious powerf u l of the earth."21

Ga l l i z io's exper imenta l practice was ent i re ly one of p rocess,

and h i s i nterest was in the com i n g i nto be ing and autonomous

deve lopment of aesthetic processes, wh ich cou ld occur

by parthenogenes is . He ca l l ed h is work ensemble painting.

Th is sh ifted detournement from the ar rang ing of preex i st i ng

aesth etic e lements to the arrang�ng of preex isti ng re lations h i ps

among peop le . H i s goal was what he ca l l ed an anti-patent

process for the shar ing and mod ificat ion of l i fe. Pa i nt ing wou l d

b e l i ke the group i mprovi sat ions of jazz, o r l i ke a good cockta i l ,

1 2

a chemistry of com binat ion , a symphony of emotions, made by

urban ists of the m i n i ma l , creating new k inds of civitas.

Gal liz i o's ensembles did not j ust produce rare and singu lar

works l ike oth er artists. They produced industrial painting.

These were on l y very min i ma l l y the product of actua l mach i nes

(a lthough Ga l l izio did invent his own pig ments and a specia l

k i l n for rap id dye i ng) . The idea was more that painting cou ld

be made us i ng mechan isms of repetit ion and var iation to

undermine the unique gesture. Th is process of paint ing

deve lops by itse lf, but is not predictab le. Ga l lizio wanted to

make the machine perfo rm the unique gestu re. The resu lt

wou ld br i ng together the c reative and sing u l ar with the serial

and repeated. He i nvented, in short, a synthesis of the two

opposed strands of the avant-garde: the Su rrea l i sts and the

Constructivists. I ndustr ia l p roduction is a quantitative concept,

yet i nd ustr ia l pa int ing is a form of product ion i n which each

meter of the art produced is unique. Michele Bernstein:

"a sh rewd mixture of chance and mechanics., ,22

I ndustr ia l paint i ng was an i nt i mation of a new soci ety

of standard luxu ry, which cou ld comb ine abu ndance with

d ifference, where quantity and q ua lity cou ld enter into

new, nondialectical relations. " Perhaps the mac h i n e is the

on ly i nstrument qua l ified to create art that is i nflationary and

industria l and therefore based on the anti-patent." 23 I n an

unconsc ious echo of, and va riation on, Wa lter Benjamin,

Ga l lizio conj ures up a mechanization of art that does not

reproduce exist ing images but is capab le of producing ever-new

ones.24 Mach ines, he says prophet ica l l y, "wi l l produce so much

art we won't even have the t ime to fix it in our memory; machines

wi l l remember for us. Other machines wi l l inte rvene to destroy,

determ i n i ng the s ituations of no val ue; there w i l l no longer be

works of art . . . but exchanges of air-ecstatic , artistic-among

peoples., ,25 Mire l l a Bandini: " u n l eash inflation everywhere.

, , 26

The potentia l of machines to i n flate the creative production

of new sensations appears on the scene as a direct result of

the i nternal contradictions of the commodification of cu lture.

"For a l l these th ings oh sti l l powerfu l l ords of the earth, sooner

or l ater you wi l l give us the mach ines to p lay with or we wi l l

13

bui ld them to occ u py that free time that you, with crazy greed,

look forward to occupying with bana lity and the progressive

depopulation of brains., ,27 The spectacle, which renders a l l

c u lture equiva l e nt, relies on an industrial base that can be

turned against equiva lence and exchange. Industrial painting

is Gallizio 's model for a genera lized creative production that

combines the mu ltiplication that the machine allows with the

creative processes of variation and montage.

I ndustrial painting implies not on ly a new aesthetic, but a

new economy, what Gal lizio called the anti-patent society.

A nti-patent is a practice of exchange among creators that

does not have to pass through the general eq uivalent of money.

Rath er it is an exchange based on the purely qua litative.

"The c urrency of the future wi l l be time-space or rather the

exchange between Situationists of experience that wi ll take

place in a space-time and the sca le of the phenomena wi l l

also determine the intensity.,, 28 One qualitative gesture calls

forth another, and another, making every re lationship creative,

aesthetic, in a word, different. Gal lizio fantasizes a society

of pure difference, yet a l so of abundance. It is a return to the

precapita list world that he discovers in his work as an amateur

archaeologist, digging u p and careful ly annotating the stone

and pottery creations of the ancient Ligurians around his

be loved A l ba. B ut the sing u l ar creative acts of the ancients

are combined in Gallizio's experimental laboratory with the

overcoming of scarcity that the machine announces.

Thus emerges the non-order that at last-brings socia l

relations back in line with the non-order, or rather emergent

order, of nature. The work that best embodies this is Gallizio's

1 6 Cavern of Anti-Matter (produced perhaps with some painterly

assistance from Soshana Afroyim). Like Jorn, Ga l l izio took

a strong interest in contemporary science, and what his

somewhat fanciful and poetic riffi ng on it amounts to is the

intuition that late twentieth-century science was undoing the

last rem nants of belief in a divine,and eternal order. With the

death of God and the death of Art, science sti l l p layed a role in

legitimating bourgeois society, in providing, indirectly and often

unintentionally, an image of an eterna l and lawful cos mic order.

1 4

Ga l l i z i o ant ic i pates the poss i b i l ity of what Manue l DeLanda

has cal l ed an onto logy without law.29 H i s Cavern of A nti-Matter 17

i s an a l l-encompass ing wor ld of pure becom ing .

Whereas the bou rgeo is appropr iat ion of sc ience sti l l d reams

of a l aw-governed cosmos that may conta i n i s lands of d i sorder,

Ga l l i z io proposes q u ite the reverse, a cosmos of chaos with

i s l ands of order: "The constants of matter wi l l defi n it i ve l y

co l l apse: a l l the ideo log i es o f ete rn ity w i l l d i s i nteg rate i n the

hands of the powerfu l and i mmorta l i ty wi l l d i s i ntegrate and

the prob lems of eterna l i z i ng matter wi l l increas ing l y fade to

nothing, thus leav i ng the art ists of chaos the infinite joy of the

forever-new. The new, conceived with the r i sk of an i nfi n ite

fantasy . . . procu red from free energ ies that man w i l l use i n the

me lt i ng down of the gold va l ue, meant as the f rozen energy

from the ignoble ban k ing system that i s now decompos i ng., , 30

A l l that rema ins i s to conce ive a practice of d r i ft i ng through 18

a wor ld itself adr ift. Let's r i de.

The Derive Genera l i zed

Your car has been sto len , that much you know. The po l ice ca l l

to say they may have found it. They take you to see the most

tang led , mang led wreck you have ever seen. The fenders are

bent, the bumpers crushed , even the roof seems l i ke someone

j u m ped g l eefu l l y up and down on i t, a lthough it i s hard to te l l

as the car i s ups ide down. Gradual l y you p i ece tog ether what

happened . "Yes, th is i s my car," you te l l the pol i ce. "I th i nk it

was sto len by i nc red i b l y dru n k joyr iders." It's detect i ve work as

geometry. You recog n i ze a form that has been folded, twisted­

and rotated 180 degrees.

Asger Jorn (1914-73) i s w ide ly acknowl edged as one of the

g reat mid twentieth-century art ists. T. J. C l ark: "the g reatest

pa i nter of the fifties., , 31 H i s contr i bution to the Si tuat ion ists

has been somewhat ig nored . It is wide ly h e l d that he funded it,

and that even after he left it he supported Debord by donat ing

h i s p ictu res. Yet h is writi ngs rare ly show u p i n antho log ies of

S ituationist materia l . Th is i n sp ite of the fact that he made

1 5

several key contr i but ions to the jou rna l . The S ituat ionist

Internat ional even pub l i shed a book let of h i s wr it i ngs on va lue

and the economy.32

It doesn 't he lp matters that Jorn's wr it ings are next to

unreadable . H i s prose is mercu r ia l i n a qu i te prec ise sense.

It c l u m ps togethe r obsess ive ly around a top ic that ag itates

h i m, before speed i n g off l i ke qu i cks i l ver onto someth ing e lse.

Sti l l , it is poss ib le to extract from Jorn's texts a qu ite un ique

take on the S ituationist p roject, one he was more ent it led than

most to c l a im as i n part h is own.

Jorn concei ves of a situology that wou l d be based not just

on aesthetic or pol it ical g rounds , but a lso on geometr ica l ones.

S ituology wou ld p lay out the consequences for an exper i mental

practice b u i lt on that b ranch of geometry known as topology.

Convent ional art h i story sees as a dec is ive turn i ng po int the

Euc l idean geometry that enters p i ctor ia l representat ion as

perspect ive in the Rena issance, but it never qu ite retu rns to

advances i n geometry as a source for new practices. For Jorn

the s ituation is not j ust a pol it ical and aesthet ic move, it i s a l so

a geometr ic one. The s ituation i s a "spat ia l -temporal work

a l ien to the o ld propert i es of art." 33

One way of expl a i n i ng Jorn's idea of the s ituat ion wou l d be

to say that a s ituation i s a ser ies of moments that a re congruent.

In c lass ical geometry, two tr iang les are congruent if I can make

one ident ical to the othe r by rotat ing , fl i pp i ng , o r sh ift i ng i t.

In topo logy, th i ngs are a l ittle more com p l i cated. In the famous

examp l e, a coffee cup and a doughnut are congruent because

one can be transformed into the other by stretch i ng, squeez ing ,

o r fo ld i ng the form without mak ing any holes i n the shape.

Indeed, mo ld ing doughnuts into coffee-cup shapes m ight be

a su itab l y J orn ian exe rcise.

In topology, as in c lass ica l geometry i n genera l , t ime is

assumed to be as uniform and even as s pace is . Thus, the

fli pp ing of the tr iang le or the squeez ing of the doughnut i nto the

coffee-cup shape can happen th� same way every ti me. In Jorn 's

s ituology, t ime is not so cons istent. S ituo logy is the study of

moments that are cong ruent with each other as a ser ies but that

a re not repeatab le. S ituo logy is the exper ience of a s ituation

16

genera l i zed, a l most as a k ind of onto logy. S ituology is the po int

of v iew of the joyr ide r of t ime rather than that of the detective

who contemp lates the stretched, squ eezed, or fo lded rema ins

after the event.

Jorn ref utes the idea of a spati a l geometry independent of

ti me, s ince it is movement that creates the bas is for measu re

and com parison, and hence for quantificat ion and identificat ion,

in geometry. S ituology stud ies what the Situationists e lsewhere

ca l l ambiences, which are exper i enced subjecti vely as

cons istenc ies of mood, but which for Jorn a re l i ke blocks of t ime

that form a tempora l unity independent of the universal , abstract

t ime that the c loc k measures. S ituology, Jorn wr ites, i s "that

which concerns the intr ins ic properties of fig u res without any

rel ation to the i r env i ronment., ,34 Jorn wants to posit ion avant­

g arde p ractice not only in advance of certa in aestheti c , pol it ica l ,

or cu ltura l precedents, but in advance of mathematical ones as

wel l . A rt took over f rom c lassical geometry certa in l i m itat ions.

It perce ives space as uniform and abstract. It conce ives t ime

as if i t were a d i mens ion of space.

Interesting ly, Jo rn th inks there is a countertrad it ion in art 19

that, in the '50s at l east, was hard ly we l l known. A convent ional

v iew m ight start with the G reek d i scovery of c l ass ica l geometry,

forma l i zed by Euc l i d and passed on f rom the H e l l enist ic wor ld

to the Rena issance, and then on to a certa in k ind of modernis m,

exemp l i fied by the a rchitectu re of Le Corbus ie r which the

Situat ioni sts so revi led . Jo rn counterposes to th is a few

instances of a d iffe rent approach to geometry. If the emb lematic

fi g u re for the G reek approach i s the set squ are, Jo rn's i mage

for the countertradition i s the knot, wh ich he finds in Le Tene

and othe r Ce ltic des igns, for examp le. Half a century l ater

we cou ld perhaps construct a who l e canon of such forms.

If "s ituo logy i s the transformat ive morpho logy of the unique,"

then we do not lack for examp les of p ract ices by wh ich the

unique was produced.35

The knot i s not a bad emb lem of a s ituation, at l east as

Jorn conce ives it. Viewed f rom the outs ide , a complex knot

appears as a mess of intersecting b its, l i ke a dev i l 's street map.

B ut conceived intrins ica l l y, experienced, as it were, i t has a

1 7

cons iste ncy, desp ite its twi sts and turns. It is the "same" rope,

no matter how its ang le var i es, o r which other parts of itself i t is

20 i n contact with. The knot i s a s ituation . Learn i ng to t ie a fabu lous

knot i s l i ke the art of the derive, i n which the S ituation i sts

wandered the streets of Par i s look ing for cons i stenc ies of

amb ience, mak i ng connective threads through the street g r i d .

The knot i s Jorn's fig u re of s i tuology as the derive genera l ized .

One need not wander the streets forever. The derive, ra ised to

the leve l of the concept, can now be practiced i n a l most any

k i nd of t ime-space whatsoever.

If for c lass ica l geometry a tr iang le j ust " is ," p u re and eterna l ,

for Jorn a knot i s someth ing that comes i nto be ing and passes

out of be ing , is t ied and unt ied , in ti me. The t ime that passes i n

the ty i ng of the knot i s part o f it. A s ituology encompasses both

the spatial and temporal aspects of form, but is sti l l i nte rested

in the "un itary" p ropert ies of form in t i me. A s ituat ion is a

un ita ry spatio-temporal fi g u re. "The exc l us ion of breaks and

i nte r rupt ions, the constancy of i ntens ity and the u n i q ue fee l i ng

of the p ropagation of the processes, whi ch d efines a s ituat ion ,

a l so exc l udes the d iv is ion i nto several t i mes . . . . " 36 A s ituat ion i s

somewhere between the ordered and the random, a tempora r i l y

stab l e amb ience o r autonomy, that comes i nto be i ng and passes

away, as Debord wou l d say, " in the war of t ime.,,37 A s ituo logy is

l i ke a d i v i n ing rod for d i scover i ng i nteresti ng t imes and spaces.

Here Jorn wants to d i sti ngu i sh h is s ituology from the

topology that neverthe less enab les hi m to thi nk i t. Topology

is i nterested i n the congruence of forms, of how one form can

be transformed i nto another by cont i n uous d eformat ion. Once

such a cong ruence is p roven, it can be repeated. It occurs with i n

a un iversal and abstract t ime. S ituology i s not i nterested i n

the v iew from outs ide , i n look i ng at the transformation from

outs ide. It i s more i nte rested i n the i nternal exper ience of the

transfo rmation. It i s i nte rested i n b locks of space-t ime that a re

cont inuous and autonomous, and not necessa r i l y repeatab le .38

S ituo logy i s topo logy without eqlli valence. "Our goal i s to

oppose a p lastic and e lementary geometry agai nst ega l itar ian

and E ucl idean geometry, and with the he l p of both, to go toward

a geometry of var iab les , a p layfu l and d i fferent ia l geometry., , 39

1 8

Jorn rather boldly c la ims to set topo logy itself on the r i ght

cou rse. "What is needed today i s a thoug ht, a ph ilosophy,

and an art that conform to that which i s projected by topology,

but th is i s only poss i ble on condit ion that th is branch of modern sci ence i s retu rned to its or ig i nal course: that of the s itu­

analys is or s ituology.,,4o An extravagant c l a i m , but Jorn was

wr it ing in the cl imate of postwar thought, when the mai nstream

of mathematics, part icular ly in France, had taken a particular l y

log ica l , r i gorous, and formal ist route, and was especi ally

susp ic ious of geometry. Jorn ant ic i pates the rev ival of i nterest

i n complexity, chaos, and turbu lence that wou ld not come for

some years.41

More i nteresti ng , perhaps, are the conseq uences Jorn i ntu its

for more aesthet ic and exper i mental practices. From v isual art

to c i nema or i nstallations or "happe n i ngs ," the flat p i cture plane

i s extended i nto new d i mens ions, new spat ia l d imens ions , the

temporal d i mens ion , but always with i n certa i n l im its. "[O]ne

can not speak anymore of pu re l y spatial phenomena," he says,

"movement is there from the very beg i n n i ng .,,42 A rt has h itherto

been just l i ke plane geometry, b racket ing off the com plex ity

of t ime and space, as if that complexity were an i nvad i ng

randomness. Jorn i s po int i ng to a pract ice of the event, an

aesthetics o f the event, and even a pol it ics of the eve nt, where

the event is conceived as a block of t ime and space that var ies ,

deforms, morphs, but that happens i n t ime and may not happen

aga in . In other words, a situation.

Jorn d raws a fateful d i sti nction: "Here the fie ld of

s ituolog ical exper i ence is d i v i ded i nto two opposed tendencies ,

the lud i c tendency and the ana l yt ic tendency.,,43 On the one

hand , the tendency of art and p lay; on the other, that of theory.

The joyr ider takes up the fi rst tendency; you as the hapless

car owner, the second. Jo rn's amb it ion was for a s ituology

that m ight advance both. Th i s d i v i s i on is i n many ways the

fault l ine a long wh ich the S ituat ion ist Internat ional fell apart,

with Debord's Par i s fact ion pursu ing the ana lyt ic tendency,

and the Scand i nav ians around Jorn's brother Nash , the

German Spur g roup , and Jacqueli ne de J o n g 's S ituat ion ist

Times i n Amsterdam pursu i ng the lud ic . Legend has it that

19

gifts of artworks from Jorn hel ped fund a l l of these factions ,

and perhaps for him they were a l l fragments of a larger project

whose eventual synthes is he foresaw but did not live to see.

With Jorn's death in 1973 a l l of these incong ruous S ituationist

projects more or less came to an end.

For Jorn, s ituology p i cked up the th read of what he i mag ined

was someth ing of a secret know ledge of certa in morphol ogies.

A way of tying and untying knots. The knots and other intr icate patte rns that decorate certain works in Jorn 's countertradit ion

are keys to a knowledge that is neithe r esoter ic mysti c i sm nor

P l atonic rationa l i sm, but someth ing qu ite d i fferent. A practica l

knowledge of s ituations. Jorn wanted to introd uce t ime into

geometry, but a l so chance into t i me.

A Ga lton mach ine is a fie l d of equa l l y spaced p ins, above

which is a s lot that releases ba l l s , and be low which is a ser ies

of s lots that catch them. If the top s lot i s positioned in the

m idd le and ba l l s are rel eased into the g r i d , the chances are that

most ba l l s w i l l dev iate a bit when they hit the p ins but w i l l fa l l

in one of the center s lots below. A few of the bal l s wi l l end u p

bouncing farther off the center l ine, but overal l the dev ice wi l l

show a Gauss ian d i stribution.

It's essent ia l l y p inba l l without the fun. I n pinba l l , the bal l i s

a lways go ing to end up pass ing th rough the m idd le between

the fl i ppe rs, but some ba l l s-th rough l uck or sk i l l-wi l l take

a long t ime to do so. The Ga lton mach ine, or p inba l l , is Jo rn's

i mage of the derive. Ti me and space are not smooth and even.

There are ti lts, there are edd ies , there are zones that attract

the ba l l s and zones that repel them. Th i s is a lso, Jorn rem inds

us, how the te lephone network functi ons. Cons idered in the

abstract, the Ga lton mach ine or a te lephone network is a flat

and even fie ld . A ba l l cou ld land anywhere; a ca l l cou ld connect

any two points. But in a r i cher spatia l and tempora l context it

i sn't l i ke that. Some passages are more l i ke ly than others, but

there are infinitesimal edd i es and fissures shaping the ba l l 's

movement, or the cal l 's c i rcu it, o rlhe swerve of someone on a

derive, who takes th is street rather than that one. Or a joyr ider

who stea ls you r car rather than m ine.

20

Un itary Urban i sm

For a l l of h i s theoret ica l extravagance, Jorn remai ned a pa i nter.

It wou ld not be ev ident to anyone for qu ite some t ime to come

just how ext raord i nary Jorn 's pract ical contr i butions to the

movement rea l l y were. I n the ear ly '60s a l l that was apparent

was the i n s uffic i ency of pa i nt i ng , and the des i re to abo l ish and

transce nd it. Gal l i z io's i nd ustr ia l pa int ing m i ght po i nt the way,

but it was sti l l too t i ed to the au ra of the un ique and s i ngu lar

artwork, what Ga l l i z i o ca l l ed the "overs i zed postage stamp."

Industr ia l pa int ing was st i l l bound by what it negated and was

a l l too eas i l y recuperated.

The S ituat ion ists were l i ke Nietzsche's madman in the

marketp lace, announc ing that A rt i s dead, that we k i l l ed it,

but that we are refus i ng to confront th is wor ld that is n ot on ly

God l ess, but A rt less. J ust as Man loses a l l coherence as a

concept w ithout the othe r of God, so the everyday d i s i nteg rates

without the other of A rt. The most extraord i nary response to

th is cha l l enge is s u re l y New Babylon, a work named after a 21

suggest ion by Debord, begun wh i l e Constant Nieuwenhuys

(1920-2005) was a member of the S i tuation i st Internat iona l , and

conti nued by h im for some years after h i s res ig nat ion .

I nterest i ng ly, of the three g reat Marx ist utop ias I know, it i s

the on l y one actua l l y s i tuated on earth.44 Constant was never

comfortab le with the not ion that h is p roject was utop ian , but

then few modern utop ians are. It is a form that, s i nce i t a lways

appears as defin i t i ve, has a hard t i m e acknowledg ing its

predecessors, wh ich a l so i mag i ned themse lves as definit ive.

But New Babylon i s a l i tt le d ifferent i n be ing not so much a

utop ia as an i nf rastructure for utopia. We i rd l y, New Babylon is

now also the name of the i magi nary c ity of the popu la r evange l i st

C h r i st ian Left Beh ind book ser ies by T im LaHaye, about the end

ti mes of the Tr i bu lat ion and the Raptu re. In choos ing the name

New Babylon, Debord and Constant h it upon an endur i ng i mage

of contested power. . Constant's ambit ions were, extravagant as it may sound,

more than utop ian . He sought to both rea l i ze and abo l i sh

utopia. Fred r ic Jameson: " I be l i eve that we can beg i n from

21

the propos it ion that Utop ian space i s an i mag i nary enc lave

with i n real soc ia l space, i n other words, that the very

poss i b i l ity of Utop ian space is itself a resu lt of spat ia l and

soc ia l d i fferentiation. But i t is an aberrant by-product, and

its poss i b i l i ty i s dependent on the momentary formation of a

k ind of eddy or se lf-conta i ned backwater with i n the genera l

d i fferentiation p rocess and its see m i ng l y i rrevers ib le forward

momentum.,, 45 In New Babylon , the chaotic eddy i s not a

backwater with i n the soc ia l order, it is the soc ia l o rder, o r rather

non-order. It is the smooth p lane u pon wh ich random movement

pushes toward emergent qua l it ies of self-organ i z i ng form.

Perhaps it makes more sense to ca l l it not utop ia (no-p lace)

but atopia (p lace lessness) .

New Babylon is a whole wor l d at p lay, or at l east it appears

so if cons idered on the hor izonta l plane. Mark Wig ley:

"New Babylon i s a seem ing l y i n fi n i te p layground. Its occu pants

conti nua l l y rearrange the i r sensory env i ronment, redefin ing

every m ic ro-space with i n the sectors accord i ng to the i r l atest

22 des i res. In a society of end less l e i su re, workers become p layers

and arch itectu re is the on ly game in town.,, 46 Cons idered

vert ica l l y, New Babylon makes l i teral Marx's d iagram of base

and supe rstructu re. Its sectors are l i tera l l y superstructures,

made poss ib le by an i nf rastructure be low ground where

mechan ica l reproducti on has abol i shed scarc ity and f reed a l l

o f t i me f rom necess ity. I t i s a n i mage of what Constant i magi nes

the d eve lopment of productive forces has made poss ib le,

but wh ich the fette r of ex ist ing re lat ions of producti on p revents

f rom com ing i nto bei ng.

I want to emphas ize the d i st i nctly Marx ist provenance of

New Bab lyon, wh ich predates Constant's part ic i pat ion i n the

Situat ion i st Internat ional . I n the convent iona l h i sto r iography

of the S ituation i st I nternational , most a re ag reed that the ear ly

"a rt ist ic" phase i s somehow less "rad ica l " than the later,

more "pol i t ica l" phase, where Debord asserts h i s author ity

over the movement and the arti sts, one after the othe r, res i gn

o r are expel led. To me it i s str i k i ng how much three of the othe r

found i ng fi gu res-Gal l i z io, Jorn, and Constant-brought a

cons istent and Marxist- i n flected rad i ca l i sm i nto the movement

22

that i s hard ly detecta b le i n the g roup around Debord at a l l in the

1950s.47 Both the e lder statesmen of the movement, Gal l i z io and

Jorn, had m i nor ro les, afte r a l l , i n res i stance movements d u r ing

Wor ld War II and hard ly needed confirmat ion from Debord i n

the catech ism of Marx and Enge ls .

One can trace the Marx ist strand through five texts by

Constant gathered for his retrospective at The Drawing Center

in 1999.48 These texts show Constant in a cons istent attempt

to re imag ine a po l i t ics , wi th and aga inst Marx, that both pre­

dates h i s membersh ip i n the S ituat ion ist Internat iona l and

conti nues long after he leaves i t. In a 1948 "Man ifesto," Constant

wr ites cr i t ica l ly about how "Western art, once the ce lebrator

of emperors and popes, turned to se rve the newly powerfu l

bourgeo is ie, becom ing an i nstrument of the g l o r ificat ion of

bourgeo is idea ls . Now that these idea ls have become a fict ion

with the d i sappearance of the i r economic base, a new era is

upon us, in which the whole matr ix of cu ltu ra l conventions loses

its s i g n ificance and a new freedom can be won from the most

p r imary source of l i fe." 49 The determ i n i s m of these sentences

is on a l l fours with Marx's famous-and i nfamous-preface

to h i s Contr i bution to the C r it ique of Pol i t ica l Economy:

"The changes i n the economic foundation l ead sooner or l ater

to the transformat ion of the whole i mmense superstructu re." 50

In 1948 Constant i s th ink ing with i n the rad ica l and

exper i mental express ion ism of the CoBr A g roup, of which

he and Jorn were members. Whereas Debord's Lettr ist

group arr ived at a cr i t ique of the i r Su rrea l i st predecessors

mostly with i n the log ic of avant-gard ist postur ing , for CoBrA ,

Su rrea l i s m i s at once a po l i t ica l and ph i losoph ica l p rob lem.

The Surrea l i sts impr i soned the unconsc ious with in the log ic

of a Freud ian analys is. They d i d not want to express it but to

represent i t. CoBrA took the other fork. Th rough exper imenta l

practice in wh i ch co l l ective human agency confronts raw

mater ia l s, forms and concepts can a r i se as products, not

precepts. S i nce c reat ive labor i s a capac ity that everyone

possesses, as part of what the young Marx wou l d cal l ou r

species-being, expe r imental express ion can be the bas i s of a

peop le's a rt. A n art that i s as far beyond beauty and ug l iness

23

as it is beyond good and evil. It is not governed in advance by aesthetic norms.

Constant will come to reject art in general, and painting in particular, and like Gallizio posit the machine as the central fact of contemporary creativity. "A free art of the future is an art that would master and use all the new conditioning techniques.,,51 It offers the possibility of reconciling quality with equality. The socialist artist is no longer forced to choose between socialism and art. Constant finds the Northwest Passage out of the dreaded socialist realism or Popular Front concessions a committed artist might have had to make without landing in the territory of a rarefied and elitist vanguard art. Interestingly, it is not a question of the artist coming around to the Realpolitik of the party, but the party coming around to a new aesthetic reality. It is, I suggest, an intuition more powerful than Constant knew.

"The lights go out. The room is filled with a strange unintelligible noise. A huge architectural plan is projected on a waiL" The camera pushes in toward the plan and discovers within its network of lines elements of a Plexiglas and steel­strut model. "The floating horizontal megastructure catches the light and stretches as far as the eye can see." The camera closes in again. "The sound of an aeroplane accompanies the descent and another set of sounds fill the room as we land on the roof deck. Each image-shift is synchronized with an acoustic shift although the sounds remain largely unintelligible.,,52 In Mark Wigley's description, Constant's unveiling of New Babylon at the Stedelijk Museum in 1960 sounds like a hipster version of a new high-end condo development sales pitch. And while there are no units to invest in here, it does have some of the same logic. Constant is using multimedia to create an ambience,

a space and time for desire. As he writes in 1963: "New Babylon is not a town planning project, but rather a way of thinking, of imagining, of looking at things and at life.

,,53 Constant's unitary

urbanism gives concrete contours to a very real terrain, but it is that of the virtual rather than the actual. What he finds there is not the eternal formlessness of the surreal but a definite expression of historical and collective desire.

24

The inhabitant of this space of desire is not the banker or corporate lawyer in the market for luxury condos, but homo

ludens, the species-being of play. The Dutch writer Johan Huizinga proposed homo ludens as an expl iCitly anti-Marxist figure, opposed to homo faber, the productivist worker-bee of Stalinist discourse. But as Constant discovers, what Marx always had in mind was the reconciliation of quantity and quality-the productive surplus of capitalism plus the qualitative being of the premodern world. I n short, something closer to homo ludens: a species at play, collectively, with the materiality of its environment, under conditions of abundance that could only apply after the great productive expansion of the capitalist mode of production. As capitalism shortens the working day necessary to sustain the species, a new possibility opens up: to imagine a world in which homo ludens's

relation to space through play can be as free as its relation to time through leisure. Homo ludens will no longer make art, but wi II create everyday life.

New Babylon responds to both the expansion of objective resources and the expansion of population. Like a suburban family that adds a new story when the second kid is born, Constant builds a second deck for the whole planet. But rather than suburban sprawl inserting itself into any and every terrain, he imagines leaving much of the old world untouched­including, interestingly, the classic spaces of the derive in the heart of the old cities such as Paris and Amsterdam. 23, 24

His is a new world that expands, not horizontally but vertically. It is "a new skin that covers the earth and multiplies its living space." 54 And why not? Who knows what built form can do?

The sectors of New Babylon are open and mobile spaces for nomadic play. There's no need to have a "home" here. By the time your wanderings bring you back to where you started it wi II be different anyway: "the i ntens ity of each moment destroys the memory that normally paralyses the creative imagination.,,55 Here is the architecture that Debord and his Lettriste companion Ivan Chtcheglov only dream of as they wander the streets of Paris: "Every square mile of

25

New Babylon's surface represents an inexhaustible field of new and unknown situations, because nothing will remain and everything is constantly changing.,,56 Constant's quibbles notwithstanding, here is utopian space reimagined as a way to exit the twentieth century. Roland Barthes: "Utopia (a fa

Fourier): that of a world in which there would no longer be anything but differences, so that to be differentiated would no longer mean to be excluded."57 Constant draws the consequence that such a space must become atopian in form and planetary in scale.

For Constant, the Situationist International "did not constitute a real movement. The adherents came and went and the only view they shared was their contempt for the current art practice."58 He does, though, credit the movement with contemplating the end to culture conceived as scarcity and property and pursuing this possibility to its conclusions. The question of relating the impossible fragments of the movement to each other poses the problem of organization, communication, and documentation with all its pathos. Not only did the Situationist International not know how to organize the project it was bold enough to conceive, neither could it communicate its consequences. From the documentation that survives, the project remains to conceive an organizational practice. The place to start might not be with the "official" Situationist International so much as with what it excluded, among other things the so-called Second Situationist International, formed largely by the Scandinavians whom Debord expelled in the early '60s.

While the more coherent Situationist International Debord created in the '60s proved worthy of an era of heightened political tension, it could not outlive it. Thought strategically, the Situationist International shifted its sphere of operation from avant-garde art to militant politics as it moved from the late '50s to the '60s. Strategic thinking would ask what other zone of operation might be more suitable for other times. Constant's strategic interventions, in and against architecture, provide one such model. But one thing that is absent from Constant's New Babylon is a conception of how architectural space is doubled

26

and transformed by communicative space, both negatively, in the form of spectacle, and perhaps positively, in the form of the detournement of media practice that the "First" Situationist International would begin to grasp consciously as a project late in its existence.

Constant is one of the variables of the Situationist movement taken as a whole, one that it could not maintain in tension with all of its other variables. In breaking with Constant-and with Gallizio and Jorn and others-Debord would in the end be able to achieve intellectual and organizational coherence, but at the price of purging some of the tensions and differences that might have driven the movement forward. The task of recuperating the Situationist International is not to play one variable off against another-although this has been a persistent characteristic of the literature-but to discover the unknown pleasures toward which the unrecognized fragments might still direct us. In this case it is toward the paradoxical thought that Constant offered a theoretical solution to the problem of giving form to the virtual (what is real but not actual), while it was Debord who proposed an architecture for investigating the strategic potentials of escaping actual space and time. Between these two positions lies the situation.

Situationist Architecture

The only member of the Situationist International to remain in 1972 from the founding in 1957 was Guy Debord (1931-94), and he is often taken as synonymous with the movement. There are anti-Debordist accounts, which rightly stress the role of others, such as Jorn or Constant, but which often in the process privilege the earlier, more "aesthetic" phase. On this score my provocation in this essay is fourfold. First, while acknowledging the significance of Jorn, Constant, and the less well known Gallizio, I have tried to show how their work is at once both aesthetic, political, and an attempt to escape from recuperation as merely one or the other. Second, I want to insist on the centrality of a hitherto marginalized figure, Michele Bernstein,

27

to whom I will return shortly. Third, I want to gesture toward the value of the work of the so-called Second Situationist International and some other excluded figures, and on this front I will discuss Jacqueline de Jong. Fourth, I want to think about Debord in a slightly different light. So I will discuss not so much his writing or his actions, but a game. Besides being a writer, a filmmaker, an editor, and a first-rate professional of no profession, he was also, of all things, a game designer.

Fourth things first. According to Debord's second wife, Alice Becker-H o, Debord patented his Game of War in 1965 . In 1977 he entered into a partnership with his then-publisher, Gerard Lebovici, in a company to make board games. The company published Game of War and commissioned a craftsman to make four or five sets in copper and silver. In 1987 Debord and Becker-H o published a book about the game.59 On this account, the game was a part of Debord's life for more than thirty years, and had its beginnings in the midst of the second, "political" phase of the Situationist International. It is, I would argue, an expression in a new form of something both the "artistic" and "political" phases of the Situationist International had in common despite their different fields of operation: namely a concept and a practice of strategy.

25 Debord's Game of War is a strategy game, and to see this as a major rather than minor part of his legacy is to insist that above all else Debord was a strategist. De Jong: "He was a great strategist.

, ,60 Giorgio Agamben: "[O]nce, when I was tempted

(as I still am) to consider Guy Debord a philosopher, he told me: ' I'm not a philosopher, I' m a strategist.' Debord saw his time as an incessant war, which engaged his entire life in a strategy." 59 The strategist is not the proprietor of a field of knowledge, but rather assesses the value of the forces aligned on any available territory. The strategist occupies, evacuates, or contests any territory at hand in pursuit of advantage.

The avant-gardes have a long-standing connection to games, and perhaps to strategy. The Surrealists invented many games.62 Marcel Duchamp famously gave up art for chess. He even coauthored a book about it.63 Fran90is Le Lionnais: "What [Vitali] Halberstadt and Duchamp perfected was the

28

theory of th e relationsh ip between squares which have no apparent connection, les cases conjugees, which was a sort of theory of th e structure of the board . That is to say, because th e pawns are in a certain relationship one can perceive invisible connections between empty squares on th e board wh ich are apparently unrelated .,,64 Like th e Surrealists, Debord invented h is own game, but as with Duchamp, it took th e form of a sustained effort to create via the game a conception of how events unfold in space.

Among the Game of War's particular qualities is that it is not a territorial game. It d oes not conceive of space as property, to be conquered and held . It is modeled on classic war games, which go back at least to the time of Clausewitz.65 It includes more or less plausible parameters of movement and engagement for infantry and cavalry. Yet it is not really a game of war at all. If it is, it models something more like a full­spectrum war where th e opposing sides are composed of forces not restricted by their extension only in space.

Besid es th e usual fi gh ting pieces of cavalry, infantry, artillery, and th e arsenal, Game of War also includes units for communication. While military units move at given speed s per turn across the board , th e lines of communication, so long as they are not broken, are instantaneous and d irect. This "war" can be fough t as much on th e plane of communication as on that of extensible space. Wh at d istinguish es th e two planes is their relation to time. Debord and Becker-Ho conceive contemporary strategy as taking place in a d oubled terrain, one of both spatial extension and sequential time, a space of both architecture and geography. This terrain is th e other of th e simultaneous time of communication-the spatio-temporal matrix that, in Society of th e Spectacle (1967), Debord would come to conceive as world h istory.

While it looks like its eigh teenth-century ancestors, Game of War is really a d iagram of the strategic possibilities of spectacular time. Debord : "The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. 'Once th ere was history, but not anymore, ' because the class of owners of

29

the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history.,,66 In Game of War, history is made mobil e again, in an irreversible time where strategy can reverse the course of events.

Game of War incorporates the problems of conflict in general within a manageable framework. Debord's ambition seems to be no less than to create a game which has possibilities for play that are as great as chess but which conceives of play in a different manner. That one's communication must remain intact is equivalent to the rule in chess that the king must not remain in check. Debord includes in his presentation of the game a line from the 1527 poem "Scacchia Ludus" by Marcus Hieronymus Vida (who was, incidentally, the bishop of Alba). The opening lines of the poem are: "We play an effi gy of war, and battles made like / real ones, armies formed from boxwood, and play realms, / As twin kings, white and black, opposed against each other, / Struggle for praise with bicolored weapons.,,67 That strategic genius, in any field, is the only thing worth commemorating is a characteristically Debordian note. Effi gy is a word that might appeal to Debord in its modern sense, given how careful he was to preserve his bad reputation.68 But here it might mean something else: that the game is a form, a mold-an allegory perhaps-for a certain kind of strategic experience.

But Game of War does not enclose space within strategy as chess does. Space is only ever partially included within the range of movement of the pieces. Some space remains "smooth" and open. The game is also subject to sudden reversals of fortune rare in chess. "In fact, I wanted to imitate poker-not the chance factor in poker, but the combat that is characteristic of it." 69 Each side makes its initial deployments in ignorance of those of the enemy, introducing at least an element of the unknown characteristic of poker.

30

The game requires attention to the tactical level of defending each of one's units, since once one starts losing one can quickly lose many pieces. H owever, units cannot move or engage unless they remain in communication with their arsenal, making lines of communication particularly vital. Players are usually more concerned with breaking the adversary's lines of communication than with offensive action directed against either the adversary's arsenal or fi ghting units. Outside of the quantitative struggle between blocks of fi ghting units is a qualitative struggle, in which a force suddenly loses all its power when the enemy cuts off its communications; "thus the outcome of a tactical engagement over just one square may have major strategic consequences.

, ,70

Each player has to keep three quite different aspects of the game in mind: fighting units, arsenals, lines of communication. "This war game-like war itself and like all forms of strategic thought and action-tends to demand the simultaneous consideration of contradictory requirements.

, ,71 While

attempting to maintain freedom of action, each side is also obliged to make diffi cult choices between qualitatively different kinds of operations, the means for the realization of which are always in short supply. One may have the means but not the time, or the time but not the means, for their realization. "Each army must strive to keep the initiative, compensating for shortfalls in troop strength by the speed with which it can concentrate its forces at a decisive point where it must be the stronger: strategic maneuvers succeed only when victory yields an immediate return, so to speak, in terms of tactical confrontation.,, 72

Antonio Gramsci famously juxtaposed the concepts of the war of position and the war of maneuver. For Gramsci the war of maneuver is associated with syndicalist approaches to political conflict, with Rosa Luxemburg, and with the events of the October revolution in Russia. He associates the war of position with "mature" Leninism, and the lessons of the defeats suffered across Europe by the revolutionary movement that the October revolution was supposed to spark. Gramsci: "In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and

31

gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks . . . . ,,73 For Debord this line of th inking can only justify th e bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist parties, their obsession with creating one institutional bunker after anoth er, from th e trade unions to the official Communist art perpetuated by former Dadaists and Surrealists such as Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon in their waning years. Game of War is a refutation of this whole conception of strategy.

In the war of position, tactics are dictated from above by strategic concerns with taking and holding institutions across the landscape of state and civil society. The Game of War refutes this territorial conception of space and this h ierarchical relation between strategy and tactics. Space is always partially unmarked; tactics can sometimes call a strategy into being. Some space need not be occupied or contested at all; every tactic involves a risk to one's positions. "It makes sense to move against the enemy's communications, but one's own will be stretched in the process.,, 74 As in a game of poker, advantage comes quick and is lost even quicker.

Debord moves the conception of conflict away from the privileging of space that persists in Gramsci's war of position. Key to Game of War is the question of judging the moment to move from the tactical advantage to the strategic. Tactics and strategy do not have a hierarchical and spatial relation, but a mobile and temporal one. Plans have to be changed or abandoned in the light of events. "The interaction between tactics and strategy is a continuing source of surprises and reverses-and this often right up to the last moment." 75

Game of War is a rigorous and schematic presentation of conflict, if missing certain qualities. The spatial field is asymmetrical but unchanging. The moment of surprise comes only once, wh en each side reveals to the other the initial disposition of its forces. In documenting one game for their book, Debord and Becker-Ho present each move on a diagram that

32

ou tlines as a static figure the changing disposition of forces, bu t this gives no real sense of the ebb and tension in time of game play. Still, the ambition of Game of War is clear: "Before they went to the printers, the figures looked like a truly dazzling pu zzle awaiting solution, just like the times in which we live.

, ,76

Whereas Jorn attempts to construct a situ ology of a congru ent bu t variable unity of space and time, Debord proposes a more rigorous architectu ral stu dy of how a fi xed unity of space and time yields tactical and strategic advantages. Whereas Constant imagines the whole of the earth as a space for play, Debord inquires into the accu mulated experience of contesting social forces that might make this other kind of play possible. War is the effigy of play. A certain kind of conflict, perhaps a new kind, has to be won before play can appear as more than a caricatu re of itself, screened off within its closed circle, fading into a dream.

Permanent Play

Not all is fair in war, or love. Both have their strategies, bu t also their ru les. For example, how is a woman who lives in an "open relationship" with a man supposed to retain her hold on him if he starts an affair that has a little more intensity than affairs usually do? Affairs are allowed. They are within the ru les, but they are not supposed to break with a fu ndamental agreement the man and woman maintain. And if this man is coming too close to breaching that agreement, what stratagems can the woman employ to see that he returns to it?

It sounds like the scenario for a French novel or movie and in a sense it is. It is that of Michele Bernstein's two novels, Tous les chevau x du roi and La Nuit. Both cover the same events in the lives of Gilles and Genevieve bu t from different perspectives and in different styles. Tous les chevau x Itdetournes" the style of Franc;oise Sagan; La Nu it, that of Robbe-Grillet. Sagan's racy novels coincided with the arrival of mass paperback pu blishing in France in the '50s. Those

33

of Robbe-Grillet were a high- modernist analogue of the new consumerist and technocratic France of these years.

Both novels may be read as fi ctionalized accounts of the relationship between Michele Bernstein (b. 1932) and Guy Debord, who married in 1954 and divorced in 1972, the year the Situationist International dissolved. Rather than read them for dubious historical details, it might be more interesting to take the books on their own terms, as fictions, but as presenting in fictional form a practice, perhaps even an ethics, for a Situationist conduct of everyday life. Situationist writing contains elaborate theories of fiction, but just two novels that are fi ctions of theory.77

It is fi tting that Bernstein's story begins at an opening and subsequent dinner party for a mediocre Surrealist painter. As Debord wrote to Constant: "Surrealism presents itself as a total enterprise, concerning a complete way of living. It is this intention that constitutes Surrealism's most progressive character, which obliges us now to compare ourselves to it." 78 One could imagine this anecdote, f rom another letter in which Debord writes about an art scene party, as if it took place at the party Bernstein describes: "Madame Van de Loo, after telling me by way of a pleasantry that she was surprised to hear of practical actions involving me, whom she saw as a theoretician, was again surprised when I told her sincerely that ' nothing has ever interested me beyond a certain practice of life.' (It is precisely this that has kept me back f rom being an artist, in the current sense of the word, and, I hope, a theoretician of aesthetics! )

, ,79 Debord and, perhaps even more so, Bernstein are

theoreticians who want to invent a complete way of living. Bernstein's presentation of an ethics of life begins with the

tale of the Surrealist's daughter. She says elsewhere that while Dada was the "good father" of the Situationists, the Surrealists were the "bad father.'

,80 Chevaux opens with a bad Surrealist

father, or rather stepfather, who covets his nubile stepdaughter, Carole. In La Nuit we learn of the sexual tension between them that "though by her spite she showed that she wanted no part of it, still she encouraged it a little, admitted it was there.'

,81

The bad infl uence that matters to Gilles and Genevieve is more 34

aestheti c than moral, however. With a little prompti ng from C arole's mother, Gi lles and Genevieve whisk Carole away from the old man.

Gi lles takes her wanderi ng around the streets of Pari s, and i n the morni ng finally makes love to her. In Chevaux, we only hear i n general terms about Gilles and hi s art of wanderi ng. Genevieve goes home to sleep and the story pi cks up again the next day. La Nui t i s centered on the events of that ni ght. "They pass besi de a column, a streetli ght rather, on whi ch is fixed, above thei r heads, a blue and white sign i ndi cati ng by an arrow: Cluny Museum. On the same column, another si gnal, lumi nous and blinki ng, i s the only one that attracts the glance of the passersby. At regular i ntervals, for the pedestri ans, the permi ssi on to pass or the order to wai t flashes. Gilles and Carole pass near the column without seei ng i t. Gilles waits, b efore crossi ng, for the cars to stop. Carole follows Gilles, 26

who holds her by the nape of the neck. They take the direction indi cated by the si gn Cluny Museum, and skirt the railings of the garden of the museum."82 Here the famous Situationist practice of the derive i s Carole's i ni tiation into the knotted streets of the sleepi ng ci ty. "I'd li ke to be i n a labyri nth with you, " says Carole. "We already are, " says Gilles.83

Gi lles's affair with Carole causes at least two rifts i n this li bidinal uni verse. Carole's gi rlfri end Beatrice i s jealous and possessive. Genevieve's feelings are perhaps more complicated. It is not the first time Gi lles has had other lovers, but Genevieve is a li ttle worried about this one. La Nuit can b e read as an account of the disturbance the affai r causes Genevieve. Her character i s in the habit, on waki ng i n the morni ng, of putting the events of the previ ous ni ght in order, but in La Nui t events refuse to fall i nto place. The novel jumps from one fragment of ti me-charged wi th affect-to another.

Chevaux presents a rather more strai ghtforward versi on of Genevi eve's strategies for keeping her hold over Gi lles. One strategy i s to become Carole's intimate friend, establishing a relationshi p i ndependent of Gilles between the two women. It i s an emoti onal intimacy perhaps greater than the sexual one b etween Carole and Gi lles, i f rather one-sided. Carole confides

35

in Genevieve but not vice versa. Another strategy is to take the same liberties as her husband. Whereas Gilles found Carole at a party hosted b y passe old Surrealists, Genevieve finds her love interest at the rather more advanced soiree hosted b y Ole, an artist modeled perhaps on Jorn. There she hooks up with a young man called Bertrand, fucks him in a hotel, throws him out next morning, then telephones Gilles to tell him about it.

Both Carole and Bertrand make bad art. Carole dabbles at painting but she merely repeats the cliches current in the art world. Bertrand's poetry is worse, in thrall to experiments that have long since lost their charge. What neither of them quite realizes is that they already embody the aesthetic, without having to objectify it. Neither Carole nor Bertrand quite realizes that they are in play in a game of everyday life. Of the two, Carole comes closer, at least when she sings. She has a small repertoire of old French songs. For Gilles she appropriates their words as her own, detournes them, as the Situationists say. When she sings she reveals a capacity that leads Genevieve to suspect that here might be a rival.

Bertrand is handsome enough, but if anything, bringing him into the picture only gives Gilles more license to love Carole. The four of them, Gilles and Carole, Genevieve and Bertrand, go off on vacation. While on vacation, they meet Bertrand's

27 friend Helene, a slightly older and very sophisticated woman from the literary scene. On returning to Paris, Genevieve discards Bertrand and takes up with Helene. This gets Gilles's attention. Gilles drops Carole. The trio of Genevieve, Helene, and Gilles hangs out together for a while, but it doesn't last. In the end it is j ust Genevieve and Gilles again- for now. But the game has changed. Chevaux ends with letters from Carole and Helene in which it is clear that Carole, while still young, is beginning to appreciate a new way of thinking about life, and that Helene, encrusted with habit, is left to her fate.

In a letter to Bertrand, Helene dismisses Gilles and Genevieve as "damaged people, " but she does not really understand them.84 Neither Gilles nor Genevieve are really heartless libertines. They appreciate beauty but not j ust as an object, a thing apart. "I wasn't built like a Greek statue, "

36

Genevieve remarks.s5 Their romantic strategies are not about conquest or possession. Gilles really does fall in love, and often. Genevieve's strategies are aimed at sustaining Gilles's love for her because she cannot help loving him. But this love is hardly romantic. It may be closer to the late eighteenth -century libertines in Laclos's Les Liaisons dangerouses-"Friendsh ip joined with desire has so much the appearance of life! "-than to th e early nineteenth -century romanticism of, say, Shelley's "Epipsychidion" : "L ove's very pain is sweet, I But its reward is in the world divine." s6 Their feelings are genuine, but feelings can be shaped aesth etically, in pursuit of adventures, in the creation of situations, in the river of time.

Love is temporal, an event. There is nothing eternal in it. Timeless love, like God, like Art, is dead. All that remains is the possibility of constructing situations. Odile Passot: "In Bernstein's universe, there is no transcendence, divine or diabolic; humans are subject to th eir own negativity, which they cultivate to destabilize their century's received truths." s7 Like the devils in Marcel Carne's film Les Visiteurs du soir, Genevieve and Gilles trouble the sh eets of the bourgeois bedchamber by disregarding property and propriety in the name of a quite different ethic of love.ss It's a question that is still with us, if in less exalted terms. Ch ris Kraus: "what kind of life could they believe in? What kind of life could they afford?" s9

Bernstein's ethics, and politics, of love comes perh aps from th e utopian socialist writings of Charles Fourier. For Fourier th ere are truth s that we "civilized" folk are unwilling to acknowledge or to use as th e basis for constructing life. Our experience of p leasure is so impoverished that it must be propped up on a wealth of illusions, above all th e illusion of property rights over the affections of others. Couples demand of each other an exclusive right of emotional and sexual property-with what success, we know. Fourier: "Marriage seems to have been invented to reward perversity.

, ,90 What will

replace the incoherence of "civilized" society will be a world th at has no place for bourgeois moderation or equanimity. It will call for ardent passions. Boredom and indifference are the natural

37

enemies of th e passions. Keeping the passions in play requires a regular clash of contraries.

This Fourierist undermining of marriage as a relation of property is particularly challenging wh en seen in the context of the celebration of th e middle-class couple as th e essential unit around wh ich postwar French consumerism and modernity was supposed to cohere. K ristin Ross: "The construction of th e new French couple is not only a class necessity but a national necessity as well, linked to the state-led modernization effort. Called upon to lead France into th e future, th ese couples are th e class wh ose very way of life is based on the wish to make the world futureless and at th at price buy security." 91

As Genevieve says of Gilles: "When I met Gilles th ree years ago, I realized quickly that h e was far from the cool libertine most people took him for. His desires always contain as much passion as h e can put into them, and it's this same state that he always pursued in various love stories that you' d be crazy to call unserious. The climate he created everywhere is one of h onest feelings and a heigh tened consciousness of th e tragically fleeting aspect of anything to do with love. And the intensity of th e adventure was always an inverse function of its duration. Trouble and breakups happened with Gilles before any valid reason appeared: afterward, it was too late. I had been th e exception, I was immune. ,,92 Strategy, as Debord says, "tends to impose at each instant considerations of contradictory necessities.,,93 Genevieve's strategies aim at th e very least to maintain her immunity, but perhaps she has other ambitions as well. She migh t surpass her teach er at his own game.

Games turn up four times in Chevaux. Genevieve and Gilles play ch ess with each other. Genevieve plays a drinking game with friends and a dice game with some Americans. Gilles and Carole play "subjective" chess, where each in turn makes up the value and moves of the piece. Each move is an approximation of the more general game that for Gi lles and Genevieve encompasses the whole of everyday life. This game is at times a game of skill, at times of chance. Sometimes it involves only two players, sometimes many. Sometimes th e players are evenly

38

matched and sometimes not. Sometimes it is not clear wh o is playing and wh o is being played.

Gilles tells Carole that he and Genevieve have invented a way of staying young forever, or at least up until the end. (As Debord will say later, borrowing from Pascal, "th e last act is bloody.,, 94) Or as Carole writes to Gilles and Genevieve: "I dreamed of you a lot: we are walking in the forest, j ust before nightfall. We are holding hands in order not to lose each other. We are still ch ildren.,,95

To stay ch ildren means to keep playing the game, to keep drifting, through th e streets, in and out of love. But it is a melancholy game, and Carole does not quite grasp why. As Debord says in Howls for Sade: "When f reedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself. Th e ambience of play is b y nature unstable. At any moment ' ordinary life' can prevail once again.

,,96

Gilles is under no illusion about the power of love. It is not eternal. It cannot conquer time. Everything passes. And he will always leave th e one h e loves before the climate ch anges. It is h ow the game keeps going. It is how the young stay young.

Genevieve trumps Gilles's desire for Carole wh en sh e presents h im with h er affair with Helene. While Gilles is intrigued b y Carole's now lost love of Beatrice, h e is much more attracted to Genevieve's for the elegant Helene. The reconciliation between Gilles and Genevieve entails not so much a renunciation of their desire for oth ers, but rather a gift of th e renunciation of that desire to each other. But while this ending has the appearance of equity, it is really Genevieve wh o wins the game. Sh e secures h er alliance with Gilles, sees off h er rival, and does it with out invoking proprietary righ ts. Sh e does not insist that Gilles be "hers," or th at she is "h is."

The title Tous les chevaux du roi does not refer as it might in English to "all the king's horses" of "Humpty Dumpty," but to an old song, "Aux marches du palais." Carole sings it on th e nigh t when sh e and Gilles and Genevieve fall into each others' lives. It is a song about a queen and her lover. One night h e steals into th e king's castle and lies with the queen in her bed. Together th ey make a river that all th e king's horses cannot

39

cross. Greil Marcus: "It is as deep and singular an image of revolution as there has ever been, but in Tous les chevaux du roi so distant an element it is barely an image at all." g7 When one is bored with the desire for mere th ings, there is only th e desire for anoth er's desire. Gilles desires Genevieve's desire for Helene. But what if one could create a desire so strong th at it put a river between it and its other? A desire th at, like a river, has to keep moving, has always to change, a desire that can play out in time and play in the end into the sea.

Th e Detournement of Detournement

28-30 Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939) was a member of the Situationist International for only a brief period. Sh e was Jorn's lover and had made the pilgrimage to Alba to work with Gallizio. When she left in protest over th e way th e artists of th e German Spur group had been expelled in an atmosphere of mutual recriminations, she was a member of the central committee. In a handwritten note about th ese events she wrote, perhaps addressing Debord: "I'm proud you call us gangsters, neverth eless you are wrong. We are worse: we are Situationists." g8 She goes on to articulate, for th e first time, an accurate formula for th e impasse into which th e Situationists had wandered: "Th e Situationist International has to be considered either as an avant-garde school which has already produced a series of fi rst-class artists th rown out after having passed th rough th eir education OR as an anti-organization based upon new ideology which is situationist and which has not yet found in details its clear formulations in the fields of science, tech niq ue, and art." gg

This anti-organization could perh aps not q uite appear yet, but sh e was right in proposing that th e Situationist International had functioned as a school for scandal, th rough which many fabulous (one would not say distinguished) writers and artists passed. She added th e first principle of the new anti­organization to come: "Everybody who develops theoretically or practically this new unity is automatically a member of

40

the situationist international and in this perspective The Situationist Times." 100

This principle would be taken up by the largely Scandinavian Second Situationist International, whose founding document de Jong signed: "now everyone is free to become a Situationist without the need for special formalities." This text was rather philosophical about the split between what it saw as the French and Scandinavian approaches. Debord's practice it identified as that of position, in opposition to the Scandinavians'-one is tempted to say Jorn's-of mobility. "In the argument neither side can claim to have a monopoly on the right ideas." 101 The distinction does not seem quite right. Perhaps it is rather one between an analytic conception of mobility in a fi xed space and a ludic conception of mobility in an open and variable space.

The Second I nternational hung together for a decade or so, producing extraordinary work and one or two interesting situations.102 They took the practice of art directly into everyday life to create situations as experiments in ways of behaving and being together. Their sophistication was at the level of participatory experiments. Nothing in their writing stands comparison to what T.J. Clark once called the "chiliastic serenity" of Debord's key texts.1 03 But what was perhaps lost in 31

the breakup of the Situationist I nternational was the opportunity to combine Debord's strategy with Jorn's situology in an expanded terrain that includes Bernstein's aesthetics of love, all of which would require an anti-patent collaboration that could delimit the surfaces of the space of its own ongoing possibility, which might look something like New Babylon. Keeping the passions in play takes a periodic clash of contraries.

The SituationistTimes, which de Jong edited from 1962 to 1967, is a remarkable set of documents. The early issues were edited jointly with Noel Arnaud ( 1919-2003) , who was a hospital administrator by profession, a member of Dada and Surrealist groups, of CoBrA and Oulipo, and a Satrap of the College of Pataphysics. He was, in short, a walking history of the avant­gardes and the sort of person Debord avoided, at least in public, like the plague. Recruiting him perhaps suggests de Jong's awareness that the Situationists' recuperation of their own

41

immediate avant-garde past was by no means complete. The SituationistTimes was initially proposed b y de Jong

in 1961 while she was still a member of the Situationist International. She recognized the need for an Eng lish-lang uag e journal of the movement. Perhaps she realized that it was no longer possible for a transnational avant-garde to use French as its lingua franca. She was the person often caug ht translating between the French speakers and the German section. At the infamous presentation of the Situationist International at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1960, she was even called on to vet a translation of the key speech that Ralph Rumney had made from French to Eng lish-a lang uag e Rumney suspects she barely spoke at the time.

The SituationistTimes, produced outside of the Situationist International itself, turned out to be a somewhat different beast. It was often multilingual rather than English-lang uag e, and even as such more written in what I have elsewhere called "Eng lishes"-Eng lish unapologetically written as a second lang uag e patterned after the writer's first lang uag e.104 It anticipates the Englishes that fl ourished in the transnational post-cyberpunk underground documented and coordinated by Nettime.105

The SituationistTimes pursued something of a middle course between the experimental practice of the Scandinavians and the strateg ic log ics of the Franco-Belgian group, who remained the core of the orig inal Situationist International. De Jong was interested in a log ic of images, of concepts that might be discovered and presented throug h the proliferation of imag es. The SituationistTimes operates in something like Gallizio's realm of industrial painting, where new relationships and possibilities might b e discovered in the plentitude of the image, but where the medium is print, not paint.

The fi rst issue defended the Spur g roup, expelled from the Situationist International at a time when charges were b eing brought against them for their "licentious" publication. It also presented what remained of Mutant, a post-Situationist International collaboration between Jorn and Debord that aimed to turn away from the then current spectacle of the

42

"space age" toward a prescient intervention in the technological transformation of earthbound life . It also introduced material for an ongoing investigation of topology, in keeping with one of Jorn's key interests. The third and fourth issues e xpande d on the fi gure of the knot and topology in general, and extensively docume nted Jorn's pet theory that there exi sted in Europe 32

an alternative geome trical culture, one able to think spatial exte nsion and temporal process together.

Each issue containe d the stateme nt, consistent with this topological thought and with established Situationist practice, to the effect that "all reproduction, deformation, modifi cation, derivation, and transformation of the The SituationistTimes are permitted." This was similar to the "copyleft" statement published in Internationale Situationniste, and connects Situationist practice with the hacker and pi rate practices of present-day struggles around free culture as a fi tfully acknowledged if still barely understood pre cursor.

The Second Situationist International set itself up as both a rival and a replacement for the Situationist International. Its principals had in mind the relationship between the Workingme n's Association of which Marx was a somewhat cantankerous member and the more Social Democratic Se cond International that succeeded it. Less doctrinaire and inflexible than Debord's group, it was in some ways less interesting for conceiving of a relation to Situationist thought and practice today than de Jong's The SituationistTimes. De Jong's actions amounte d less to a split within the movement than a detournement of it. No longer a secre t enemy of spectacular society but a known one, Situationist thought and practice had to change . As to how it might change and what it might become, this is work that was bare ly begun in The SituationistTimes. Perhaps the problem is not the recuperation of "situationism" in the fi fty years since the inception of the Situationist I nternational, but that the recuperation is so partial and incomplete. After all of the variables of the movement are accounted for, they might lend themselves again to an agency that is at once critical and creative.

43

At l east some of the key e l ements are here before us.

Exper i mental behavior, for i nstance. The word experimental

has lost a l l p rec i s ion. But it can be understood, with Ga l l i z io ,

as ant i-patent exchanges of creat i ve exper i ence, form ing

ensembles that produce works both i n abu ndance and i n fi n ite ly

d i fferent iated. The pract ice of derive i s more than j ust an u rban

wa l kabout. As Jorn proposes, i t i s a p ract ice connected to

the d i scovery of the qualities of any b lock of space and t i me.

C onstant po ints toward a rea l i st concept of bu i l t space i n

negat ive. H i s i s the best examp le o f what modern cap ita l i s m

has refused u s . Debord, f a r f rom be i ng a mess ian ic fi g u re,

emerges as the conceptua l arch itect of act i ng strateg ica l l y i n

g i ven b locks o f space and t i m e. Bernste i n shows how the spaces

and t i mes ava i l ab le for exper i mental comportment traverse

the pub l i c/pr ivate d i v i de, and that it does n 't take a multitude

to conceive of a new sovere ign pract ice of permanent p lay.

S h e a lso shows that p lay conta i ns , rather than escapes, the

p rob lem of power. De Jong shows us that a l l of t h i s mate r ia l

i s a l ready avai lab le to us to detourne i n the i nterest of new

exper iments, new concept ions.

33 The S ituat ion ists are nobody's p roperty. They be long now

to the very " l i terary commun ism" that Debord and company

announced befo re the movement had even rea l l y beg u n .

But before w e c a n proceed t o a new p ract i ce a n d escape

the i r orb i t, the S ituat ion ists present us with some unfin is hed

bus i ness. The derive has to become a pract ice with i n the arch ive,

a l lowing the d iscovery of the h i dden amb iences w it h i n the

Situat ion i st stacks that escape the d i v is ion of i ntel lectua l labor.

The e lements thus freed have to be recuperated f u l l y rather than

part ia l l y. Wh ich , last, m ight ra ise detournement to a new leve l ,

to a sovere ign appropr iat ion of appropr iat ion itse lf. I f journa l i sm ,

art, and scholarsh i p fai l us as the resources for cr i t ica l leverage,

the arch ive y i e lds the i r shadow i mage, revea l i ng in out l i n e the

cu l tura l resources we do not have, but req u i re , for leav ing the

twenty-fi rst centu ry.

44

Notes

1. After Chateaubriand, as qu oted in Guy Debord, "Refutation of All J u d gments," in Guy Debord: Complete Ci nematic Works, trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), p . 1 1 1 . The reader

is hereby notified that many of the best l i n es in the present essay have been l i fted from other sources without acknowledgment. 2. E l i zabeth Sussman, ed. , On the Passage of a

Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist I nternational 1957-1972 (Cambridge, MA: M I T Press, 1989); and Grei l Marcus, Li pstick Traces: A Secret H istory of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U n iversity Press, 1989). 3. Simon Ford, in The Realization and S u ppression of the Situationist International: An A n notated B ib l iography 1972-1992 (Sti r l ing , UK: AK Press, 1995), docu ments mostly the Engl is h-lang uage reception from the pro-Situ m i l ieus of the 1 970s to the first "boom" i n interest around 1989. 4. A reading vigorously d isputed in Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Stir l ing , UK: AK Press, 1991); and Stewart Home, Cranked Up Really H igh : Genre Theory and Punk Rock (Hove, UK: Codex, 1995). 5. See Tom McDonough, ed. , Guy Debord and the Situationist I nternational : Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: M I T Press, 2002); and Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France 1945-1968 (Cambridge, MA: M I T Press, 2007). 6. See Vi ncent Kaufman, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans. Robert Bonono (Minneapol is : U n iversity of M in nesota Press, 2006); and Martin Puch ner, Poetry ofthe Revolution: Marx, Man ifestos, and the Avant­Gardes (Pri nceton: Princeton U n iversity Press, 2006). 7. G u y Debord, Oeuvres c inematographiques completes (Gaumont V ideo, 2005). 8. See Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, eds., Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writin g s on the City (Barcelona: Actar, 1996); Simon Sadler, The Situat ionist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Alberto lacovoni , Game Zone: Playgrounds between Virtual Scenarios and Reality (Basel: B i rkhauser, 2004); Francesco Careri, Walkscapes (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo G i l i , 2003). 9. For exam ple, Anselm Jappe, G u y Debord (Berkeley: Un iversity of California Press, 1993); Darrow Schecter, History of the Left from Marx to the Present (London: Conti nuum, 2007); and Gerald Raunig, Art and Revol ut ion: Transversal

45

Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007). 1 0. See Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist I nternational in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992); or more recently, John Roberts, Ph i losophiz ing the Everyday: Revol utionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (London: P luto Press, 2006). G u y Debord has i nterestin g walk-on parts in Alain Badiou, The Century, translated by Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Pol ity, 2007); and S imon Critchley, I nfinitely Demanding : Ethics of Commitment and the Pol itics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). It would be worth investigating his "structural"

role i n these last two cases. 1 1 . Of part icular interest are a number of British pub l icati ons such as Here and Now, Smi le, Vague, Break/Flow, and pamphlets from the Londo

-n -­

Psychogeographical Association. On the h i story of British pro-Situs, see King Mob Echo 7 (2000); and Stewart Home, ed., W hat Was Situationism? A Reader (Ed inburgh: AK Press, 1995). 1 2. For example, A d i lkno, Media Archive (New York: Autonomedia, 1998); Critical Art Ensemble, Di gital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (New York: A utonomedia, 2001) ; Stewart Home, Neoism, Plag iarism and Praxis (Ed inburgh: AK Press, 1995); Josephine Bosma et ai. , eds. , Readme! F i ltered by Nettime ASC I I Cu lture and the Revenge of Knowledge (New York: Autonomedia, 1999). The introduction to the latter begins: " Noth ing is spectacular if you are not part of it ." 1 3. See G uy Debord and Gi l Wolman, "Methods of Detournement," i n Ken Knabb, ed. , Situat ionist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: B u reau of Pub l ic Secrets, 1985), p . 1 1 . 1 4. Four of my books can b e read a s a reworking of some core concepts: Virtual Geography (B loomington: I ndiana U n iversity Press, 1994), of Debord's theory of time; Dispositions (Cambridge: Salt P u bl ish ing , 1999), of the derive ,

or drift, in the age of g lobal posit ioning satellites; A Hacker Man ifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Un iversity Press, 2004), of d ig ital detournement,

or appropriation; and Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Un iversity Press, 2007), of play in the age of compulsory creativity. The present essay is thus a "settl i n g of accounts." 15 . Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sangu i netti, The Real Sp l it in the I nternational, translated by John McHale (London: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 33. 16. I bid . , p. 37. 17. Gerard Berreby, ed., Textes et docu ments Situation n istes 1957-1960 (Paris: Edit ions A l l ia, 2004), p. 47. 18. Howard Slater, "D ivided We Stand: An O ut l ine of Scan d inavian Situationism," Infopool 4 (2001 ).

19. Giorg i na Berto l i no et aI . , eds. , P inot Gal l iz io: I I laboratorio del la scrittura (Mi lan: Charta, 2005), p . 20. 20. Quoted in ib id . , p . 135 21 . Quoted in ib id . , p. 1 64. 22. M ichele Bernste in , " I n Praise of Pinot

Gal l iz io ," in McDonough , ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist I nternational , p . 70. 23. Quoted in Bertol i n o , Pi not Gal l iz io: I I laboratorio del la scrittura, p . 171 . 24. See Walter Benjam i n , "The Work of Art i n t h e Era o f Mechan ical Reproduc ib i l ity: Second Version," Selected Writi ngs, vol. 3, 1935-38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U n iversity Press, 2002), pp . 1 01 -33. 25. Bertol ino, P inot Gal l iz io: I I laboratorio del la scrittura, p . 1 72. 26. M i re l la Band in i , "An Enormous and U n known Chem ical React ion ," in Sussman, On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, p. 72. 27. Berto l ino , P inot Gal l iz io: I I laboratorio del la scrittura, p. 172. 28. Ib id . , p . 27. 29. Manuel DeLanda, I ntensive Science and V i rtual Ph i losophy (London: Conti n u u m , 2002), p. 4. 30. Ib id . , p . 1 7 1 . 31 . T. J . Clark, Farewell to an I d ea (New Haven: Yale U niversity Press, 2001 ) , p . 389. 32. Reprinted in Asger Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, trans. Peter S h ield (Aldershot, UK: Ash gate, 2002), p . 121ff. 33. Asger Jorn , "La Creation ouverte et ses ennemis," I nternationale Situationn iste 5 (December 1960), pp. 29-50. Eng l ish translations here and fol lowing are by the author un less otherwise attri buted. 34. Ib id . , p. 39. 35. Ib id . , p. 40. 36. l b i d . , p . 39. 37. G u y Debord, " I n g i rum," in G u y Debord: Complete C i nematic Works, p. 1 50. 38. Asger Jorn, " La Pataphysique, une religion en format ion ," I nternationale Situatio n n iste 6 (August 1961 ), pp. 29-32. 39. Asger Jorn, "La Creation ouverte et ses ennemis," p. 42. 40. Ib id . , p. 44. 41. James G leick, Chaos: Maki n g a New Science (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988). 42. Asger Jorn , "La Creation ouverte et ses ennemis," p. 44. 43. Ib id . , p. 45. 44. Both A. A. Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson bu i lt their utopias on Mars. A . A. Bogdanov, Red Star: The Fi rst Bolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: I nd iana U n i versity Press, 2006); and Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

46

(New York: Harper Col l ins, 1992). Despite the title, Bogdanov broke with Len i n , and in a sense h is Red Star is not " Bolshevik" at al l . I f one reason to read the Situation ists is as a cou nterweight to the q u ite strange Leninist revival perpetrated by Slavoj Zizek and Alain Bad iou , Bogdanov too m i g ht be d u e for an u ntimely "rehabil itation . " 45 . Fredric Jameson , Archaelogies ofthe Future (London: Verso, 2005), p. 15. 46. Mark W i gley, ed., A n other City for A n other Life: Constant's New Babylon, Drawing Papers 3 ( New York: The Drawi ng Center, 1999), p. 9. 47. On Jorn's worki ng-through of his Marxist and synd icalist i nheritance, see Graham Birtwhistle, Living Art: Asger Jorn's Com prehensive Theory of Art (Utrecht: Reflex, 1986). Constant's fasti d ious relation to the letter of Marx comes out in the interview with h im in Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley, eds., The Activist Drawing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001 ). 48. The Decomposition of the Artist: Five Texts by Constant, addendum to Wigley, Another City for A nother Life: Constant's New Babylon. 49. Constant, "Manifesto" (1948), The Decomposition of the Artist, p . a2. 50. Karl Marx, "Preface" to A Contri bution to the Criti que of Political Economy, i n Ear ly Writin gs, trans. Rodney Liv ingstone (Harmondsworth: Pengu in , 1975), p . 426. The relat ion of the CoBrA artists to Marx i s compl icated. Jorn argued at the t ime that art was not infrastructural, but superstructural. It was for him the qualitative aspect of social labor. 51. Constant, "On Our Means and Our Perspectives" (1958), The Decomposition ofthe Artist, p . a7. 52. Mark Wig ley, "The Great U rbanism Game," Arch itectural Desi g n , special issue on New Babylonians, ed . la in Borden a n d Sandy McCreery, vol . 71 , no. 3 (June 2001 ), p. 9. 53. Constant, "Lecture Given at the ICA, London" (1963), The Decomposition of the Artist, p. a9. 54. I b id . , p . a12. 55. I b i d . , p . a13. 56. I b id . 57. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York: Noonday Press, 1 989), p . 85. 58. Constant, "The Rise and Dec l ine of the Avant-Garde" ( 1 964), The Decomposition of the Artist, p . a26. 59. Alice Becker-Ho, " Historical Note (2006) , " i n A l ice Becker-Ho and G uy Debord, A Game of War, translated by Donald N icholson-Smith (I.:ondon: Atlas Press, 2007), p . 7 . 60. Jacquel ine de Jong , i n Stefan Zweifel et a I . , eds. , I n Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur I g n i : T h e Situationist I nternational 1957-1972 (Zurich: J RP-Ringier, 2006), p. 240.

61 . Giorgio Agamben, in ibid . , p. 36. 62. See Susan Laxto n , Paris as Gameboard: Ludic Strategies in Surrealism (Ph .D . d iss. , Columbia Un iversity, 2004).

63. Marcel Duchamp and Vitali Hal berstadt, L' Opposition et les cases conjugees sont reconcil ieesjOpposition und Schesterfelder s ind durch versohntjOpposition and Sister Squares Are Reconci led (Paris: L'Edit ions l 'Ech iqu ier, 1932). 64. Quoted in Al lan Woods, The Map Is Not the Territory (Manchester, U K: Manchester U n iversity Press, 2000), p . 199. 65. See Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox (New York: T h u nder Mouth Press, 2006). 66. Guy Debord, Society of the S pectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2005), para. 1 43. 67. Thanks to Michael Petti n ger for this translation .

68. See G u y Debord, Cette mauvaise reputation (Paris: Gal l imard, 1993). 69. Becker-Ho and Debord, A Game of War, p. 156. 70. Ib id . , p. 19. 71 . Ib id . , p . 21 . 72. Ib id . 73. Antonio G ramsci , Selections f rom The Prison

Notebooks, trans. Q u intin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Pub l ishers, 1971), p . 238. 74. Becker-Ho and Debord, A Game of War, p. 22. 75. Ib id . , p. 24. 76. G uy Debord, "Preface to the First Edition , " in ib id . , p . 9 . 77. More could be sa id about a Situationist approach to the novel and about novels that were key to the movement, such as those by Malcolm Lowry and Louis-Ferd inand Cel ine, or those it inspired, such as Patrick Straram's recently rediscovered Les Bouteil les se couchent (Paris: Edit ions Al l ia, 2006), or Georges Perec's Th ings: A Story ofthe Sixties (Boston : David R. Godine, 1990), or Ph i l i ppe Sol lers's The Park (New York: Red Dust , 1977). 78. Debord to Constant, 8 August 1958, in G u y Debord, Correspondance, vol . 1 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). Thanks to B i l l Brown for th is reference. 79. Debord to Constant, 26 Apri l 1959, in ib id . 80 . Zweifel, I n Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Ign i : The Situationist I nternational 1957-1972, p . 9. 81 . M ichele Bernstei n , La N u it (Paris: Buchet­Chastel, 1961 ), p. 40. 82. I b id . , p. 18. 83. Ib id . , p . 92. 84. Michele Bernste in , Tous les chevaux du ro i (Paris: Editions Al lia, 2004), p. 1 1 6. I would l i ke to thank J o h n Kelsey for making h i s translation of th is text avai lable to me. I have mod ified h i s translation s l ight ly here and there. 85. Ib id . , p . 53. 86. Choderlos de Lados, Les Liaisons

47

dangereuses, translated by P. W. K. Stone (London: Penguin , 1961 ), p. 364; Percy Bysshe Shel ley, " E p i psych id ion ," in T h e Poetical Works of Shel ley, ed. Newell F. Ford ( Boston: Houg hton Miffi i n , 1974), p. 306. 87. Odi le Passot, " Portrait of G u y Debord as a Young Li bertine," Su bstance 3 (1999), p. 77. Odi le Pas sot is a pseudonym; th is text was actually written by J ean-Marie Apostolides. See his Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord (Paris: Flammari o n , 2006). 88. See Marcel Carne, Les Visiteurs du soir, 1942, with screen play by Jacques Prevert and Pierre Laroche. 89. Chri s Kraus, I Love Dick (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 97. 90. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge U n iversity Press, 1996), p . 1 1 1 . 9 1 . Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p . 1 48. For the characters in Bernste in 's novels, it 's more l i ke fast bodies, dean cars. 92. Bernste i n , Tous les chevaux du roi , p . 36. 93. Len Bracken, Guy Debord Revolutionary (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1997), p . 245. 94. G u y Debord, Panegyric, Books One and Two, translated by James Brook and John McHale (London: Verso, 2004), p . 61. 95. Bernste in , Tous les chevaux d u roi, p. 113. 96. "Howls for Sade," Guy Debord: Complete C inematic Works, p. 17. 97. G reil Marcus, L ipstick Traces, p. 423. 98. Jacq uel ine de Jong, "Critic on the Political Practice of Detournement," The Situationist Times 1 (1962). 99. I b id . 1 00. Ib id . 1 0 1 . "The Struggle for the Situcratic Society," signed by Nash, de Jong , et aI . , The Situation ist Times 2 (1962). 1 02. See Howard Slater, " D ivided We Stand: An Outl ine of Scandinavian Situationism." 1 03. T. J . C lark, The Painti n g of Modern Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Un iversity Press, 1984), p . 1 0. 1 04. See Emi ly Apter, The Translation Zone:

A New Comparative Literature (Pri nceton, NJ: Princeton U n iversity Press, 2005), p. 226ff. 1 05. See Josephine Bosma et a I . , eds., Readme!.

Cred its

1 Chris Jordan, Cell p hones #2, Atlanta, 2005. From the series I ntolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption. Courtesy C h ri s Jordan 2 Edward Burtynsky, Man ufactur ing #16, N i n g bo, Zheijang Province, 2005. From the series C h i na. Courtesy Edward Burtynsky and Charles Cowles Gallery, New York/Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco/Nicho las Metivier Gallery, Toronto 3-10 Ralph Rumney, photographs taken in Cosio d'A rroscia, Italy , J u ly 1957. Courtesy Avery Arch itectural and F ine Arts L ibrary, Columbia U n iversity 11 Film sti l l from Bernadette Corporation, Get R id of Yourself, 2003. Courtesy Bernadette Corporation

12 Game sti l l from Radical Software Group, Kriegspiel : G u y Debord ' s 1978 "Game of War," 2008. Courtesy Radical Software Group 15 Pinot (G iuseppe) Gal l iz io and gypsies, Alba , Italy. Photographer u n known. Courtesy Archivo Gal l i zio, Tur in 16 P inot (G iuseppe) Gal l i z io and Soshana Afroyim, in Cavern of Anti-Matter instal latio n , Rene Dro u i n Gallery, Paris, 1959. Photographer u nknown. Courtesy Arch ivo Gall iz io, Turin 17 Pi not (G iuseppe) Gal l iz io , Cavern of Anti-Matter, I n stallation view, Rene Drouin Gallery, Paris, 1959. Photog rap her u n known. Courtesy Archivo Gal l iz io , Turin 1 8 P i not (G iuseppe) Gal l iz io, Untitled (detai l ) , 1959. Photographer u n known. Courtesy Arch ivo Gal l i z io , Turin 21 Constant, New Babylon Yellow Sector, 1958-61 . Courtesy Victor N ieuwen h uys 22 Constant, Combi nation of Sectors, 1958-61 . Courtesy Victor N ieuwen h uys 23 Constant, New Babylon Paris, 1963. Col lection of the Gemeentem useum, The Hague 24 Constant, New Babylon Amsterdam, 1963. Col lection of the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague 28 Jacq uel ine d e Jong with Pinot (G iuseppe) Gal l iz io in Al ba, Italy, 1960. Photographer u n known. Courtesy Jacquel ine d e Jong 29 Jacquel ine de Jong with Asger Jorn at an open ing of an exh i b ition of collages by Jacques Prevert, 1962. Photographer u nknown. Courtesy Jacquel ine de Jong 30 Jacquel ine de Jong i n her Paris stud io . Photographer u n known. Courtesy Jacquel ine de Jong 33 Kevin C. Py le and McKenzie Wark, Cataract of Time, 2007. From Totality for Kids, on-l ine work in progress

48

1 Chris Jordan, Cel l phones #2, Atlanta, 2005. From the series I ntolerable Beauty: Portraits of Mass A merican Consumption

2 Edward Burtynsky, Manufactur ing #16, N ingbo, Zheijang Province, Ch ina, 2005. From the series C h ina

With the development of capital ism, irreversible time is u n ified on

a world scale . . . . W h at appears the world over as the same day is

the time of economic production cut up into equal abstract fragments.

Unified irreversible time i s the time of t h e world market and, as a

coro l l ary, of the world spectacle. -Guy Debord

3-8 Ral p h Rumney, photographs taken in Cosio d 'Arroscia, Ju ly 1957. I dentifiable are Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord, Piero Sismondo, and Elena Verrone.

I got summoned, or i n vited, to Cosio d' Arroscia. 50 we went there

and Debord turned u p with this tract he'd written and we founded the

5ituationist Internati onal. 5ism ondo had a place there. H e was a friend

of Jorn's and Jorn was l iving nearby ... anyway Piero had this place,

or his aunt had a hotel there where we could all stay and get free food.

50 we stayed there for a week getting drunk, and that was how the

5ituationist I nternational was formed . -Ralph Rum ney

9 Ralph Rum ney, photog rap h taken in Cosio d'Arroscia, J u ly 1957. Portrait of Michele Bernstein

1 0 Ralph Rum ney, photograph taken in Cosio d 'Arroscia, Ju ly 1957. Portrait of G u y Debord

Since each parti c u l ar feel i n g is only a part of life and not life in its

entirety, l ife yearns to spread i nto the ful l d i versity of fee l i n g s so as to

rediscover itself in the whole of this div ersity . . . In love, the separate

sti l l exists, but it exists as unified, no longer as separate: the l i v i n g

meets t h e l i v i n g . - G u y Debord

11 Bernadette Corporation, fi lm sti l l from Get Rid of Yourself, 2003

12 Radical Software Group , game sti l l from Kriegspie l : Guy Debord ' s 1978 "Game of War", 2008

W h at we need to beg i n t h i n k i n g about is the totality of society under

attac k. We are fac i n g a new subjective space, one that threatens

power and i g nores it. It's not political because it refuses any social role.

There are no demands, there are no negotiations. It's a mass exodus

on the spot. -Bernadette Corporati on

NOUVEAU THEATRE D'OPERA TIONS DANS LA CULTURE

�Uuction da ulualiolU

LA DISSOLUTION DES IDEES ANCIENNES VA f)£ PAIR AVEC LA DISSOLUTION DES ANCIENNES

CONDITIONS D'EXIS TENCE ,

INTERNATIONAl.E

SITVATIONNISTE

13 Poster for the I nternati onale 'Situation n iste, 1958

1 4 Guy Debord, Map of Paris before 1957, 1957

I know G i l les's thing for wal king all n i g ht, how a cafe sti ll open late

becomes a precious port of call in streets where somnambul ists

normally don't go. After two, rue M ouffetard is deserted. Y o u have to

go up to the Pantheon to find a bar, to r u e Cujas. The next stop is by the

Senate, then rue d u Bac, if you really want to steer clear of what

we sti ll call the Quartier. Here, I g u ess Carole told h i m the story of

her life (if she even had one yet). And then the sun starts to rise over

Les Hailes-it's a ritual. -Michele Bernstein

15 Pinot (Gi useppe) Gal l iz io and gypsies, A l ba, Italy. Photographer unknow n

16 Pinot (G iuseppe) Gal l iz io and Soshana Afroyim in Cavern of Anti-Matter installation, Rene Drou in Gallery, Paris, 1959. P h otographer u n known

The gypsies rightly contend that one is never compel led to speak

the truth except in one's own language; in the enemy's language,

the l i e must reign. -Guy Debord

17 P inot (G iuse ppe) Gal l i z io , Cavern of Anti-Matter, i nstal lation view, Rene Drou in Gallery, Paris, 1959. Photographer un known �

18 P inot (G iusep pe) Gall iz io , U ntitled (detail), 1959

The patented society, conceived and based on simple ideas, on the

elementary gestures of artists and scie ntists reduced to captivity

l ike fleas by ants, is about to end; man is expressing a col lective sense

and a suitable instrument for transmitting it i n a potlatch system of

g ifts that can only be paid for by other poetic experiences.

-Pinot (Giuseppe) Gall izio

19 Laocoon's fate. I l l u stration for Asger Jo rn's article "Apol lo and Dionysus" as pu bl ished in Byggmastarn (Sweden), 1947

20 Graph ic i mage of the movement of a pendu lum. I l l ustration for Asger Jorn's artic le "Living Ornament" as pub l ished in Forum (The Netherlands), 1949

The tremendously consistent purge of empty ornamental elem ents

ofform is in reality classicism's Pyrrhic victory. It is a tabula rasa for

what is to come; for an art of the future. -Asger Jorn

21 Co nstant, views of New Babylon Yellow Sector, 1958-61

22 Constant, Combination of Sectors, 1958-61

For many a year the gypsies who sto pped a whi le i n the little

Piedmontese town of Alba were in the habit of camping ben eath the

roof that, once a week, on Saturday, h oused the l i vestock market .. . .

It's there that i n December 1956 I went to see them in the company of

the painter Pi not Gal l izio, the owner of this u neven, m u ddy, desolate

terrain, who'd g i ven it to them . . . . That was the day I conceived the

scheme for a permanent encampment for the gypsies of A l ba and that

project is the origin of the series of maqu ettes of New Babylon. Of a

New Babyl on where, u n der one roof, with the aid of movable elements,

a shared residence is bui lt; a temporary, co nstantly remodeled l i v i n g

area; a c a m p f o r nomads on a planetary scale. -Constant

23 Constant, New Babylon Paris, 1963

�UIH� 'AL� VAH AlUTHOAH � ............. -,,�.-.,,�

-" -�-'"""'# '''-''

24 Constant, New Babylon A m sterdam, 1963

The first step, arch itectu ral ly, wou l d obviously be to replace the

current pav i l ions with an autonomous series of small Situation ist

architectural complexes. A m o n g these new architectures ... ou ght

to be b u i lt perpetually changing labyrinths . . . . S h o u l d Les Hai les

of Paris survive unti l such a time as these problems will b e posed by

everyone, it wil l be fitting to try to turn them i nto a theme park for

the l u d i c education of the workers. -Abdelhafid Khatib

25 Guy Debord, fi lm sti l l s from In Girum I m u s Nocte et Consum i m ur I g n i , 1978, incorporati ng Debord's Game of War and detourned i mages from war movies

I have long striven to maintain an obscure and el usive existence,

and this has enabled me to further develop my strateg ical experiments,

which had already begun so wel l . A s someone not without abi lities

once put it, this is a field i n which no one can ever become expert.

The results of these investigations-and this is the only good news i n

the present c o m m u n ication-will n o t b e presented in cinematic form.

-Guy Debord

26 Guy Debord, fi l m sti l l from Critiq ue of Separati o n , 1961 , showing Debord with Carol ine Rittener

27 Michele Bernstein on the cover ofthe 2004 reissue of her 1960 novel Tous les chevaux d u roi

Helene was at the center of a group that came apart. Her presence gave

it equ i l i br ium, but l ater she became as useless as a grand staircase i n

a ruined castle. Helene didn 't change, b u t a change i n perspective had

abolished her functi on. We stopped seeing her for all these reasons,

and for no reason ... out of sadness. N ot having anyt h i n g to confront her

with, I refused to confront her, and there was a bad

fi ght on the telephone. -Michele Bernstein

28 Jacq uel ine de Jong with P inot ( G i useppe) Gal l iz io in Al ba, 1960. Photographer u nknown

29 Jacquel ine de Jong with Asger J orn' at an opening of an exh ib i tion

of collages by Jacques Prevert, 1962. Photographer u nknown

30 Jacquel ine de Jong i n her Paris stud io . P h otographer unknown

I n 1962, the outrage expressed by de Jong that such a group could be so

undem ocratic as to seek to eject a 'majority' of its own mem bers, could

well be ind icative that as an organization of affi nities the Situationist

International was self-selecti ng. T h e trum peted exclusions are

also i n dicative of its bid for "sovere i g n power"-a political act that

annou nces its own state of exception, its own rules ("creating the

sphere of its own reference"), and in so d o i n g disregards any notion of a

binding 'contract' being at the orig in of its power. -H oward S l ater

.. ..

�ATIONAL EDmON .

� smJl . . . . . 11BJ limt$ It{t. ·

'"'-- .. ..... , . - - .. ... - - � -_ . . __ ... _ ........ ...... - - -...... -. �.J".'.l<O<.

31 The Situationist Times 4, October 1963. Issue on the labyrinth

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oJ <> ... foa.oior""s...-�

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D.a .... ' � dt< K ... b·;nrcin; D",d. dOc R..ito<n!>I>It 1�1t du Kbn>Jo;n Uoi".

X"" winl Him ... ..,; ..... s.:IMIu &n;&dl<h .. A ... " .,. <n<h<ioI JOfon ....! .... <ka KAiboo> lIIio .... -.

IftJo.ircd>n ..... gr1IIIUC"'t4.. IMw:u kommcu dcrKnlb'in !'dll: Owdo .no J.iocor. .... &lin .w K o!ruIci .. kkin.

S ... "ird HMiI "'" .o...n5<"" ... . ..,.lIehc. A ... � .. <r><brinI toI"ort """ rthrl deAKDob<nnti,>kh ...-q;.

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r...u",bt". "u",du Knab 10 kjn Srii",� .... �IcinU"""

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Samizdat movements, being utopian, seek to intervene i n all areas

of l ife. However, the anti-professionalism of sami zdat biases it in favor

of cultural and pol itical activities and away from seri ous scie ntific

i n vestigation. Since Western society encourages speciali zati o n ,

o n c e a n y g i ven sami zdat movement loses i t s dynamism i t tends t o be

pushed into a single area of contestation. -Stewart Home

�--::" :. �>\ \ . .

-. . . .

'\., �.'" .... --,

� . '

. �:� �

•.. ' !::

100

102

II Charles Olso12 The death in life ( �s endless. Etemit

death itself)

1S a false cause Y

The knot is other . presents itseU a

;Ilse, each topological

cuts it, each k' n

. �o sword

comer

Each

not IS Itself its fire

. knot of which

15 for the hands to the nets are made

the knot's makin untake

can turn the k g, �nd touch alone

not IOta its own flame

�. ,--_ 105

106

.... f� 107

.'"

(( ,� �� , �0) 31 The S't .

. -�<---.;:==���. ��!!:�!� I uatlonist Times 4 0 , ctober 1963 I . ssue on the labyrinth

3JUf)'ON

H- -. .

•

32 The Situationist Times 5, Decem ber 1964. Issue on the r ing

In this n u m ber of The Situati onist Times, we try to open up the

problem of the ring, interlaced rings, and consequently chains .. . we do

not want to make any statement . . . either in a so-called "symbol istic"

way or in a sc ie ntific one, even though some of the contrib utors might

show a certai n tendency in one way or another. -J acqueline de J o n g

When freedom is practiced in a closed cirtle.

it fades into a dream. and becomes

a mere representation of itself.

All the eddies of the world course into history. but history does not fill up. And to the place from whence these rilers of turbulence come they return.

33 Kevin C. Pyle and McKenzie Wark. Cataract of Time. 2007. From Totality for Kids, on-l i n e work in progress

Guy came in, dressed in black from head to foot, and in b l ac k

corduroy no less! . . . Flo urishes o f rare precision and without any

hurry. The real adventure novel i s Cel ine. I'm entirely in agreement

with you there, Guy. He sat down with no preamble other than

his smile ... and ordered two liters of white wine, dry white wine.

-Patrick Straram