Situationist Space (original) (raw)

Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City

Environment and Planning A, 1996

It is increasingly recognised that cartography is a contested practice, embedded within particular sets of power relations, and that maps are bound up with the production and reproduction of social life. This paper begins by emphasising the importance of these issues for considering how the city has been mapped and represented through cartographic schemes, and it draws on debates around the power and politics of mapping, and contentions that maps are 'preeminently a language of power, not of protest' (Harley). However, it argues that maps and mapping have not been the preserve of the powerful, and the main part of the paper is devoted to examining some specific challenges to ‘official’ cartographies of the city. It focuses on the radical art and political group, the Situationist International, and its avant-garde predecessors of the Lettrist International, who sought to appropriate urban maps and cartographic discourses, and to develop a new form of 'psychogeographical mapping' during the 1950s and 60s. The paper provides an account of their subversions, and an assessment of how their concerns might inform contemporary discussions on cartography and the mapping of urban space.

The Strange Respectability of the Situationist City in the Society of the Spectacle

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2002

Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions modernes de production s'annonce comme une immense accumulation de spectacles. Tout ce qui était directement vécu s'est éloigné dans une représentation (1st thesis of La Société du Spectacle [Debord, 1967]). The Situationists, the Situationist City and related 1960s urban cultural, architectural and political movements have received considerable attention in recent years. A plethora of new and re-edited books and collections have been published and a series of prestigious exhibitions have been staged. 1 This paper critically discusses this regained 'respectability' of what once were revolutionary, anti-establishment, anarcho-marxist and radically transformative movements. The essay engages particularly with the present reinvention of the Situationist Movement and argues that the rediscovery of the 'Situationist City' celebrates an intellectualized, aestheticized and depoliticized version that is particularly oblivious to the political and revolutionary theories and programmatic emancipatory urban agenda that underpinned the Situationist Movement. We shall argue that this aestheticized reappropriation of selected parts of the Situationist legacy reinforces exactly what the Situationists actively criticized and tried to undermine. At the same time, intellectual and cultural attention is diverted away from the active urban reconstructions that try to confront the totalizing presence of the spectacle and breathe the spirit that Guy Debord and his friends pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s. We shall attempt to connect this rediscovery of the 'Situationist City' and the urban imaginations of the time to the theoretical and political insights, particularly those of Guy Debord, that developed in tandem with their concern with the production of a new way of living, one that revolved squarely around recapturing the urban.

Delirious Paris: Mapping as Paranoiac-Critical Activity

Grey Room

Mapping, in the hands of Guy Debord and his Situationist colleagues, could become a paranoiac-critical approach to contesting the urban realities of postwar Paris. A paranoiac vision of the city was evident in the “psychogeographic” maps Debord made toward the end of the 1950s. Originating in the interwar practices of Surrealism, this psychogeography of the modern city was, however, not only an instrument of critique, but also a utopian suggestion of the “great game” that for the Situationists would be the collectively organized space of the revolutionary city. Although Debord later pessimistically dismissed the city as the very space where history might be made, these maps remain suggestive.

(De)Facing the Suburbs: Street Art and the Politics of Spatial Affect in the Paris banlieues

This essay takes the strands of aesthetics, politics and affect to examine the interrelation between street art and urban renewal in re-making ‘place’ in the Paris banlieues. If recent French policies of decentralization and urban ‘renewal’ or ‘renovation’ present opportunities to rethink the affective terrains defining the banlieues’ relationship to the capital, they also present the need to resituate cultural production within the context of the territorial disturbance of suburban renewal. In this exploratory piece, I want to look at one aesthetic ‘refrain’ in particular – the human face in the ‘photograff’ (a photographic form of street art, a linguistic blend of ‘photograph’ and ‘graffiti’) – to suggest how the face in the urban environment invites an affective approach to considering the spatialities emergent at the edge of the intra muros city. It is the affective interrelation between the human face in street art and spatialities of renewal in suburban Paris that is at the heart of this discussion, where spatiality is understood to mean the relatively grounded and constructed series of socionatural processes in which humans participate and which, mutually, shape what happens in space. The affective relation that ensues from the encounter with the human face, postered and pasted onto the walls of a suburb undergoing renewal and within the greater context of the Inside Out project, brings into view a moving interaction of urban artefacts, histories and aesthetic sensibilities – what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari will term ‘la ritournelle’, the refrain – which, while these may anchor the ‘virtual synesthetic perspectives’ that constitute affect, at the same time, open onto a myriad of potential encounters between people in public; or, better, they open onto a politics.

Unorthodox Ways to Think the City (Representations, Constructions, Dynamics)

Routledge, 2018

This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city. The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Paradigm: Notes For a Definition of Architecture as Paradigm 3. Island: The Possibility of the City as an Island 4. Map: From Description to Making 5. Model: from object to process 6. Dust: From Form to Transformation

The Situationists and the Right to the City

2011

The Situationists and the Right to the City This paper will examine the contribution of the Situationist international to the right to the city. Beginning with a review of the contributions the Situationists make to a 'hegelian urbanism' the creative destruction of urbanism is discussed. Using illustrative examples such as Ferdinand Cheval's creation of the palace idéal at Charmes-sur-l'Herbasse, Drôme, France, the Dutch architect Constant's unitary urbanism, and Henri Lefebvre's work the understanding of the right to the city, are considered. From this context, the history of the Situationists is developed from the Lettrists, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB), Scandinavian movement COBRA, and the London Psychogeographical Association. The Situationist's central concepts of the spectacle, dérive, détournement, psychogeography and unitary urbanism are examined to suggest strategic and tactical interventions for a reclamation of a right to the city. Contemporary discussion of future directions of Situationist informed urbanism are presented for the continuing legacy of the Situationist International's understanding of the right to the city.