MASSES AND MACHINES

A Few Thoughts After Reading Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings on the City, edited by Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa for the 1996 Exhibition on the Situationists and Urbanism at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art

Anarchists in the United States have had a rather slim portion of situationist literature available to them, and this has created a skewed view of of the actual thinking of this unorthodox marxist group. Even the most comprehensive collection in English (Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology), is fairly limited in what early material it presents. This is what made Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings on the City an interesting read.

This anthology, published as part of an exhibit at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, emphasizes SI and pre-SI writings on architecture and urbanism. All of the writing is provocative. Some of it may disturb those who think of the situationists as libertarian in their outlook. The book clearly undermines the idea of a split between an artistic side of the SI on the one hand and a radical political side on the other. In fact, the writings of the most artistic members (and their attitudes toward their art projects) is drenched as much in marxism as in artisitc avant-gardism. In fact, I would argue that the latter was an outgrowth of the former for the artists of the SI. Though it is true that their marxism wasn't orthodox, it was certainly crude at times, and often not even faintly libertarian. The cruder marxism was most evident in their unequivocal adulation of technological developments. Their ideas verged on a positive sort of technological determinism: industrial and post-industrial technology was supposed to provide the basis for human liberation. This led to science-fictionesque conceptions of vast, completely denatured urban landscapes with mobile, high-tech parts that could undergo perpetual transformations. These were to be environments where "the masses" would be able to exercise their collective creativity while "professional situationists" prepared the ambiences. Within these visions. living, breathing individuals seemed to get lost completely. There were only masses and machines. There is no questioning at all of technology or of the city as such. In fact, in the earliest writings, there isn't even any deep questioning of expertise (hence the "professional situationists").

With the ejection of Constant and friends, and various encounters and new members, the SI critique did seem to deepen. Aspects of Constant's ideas were rejcted, particular that of "professional situationists". In addition, the SI developed a critique of "the masses". In addition, the anti-individualist attitude, expressed in crude marxist terms in the early writings, was toned down, and certain situationists (Vaneigem in particular) even began to recognize subjectivity as lying in the individual. But their vision remained essentially marxist, with a basis in urban society and technology.

Nonetheless, there are ideas worth looting from the situationists: the drift (derive*), psychogeography, misappropriation/cultural highjacking (detournement*), the revolution of everyday life, the spectacle,creative encounter with the spaces we pass through, the refusal of the static with its implication of constant transformation. Along this line, Vaneigem points out in his essay "Commentaries Against Urbanism" (in my opinion, one of the best essays in the book) that the shantytown dweller, with no professional training whatsoever, has more real knowledge of how to build the space in which he or she lives than any architect or urban planner, and to do so in a temporary fashion. No need for the vast mechanized urban landscapes imagined by Constant and friends. No need for the professional situationists. What the imagination already does among people on the margins now could only expand in surprising and beautiful directions in a world with no state, no economy, no experts and no abstract masses to squelch the imagination.
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* At this point, regardless of how inexact English translations of these words may be, I prefer to use an English equivalent to the pretension of insisting on sticking to the French. Thus I use "drift" for "derive" and "misappropriation" or "cultural highjacking" for "detournement". I made these choices, however imprecise, after consulting a French/English dictionary. The only thing I added was the word "cultural" to clarify the type of highjacking I am referring to. As I translator, I know that exact translation is always impossible. If you want the piece you are translating to be understood, you choose words in the language you are translating into that come as close to the feeling and intended meaning of the original as possible. If, on the other hand, you want to create a specialized code language for your little group, you do what English speaking pro-situs did, and refuse to even attempt to translate certain terms.
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P.S. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get a hold of this book. Used copies seem to range from $100 to $450, even though the original cover price was (a still too expensive) $22. I took the copy I read out on inter-library loan.

THE CITY

Thoughts inspired by reading Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Of course, ultimately I want to do away with the city. It represents the values of civilization which boil down to alienated and centralized power and wealth. Yet there are aspects of the city that I enjoy, particularly the opportunity for chance encounters with stimulating strangers. Where human beings do not congregate in large numbers, the opportunities for such encounters are much reduced or even disappear. But contemporary cities are built to serve the needs of capitalism and the state. And they have always served the interests of the ruling powers who had them built: priesthoods, military elites, those who stole the wealth and creative energy of others in order to set themselves up as rulers.

In her otherwise interesting book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs forgets this aspect of the city, its role as symbol and tool of the ruling class. This is not so surprising since at a certain point cities become too large and chaotic for the rulers to keep them in hand. So Jane Jacobs tries to look at cities in terms of how they actually function as relationships among human beings and between the human being and this particular artificial environment. What I find most interesting in Jacobs’ book is her assessment that the city functions best as an environment for human life when it is diverse and vibrant with a wide variety of people and activities interweaving with each other. This parallels what comprises a healthy wild environment – it needs a wide variety of different life forms carrying out a variety of different activities that weave themselves together. The destruction of such diversity indicates a moribund situation.

Going back to the city as Jacobs conceives it, we see the need for an active street life. This is where the interweaving diversity manifests itself most clearly. According to Jacobs, for this to function most effectively, wide sidewalks where various activities could take place would have to combine with a mixture of different sorts of uses of space in the neighborhood. Consider, for example, how a café with outdoor tables on the sidewalk in a neighborhood that also included people’s homes and public spaces for other purposes could encourage regular interaction and discussion of experiences among those who live in the neighborhood.

All in all, Jacobs’ conception points out the necessity for a wide variety of different levels of relationship as necessary for making cities livable human environments.

I think Jacobs is wrong in considering the various suggestions of city planners that undermine this diversity and empty the streets to be well-intentioned mistakes. She is giving these well-paid servants of power too much credit. As I pointed out above, cities emerge with centralized power and wealth and have always been meant to serve the purposes of the rulers who hold these. As industrialism congregated greater and greater numbers of those in the exploited class into cities, they began to turn the environment to their own purposes, and the ruling class had to take action to counter this. City planning as a recognized specialization can be traced back to Hausmann whose changes in Paris were intended to limit the possibility of insurrection by making it easier for the state’s troops to maneuver through the streets. This should make it clear that the aim of city planning has always been control in the ruling class’s interest. If, in times of “social peace”, the vibrant and varying activity on the streets prevents the petty unpleasantness that might otherwise mar people’s daily lives, it also provides a network of relationships that can form the basis for self-organization among the poor and exploited in times of social unrest, with the potential of pushing that unrest in the direction of insurrection. The “surveillance” that Jacobs says the eyes of those active on the street provide for preventing undesirable activities goes hand in hand with the existence of active networks of communication among people that can be turned to much more interesting purposes – such as keeping an eye out for the cops – in situations like riots and other forms of collective unrest. It is in the interest of the ruling class to do all that it can to hinder the formation of such networks of communication even if it means losing this form of “surveillance”. And the forms of city planning she describes and attacks in her book do precisely that. At this point, police, security guards, surveillance cameras and other forms of surveillance technology are used in the place of active street life. The division of cities into zones for different purposes – downtown shopping areas, more specialized shopping areas for “bohemian” tastes, arts districts, residential areas, industrial areas, while rarely having strict boundaries, nonetheless, indicate the specialization of space in cities which affects the nature of foot traffic.

I mentioned my enjoyment of stimulating chance encounters as one of the things I like about cities. If I dealt with some less than pleasant realities when I lived in New Orleans in 1991, I also discovered a vibrant, active street life that offered me a wide variety of interesting encounters and led to the discovery of such wonderful secrets as the number of bars that offered free red beans and rice on different evenings of the week. Of course, New Orleans has changed drastically since then. And the devastation that Katrina caused has opened the door to building the city completely in the service of capital.

Portland, on the other hand, already has its divisions. It is not as bad as some places, but increasingly the only public spaces that exist are those dedicated to commerce in some form and these are being more and more concentrated into malls, strips and other areas devoted almost exclusively to commercial interaction. So these become the areas of activity while residential sidewalks are mostly deserted. Thus, public gathering is, for the most part, specifically attached to commodity consumption. Nonetheless, in some of the poorer neighborhoods, the streets are more active with playing children, adults hanging out on their porches, at bus stops, etc. But it is not the vital street life Jacobs describes from fifty years ago.

So the question arises, where will we find the networks of communication we will need in times of social unrest? This is particularly important now in the US where class reality is often hidden under racial tension. In a riot provoked by another cop killing another black person, how are black people on the street to know who their “white” accomplices are when day-to-day interaction is so minimal? This is not a minor problem.

In the context of industrial civilization, the desire for chance encounters with strangers is more readily fulfilled in cities than in any other human environment. But this comes about purely by accident due to the gathering together of large numbers of people who end up concentrating in these artificial environments for much less desirable reasons. (Cities have generally been formed for purposes of control and commerce – having military, religious and/or economic origins.) Over the last several decades, city planners, obviously working in the interest of the ruling order, have been doing all they can to reduce the possibilities for such encounters, keeping them confined to locales where they are easily controlled and are generally connected to commodity consumption – bars, cafes, malls, etc. And these environments are less and less conducive to such encounters. This combines with the reification and commodification of social identities and relationships that has made it harder for people to reach out beyond their own cliques and subcultures and the underlying everyday fear of the other that has insinuated its way into our minds from a variety of media scare stories to transform cities into wastelands of overcrowded desolation.

There are people who are content to stick with their cliques or retreat to small town or rural provincialism with only the expected and known relationships. But this is indisputably a recipe for stagnation. The desire for chance encounters is a reflection of a desire to be stimulated and challenged in new ways, to be provoked to explore the unknown, to act and think outside one’s usual habits. The people that one knows too well, that one sees and interacts with regularly, cannot provide such stimulation. These known relationships are necessary for providing intimacy, comfort, trust, complicity, affinity and the support necessary for exploring the unknown. But it is the encounter with the unknown, the stranger, the encounter with difference, that keeps life vibrant and lush.

But this brings up another way in which this society has been undermining the joy of chance encounters. The reification of social identities into defined categories, particularly in this age when mass media guarantees an increasing standardization of these identities, undermines the capacity for individuals to express their uniqueness. It is increasingly difficult for many people to break out of a character that is simply a collage of social identities to express anything deeper. So most “chance” encounters now have a ritualized style similar to those sorts of encounters this society imposes. This raises an immediately practical question: what can we do to break through these standardized rituals? Here the ideas of creating situations, detournement and subversion take on a significant personal meaning in the context of daily life.

As cities are increasingly designed to enforce the suppression of these encounters, to be stagnant swamps of enslaved humanity capable only of serving the needs of the state and capital, it becomes urgent for everyone who loves these encounters, and particularly those of us who see the need to destroy civilization and, thus, cities to reflect on how we could maintain the possibility for such encounters, both now within (and outside of) increasingly sterilized, prison-like cities, and in the future in world without cities. The purpose of such reflection is not to come up with the solution, the blueprint, the guarantee of an ideal future. Rather it is an area for exploration and experimentation.

In Letters of Insurgents, Jan describes his dream of possibilities in a world without the economy or the state: “We’ll leave the clearing and walk through the forest to the neighboring village and we’ll think we’re dreaming, because the village won’t be there anymore; we’ll find thousands of people building a city like no city that’s ever been built and they’ll welcome us and ask us to help because they’ll all be our friends; there won’t be any policemen or prying old women because they’ll all be to busy building or making love. We’ll stay in our friends’ beautiful city as long as we want and not a minute longer; we’ll be as free as birds; we’ll roam across the entire country; we’ll visit streams and caverns and other cities, and in each city we’ll find only friends; they’ll all beg us to join them in what they’re doing and we won’t know where to turn first because every activity to which we’re invited will seem more gratifying than the rest.” Certainly, the capacity to freely roam will play a significant factor in the opening possibilities for chance encounters, as will experiments in creating different ways that human beings can be together, based upon the active creation of our desires.

I also think of large festivals and gatherings that may last for weeks, based upon the sheer enjoyment of other people rather than on shared ideas – or shared subcultural style. It seems that in certain areas of the world, before permanent trading centers arose, temporary bazaars would be set up in recognized places for trade and other forms of human encounter. Although these bazaars originated in economic exchange, many other sorts of interactions could and did happen there. In addition, Native American powwows are an example of people coming together for larger scale interaction.

In addition, because I don’t have or desire a blueprint for what a decivilized, anarchic society might be like, I would not rule out the possibility of a different sort of large-scale, more permanent gatherings of human beings – something that might still be called a city (for want of a better word), but that would be unlike any city that has ever existed, because it would be free of all economic, political, religious and military aims or constraints that have been the purpose behind every city since the beginning of civilization. The question of how any of this might manifest is an area for creative exploration and the practical application of imagination. There are numerous sources of inspiration: William Blake, the surrealists, the Diggers, various radical millenarian movements, Native American powwows and villages, the wide variety of festivals that have existed throughout human history. This is a realm for creative dreaming, for considering the broad spectrum of human possibilities and what we could create from it to realize our various and conflicting desires.

Along these lines, in the article “What Is Society?” by Alain Ajax, interesting questions are raised about “the importance of the time/space of non-work, which, until the stage of the real domination of society was reached (i.e., before World War II), was one of encounters between individuals as opposed to simply one of recreation. The city represented the space in which the activities of reproducing the labor force were détourned into the streets, cafes, festivals (especially traveling carnivals), dances and music, expressing the existence of individuals who were both unique and separated from their social relationships (i.e., Argentinean tango, American urban blues, Parisian cafes in which popular music is played, etc.)”

CREATING OUR SPACES

On Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects

Bernard Rudofsky’s picture book, Architecture Without Architects, is a delight to page through. It consists mainly of pictures with brief commentary showing what people who have no university training in the design of buildings actually build. The illustrations are intended to illustrate more than just the buildings themselves. They also illustrate the ideas Rudofsky expresses in words in his preface to the collection of pictures.

In the preface, Rudofsky (himself a trained architect) justifiably belittles professional architects, most of whom “are concerned with problems of business and prestige”. He describes the lessons to be learned from “non-pedigreed architecture” – what people build for their own use and enjoyment when left to themselves. First of all he points out that “The untutored builders in space and time… demonstrate an admirable talent for fitting their buildings into the natural surroundings. Instead of trying to ‘conquer’ nature, as we do, they welcome the vagaries of climate and the challenge of topography.” Certainly, a capacity to create our spaces within the living environments that surround us, to actively participate in these environments rather than battling them, is essential to discovering new ways of living beyond civilization.

I found it particularly interesting when I read these lines: “A town that desires to be a work of art must be as finite as a painting, a book, or a piece of music.” I am not interested in creating towns as such, but when I dream of how the world might be decivilized, I imagine space-times in which large groups of people may come together to share knowledge, stories, gifts and skills, a situation in which chance encounters can easily occur. Not only would the space of these temporary “towns” be finite, but so would the time. In fact, they would be more like festivals, carnivals or powwows. But their creativity and beauty would depend precisely on their finitude.

Rudofsky is no friend of Progress. He recognizes that it has not improved the art of building, because it has suppressed the art of living. This process has occurred as a result of the fragmentation that makes specialization the norm in this society. Fragmented life can only be ugly as it attempts to force its unconnected pieces into an artificial order. The capacity for bricolage (the art of putting a whole together from seemingly random bits and pieces – the art of collage applied to fulfilling the needs and desires of everyday life), which will certainly be needed in the process of decivilizing life, can only grow from a wholeness of life that industrial/post-industrial capitalism perpetually undermines.

This wholeness develops when individuals grasp their lives as creative projects that weave together with the projects of others. It provides the basis for a world in which the “general welfare” as an aspect of the welfare of each individual can put an end to the domination of profit and capitalist Progress. Not that Rudofsky is a radical. Rather he seems to be a utopian liberal. He believes (or at least hopes) that things could be done differently within this society to make it more humane. Still his emphasis on building as the ongoing, spontaneous, collective activity of people creating their lives together is itself a challenge to the atomized, specialist world of the state and capitalism, and so opens the door to broader vistas.

The pictures that make up most of the book illustrate the points Rudofsky makes in his introduction and, furthermore, offer amazing evidence of how beautifully people can build without the help of experts. As a whole, the book illustrates the potential for human creativity that makes the dreams of anarchists seem like real possibilities, even the dreams of those who desire a world beyond civilization.