Unitary Urbanism: Play-Tactics of the Internationale Situationniste (1957–1972)

Unitary Urbanism: Play-tactics of the Internationale Situationniste (1957-1972)

LIBERO ANDREOTTI
Georgia Institute of Technology

In Girum Inus Noctet et Consumimur Igni, we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire. The long Latin palindrome used by Guy Debord as the title for one of his last films can also serve to characterize the urban play tactics of the Internationalale Situationniste. As Johan Huizinga noted in a book that was a key source for this group—but whose role is all but completely ignored in recent historical writings—the palindrome is in fact an ancient play-form which, like the riddle and the conundrum, "cuts clean across any possible distinction between play and seriousness." Debord seems aware of this when he notes, somewhat cryptically, that his title is "constructed letter by letter like a labyrinth, in such a way that it conveys perfectly the form and content of perdition" a remark that can be interpreted in many ways but that recalls the phenomenon of "losing oneself in the game" described so well by Huizinga himself. Certainly, of all the detournements for which Debord is justly famous, this one seems best suited to convey the iconoclastic spirit of the Internationalale Situationniste (henceforth SI), a movement of great ambition and influence, whose reflections on the city, everyday life, and the spectacle have insured it a vital place in the art and politics of the last forty years.

In what follows I would like to explore the play element in the activities of three key protagonists around the time of the group's founding in 1957, namely Debord himself, the Italian environmental artist Giuseppe Gallizio, and the Dutch painter Constant Naweshis, whose models for a future city called New Babylon vividly expressed the principles of unitary urbanism underlying the group. More specifically, and in the spirit of the palindrome, I would like to show how each of them radicalized Huizinga's theory of play into a revolutionary ethics that effectively abolished any distinction between play and seriousness, or between art and everyday life.

One of the favorite play-forms engaged in by the SI and its predecessor organization, the Lettrist International, was the derive, the art of wandering through urban space whose special mood is well conveyed in the darkly romantic meaning of the palindrome. The derive's closest cultural precedent would have been the Dalai and Surrealist excursions organized by Breton in 1925, such as the one to the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre. Debord however was careful to distinguish the derive from such precedents, emphasizing its active character as "a mode of experimental behavior" which ultimately reached back to Romanticism, the Baroque, and the age of chivalry, with its tradition of the long voyage undertaken in a spirit of adventure and discovery. In Paris this kind of urban roaming was characteristic of Left-bank bohemianism, where the art of drifting was a favorite way to cultivate that feeling of being "apart together" that Huizinga described as characteristic of play. A vivid record of this time and place is Van der Elsken's book of photographs, Love on the Left Bank, which recorded some of the favorite haunts of the letrists.

Fig. 1. Ed丹der Elsken. Love on the Left Bank. Paris 1957 c.

Later some of these images would find their way into Debord's poetry and films.

Central to the derive was the awareness of exploring forms of life radically beyond the capitalist work-ethic, as seen in the famous graffiti incitement Ne travaille jamais (Never Work) made by Debord in 1953 and reproduced in the SI journal with the caption "minimum program of the situationist movement."

Another fine example of such street philosophy is the Lettrist flier showing Debord and his friends next to the revolutionary slogan of Saint Just, La guerre de la liberté doit être fate avec colère (The War for Freedom must be Waged Angerily) (fig.5). Both recall Huizinga's likely description of the initerant sophist of ancient Rome, whose seductive propaganda would lead to Emperor

Vespasian’s banishing all philosophers from the city.

A key source of information on the derives is a book of poetry entitled Memoires, composed by Debord and the painter Agr Jorn in 1957, which evoked the activities of the Letrist International. The dominant technique consisting of Joan’s dripping and splashing of oil, over which Debord scattered his own literary and visual fragments, was evidently intended to minimize the amount of labor and handicraft characteristic of a “serious” work. In this sense Memoires is a radically anti-productivist work, or more precisely an anti-work whose discursive antiphonal form reflected the derive’s emphasis on collective play (Jorn, it should be noted, had already experimented with a similar techniques in his word-paintings with Dorremont in the late 40s, and somewhat similar letter-poetry could be found in the work of the Letristis GII Wolman and Isidore Isou).

The eloquent improvisation of textual fragments that makes up the first page (fig. 3), where allusions to some of Debord’s favorites therein — such as time passing, love, war, and drinking (“me souvenir de toi? oui, je veux;” “le soir, Barbara;” “pleine de discorde et épouvante;” “il s’agit d’un sujet profondement impregde d’alchool”) are all underlined with the witty ceremonial statement: “je vais quand meme agiter des events et metre des considerations.” (I will, of course, agitate some facts here and develop some considerations), is typical of the lyrical tone constantly hovering between farce and seriousness that Huizinga described as characteristic of the play spirit.

The following pages (fig. 4), in their use of recycled images, exemplified a second play critique by Debord in the early 50s, décorement, or the creative pillaging of pre-existing elements. About halfway into the book, beginning the fall of 1953, fragments of city plans begin to appear. On one page, the various parts of the plan of Paris are most likely related to the written account of a derive that appeared in the Belgian journal Les Levres Nues. On another, the focus is on the Constrescarpe region, celebrated by the Letristis for its “aptitude for play and forgetting.” Both pages exemplify the myth-making turns described by Huizinga as typical of play. Among these, the tendency to exaggerate and embellish actual experience and invest surroundings with personality — as seen in the phrase une le flotteur (a floating city), probably alluding to the De la Cise. Also characteristic is the tendency towards evinculent self-presentation in the phrase Rien ne s’arête pour nous. C’est létat qui nous exat naturel — nous brûlons de désir de trouver (nothing ever stopped with us, it was our natural state ... we burned with a desire to find), and the playing at being heroes and warriors. Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of these pages is the agonistic tone, as seen on the same page, where a plan of the Constrescarpe region is juxtaposed against an identical surface in reverse representing a battle scene in the Americas, the literary fragments including le siège perilite (the perilous siege) and on balairait le veux monde (we will wipe away the old world), with other comments probably referring to the urban renewal projects denounced by the Letristis in this district.1 This was like tone in fact a recurring mode of address throughout Memoires.

Debord’s best known and widely reproduced psychogeographies of Paris, which he made around the same time, belong in the same family as Memoires and should be read in a similar vein. Both enact a fluctuation between spatial and temporal registers: the isolated fragments form complete and enclosed entities, while the red vectors, much like Jorn’s earlier drippings, suggest forces of movement and passional interaction. This sort of temporalization of space was a key situationistic and a distinctive quality of the derive, which aimed to resist the refusing tendency to spatialize physical surroundings through the play’s anti-objecting sense.2 The erotic overtones of the two titles, of which the second, Discours sur les Passions de l’Amour (Discourse on the Passions of Love), was appropriated from the homonymous work by Pascal, underscored the irreducibility of the derive, and of pleasure in general, to the productivist imperatives of Bourgeois living.

Fig. 2. Minimum program of the Situationist movement, S# 10 (1967).

Fig. 3. G. Debord and A. Jorn, Memories (1958), p. 1.

One source offered by Debord for the derive is the Carte de Tendre, an imaginary representation of the Land of Love devised as an aristocratic pastime by the 17th century noblewoman Madeline de Scudery. Like the Naked City, it also charmed a passional terrain — the erotic theme suggested also by its strange resemblance to the female reproductive organs. “The River Inclination” leads from the town of Budding Friendship toward the unchartered territories of Marriage above it divides the Land of Reason on the right, dominated by the “Lake of Indifference,” from the Land of Passion on the left, stretching out towards the “Forest of Madness.” In Debord’s case, however, the elaborate narrative that accompanies the Carte de Tendre is replaced by a much more realistic urge to map actual urban sites, including, as he would say, “their principal points of passage, their exits and defenses.”

This revolutionary idea of pleasure was a constituent feature of the psychogeographical “research” that these maps were supposed to exemplify, and which as Ross notes, entitled a “careful survey of the residual and interstitial spaces of the city in a systematic search for elements that might be salvaged from the dominant culture, and once isolated, put to use new in a juxtaposition of social space.”3 The understanding of city space as a contested terrain in which new forms of life had no proper place but can only assert themselves in a provisional way can also be seen in the flier announcing “A New Theatre of Bourgeois living.”

Fig. 4. G. Debord and A. Jorn, Memories (1958).

Fig. 5. Debord, The Naked City (1957).

juxtaposed new methods of military aerial survey against an array of programmatic terms related to the higher goal of "constructing situations." It is necessary, at this point, to at least mention the sociopolitical transformations of Paris during these years, which witnessed an increased policing of city space under De Gaulle and the wider phenomenon known as "internal colonization" as seen in the massive displacement of poor populations into new belts of grimly functionalist housing projects at a safe distance from the city center. It is not by chance that many of the areas included in Debord's psychogeographies were sites of political battle, including the overwhelmingly North African neighborhood of La Houchette, where the SI was headquartered.

Fig. 6. Pinot Gallizio, The Cavern of Anti-Matter (1959).

The first attempt to actually construct a situation was Pinot Gallizio's so-called Industrial Paintings — long rolls of painted cloth made collectively with the help of rudimentary "painting machines" and sold by the meter on the market square — this complete micro-environment was designed in close collaboration with Debord, who played a much greater role in it than is generally assumed (in fact, the event was orchestrated by Debord with Gallizio a sometimes uncomprehending bystander). The goal of the Cavern was to merge art with everyday life in a move complementary to the derive's elevation of the quotidian realities of city space. The source of this idea was again Huziriga's description of the "over valuation" of art, which he saw as the main cause for its increasing remoteness from everyday concerns.1 Against this, the Cavern proposed an opposite process of "devaluation," an immersion of art in the everyday which was symbolized by the use of painting as clothing and urban decor. The fact that Gallizio was an amateur, who dabbled equally well in archeology and chemistry, only served to intensify the Cavern's attack on professionalism and the institution of the art gallery.

The opening event recalled an early scientific demonstration, complete with staged explosions showing off the pyrotechnical possibilities of Gallizio's newly invented resins. The ludic tone of the whole proceeding could also be seen in the invitation card, which promised to illustrate "the encounter between matter and antimatter," and whose mock-scientific tone recalls Huziriga's definition of the ludic element of science as the tendency toward "perilous theorizing."14 The reference in this case was to the theories of ant-matter developed by Dirac and the Italian mathematician Enrico Severi. The Cavern's neo-futurist tone was also apparent in the use of sound machines that would rise to a high pitch as one approached the walls of the room, as well as the deployment of perfumes and moving lights. The ludic reconversion of technology suggested in the whole idea of industrial painting reflected a positive faith in industry's liberating potential, quite similar in fact to Benjamin's description of the loss of aura resulting from mechanical reproduction. In either case, the power and destiny of technology become an instrument for human emancipation was asserted against its actual use for opposite ends. As Debord put it: "this society is moved by absurd forces that tend unconsciously to satisfy its true needs."15

The Cavern's challenge to the institution of the art gallery would have gone further, and perhaps taken an unpredictable turn, if the SI had been allowed to mount a group exhibition at the Stedeljck Museum in Amsterdam a few months later. The installation, as seen in the only surviving evidence of it in a diagrammatic plan, would have turned a wing of the museum into a two mile-long obstacle

Fig. 7. New Babylon, Yellow Sector (1958).

course culminating in a tunnel of industrial painting. At the same time, a series of real “operational” derivs were to take place in downtown Amsterdam, where teams of situationists would have derived for three days communicating with each other and the museum space with radio transmitters.

Nowhere was the mirage of a civilization liberated from work more evident, however, than in Constant’s New Babylon — whose title, attributed to Debord, evoked the material abundance made possible by automation as well as the anti-Christian morality that animated the group. This one attempt to actually work out the technical, structural, and sociopolitical contours of a situationist architecture had its origins in Constant’s own evolution from painting to sculpture, a process that beginning with the large and impressive Ambiance de Leru (1954), which for the first time moved to the horizontal plane and began to address issues of three-dimensional space, and continuing with a series of geometric explorations like Structure with curved planes (1954), which already indicates a search for lightness and dynamism in its displaced corner supports, culminated in the series of dynamic neo-constrictive works, such as Suspended Spiral (1958) and Nebulose Mechanique (1958), whose tensile system of cables and steel elements provided the basic syntax for Constant’s first practical application in Nomade Encampment. This was a flexible shelter whose lightweight and transportable elements were supposed to serve a gypsy community that Constant befriended during a stay in Northern Italy.

From here Constant moved directly into the development of his large steel and Plexiglas structures, lifted off the ground and offering a multilayer and potentially extendible system of construction. The first was called the Yellow sector (fig. 7), a title that reflected Constant’s version to the more homely and bourgeois connotations of neighborhood. Like most of the other models, it was organized around fields of movable prefabricated elements arranged randomly to emphasize their dependence on changing needs. The guiding idea was what Constant called “the principle of disorientation” — a deliberate confusion of spatial hierarchy through obstacles, incomplete geometries and unnatural elements. Aside from designing certain areas, and suitable for tactile activities, the absence of any functional zoning or separation of public and private space reflected a desire to multiply the variability of the space — somewhat like Cedric Price would do a few years later with his Fun Palace.

The exotic Oriental sector which followed shortly after, along with the Ambiance de Depart, explored the range of atmospheres that could be achieved within this basic formal syntax. Both works recall the hedonic vision of a situationist city advanced by Gilles Ivain as early as 1952; a series of city quarters designated according to different moods, and where the principal activity of the inhabitants would be a continuous derive. Constant described these models as examples of an “urbanism intended to bring pleasure.” In an essay significantly entitled “Another city for Another Life,” he noted:

We crave adventure. Not finding it on earth, some have gone seeking it in the moon. We prefer to wager first on a change on earth. We propose creating situations there; new situations. We count on infringing the laws, which hinder the development of affective activities in life, and in culture. We are at the dawn of a new era and are already attempting to sketch out the image of a happier life.

The science-fiction theme is best seen in the series of oyster like space-units called Spatatovoore which vividly express the uprooted and nomadic life of the “New Babylonians” who would be free to roam and alter their surroundings at will. Liberated from work, no longer tied to fixed places of habitation, relinquished from the oppressions of the family structure, the citizens of this new community would be free to abandon themselves to the derive and the playspirit.

At a larger scale, New Babylon presented itself as a wide-mesh and decentralized network of connecting sectors, superimposed over a system of rapid transportation routes. As Ohr notes, the most likely precedent for such a scheme would have been Team Ten’s 1958 proposal for Berlin which offered a similar arrangement of elevated pedestrian platforms. At the same time, New Babylon gave to them the notion of the tissue urban, developed by the philosopher Henri Leibvre in his utopian descriptions of an urban civilization beyond the old distinction between city and countryside. The similarities between New Babylon and other megastructural fantasies of the 60s, such as Archigram and Metabolism, would be worth pursuing. Certainly New Babylon shared with them a fascination with technology and a positive faith in the power of architecture to stimulate new behavior — two aspects that made it an easy target for criticism, especially in view of the eventual assimilation of the megastructure theme within the commercial real estate speculations of the 70s and 80s. Moreover, as several other situationists were quick to point out, its own nature as a romantic predisposition meant that it was sure to be “recuperated” and turned into a mere “compensation” for societys shortcomings.

Against this, the so-called “second phase” of the SI, following

Constant’s resignation in May 1960, showed that another direction lay open for the extension of play tactics into highly politized behavior, as seen in the urban poetry of the graffiti, the wild architecture of the barricades, and the detourment of entire city streets in May 68. While the role of the SI in these events is still disputed its main theme of them were inspired by its play-spirit and its capacity in Huizhang’s terms to “express a profound seriousness through play.”

To conclude with three general remarks: first, it is necessary to emphasize that Huizhang’s ludic philosophy was only one of many elements that fed into the SI’s urban practices. More time would be necessary to discuss its critique of post-war consumer culture and the multiple connections with other cultural and political manifestations in France and elsewhere — a subject developed by Simon Sadler among others in a recent book. No less important is to elucidate the SI’s complex relations with Marxist theory, especially Deboris philological structure of play, in this sense, might help to bridge the gap between the SI’s so-called “first” and “second” phase, a division that is still strongly reflected, unfortunately, in recent historical writings.

Finally, it is essential to stress the agonistic drive that animated the urban theories and practices of the SI. This suggests a more general reading of the Latin palindrome which I used to begin this paper, in addition to that of a play-form and poetic figure for the derive. “We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire” recalls, in fact, Pogglioli’s classic description of the agonistic menace of the avant-garde the point of self-immolation reached when, as an Italian anxiety to always further, it reaches a point where it ignores even its own “catastrophe and perdition,” welcoming this self-run as “an obscure sacrifice to the success of future movements.” The point could not have been made better than by Debord himself, who in another recent statement recalling the palindrome’s cyclical form, writes: “All revolutions enter history and history rejects none of them; and the rivers of revolution go back to where they originated, in order to flow once again.”

NOTES

1. A version of this paper was delivered at the conference “Reconceptualizing the Modern: architectural culture 1945-1968,” Harvard Graduate School of Design, pp. 24-25 (April 1998). The palindrome is attributed to the Roman orator Sidonius Apollinellus, who put into the mouths of moths circling around a lit candle at night. See Situationists: art, politics, urbanism, catalogue of the exhibition held in Barcelona in 1996-97, edited by Libero Androtti and Xavier Costa. Thanks go to Prof. Jean-Paul Flamard for help in describing Debord’s maps of Paris. It not otherwise indicated, references to SI texts henceforth come from Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings on the City, edited by Libero Androtti and Xavier Costa (Baccalaurea, 1997). All translations are mine. Recent writings on the SI are too numerous to be listed here, but see Giancarlo Marelli, L’Anara Vitoria del Situationismo, (Pisa, 1996); Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, (Cambridge, Mass, 1998); October n. 79 (Winter 1997) special issue on Guy Debord and the International Situationism, edited by Tom MacDonough, and Anselm Jappe, Debord, (Pescara 1992), and Mark Wigley, The Hyperarchitecture of Desire: Constant’s New Babylon (Rotterdam 1999). See also Michel Lowy, “Consumed by Night’s Fire: the Dark Romanticism of Guy Debord in Rudical Philosophy,” in Best reference text in English is still Situationist International Anthology, ed. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, 1980).

2. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (Boston 1955), p. 110.

3. Oeuvres Cinematographiques Completes 1952-78 (Paris, 1994), p. 242. On play, see Huiznga, Homo Ludens Chapter one and ff. A fine discussion of the anti-objective stance of the player, as well as play’s “total meditation” of form and content is Hans Georg Gadamer’s, The Truth and Method. See also Roger Callott, Le Testament de la Bonne et la masque et la verge (Paris, 1967). Galizio is often incorrectly referred to by Anglo-Saxon writers as Giuseppe Pinot-Gallilio. Pineto is short for Guisepppe.

While the importance of play for the SI is often been noted, no effort has been made to examine it in any detail. Two recent books on the SI, Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture: The Situation International in a Post-Modern Age (London, 1993) and Anselm Jappe’s intellectual biography mentioned above, for example, contain no mention of Huiznga, one of the few actually acknowledged sources of the SI. See “Architecture and Play” Theory... p. 54, where Debord discusses Huiznga’s work but criticizes its “literal idealism and narrow sociological understanding of the higher forms of play,” neither of which, however, “diminish the author’s basic worth.” Furthermore it would be futile to want to find any other motive behind our theories of architecture and drifting as a passion for play. A year before this article appeared in Poulchat, André Breton raised Huiznga’s work in Medium n. 2 and 3 (February and May 1954) and linked it to various Surrealist games. See Mirella Bandini, La vertigine del moderno: surrealist realism (Rome, 1986) pp. 152 FF. The first French translation of Homo Ludens dates from 1951.

Homo Ludens, p. 12. Ed Ewald Velerken and Andre Deutsch, Love and the Left Bank, Amsterdam n. (19577).

Homo Ludens, p. 153 et passim.

Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, Memoiries (1958) reprinted in 1993, Editions Jean Jacques Pavurt.

“Two Accounts of Derive” in Theory ... pp. 28-32.

See Les Levres Nues n. 9 (November 1956) “Position du Continent Contracarpe,” reprinted in Gerard Berbury, ed. Documents Relatifs à la Foundation de l’International Situationisme (Paris, 1985), p. 326.

See Homo Ludens, Chapter 8, “The Elements of Mythopsis.”

See also Debord’s later reflections on strategy in Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (1988) Engl. trans. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London, 1990), as well as Debord’s board game La Jeue de la Guerre (1977). Engl. translation in Len Braken, Guy Debord: Revolutionary (Venice, CA, 1997).

See Joseph Gabel, La Fausse conscience (1962) Engl. Trans. False Consciousness: an essay on reification (Bristol UK 1975). On the Naked City, see also Thomas McDonough, “Situation Space” in October n. 67 (Winter 1994).

Cl. Les Levres Nues n. 5 (June 1955), p. 28, where an anonymous writer notes the similarity. This would have been consistent with Madeline de Seydur’s naturalist philosophy. Another likely source for the Naked City is the arctic novel of Irsan Anguille Schade, People Meet and Their Hearts are Filled with Sweet Music (1988), describing the aimless wanderings of the librine, constantly falling in to love and unable to keep a fixed course. Schade’s novel was first published in French in 1947 and was widely reed in Debord’s circle. Gilles Vain叫它 “the greatest novel of the twentieth century.”

Kristin Ross, “French Quotidian” in The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, edited by Lynn Gumpert, (New York, 1997), p. 22.

Homo Ludens, pp. 158-172.

Homo Ludens, pp. 203-204.

Architecture and Play, p. 53.

As Robert Oht notes, the title is also a likely reference to the 1929 film Nowi Wawilion by the Russians Kosinzev and Trauberg on the Paris commission that

the SI held out as “the only example of a revolutionary urbanism to date.”

21 See Jean-Clarence Lambert, New Babylon (Paris, 1998). See also Thomas Levin, “The Geopolitics of Hibernation” in Situationists, Art Politics Urbanism.

22 Formulary for a New Urbanism” in Theory ... pp. 14-17.

23 Theory ... p. 92.

24 Constant, “La revolte de l'Homo Ludens” in New Babylon, cit.

25 On the SI and May 68, see Rene Vienet, Enragées et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Paris, 1968) and Pascal Dumontier, Les Situationnistes et Mai 68: theorie et pratique de la revolution (1966-72) (Paris, 1990).

26 See Jappe, Debord, cit.

27 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge MA, 1968), p. 26.

28 Panegyric, Tome I (London - New York, 1991), p. 26.