Debord, Constant, and the Politics of Situationist Urbanism

Author: Brian Elliott
Year: 2009 (Portland State University)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/elliott-2009-debord-constant-situationist-urbanism.md

Summary

Elliott offers a critical evaluation of the early Situationist International's (1957–1960) model of urban practice — unitary urbanism, arising from the collaboration of Guy Debord and Constant — and of Constant's later New Babylon. He argues the situationist critique turns on "genuine popular participation under the conditions of advanced urbanization," and frames the Debord/Constant split as between "formal" and "material" utopianism. While criticizing the SI's post-1960 retreat to "purity of intention," he contends Constant's detailed urban utopia has genuine transformative potential.

Key Claims

• Urbanism as politics: following Lefebvre, the urban is "a place where conflicts are expressed" and "place of desire"; urbanism as "a mask and a tool" — "the space it creates is political." Against the Habermasian/Third-Way "consensus" model (and with Mouffe's agonism and Rancière's dissensus), politics requires confrontation between qualitatively different interests — everywhere relevant to "genuine popular participation."
• Modernist urbanism and the SI critique: against Le Corbusier's vertical hierarchy ("the few construct ... for the many"), the SI diagnosed modernist urbanism as giving "physical expression to the alienation and separation engendered by the ideology of consumer capitalism"; "urbanism is the final decadence of the Great Architect" making "alienation tangible."
• The dérive: "a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances," playful-constructive, attentive to "psychogeographical contours"; counter-urbanist practice producing a "mobile space of play," contesting the homogenization of place ("The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls").
• Unitary urbanism: "the construction of situations," the "concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature"; Constant's "covered city" of agglomeration and collective play (against zoned/radiant/garden cities), an "overcoming of nature."
• Formal vs. material utopianism: Constant's New Babylon (homo ludens, Huizinga; nomadic mobility; global control/local spontaneous agency) tends — against the practice of dérive/détournement — toward a "formal utopianism" / tabula rasa ("there is simply no city other than the city of the future"), which Debord and the SI after 1960 attacked as "public relations for the integration of the masses into capitalist technological civilization" (their 'Critique of Urbanism', 1961).
• Elliott's assessment: the SI's retreat from unitary urbanism "placed a desire for purity of intention over the need for specific material means of oppositional praxis"; Constant's detailed projections do carry "genuine transformative potential," so the retreat was "an important lost opportunity."

Connections

Concepts: Unitary Urbanism · Dérive · New Babylon · Play
Authors: Guy Debord · Constant · Brian Elliott
Debates: Formal vs. Material Utopianism
Related source notes: Unitary Urbanism (Andreotti) · The Society of the Spectacle (Debord)

Direct Quotes

"Urbanism is a mask and a tool: a mask for the state and political action, a tool of interests that are dissimulated within a strategy and a socio-logic ... The space it creates is political." (Lefebvre, as quoted)

"The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls." (Debord, as quoted)

"The street is a place to play and learn. The street is disorder." (Lefebvre, as quoted)

"[C]an architectural/urbanist utopianism be effective in countering the social alienation produced by the mechanisms of advanced commodity capitalism?"

Open Questions

• Does Elliott's defense of Constant resolve the "formal vs material utopianism" debate, or merely restate it in a more favorable light?