Constants New Babylon

Book Reviews

Reviewed by Andy Merrifield

The SituationistCity by Simon Sadler

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998

Constant’s New BabylonThe Hyper-Architecture of Desire by Mark Wigley

Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998

THE CITY OF MARX AND COCA-COLA

In November 1994, a sixty-two-year-oldreclusive Frenchman, living in the vil-lage of Auvergne, put a bullet throughhis heart. The man was Guy Debord,once the guru of the Situationist Inter-national, a radical political and artisticmovement made up of romantic youngmen and women—poets, writers, artists,and socialists—that flourished in the late1950s and ’60s and then languished asthe conservative rot set in during the’70s and ’80s. By the 1990s, the spectac-ular, show-biz-obsessed society that De-bord had so vehemently denounced hadall but taken over the world. Debord hadplainly had enough; the jaded prizefight-er had taken too many punches to thehead. He saw only darkness. His radiantdream of spontaneous freedom never be-came real. But for one brief instant, onthe volatile streets of Paris in May ’68,“imagination seized power,” and thedream seemed within sight. The stu-dents who threw bricks and Molotovcocktails and demanded the impossible,whom Jean-Luc Godard christened “thechildren of Marx and Coca-Cola,” were

famous for (at least) fifteen minutes. Fora while, the city was theirs; it neverwould be again. Thirty-odd years on, theSituationists’ legacy and spirit lingers,continuing to tell us much about our-selves and our cities, especially aboutwhat we’ve lost and have yet to gain.The publication of Simon Sadler’s TheSituationist City and Mark Wigley’shandsome Constant’s New Babylon sug-gests that some people out there stillwant to listen.

The Situationists are lost prophets ofa bygone age, an age of innocence andnaïveté, of dreams and hopes, of espressoand wine and Gauloises and mad ravingideals. They were immature people—many of them students—who taughtgrown-ups a thing or two about maturelife and politics. They were the mostmarginal of dissidents, never more thana dozen or so free spirits; little of theiractivity extended beyond the centers ofParis, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Theirprogram was epigrammatic not system-atic, and its legacy consists only of scrapsand preliminary ideas, blurry vignettesand vague hypotheses. No completed orcoherent body of work endures. And yetsomehow, after the Situationists, urbanpolitics and radical art and design wouldnever quite be the same.

The tale is complex, full of acronymsand bad faith, camaraderie and vanity,with close friends falling out over eachother’s petit bourgeois pretensions and counter-revolutionary predilections.Sadler does his best to unravel the fine-grained detail. He locates the Situa-tionists in European cultural and archi-tectural history and reveals the ideas andshenanigans of their precious inner cir-cle: Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, IvanChtcheglov, Michèle Bernstein, AsgerJorn, and Constant Nieuwenhuys.

H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 1

This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000, Number 12. To order this issue or a subscrip-tion, visit the HDM homepage at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/HDM>.

© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced withoutthe permission of the publisher

(Ralph Rumney sat on the fringes inLondon, while Henri Lefebvre, an olderfigure who taught many budding Situa-tionists sociology and Marxism at theUniversity of Strasbourg in 1958, tow-ered somewhere overhead.) It’s a rippingyarn, with egos on show everywhere.There’s hope and glory, too, as well asblood and tears, back-stabbing and ex-pulsions, ideological deviations andsquabbles, especially between Debordand Constant, and Debord and Lefeb-vre, and Constant and Jorn. As is so of-ten the case with the Left, theSituationists at times seem harder onthemselves and their fellow travelersthan they do on their ruling-class antag-onists.

The prehistory of the Situationistsinvolves several small subversive artgroups. First came the Lettrist Interna-tional, an underground Minimalist set-up pioneered by Debord. Next wasCOBRA, the Copenhagen, Brussels, andAmsterdam Surrealist and experimentaldesign conglomerate, dominated by theDutch utopian architect and ex-Provoand anarchist Constant Nieuwenhuys(who later abbreviated his name to thesnappier “Constant”). Then the Imagin-ist Bauhaus entered the fray, Asger Jorn’sbrainchild, a Brussels-based crew withan Abstract Expressionist bent. London’sPsychogeographical Association belongsin there somewhere, as does the so-called Congress of Free Artists. All thesegroups were politicized, revolutionary intheir intention to renew art, to renewthe action of art on life, and to transformboth life and the city in the process.Spontaneity and playfulness becametheir lingua franca. They found intellec-tual sustenance in the works of Hegel,Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Rabelais,Piranesi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Artaud,Brecht, and Breton played cameo rolesin the drama that began to unfold afterJuly 1957, when delegates from all theabove groups gathered in the Italian vil-lage of Cosio d’Arroscia, “in a state ofsemi-drunkenness,” to establish the Sit-uationist International.

The SI was a reaction to bourgeoisculture and politics, on the one hand,and to the sterile, austere functionalism

of High Modernism, on the other. Andright from the start the SI engineered anattack. Both bourgeois and avant-gardehigh culture, they said, eviscerated thecity; each left its debilitating imprint onthe built environment and on socialspace; each was pathological to the hu-man spirit and to genuine social progressand freedom. Architecture or revolu-tion? Neither, to the Situationists, couldbe avoided. In the modern city, Logostriumphed over Eros, order over disor-der, the organization man over the rebel.The cities of the Communist Easternbloc were reviled as much as their com-modified capitalist counterparts. LeCorbusier’s machine aesthetic and “radi-ant” utopia received the thumbs down,as did the rigid minimalism of CIAM.Ditto the notorious grand ensembles ofbarrack blocks; and Oscar Niemeyer’sBrasilia, Sadler notes, was “one of themodern movement’s most extraordinaryachievements, and as such was despisedby the Situationists” (48). According tothe SI, all these places and ideas em-braced the Cartesian master plan—strictzoning laws and spatial compartmental-ization created desolate desert-likespaces, and these desert spaces createddeserts of the mind, Alphavilles of thebody and soul. In response, the Situa-tionists defended the urban mix, wantedto move beyond the rational city, stroveto reassert daring, imagination, andthrill in social life and urban culture.

Guy Debord remained the SI’s lead-ing theoretical light throughout its brieflife, and Paris became his workshop.Much like Walter Benjamin two decadesearlier, Debord adored Paris, yetlamented its downfall, detested its em-bourgoisement, seethed in the face of cor-porate colonization and anodynemuseumification. His beloved LesHalles, with its cheap bars, gritty streets,and market halls—and where Debordlived on a shoestring in a studio apart-ment with Michèle Bernstein—was es-pecially under threat. The modernizingbulldozer and the chic boutiques andwine bars cast their shadow right outsideDebord’s doorstep. Before long, LesHalles became the testing ground for theideas contained in his masterpiece, The

Society of the Spectacle (1967). Indeed,Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s infa-mous Pompidou Center, located in thequarter, was, in Sadler’s words, “a show-case for industrial design, canonicallygreat modern painting, and information,sheathed in a brash functionalism.” Assuch, it “represented one of the purestand most refined forms of spectacle, anattraction more popular than the EiffelTower. Profoundly divorced from thesort of radical local initiative implied bysituationist urbanism, Beaubourgseemed to be one more piece of territorylost in the battle for urban space” (65).

The Society of the Spectacle, since trans-lated into dozens of languages, delvedinto the belly of the spectacular beast. Its221 strange, short theses, aphoristic inform, peppered with irony, are Niet-zschean to a T. Yet the content of thetheses is uncompromisingly Marxist. InThesis 35, Debord writes, typically: “Inthe essential movement of the spectacle,which consists of taking up all that exist-ed in human activity in a fluid state so asto possess it in a congealed state asthings which have become the exclusivevalue by their formulation in negative oflived value, we recognize our old enemy,the commodity, who knows so well howto seem at first glance something trivialand obvious, while on the contrary it isso complex and so full of metaphysicalsubtleties.” “This is the principle,” De-bord adds in the next thesis, “of com-modity fetishism”—Marx’s major insightfrom the opening chapter of Capital.Marx recognized how market economiescannily transform relationships betweenreal people—workers and consumersand citizens—into relationships between“things” like money and capital and la-bor power. After a while, these “things”begin to control and condition every hu-man being and assume a perverse logicof their own, severing organic ties be-tween people and their environments,and between people and other people.“Things” become at once illusory andmaterial, deceptive and seductive, theworst and best that modern culture hasto offer.

But Debord takes commodityfetishism a step beyond Marx. In postwar

Book Reviews The Situationist City and Constant’s New Babylon

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capitalism, he reasons, “the spectacle isthe moment when the commodity has at-tained the total occupation of social life”(from Thesis 42). The “world of things”has colonized images and events, archi-tecture and culture, mass media andeveryday life. Little wonder that Debordwrote The Society of the Spectacle “withthe deliberate intention of doing harm tospectacle society,” of puncturing thefetishism, overcoming the alienation. Inthe process he and Constant and their SIcomrades formulated some weird truthsof their own. One was a holistic andwholesome type of urbanism, an alterna-tive city, sublime and prototypical, wherethere’d simply be more there there. Atthe heart of the Situationist city—at theheart of The Situationist City—thus re-sides a major political and spatial im-pulse: “unitary urbanism.”

Unitary urbanism would battle againstplanners and efficiency experts and menin suits who sat in fancy offices highabove everyone else; it would workagainst market-driven cities, too, againstcities where spaces became “abstract”commodities, monopolized by the high-est bidder. The unitary city would be dis-ruptive and playful, reuniting all that hadbeen physically and socially sundered,emphasizing forgotten and beleagueredplaces, mysterious corners, quiet squares,teeming neighborhoods, sidewalks filledwith strollers, parks with old-timers inberets sitting on the benches. The onlypredictable thing in the Situationist citywould be its unpredictability, its randomintensity, its “unity of ambience.” Tohighlight their ideal city—their NakedCity—Debord and Jorn cut up a map ofParis and rearranged the parts into athrilling collage. The counterpart activi-ty was a surreal trip, a dreamy journeythrough Parisian passageways, always onfoot, drifting for hours, often at night,identifying subtle moods and nuances ofneighborhoods. In this way the SI wouldtap the city’s unconscious; primitivewalkie-talkies helped them communicatewith each other, sometimes miles apart.Through these imaginary and realdérives, Situationists became latter-dayflâneurs, aimless strollers, botanizing onthe asphalt, wandering in and out of pub-

lic spaces, accumulating rich qualitativedata, key ingredients in their experimen-tal “psychogeography.”

To up the political ante, the Situa-tionists also invented détournement, orhijacking, which monkey-wrenched ac-cepted behavior and received meaning inbourgeois cities. Squatting and occupy-ing buildings and streets are classic ex-amples of détournement, as are graffitiand “free associative” expressionist art.These actions would somehow createnew “situations,” turn things around,recreate meaning out of nonsense (andnonsense out of meaning); they wouldinspire revolts inside one’s head as wellas revolts out on the street. The dé-tourned city would transform the Pla-tonic Republic into Rabelais’s Abbey ofThélème: “hypocrites, bigots . . . hungrylawyers . . . [and] money suckers, stayaway.” Détournement involved collec-tive and individual feats of resistance,both serious—deadly serious—and fun.At best these feats were infectious “festi-vals of the people,” luminous streetdemonstrations that recalled the glorydays of the 1871 Paris Commune; theycombined rent strikes with a generalstrike, while retaining—but only just—arambunctious carnivalesque spirit. A lotof the May 1968 skirmishes incorporat-ed détournement; the streets of Paris be-came something of a microcosm of theSituationist city, the staging of epic—orabsurd—theater. “To be free in 1968,”read one wall graffito, “is to participate.”In the end, détournement, as HaroldRosenberg once said, is really “surreal-ism in the streets.”1

One of the nice things about Sadler’sbook is that, unlike much writing on theSituationists, it is relatively unpreten-tious. These days the topic seems to befair game for hip cultural critics and“discourse” merchants, those who speakabout transgressive and emancipatorycounter-hegemonic strategies and radi-cal postmodern deconstructivist inter-ventions. In contrast, Sadler says whathe has to say in plain language. If any-thing, the language is maybe a little tooplain for its own good. The prose is of-ten flat and, given the subject, surpris-ingly uninspired and uninspiring.

Occasionally the narrative gets clogged,unable to bear the weight of the accu-mulated history, and its shifts back andthrough time, as well as the large cast ofcharacters who enter and depart thescene, can become confusing, even be-wildering. The Situationist City has noneof the idiosyncratic charm and imagina-tion of Greil Marcus’s “secret history ofthe 20th century,” Lipstick Traces, whichexplores the continuity between Dadaand Situationism and punk rock. (Appar-ently Malcolm McLaren, flamboyantcreator of the Sex Pistols, was smitten bythe Situationists.) Moreover, Marcussketches in the connections between theutopian events of ’68—when protestorsdemanded the impossible—and the ni-hilism of the early ’80s—a period thatsaw the “end of history,” and the “NoFuture” of Johnny Rotten. Sadler stayscuriously silent on this crucial theme,and says nothing, too, about how “NoFuture” eventually became the platformfor the “There Is No Alternative”mantra propounded by MargaretThatcher and Ronald Reagan. (The re-frain lives on, of course, in the wishfulthinking of today’s proponents of global-ization.) Ultimately, The Situationist Citylacks serious political engagement; itstrives for but never quite achieves theradical oomph of its subject.

This same shortcoming mars Con-stant’s New Babylon, Mark Wigley’s im-pressively designed, lavishly illustratedmonograph about the work and career ofConstant Nieuwenhuys. Some of thephotos are quirky, like the black-and-white close-up of Debord and Constant,et al., toasting each other’s health in Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. There are exhil-arating images of bright-colored decon-structed landscapes and plexiglassmodels of futuristic cities. A few of Con-stant’s designs look like aircraft hangers,or half-finished shopping malls, massiveconstruction sites with gaping steel scaf-folding that dwarf anything Richard Ser-ra has done. A lot of the designs appearincomprehensible and dumb. In theirinimitable way, these are all raw attemptsto “concretize” unitary urbanism, tomake it more graphic; though it’s hard tosee any of this as a “hyper-architecture



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of desire”—as the book’s subtitle putsit—especially since none of the imagescontains people.

Wigley’s accompanying text, whichprefaces Constant’s own scribbles, isequally disembodied. It skirts real-lifecontent; written in the self-indulgenttone of the haute cognoscenti, it has lit-tle humanity. Wigley seems as detachedfrom his own prose as he is from thepeople who’d supposedly live in Con-stant’s city. “The floating transparentlayers,” he says, “carry delicate tracery ofsome kind of embedded technical systemand the division between spaces isformed by folded metal screens, cut-outsin the floor, changes in lighting, and soon. . . . Inhabitants of New Babylonwere meant to promiscuously combineresources to produce unique transientspaces. . . . Perhaps the most strikingresonance is the way the project prefig-ures contemporary concerns with elec-tronic space. Its fantasy of an infinitelyflexible, ever-shifting, interactive spatial-ity is echoed in countless computer-based models” (11, 63).

Debord first coined the term “NewBabylon” one winter’s night in 1959,when he responded enthusiastically toConstant’s drawing-board visions. Thename stuck, even as his and Constant’sfriendship waned. The project receivedits first public unveiling a year later in asmall gallery in Essen, Holland. Con-stant effectively gave the finger to the ar-chitectural profession: architects, heinsisted, must shift their emphasis fromform to atmosphere—ambience—“soradically that architecture itself will dis-appear as a discrete practice” (34). WithNew Babylon, Constant strove to modeldérive by constructing redolent passage-ways and shocking landscapes, by super-imposing routes and spaces on otherroutes and spaces, sometimes on existingcityscapes, other times on new cities.Above all, he posited an urban environ-ment overflowing with content and tex-ture and topographic fantasy; Constant’shope against hope was that Marx’s nor-mative Good Life, in which “the free de-velopment of each is a condition for thefree development of all,” would becomethe means as well as the ends. As Con-

stant conceived it, all useful yet repetitiveactivity would become automated; mobi-lized at grand scale, technology wouldrelease people from the drudgery of ne-cessity, guaranteeing a healthy dose offree time. There’d be big institutionaltransformations, too, like collective own-ership of land and the means of produc-tion, together with the rationalization ofthe manufacturing of consumer goods,making scarcity old hat. In this vein,Wigley admits, “Constant designed aprovocation rather than a city”; “likestriptease,” New Babylon “stimulates ac-tion and therefore it is real” (71).

Throughout the 1960s, Constantmentored a lot of Provo street actionsand rebellion. After a while, he started toborrow a few of the Provo’s disruptivetropes for himself, inserting them intohis radical architectural models. Whilehe rejected the idea that human naturewas intrinsically violent, Constant sawviolence as legitimate in urban realpoli-tik, fundamental to the achievement ofNew Babylon ends. However, before thedust could settle in the streets of Paris,“revolutionary violence and postrevolu-tionary life became indistinguishable”(70). Both the progressive dreams of theinsurgents and the flailing batons of thecops left a lot of bruised bodies. Sudden-ly, the very idea of a postrevolutionarylife, with its optimism and promise, dis-sipated. Constant’s visionary city ideadissolved, the music was over, there wasno other side to break on through to.

Neither Sadler nor Wigley offers ahappy ending. In fact, neither offers anydiscernible ending at all. We hope for anepilogue, some coda to the tale, anythingthat might bring the Situationists’ legacyup to date. But we are left wonderingwhat these books have in mind beyondthe retrieval of eccentric architecturalhistory—beyond the vivid descriptions,the glossy pictures, the remembrances oflost spaces. What happened to thosechildren of Marx and Coca-Cola? We al-ready know about Debord’s grim fate;other ’60s children, of course, simplylost their minds, while some, like JerryRubin, turned to Wall Street for somesort of redemption. But what about theirideals, their dreams? Did they get buried

in the rubble, or did they get dialectical-ly inverted? For during the 1980s and’90s, our would-be revolutionaries hadto do the truly impossible: they had todemand not the utopian but the realistic;they had to wise up, grow up, listen upto the pinstriped spin doctors, to thetechnocrats and the disciples of theThird Way. In the face of the emergingCoca-Cola realism, the Situationists’ ur-ban romance and in-your-face politicsbegan to appear juvenile, even idiotic.Those children of Marx who tried tooverthrow the spectacular society even-tually got consumed by it; eventuallythey plunged down the abyss they’dbeen staring into for way too long.

In The Situationist City and Constant’sNew Babylon, the story pretty much stopsin 1972, when the Situationist Interna-tional evaporated. Perhaps this prema-ture closure can be explained by the factthat neither book makes any argument,posits a central thesis. They leave thereader with nothing that cuts through thedescription, that might let us out theother side, into daylight. In both booksthe Situationist saga is a benign not anactive history; neither book seems to seethe past as meaningful in the present, asa past that might still be alive today—even if the action has slowed. Indeed, ifthe light grew dim in the 1980s, a shaftof sunshine could be glimpsed in the1990s. Slowly, air began to penetrate thevacuum, water began to nourish aridground, and “childish” pranks erupted inthe streets once again. This time aroundthe hair styles and the fashions were dif-ferent and the protagonists spoke a dif-ferent language. And yet the spiritremained definitively Situationist: thenew protestors wanted the world, andthey wanted it now.

“Reclaim the Streets,” one suchgroup calls itself. In recent years theirdemonstrations have closed streets inTimes Square in Manhattan, in Sydney,Australia, in north, south, and centralLondon, and in many European cities.In these places crowds have danced andshouted and partied, crowds of men andwomen (and children) from diversebackgrounds—revolutionaries, students,dancers, workers, activists, madmen,



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malcontents. In their “Festivals of Loveand Life,” they’ve brought traffic to astandstill and demanded pedestrians’ andbikers’ right to the city. In New York,they’ve rallied against Mayor RudolphGiuliani’s “quality of life” campaignagainst the homeless, sidewalk vendors,and the poor. In Seattle, right under thenoses of World Trade Organization big-wigs, Reclaim the Streets and severalother radical groups established “Seat-tle’s Citizen Committee.” This grass-roots alliance instigated widespread civildisobedience, embarrassed the politi-cians and business honchos who weremeeting to carve up the world into prof-it centers, and made a lot of noise de-manding an “alternative to globalcapitalism and local commercialism.”These sorts of initiatives are rediscover-ing a new-millennium Situationism,“transforming stretches of asphalt into aplace where people can gather withoutcars, without shopping malls, withoutpermission from the state . . . to developthe seeds of the future in the present so-ciety,” in the words of a poster I saw on awall somewhere on the Lower East Sideof New York. Much like their ’60s fore-bears, these participants have a keensense not only that cities should be excit-ing places but also that politics can beexciting too. And they’ve shown anamazing capacity to politicize youngpeople—hitherto alienated from ballot-box politics—and to make them careabout the fate of our cities and aboutdemocracy. This is one way to read Situ-ationist history backwards.

Ultimately, the Situationists remindus of what’s gone, of the cheap thrills ofthe everyday city, the city now belea-guered from every side, airbrushed bycorporate logos, plagued by burgeoningrents and inflated property values, greedand exploitation. The Situationists stillsing a paean to the oppressed minor lea-guer, to those who play in worn-out cityballparks—to those who still mix andmingle in street-corner societies in thefast-disappearing affordable parts of thecity. Meanshile, the Situationists remindus of what we need, of what we have yetto achieve. Like Nietzsche, they were“preparatory men,” people of the future,

who wanted “their own festivals, theirown weekdays, their own periods ofmourning,” and whose “greatest enjoy-ment” was to live dangerously, to build acity under Vesuvius. Maybe one day wetoo can build a preparatory city, our veryown Situationist city, under a smolder-ing volcano.

Notes1. Harold Rosenberg, The Re-Definition of Art(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972),chapter 4.

Andy Merrifield teaches urbanism and social theo-ry at the Graduate School of Geography at ClarkUniversity. His books include The Urbanization ofInjustice, coedited with Erik Swyngedouw; his arti-cles have appeared in The Nation, Social Text,Rethinking Marxism, and Monthly Review.



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Documents

Constants New Babylon