This essay argues that the Situationist International (1957–72) and its early concepts of psychogeography (a city's sensorial impact on its residents), dérive (drift), and détournement (rerouting, ...recontextualization) can enliven our thinking about recent politically charged events—namely, a performance of Katori Hall's Our Lady of Kibeho at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City on December 4, 2014, and a spontaneous Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration on August 14, 2014. Constellating or connecting these sites is the experience of the city under capitalism: Paris for the situationists (1950s and '60s), and a gentrified and redeveloped midtown Manhattan (1980s–2010s) for Hall's Kibeho and the BLM demonstration. For the situationists, postwar capitalism—or the "spectacle"—induced habits of passive consumption and alienation. Le Corbusier–style urban planning exacerbated this alienation and destroyed the liveliness of Parisian streets. By contrast, the situationist drift was a creative pedestrian practice responding to the emotional currents of the city—a negation of the passivity on which consumerism depends. The iconic situationist map, "The Naked City," uniquely records the effects of situationist drifts even as it wittily détourns the title of a famous film noir. Turning to New York, the essay discusses the cleanup of Forty-second Street and Times Square through development and gentrification, tools of what Neil Smith calls a "revanchist" city, one that puts corporate profits over the needs of its working poor and indigent citizens. Yet, developers were granted zoning exemptions to build higher and wider if they included theatres in their plans. The Signature Center, part of the MiMa apartment tower on Forty-second and Tenth Avenue, is a fortuitous part of this complex development story. This became clear, the essay suggests, when, at the third curtain call for Our Lady of Kibeho, the actors boldly raised their arms in the "hands up/don't shoot" gesture, thus linking their artistic effort to the antiracist, anticapitalist politics of the BLM movement—indeed, to the spontaneous BLM march up Broadway to Times Square and back down to Forty-second Street that took place four months earlier. Those marchers, the essay suggests, reactivated the city by behaving like situationist drifters, dodging around police barriers and tourist buses and bringing midtown Manhattan and a tourist-filled Times Square to a standstill. If a situationist-style map were to be made, the Signature Center and Times Square would become linked across time as revolutionary hubs of resistance. In sum, situationist theory and practice speaks across the decades, providing playful tools for imagining and enacting political resistance.
This article focuses on the possible outcomes that may unfold when personal narratives have been intentionally applied on stage to generate a tension between the ideas of reality and fiction in ...performance. The article uses theoretical references that conceptualize the notion of the ‘Real’ - from the social context of the 1960s to the present - and follows the thoughts of philosophers like Debord, Baudrillard and Rosset with the aim to consider theater and performance as artistic fields that have the potential to interrogate totalizing statements about the truth in today’s world.
Resumo: Este artigo dedica atenção aos possíveis desdobramentos do uso de narrativas pessoais em cena, quando tomadas no intuito de provocar tensão entre realidade e ficção no instante do acontecimento cênico. Utilizando como referência formulações que ponderam acerca da concepção do real - do contexto social dos anos 1960 aos dias de hoje -, a partir do pensamento de filósofos como Debord, Baudrillard e Rosset, busca-se refletir sobre o teatro e a performance como campos artísticos capazes de interrogar a afirmação totalizante sobre a verdade no mundo atual.
Résumé: Cet article porte une attention aux possibles conséquences de l’utilisation de récits personnels dans la scène, lorsqu’ils sont pris afin de provoquer une tension entre la réalité et la fiction au moment de l’événement scénique. Utilisant comme références les formulations qui examinent la conception du réel - du contexte social de 1960 à nos jours -, bien que la pensée de philosophes tels que Debord, Baudrillard et Rosset, ce texte réfléchit sur le théâtre et la performance comme domaines artistiques capables d’interroger l’affirmation totalisant sur la vérité dans le monde actuel.
As was the case for other writers from the Beat Generation, geography is more than simply a setting for Allen Ginsberg’s work, as his poetry also bears the imprint of the influence of the landscapes ...through which he traveled in his mind and poetic practice. In the 1950s, the same decade which saw the composition of Ginsberg’s Howl, Guy Debord and his followers developed the concept of “psychogeography” and “dérive” to analyze the influence of landscapes on one’s mind. The Debordian concept of psychogeography implies then that an objective world can have unknown and subjective consequences. Inspired by Debord’s theories and through the analysis of key poems, this paper argues that a psychogeographical focus can shed new light on ecocritical studies of Ginsberg’s poetry. It can indeed unveil the complex construction of the poet’s own space-time poetics, from hauntological aspects to his specific composition process.
This article analyses the course of Guy Debord by putting forward an analogy with the figure of the wandering prophet as analyzed by Max Weber in his sociology of religions. During the 1950s and the ...1960s, when Guy Debord was primarily concerned with animating a «vanguard movement», he navigates from one social microcosm to another. In these microcosms, he brings a heterodox message: art, but also metaphysical philosophy and specialized politics, are dead. From now on, nothing can prevent the advent of a new practice, revolutionary: the construction of «situations». In order to understand how Debord was able to incarnate a secularized version of the figure of the wandering prophet, this article deals with both the social fabric of his habitus (notably through the analysis of his youth letters) and the social conditions of the emergence of a «pro-situationist» community in the mid-1960s.
A SPECTACULAR PRESIDENT Campbell, Charles
Dalhousie review,
03/2019, Letnik:
99, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
French philosopher Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967) theorized a society made up of and operating amidst a constant stream of images that define people's lives, and it argued that the more ...people consume these images the more they live mainly as spectators, as social life consists solely of the exchange of commodified images. The society of the spectacle also fails to provide people's essential needs, like housing, health care, safety, and life satisfaction, yet it is very good at creating artificial needs and fulfilling them with an endless stream of new products and pseudo-events. Here, Campbell talks about the continued relevance of Debord's theory as he continue to understand contemporary events in the US. He argues that Debord's society is much like the contemporary US, where movies, television, and especially the internet now take up most of people's lives outside of work. As a result, pseudo-events and pseudo-people are becoming more and more central to American politics, as demonstrated by Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit presents a history of the two avant-garde groups that French filmmaker and subversive strategist Guy Debord founded and led: ...the Lettrist International (1952-1957) and the Situationist International (1957-1972).
(Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, reprinted with the permission of A. Debord and Intertalent.) Fascinated by the potential of aerial photography, especially in ...mapping how capital was rationalizing urban space in Paris after World War II, Guy Debord and Asgar Jorn offered a deliberately nonrational, resistant optic on the modern city—a psychogeographic view, one that revealed the psychic impact of the city on its pedestrians. Melissa Schultheis, now a graduate student and early modernist in the Department of English at Rutgers University, enjoys dabbling in graphic design and she brilliantly rose to the challenge of connecting the ambiances of the two moments of revolutionary energy that I discuss in my essay: the moment when the actors at a performance of Katori Hall's Our Lady of Kibeho raised their arms in the Black Lives Matter gesture, "hands up/don't shoot," on December 4, 2014, and the moment when a gathering in New York's Union Square ("Moment of Silence," August 14, 2014), commemorating the deaths of unarmed black citizens at the hands of police, erupted in a march up Broadway to Times Square, against traffic and without a permit, which the police were not able or willing (given public scrutiny after the death of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014) to stop with force. In the spirit of situationist irreverence and creativity, Melissa Schultheis has détourned not only Debord/Jorn's The Naked City (see figure 1), but also Debord's own détournement, called "Life Continues to Be Free and Easy" (1959), in which he collages pieces of The Naked City, text, postage stamps, and hand-colored figures of soldiers (see the image at https://www.flickr.com/photos/32491186@N05/4069785969).
Partei ohne Partei Barber, Bruce
Third text,
11/2018, Letnik:
32, Številka:
5-6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
'Whatever' as the ethical ground for the potentiality of a 'party without party' (Partei ohne Partei). Herman Melville's Bartleby, the scrivener, says 'I would prefer not to' three times. This famous ...speech act constitutes the urtext 'what if/ever potentiality' of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's ethics for the contemporary philosopher (as) scrivener; the one who like the party without party (senza il partito) member, may engage in 'an experience of the possible as such'. Does this privileging of potentiality in the political process coincide with the renunciation of the creative will to power in Guy Debord's famous line from his film Critique de la séparation (1961),
Taking his cues from Aristotle's Metaphysics 'thought thinking itself, which is a kind of mean between thinking nothing and thinking something, between potentiality and actuality', Agamben affirms the anaphorised potential of Bartleby's speech act: 'I would prefer not to prefer not to'. What if conventional party politics, partisanship left/centre/right divisions were a thing of the past? Now to the Dead Letter Box and the potentialities of a Partei ohne Partei (party without party)!
Barber's détournement of the original Surrealist map is a situationist enterprise and related to the question of building arbitrary barriers such as the 'Trump wall' between the US and Mexico and the relinquishing of the open borders implicit in the European project initiated when Charles de Gaulle stated 'Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals', which in 1967 implicitly included Great Britain.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Focusing on the works of Guy Debord, Chris Marker and Georges Perec, this dissertation is a study of interdisciplinary practices as they transform the art of writing and everyday experiences of the ...city. With a major emphasis on the sensorial differences and affinities between textual and visual media, the chapters – each of which focuses on a close reading of a work by one individual - look at the three interdisciplinary figures as they work separately as innovators in their fields and how, when looked at comparatively, paint a portrait of changing creative sensibilities relevant to both their respective time periods and digitizing ones on the horizon. Central, too, to this examination of elasticizing imaginations, new ways of reflecting and collaborations between different artistic practices and writing techniques are shifting notions of home, mobility and familiarity.
...Evanson's work also gestures towards the porousness of the boundary between the body and the world beyond it, forging an interstitial threshold, a vortex for radical experiments of identity. ...I ...am interested in fusions of the physical and the ghostly, a synthesis that can be better understood alongside Kwasi Wiredu's concept of quasi-materialism. ...sound technologies serve as a kind of material postbody that transmits across and acoustically challenges spatial, temporal, and body boundaries. The psychogeographic text-art project Mémoires (1959), for example, is famous for its sandpaper cover, signifying the use of found objects and the abrasive textured-textuality of the work, akin to de Couto's method of scratching spoken samples as commentary. ...splicing becomes a tool for liberation, freeing the Black voice and Black subjectivity from conventional sensory, spatial, and temporal boundaries.
PDF
