Paris- Amsterdam Underground

paris- amsterdam underground edited by christoph lindner and andrew hussey Essays on Cultural Resistance, Subversion, and Diversion AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS Paris-Amsterdam Underground Cities and Cultures Cities and Cultures is an interdisciplinary humanities book series addressing the interrelations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce. The series takes a special interest in the impact of globalization on urban space and cultural production, but remains concerned with all forms of cultural expression and transformation associated with contemporary cities. Series editor: Christoph Lindner, University of Amsterdam Advisory Board: Ackbar Abbas, University of California, Irvine Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of New South Wales Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary, University of London Geoffrey Kantaris, University of Cambridge Bill Marshall, University of London Ginette Verstraete, VU University Amsterdam Richard J. Williams, University of Edinburgh Paris-Amsterdam Underground Essays on Cultural Resistance, Subversion, and Diversion Edited by Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey amsterdam university press This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humani- ties and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe. Cover illustration: Sarah Guilbaud Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Heymans & Vanhove, Goes isbn 978 90 8964 505 0 e-isbn 978 90 4851 820 3 (pdf) e-isbn 978 90 4851 821 0 (ePub) nur 694 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) C. Lindner, A. Hussey / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 Foreword 9 David Pinder 1. Concepts and Practices of the Underground 13 Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey Part 1: Projections 21 2. Metromania or the Undersides of Painting 23 Sophie Berrebi 3. Mapping Utopia: Debord and Constant between Amsterdam and Paris 37 Andrew Hussey 4. Amsterdam’s Sexual Underground in the 1960s 49 Gert Hekma Part 2: Mobility 63 5. Detours, Delays, Derailments: La Petite Jérusalem and Slow Training in Culture 65 Sudeep Dasgupta 6. Underground Visions: Strategies of Resistance along the Amsterdam Metro Lines 77 Ginette Verstraete 7. Underground Circulation: The Beats in Paris and Beyond 97 Allen Hibbard Part 3: Visibility 113 8. (In)audible Frequencies: Sounding out the Contemporary Branded City 115 Carolyn Birdsall 9. Red Lights and Legitimate Trade: Paying for Sex in the Branded City 133 Joyce Goggin 10. Visibly Underground: When Clandestine Workers Take the Law into Their Own Hands 147 Anna-Louise Milne 11. Archaeology of the Parisian Underground 159 Stephen W. Sawyer 5 Bibliography 171 Illustrations 183 Contributors 185 Index 189 6 paris-amsterdam underground Acknowledgements This book – like its subject – is the product of a series of interactions and ex- changes between Paris and Amsterdam involving a group of creative and critical thinkers whose work addresses (and is sometimes implicated in) countercultural movements, moments, scenes, and spaces in both cities. The project developed from a pair of linked conferences on the topic of the underground – one held in Amsterdam in 2010 and the other in Paris in 2011 – which involved a lot of geographic and intellectual shuttling between the two cities on the part of the speakers. The benefit, we believe, can be seen throughout this book in the often surprising, sometimes strange, but always productive interconnections between the various chapters. Our thanks, therefore, to the speakers and audiences at both conferences for their energetic contributions, as well as to our respective institutions, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the University of London Institute in Paris, for providing financial support. For serious and sub- stantial help in getting this book ready for publication, we are greatly indebted to Miriam Meissner at ASCA, whose editorial and research assistance tied many loose ends together. Most of all, we are grateful to the authors in this book for participating with such a collaborative spirit in the extended conversation involved in the project as a whole, from its guerrilla conference roots through to its final published form. Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey 7 Foreword David Pinder In one of the many striking images in this book, a figure scrutinizes the earth through a giant magnifying glass. A painting by Jean Dubuffet, it is one of many that he composed from the mid-1940s that depict the ground and what lies be- neath. Readers of the book are often invited similarly to look downward, to consider spaces that are literally under the ground of Paris and Amsterdam. Our attention is directed to what is under the paving stones, asphalt, and concrete on which so many people daily tread. What may be found there unseen, buried, sequestered, and forgotten? How can explorations of those depths trans- form understandings of the urban? The vertical line down may be a relatively neglected dimension of cities, the subterranean largely an unknown realm. But the latter, in its darkness and opacity, as a place to which expelled matter and waste flows and in which secrets as well as bodies are buried, has also long been a source of fascination combined with repulsion. That is particularly the case with Paris where the underground became an obsession during the nineteenth century among many writers and artists as well as politicians and administrators as the construction of new sewers, cemeteries, trains, and other infrastructure proceeded. Traditional imagery of underworlds was reworked as spaces under the city came to harbor all manner of fears, superstitions, fantasies, dreams, and visions. Associated with danger, decay, criminality, terror, insurrection, and the demonic, it was also a site of technological accomplishment, beauty, and wonder as well as escape, shelter, and refuge (Williams; Pike). Looking downward provides a distinct perspective on the city above, the underground even perhaps offers a key to unlock certain of its mysteries. Yet the underground cannot be comprehended through an abstract viewpoint and instead requires entering its ‘shadows’. That is an observation drawn toward the end of the book from one of the most famous chroniclers of Paris souterrain, Victor Hugo. The preceding pages take us on many journeys below the surface. The underneath is at times literal, for example via train or metro. But it is also meta- phorical. The underground of these pages is both a place and an idea, one that resonates in manifold ways with the histories of Paris and Amsterdam. They have become renowned for their underground movements and practices of cultural resistance, subversion, and diversion (and some of the paradoxes and recuperations involved in that ‘renown’ are explored insightfully in what follows). Opposing dominant power relations, these movements and activities have typically oper- ated below dominant culture’s threshold of visibility, even clandestinely. 9 One characteristic mode has been that of digging, grubbing, burrowing, undermining – and on occasion erupting through the surface. That is to use the terms of the ‘old mole’ evoked by Marx, an image he borrowed from Shake- speare’s Hamlet to refer to revolutionary struggles in 19th-century Europe. It is also the language adopted a century later by the Situationists, who play a prominent role in this book. Positioning themselves as ‘the catacombs of visible culture’, they sought not to gain access to the artistic and cultural establishment but rather to undermine it (SI ‘The Adventure’, 79). Renunciating the ‘world of the spectacle’, they looked to desires, resistances, and struggles from below that threatened the current social and spatial order. ‘An irreducible dissatisfac- tion spreads subterraneanly, undermining the edifice of the affluent society’, they noted with satisfaction in 1962, adding that the ‘old mole’ conjured by Marx ‘is still digging away’ (SI ‘Bad Days’, 107). It was an image to which they often re- turned, including during the uprisings in Paris, in May 1968, when they believed ‘a decisive threshold’ was crossed: ‘Europe can only leap for joy and cry out: “Well dug, old mole!”’ (Viénet, 15). The book focuses on the decades since the mid-twentieth century. The underground at its heart is that associated with the counterculture whose designation as ‘the underground’ the editors and others trace from the 1950s and 1960s. The text nevertheless resists a single track and gives free rein to the term’s fluid mean- ings and associations. Maps are reworked, detours taken, and lines hijacked.

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