DOCSLIB.ORG

Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented*

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented* Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented* ANTHONY VIDLER But I must here, once and for all, inform you that all this will be more exactly delineated and explained in a map, now in the hands of the engraver . not to swell the work . but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents, or innu- endoes as shall be thought to be either of private interpretation, or of dark and doubt- ful meaning after my life and my opinions shall have been read over (no don’t forget the meaning of the word) by all the world. —Guy Debord, quoting Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy1 The radical refusal of official urbanism and architecture in the polemics of the Lettrists and Situationists, together with the direct opposition to figures like Le Corbusier and Paul Chombart de Lauwe evinced by Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and Raoul Vaneigem, among others, has obscured the extent to which their call for a new architecture and a “unitary” urbanism relied deeply on the professional approaches to which it was nonetheless opposed. This was so, not only in the ambiguous stance of Jorn to the work of Le Corbusier, and the architectural propositions of Constant, themselves springing from the critique of CIAM ortho- doxy by Team X architects such as Aldo van Eyck, but also in the ways in which Debord and his colleagues analyzed the problem of urbanism in itself, drawing on * With apologies to Patrick Straram. This essay has grown out of my work on the role of aerial photography in shaping the modernist urban imaginary, which was published as “Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below,” in Gary Bridges and Sophie Watson, eds., A Companion to the City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), pp. 35–46, and later elaborated at a conference at the Maison Française at New York University organized by Denis Hollier. I thank the participants at that conference, and Denis Hollier in particular, for their responses. 1. Guy Debord, Panegyric, Volumes 1 and 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale (London: Verso, 2004), p. 167. OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 13–30. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.115.1.13 by guest on 03 October 2021 14 OCTOBER cartographic and photographic techniques, and even the “evidence” put forward by planners themselves. On the one hand, this was the result of the entirely self- conscious strategy of détournement, of using the enemy’s material against itself; but on the other hand, it also represented a kind of collusion based on a mix of nostalgia for the original aims of a modern urbanism—for what avant-garde urbanist did not dream of a unitary solution?—and a historical sense that alternative traditions, rooted in the seventeenth-century conflict between Cartesians and Pascalians, had been suppressed. For Debord, in particular, the maps, ideal and real, that traced the settlement of the earth, and the aerial photographs that viewed these settlements in all their three-dimensional complexity, were charged with more than their official origin. From the outset they acted as objects of memory, reflection, and strategic plans. In the following essay, I trace only a few of the themes that linked Debord’s thought to that of cartographic representation—representation that, in its faithful- ness to the real somehow escaped the label of the spectacular, and that might still work as a ground for the reconstruction of the real.2 Geography First there was a geography lesson. Debord’s “Valeur Éducative,” published in three parts in Potlatch nos. 16–18,3 carefully selected phrases and paragraphs from his beloved grade-school textbook Géographie générale : Classe de 6ème by Albert Demangeon and André Meynier.4 Mingling these excerpts with other fragments of text taken from the Book of Psalms, Jeremiah, and Samuel, from Bossuet, Saint-Just, Marx, Engels, and from the November 5, 1954, edition of France-soir, the series was presented as a mock radio emission delivered in four voices, the second one of which is noted as jeune fille. Debord states that this émission radiophonique is published “with- out mention of the tones and sound effects that can only pass over the airwaves,” in favor of the words themselves. In apparently random order, the voices speak of the need for rain, the story of Tamar and Ammon, Marx’s theory of the bourgeois family, the theory of intellectual and material production, the Algerian and Vietnamese con- flicts, prehistoric carnivores, and the scandal of the Queen of England purchasing from Dior. Interspersed among these excerpts are twelve fragments from Géographie générale that describe the weather, the lifestyles of peoples in warm and cold climates, 2. For a summary treatment of this subject, see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 82–90. For an analysis of Situationist mapping techniques, see Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space,” in McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 241–65, which also treats the geographical discourse current in the 1950s, and more recently, McDonough, “Delirious Paris: Mapping as a Paranoiac-Critical Activity,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005), pp. 6–21. 3. Guy Debord, “La valeur éducative,” in three parts, Potlatch nos. 16 (January 26, 1955), 17 (February 24, 1955), and 18 (March 23, 1955); republished in Potlatch 1954–1957 (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1996), pp. 64–65, 71–72, 76–77. 4. Albert Demangeon and André Meynier, Géographie générale: Classe de 6ème (Paris: Hachette, 1937). This text was authored by Meynier in the series “Nouveau Cours de Géographie,” edited by Demangeon. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.115.1.13 by guest on 03 October 2021 Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented 15 the dwellings of man, and the exploration of the polar ice caps. The result is a political-geographi- cal collage that anticipates many of the détourements (the word used by Debord to describe these extracts) later employed in the journal of the SI. The common understanding of détourne- ment, as defined by Debord in the first issue of the journal IS, was an “abbreviation” of the formula- tion “détournement of prefabricated aesthetic elements,” or, more precisely, “the integration of present or past products of the arts into a superior construction of the milieu,” in the sense that “there could be no Situationist painting or music, but only the Situationist use of these means.” More fundamentally, the definition went on, “détourne- ment at the interior of ancient/traditional cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, which bears witness to the erosion and loss of importance of these spheres.”5 Literally “diversion, diverting, Albert Demangeon and André turning aside,” the juridical meaning of the word Meynier. Géographie détournement suggested embezzlement, and misap- générale (cover). 1946. propriation of funds, and it is clear that Debord understood the procedure in both senses: not simply quoting, not simply borrowing, but through appropriation and recontexualization making new meaning out of old productions. In this sense, his citation of Demangeon and Meynier, in the context of a fictive radio broadcast, would have a doubly diversionary effect—the détournement both of the form of the broadcast and of its contents, themselves juxtaposed to con- struct a new “milieu.” Thus the essentially didactic form of the official broadcast is taken seriously in order to construe both an ironic critique of the form, as well as to propose a new didactic message; while the message, delivered in apparently benign maxims and knowledge bites, is in fact constructed to undermine the schoolbook platitudes. On another level, given the direct association of détournement with the juridical charge “détournement de mineur,” or “abduction of a minor,” the insertion of “Voice 2,” the young girl, adds to the force of the piece as it seeks to overturn the traditional “educational value” of the lesson and construct a new milieu that would kidnap the young and induct them into the new generation of proto-Lettrists.6 5. “Définitions,” Internationale Situationiste 1 (June 1958), p. 13. 6. Boris Donné has pointed to the connection between the formula “détournement de mineur” and the amorous liaisons in Debord’s circle commemorated in the pages of Mémoires. See Donné, (Pour Mémoires) Un essai d’élucidation des Mémoires de Guy Debord (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2004), p. 92. I am deeply indebted to this meticulous study of the origins and contexts of the fragments of text in Mémoires for the clues that I have followed in this essay. Mémoires was published for private distribution by Guy Debord with painted “supports” by Asger Jorn in 1959. See Guy Debord, Mémoires: Structures portantes d’Asger Jorn (Paris: Belles-Lettres Pauvert, 1994). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2006.115.1.13 by guest on 03 October 2021 16 OCTOBER There is however, another sense in which Debord understood his rapacious appropriations, as he indicated much later in a note to potential translators of his Panégyrique 2: Each time—and there are frequent instances of this—that a word or sentence presents two possible meanings, both of them must be recog- nized and retained, for the sentence must be understood as wholly veracious with regard to both meanings. This also implies that the sole truth running through the entire text is the sum total of the possible meanings to be found therein.7 Thus, while all citations should first be understood as construed against their orig- inal meanings, directly or ironically, the very ambiguity of irony also has to be retained: “the reader should also be aware of the fact that he is not apprehending merely irony here: in the final analysis, should they be perceived as truly ironic? The doubt surrounding this question should remain intact.”8 Here the dialectic of détournement is clarified as a double identification: with the original and with its transformed state, which are both retained in the resulting milieu that conserves all possible past and future implications of the détourned work.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Iain Sinclair and the Psychogeography of the Split City
    ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Iain Sinclair and the psychogeography of the split city https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40164/ Version: Full Version Citation: Downing, Henderson (2015) Iain Sinclair and the psychogeog- raphy of the split city. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email 1 IAIN SINCLAIR AND THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF THE SPLIT CITY Henderson Downing Birkbeck, University of London PhD 2015 2 I, Henderson Downing, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract Iain Sinclair’s London is a labyrinthine city split by multiple forces deliriously replicated in the complexity and contradiction of his own hybrid texts. Sinclair played an integral role in the ‘psychogeographical turn’ of the 1990s, imaginatively mapping the secret histories and occulted alignments of urban space in a series of works that drift between the subject of topography and the topic of subjectivity. In the wake of Sinclair’s continued association with the spatial and textual practices from which such speculative theses derive, the trajectory of this variant psychogeography appears to swerve away from the revolutionary impulses of its initial formation within the radical milieu of the Lettrist International and Situationist International in 1950s Paris towards a more literary phenomenon. From this perspective, the return of psychogeography has been equated with a loss of political ambition within fin de millennium literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Beyond the Black Box: the Lettrist Cinema of Disjunction
    Beyond the Black Box: The Lettrist Cinema of Disjunction ANDREW V. UROSKIE I was not, in my youth, particularly affected by cine - ma’s “Europeans” . perhaps because I, early on, developed an aversion to Surrealism—finding it an altogether inadequate (highly symbolic) envision - ment of dreaming. What did rivet my attention (and must be particularly distinguished) was Jean- Isidore Isou’s Treatise : as a creative polemic it has no peer in the history of cinema. —Stan Brakhage 1 As Caroline Jones has demonstrated, midcentury aesthetics was dominated by a rhetoric of isolated and purified opticality. 2 But another aesthetics, one dramatically opposed to it, was in motion at the time. Operating at a subterranean level, it began, as early as 1951, to articulate a vision of intermedia assemblage. Rather than cohering into the synaesthetic unity of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk , works in this vein sought to juxtapose multiple registers of sensory experience—the spatial and the temporal, the textual and the imagistic—into pieces that were intentionally disjunc - tive and lacking in unity. Within them, we can already observe questions that would come to haunt the topos of avant-garde film and performance in the coming decades: questions regarding the nature and specificity of cinema, its place within artistic modernism and mass culture, the institutions through which it is presented, and the possible modes of its spectatorial engagement. Crucially associated with 1. “Inspirations,” in The Essential Brakhage , ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: McPherson & Co., 2001), pp. 208 –9. Mentioned briefly across his various writings, Isou’s Treatise was the subject of a 1993 letter from Brakhage to Frédérique Devaux on the occasion of her research for Traité de bave et d’eternite de Isidore Isou (Paris: Editions Yellow Now, 1994).
    [Show full text]
  • The Interventions of the Situationist International and Gordon Matta-Clark
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Potential of the City: The Interventions of The Situationist International and Gordon Matta-Clark A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Art History, Theory, and Criticism by Brian James Schumacher Committee in charge: Professor Norman Bryson, Chair Professor Teddy Cruz Professor Grant Kester Professor John Welchman Professor Marcel Henaff 2008 The Thesis of Brian James Schumacher is approved and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm: __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2008 iii EPIGRAPH The situation is made to be lived by its constructors. Guy Debord Each building generates its own unique situation. Gordon Matta-Clark iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………… iii Epigraph…………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………... v Abstract………………………………………………………………….. vi Chapter 1: Conditions of the City……………………………………….. 1 Chapter 2: Tactics of Resistance………………………………………… 15 Conclusion………………………………………………………………. 31 Notes…………………………………………………………………….. 33 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….. 39 v ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Potential of the City: The Interventions of The Situationist International and
    [Show full text]
  • The History of Unitary Urbanism and Psychogeography at the Turn of the Sixties
    The History of Unitary Urbanism and Psychogeography at the Turn of the Sixties Ewen Chardronnet 2003 Contents Examples and Comments of Contemporary Psychogeography (lecture notes for a conference in Riga Art + Communication Festival, May 2003) 3 2 Examples and Comments of Contemporary Psychogeography (lecture notes for a conference in Riga Art + Communication Festival, May 2003) The topic of our panel discussion this afternoon is about “local media, maps and psychogeography”. I think it’s necessary to come back first to a brief history of psychogeography, Unitary Urbanism and the Situationnist International at the turn of the sixties. The end of the fifties and the beginning ofthe sixties were a period of acceleration in urbanism of European and world cities. In Paris, this period is the explosion of what politicians and urban planners called “new cities”. Paris was exploding outside its “ring road” and cities such as Sarcelles were created with totally new urban models. There was a strong feeling in that time that the cities were losing their human dimensions. I will first try to show how this acceleration of modernization of urban society had an influence on the tactics of the SI as an avant-garde concerned with the uniformization of society through urbanism, mass media, and the dichotomy of work and leisure. I will especially focus on Unitary Urbanism and 4 years of intense activities (‘58-‘61) that finally culminate by totally abandoning these theories. We will then discuss actual initiatives that use tactical medias in the streets and how this is link to the new rise of psychogeography and the necessity of reclaiming the streets.
    [Show full text]
  • 'How Does One Become Guy Debord'?
    HIMA 13,1_Rev_268_f9_183-193 3/14/05 2:52 PM Page 183 The Tribe JEAN-MICHEL MENSION, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith London: Verso, 2002 The Consul RALPH RUMNEY, translated by Malcolm Imrie London: Verso, 2002 Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts ELIZABETH WILSON London: I.B. Tauris, 2000 Reviewed by MICHAEL CALDERBANK ‘How Does One Become Guy Debord’? The highest aspiration of the revolutionary, it has been argued, is to be put out of business altogether. That is, the aim of a radical politics is to eradicate the very conditions that necessitate its emergence, and thereby dissolve the exceptional nature of its own stance. From this perspective, the contemporary fascination and nostalgia for the Situationist International (SI) might be seen, ironically, as symptomatic of the ultimate failure of their enterprise.1 The situationists, for their part, anticipated with dread the dangers of ‘recuperation’ into the Spectacle, the all-encompassing surrogate that they believed late capitalism was substituting for autonomous human experience. Here was a movement heavily steeped in aesthetic concerns that sought to challenge the very discursive and institutional specialisation of art itself. They understood from the beginning that their success could be guaranteed only in so far as they managed to engineer their own self-liquidation, and here it is tempting to see their self-destructive drinking binges and Debord’s eventual suicide as a distorted expression of the broader logic of the movement. By contrast, the erection of a whole academic sub-industry around the SI threatens to see them immortalised and turned into something of a fetish: the obsession with the last of the real revolutionaries, the authentic expression of radical Sixties’ counterculture at its purest.
    [Show full text]
  • Psychogeography: Framing Urban Experience
    Psychogeography: Framing Urban Experience The cross-disciplinary thought given to the city, particularly over the past forty years, has led to its reconceptualisation in terms of urban -economic, sociopolitical, and more recently cultural- relations. This has provided the context for often generalised observations of subjective urban experience, recalling Simmel’s investigations of industrial metropolitan individuality, and a recycling of artistic practices like psychogeography that engaged with the urban imaginary and everyday life. Initially, “the word psychogeography,” so Guy Debord’s story goes, was a neologism, “suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for a phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953”. The directeur of the Lettrist International (LI), and from 1957-72, also Situationist International (SI), goes on to explain this phenomena as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”1 In practice, this was approached with emphatically un-academic methods, the most established being the dérive. With a backward glance at surrealist automatism, this recreational tactic properly entailed several psychogeographers together negotiating “urban ambiences” -frequently in Paris, but also in Amsterdam, London, Venice- talking and taking advantage of any bars en route. Such diversions were documented in written accounts and psychogeographical maps, and thus described in the LI’s journal Potlatch and the SI’s Internationale Situationniste. Moreover, the resulting conclusions were applied in proposals for a unitary urbanism that reimagined the city as a site of play, creating disorientating ‘situations’ for the ludic education of its inhabitants.
    [Show full text]
  • Chronology of the Lettrist International and the Situationist International
    Appendix 4 Chronology of the Lettrist International and the Situationist International 1951 – In April, Guy Debord meets Lettrist leader Isidore Isou and several other Lettrists at the Cannes Film Festival. – In the summer, Debord graduates from high school in Cannes, moves to Paris, and joins Isou and the Lettrists. – Throughout 1951, Debord spends much of his time at his favorite bar, Chez Moineau, where he meets several people who would become important to him during that time, including Gil Wolman, Michele Bernstein, Ivan Cht- cheglov, Eliane Papai, and Jean-Michel Mension. 1952 – In February, Wolman screens his only film L’Anticoncept. – In June, Debord screens his first film, Howls in Favor of Sade; the audience erupts in anger, halting the screening. – In October, Debord, Wolman, and two other Lettrists perpetrate the “No More Flat Feet!” scandal against Charlie Chaplin, an action Isou distanced himself from in a newspaper article. – In December, Debord, Wolman, and other Lettrists split from Isou to form the Lettrist International (LI). 1953 – In early 1953, Debord artistically manifests the LI’s contempt for wage slav- ery when he scrawls “Ne Travaillez Jamais!” (“Never Work!”) on a wall on the rue de Seine. – In October, Chtcheglov presents Debord with his poetic manifesto, “Formu- lary for a New Urbanism.” © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004402010_014 James Trier - 9789004402010 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 07:21:04AM via free access 422 Appendix 4 1954 – In June, the LI publishes the first issue of Potlatch, which will continue to be published semi-regularly through much of 1957, when the Situationist International is formed.
    [Show full text]
  • Sire, Je Suis De L'ôtre Pays
    19.02 – 24.04.2016 Vincent Meessen Sire, je suis de l’ôtre pays Introduction / Inleiding FR Depuis plus de dix ans, l’artiste belge artistiques et intellectuels inconnus à ce Vincent Meessen (né à Baltimore en 1971, jour entre l’Internationale situationniste et E.-U.) explore les facettes multiples et le Congo. contestées de la modernité occidentale. En Se référant au projet situationniste revisitant des épisodes oubliés ou négligés d’édification d’une cité expérimentale sur de notre passé colonial, Meessen met en une île déserte, Meessen construit une lumière les inévitables points aveugles installation sculpturale ambitieuse en forme d’une interprétation eurocentrique de de labyrinthe. L’idée de l’île implique à la l’histoire. Sa pratique fait preuve d’un fois une séparation du monde et sa possible engagement dans la collaboration recréation. La question demeure : jusqu’où interdisciplinaire et d’actions au-delà des l’art peut-il aller dans la production de sites frontières de l’art. Dans cette optique, il a d’expériences collectives qui aspirent à défriché une partie méconnue de l’héritage changer le monde ? influent de l’Internationale situationniste qui a si radicalement bouleversé les relations entre culture, politique et vie quotidienne. NL Al meer dan tien jaar verdiept de Bien qu’attiré par l’Internationale Belgische kunstenaar Vincent Meessen situationniste, Meessen porte un regard (°1971 in Baltimore, VS) zich in de vele, vaak critique sur sa mythologie, notamment sur la gecontesteerde gezichten van de westerse consécration de Guy Debord comme le héros moderniteit. Door vergeten of verdrongen et de Paris comme son épicentre.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International
    The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Nicola Pezolet, "The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe "Pinot" Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International," Grey Room, Winter 2010, No. 38, Pages 62-89. (doi:10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.62) © 2010 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/grey.2010.1.38.62 Publisher MIT Press Journals Version Final published version Citable link http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55965 Terms of Use Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. Pinot Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Piero Simondo, and friends working outside the Alba Experimental Laboratory, 1956. Courtesy of the Gallizio Archive, Turin. 62 The Cavern of Antimatter: Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio and the Technological Imaginary of the Early Situationist International NICOLA PEZOLET Perhaps the machine is the only instrUment qUalified to create that is inflationary and indUstrial and therefore based on the anti-patent; the new indUstrial cUltUre will only be “Made by the People,” or it will not be. —GiUseppe “Pinot” Gallizio, 1959 DUring its formative years (1957–1960), the SitUationist International (SI) charted a paradoxical relationship between an enthUsiasm
    [Show full text]
  • Ralph Rumney
    the consu I RALPH RUMNEY CONVERSATIONS WITH GERARD BERREBY WITH THE HELP OF GIULIO MINGHINI AND CHANTAL OSTERREICHER TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MALCOLM IMRIE Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time, Vol. II CITY LIGHTS BOOKS SAN FRANCISCO © 2002 by Malcolm Imrie for this translation © 1999 by Editions Allia, Paris, forLe Consul by Ralph Rumney All rights reserved. 10 987654321 Cover and book design: StefanGutermuth/doubleu-gee Editor: James Brook This work, published as part of the program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States. Cet ouvrage publie dans le cadre du programme d'aide il la publication beneficie du soutien du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres et du Service Culture! de l'Ambassade de France represente aux Etats-Unis. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rumney, Ralph, 1934. [Consul. English] The consul I by Ralph Rumney ; translated from the French by Malcolm Imrie. p. cm. - (Contributions to the history of the Situationist International and its time ; 2) ISBN 0-87286-398-0 1. Rumney, Ralph, 1934--Interviews. 2. Artists--England-Interviews. 3. Internationale situationniste. 4. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)-Europe-History-20th century. I. Title. IL Series. N6797.R83 A35 2002 700'.92-dc21 2002019772 CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. Visit us on the Web at www.citylights.com. To Sindbad Flee the ruins and don't cry in them.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction: from the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: the Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano
    CHAPTER 2 Introduction: From the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: The Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano 1. Context and Purpose Sometimes the literary fortune of a book can almost be unfortunate. We think this is the case of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which on the one hand succeeded where most of our scholarship concerned with the production of critical knowledge tends to fail, by going beyond the constraining walls of aca- demic discourse and inspiring human emancipation. On the other hand, while the idea of the Spectacle has infiltrated the collective imagery, it has most fre- quently done so through the popularization of its most glaring surface, thus limiting its overall significance. It is indeed easier to think of the Debordian notion as spectacularly medi- ated content – such as media images and extravagant events – rather than the general process of mediation that for Debord propels the Spectacle. That is because we do live in a media saturated environment, but to the point in which How to cite this book chapter: Briziarelli, M. and Armano, E. 2017. Introduction: From the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: The Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations. In: Briziarelli, M. and Armano, E. (eds.). The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. Pp. 15–47. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi. org/10.16997/book11.b. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 16 The Spectacle 2.0 the mediation logic that drives current conditions of life in many societies has gone beyond spectacular images, and is increasingly subsuming more spheres of social life to the total and integral Spectacle: capitalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Lynchian Cognitive Mapping and Situationist Psychogeography
    Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1-1-2006 A critical and historical case study of experience design : Lynchian cognitive mapping and Situationist psychogeography Derek Cori Wallen Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Recommended Citation Wallen, Derek Cori, "A critical and historical case study of experience design : Lynchian cognitive mapping and Situationist psychogeography" (2006). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 19068. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/19068 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A critical and historical case study of experience design: Lynchian cognitive mapping and Situationist psychogeography by Derek Cori Wallen A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Graphic Design Program of Study Committee: Paula J. Curran, Major Professor Sunghyun Kang Michael J. Golec Carl W. Roberts Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2006 Copyright ©Derek Cori Wallen, 2006. All rights reserved. 11 Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the master's thesis of Derek Cori Wallen has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University Signatures have been redacted for privacy 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES iv LIST OF TABLES v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER 1.
    [Show full text]