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.