THE BEACH BENEATH THE STREET THE BEACH BENEATH THE STREET THE EVERDAY LIFE AND GLORIOUS TIMES OF THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL MCKENZIE WARK London • New York This edition fi rst published by Verso 2011 © McKenzie Wark 2011 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-720-7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Cochin by MJ Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Vail Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Leaving the Twenty-First Century 1 1 Street Ethnography 7 2 No More Temples of the Sun 19 3 The Torrent of History 33 4 Extreme Aesthetics 45 5 A Provisional Micro-Society 61 6 Permanent Play 75 7 Tin Can Philosophy 83 8 The Thing of Things 93 9 Divided We Stand 109 10 An Athlete of Duration 125 11 New Babylon 135 12 The Beach Beneath the Street 147 Notes 161 Index 191 “Monsters of all lands unite!” Michèle Bernstein In memory of: Helen Mu Sung Andrew Charker Stephen Cummins John Deeble Colin Hood Shelly Cox in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni Acknowledgements My only qualifi cation for writing this book is some time spent in a certain militant organization, then in a bohemian periphery, and sub- sequently in avant-garde formations that met at the nexus of media, theory and action. This was all long ago and far away, but nevertheless my main obligation is to salute some comrades from all three worlds who taught me invaluable things. This book is for certain friends from those worlds within worlds who, for various reasons, fell before their time. Some of their names are acknowledged in the dedication, others will be known to those who need to know. Thanks to Joan Ockman and Mark Wigley for the invitation to give the Buell Lecture at Columbia University in 2007, from which this book eventually evolved. Thanks also to my hosts for conversations at NYU, MIT, UCLA, UC Irvine, Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown, Parsons School of Design, the New School for Social Research, Laboral, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Cabinet, and 16 Beaver. Thanks to my Lang College students, past and present. Earlier versions of some material appeared in Multitudes, Angelaki, as an introduction to Guy Debord, Correspondence (Semiotext(e)) and in my booklet 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (Prin- ceton Architectural Press).Thanks to readers for useful comments, which led to substantial modifi cations. Special thanks to Kevin C. Pyle for collaborating on Totality for Kids, part of which appears here as the cover The Situationists détourned comics by inserting their own texts into the speech bubbles. Kevin and I reverse the process. The words I have mostly détourned from Situationist classics. Kevin’s art is the new element. Thanks for research assistance to Whitney Krahn and in particular vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Julia P. Carrillo. Also to librarians at Bobst, Brown, Columbia and MoMA, and to innumerable Lang colleagues for their advice, whether I followed it correctly or not. Thanks to The New School for a faculty research grant, and to Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital for an art writer’s grant. When I gave Tino Sehgal a copy of 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situ- ationist International one day in Central Park, he exclaimed at once: “May there be fi fty years more!” My thanks to Tino for the invitation to interpret his work This Situation at the Marian Goodman Gallery, and to all of the other interpreters and visitors for many hours of underpaid but stimulating conversation about “the situation.” I would also like to offer a special thanks to those who, in the true spirit of potlatch, translate and archive Situationist writings and make them freely available: The Bureau of Public Secrets, Infopool, Not Bored, The Situationist International Online Archive, Unpopular Books and others. Lastly, a shout out to Brooklyn Rod and Gun Club and the Lake- house Commune, and most of all: love to Christen, Felix and Vera. viii Introduction: Leaving the Twenty-First Century A giant infl atable dog turd broke loose from its moorings outside the Paul Klee Center in Switzerland and brought down power lines before coming to a halt in the grounds of a children’s home. The Paul McCarthy sculpture, the size of a house, reached a maximum altitude of 200 meters. Other civilizations had their chosen forms: from the Obelisk of Luxor to Michelangelo’s David. The futurist poet Marinetti found his crashed motor car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but he might have balked at fl ying dog shit.1 In the twenty- fi rst century, the insomnia of reason does not breed monsters, but pets. No wonder there are no longer any gods, when what is expected of them is that they descend from Mount Olympus with plastic baggies and clean up. We are bored with this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spec- tacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it. It’s time to start scheming on how to leave the twenty-fi rst century. The pessimists are right. Things can’t go on as they are. The optimists are also right. Another world is possible. The means are at our disposal. Our species- being is as a builder of worlds.2 Sometimes, to go forwards, one has to go back. Back to the scene of the crime. Back to the moment when the situation seemed open, before the gun went off, before the race of champions started. This is a story about a small band of artists and writers whose habits were bohemian at best, delinquent at worst, who set off with no formal training and equipped with little besides their wits, to change the world. As Guy 1 BEACH BENEATH THE STREET Debord later wrote: “It is known that initially the Situationists wanted at the very least to build cities, the environment suitable to the unlim- ited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more.”3 Where does one fi nd this kind of ambition now? These days artists are happy to settle for a little notoriety, a good dealer, and a retrospec- tive. Art has renounced the desire to give form to the world. Having ceased to be modern, and fi nding it too passé to be postmodern, art is now merely contemporary, which seems to mean nothing more than yes- terday’s art at today’s prices.4 If anything, theory has turned out even worse. It found its utopia, and it is the academy. A colonnade adorned with the busts of famous fathers: Jacques Lacan the bourgeois- magus, Louis Althusser the throttler-of-concepts, Jacques Derrida the dandy-of-difference, Michel Foucault the one-eyed-powerhouse, Gilles Deleuze the taker-from-behind. Acolytes and epigones pace furiously up and down, prostrating themselves before one master—Ah! Betrayed!—and then another. The production of new dead masters to imitate can barely keep up with consumer demand, prompting some to chisel statues of new demigods while they still live: Alain Badiou the Maoist-of-the-matheme, Giorgio Agamben the pensive-pedant, Slavoj Žižek the neuro-Hegelian-joker.5 In the United States the academy spread its investments, placing a few bets on women and people of color. The best of those—Susan Buck-Morss, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Donna Haraway—at least appreciate the double bind of speaking for difference within the heart of the empire of indifference. At best theory, like art, turns in on itself, living on through commentary, investing in its own death on credit. At worst it rattles the chains of old ghosts, as if a conference on “the idea of communism” could still shock the bourgeois. As if there were still a bourgeois literate enough to shock. As if it were ever the idea that shocked them, rather than the practice.6 Beneath the pavement, the beach. It’s a now well-worn slogan from the May–June events in Paris, 1968, at the moment when two kinds of critique seemed to come together. One was communist, and demanded equality. The other was bohemian, and demanded differ- ence. The former gets erased from historical memory; as if one of the world’s great general strikes never happened. The latter is rendered in a language that makes it seem benign, banal even. As if all that was 2 INTRODUCTION demanded were customer service. Luc Boltanski: “Whole sections of the artistic critique of capitalism were integrated into management rheto- ric.”7 What is lost is the combined power of a critique of both wage labor and of everyday life, expressed in acts. What has escaped the institutionalization of high theory is the possibility of low theory, of a critical thought indifferent to the institutional forms of the academy or the art world.