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Situating Situationism: Wandering around New Babylon with Mille Plateaux

2008; Routledge; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13264820802216874

1755-0475

Leslie Kavanaugh,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

Abstract This paper explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with respect to art, space, and politics. Specifically, I wish to suggest an affinity between their philosophy and the work of the Dutch artist Constant, who was one of the originators of the Situationist International movement in post-war Europe. Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of re-territorialization, constructivism, and nomadology find a resonance with Constant's project of New Babylon, a project he worked on for more than twenty years. Recently, many scholarly works have assessed the intellectual legacy of the Situationist International. Given the solid foundation of this historical work, this paper proposes instead to extend the argument in the direction of the philosophy that would be later proposed in What is Philosophy? and Mille Plateaux. In contrast to a purely historical account, this paper juxtaposes several of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas in an encounter with Constant that aims for a bleeding over, or migration, of relevant themes into new productive territories. With regards to the politics of place, to begin, this paper briefly sketches out the historical position of the Situationist International in Europe, and specific proposals for a project called New Babylon by Constant, an early member of the group. Then a discussion of the political grounding of any possible notion of utopia is followed by a comparison between Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'constructivism' and Constant's notion of 'construction.' In conclusion, this paper asks what are the possible consequences or implications of a utopian notion of nomadism upon contemporary life. Notes 1 For an extensive discussion of the historical roots of the Situationist Movement, see among other publications, the exhibition catalogue from the Tinguely Museum in Basel: Stefan Zweifel, Juri Steiner, and Heinz Stahlhut (eds.), IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI—The Situationist International (1957-1972), Zurich: JRP/Ringer, 2006. Also Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User's Guide, London: Black Dog, 2005; Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: a Critique, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999; Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998; Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, Theory of the Dérive and other Situationist Writings on the City, Barcelona: MACBA and ACTAR, 1996; Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, Situationists, Art, Politics, Urbanism, Barcelona: MACBA and ACTAR, 1996; Simon Ford, The Realization and Suppression of the Situationist International: An Annotated Bibliography 1972-1992, San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1994; Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Post-modern Age, London: Routledge, 1992; Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; Elizabeth Sussman (ed.), On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989; Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. 2 The first collaborative publication of Deleuze and Guattari came in 1972 with Anti-Oedipus (1972). Then the second volume on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, entitled Mille Plateaux (1980), and What is Philosophy? (1981). In English translation, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans.), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson (trans.), London & New York: Verso, 1994. 3 Cf. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, D. Nicholson-Smith (trans.), New York: Zone Books, 1994, pp. 44-46, §§69-71. See also Guy Debord, Comments of the Society of the Spectacle, London & New York: Verso, 1998; Guy Debord, Correspondance, Paris: Libr. A. Fayard, 1999; Guy Debord, Panegyric, vols. 1 & 2: vol. 1, James Brook (trans.), vol. 2 John McHale (trans.), London and New York: Verso, 2004; Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, Ken Knabb (trans. and ed.), Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003; Guy Debord, Mémoires: Structures Portantes d 'Asger Jorn, Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert aux Belles Lettres, 1993. 4 Cf. Jean Baudrillard, "The Political Economy of the Sign," in Selected Writings, Mark Poster (ed.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 68-69. Baudrillard, in his analysis of post-war consumer society as a circulation of signs, signifiers inherently empty of meaning—simulacra—correctly identifies the post-industrial age with a distancing of the Marxian notion of exchange value into a system of interchange of objects that are "outside the field of denotation." As a consequence, all needs are abstracted and translated into equivalence in terms of the currency of desire. "At the present stage of consummative mobilization," he argues, "to see that needs, far from being articulated around the desire or the demand of the subject, find their coherence everywhere." Needs become, thus, a-topic; and desire becomes ubiquitous. (Original emphasis.) 5 Cf. Antonio Negri, "Value and Effect,"Boundaries 2, 26,2 (Summer 1999): 88. "An economy of desire is the order of the day … the standpoint of the oppressed that constructs insurrection and imagines a revolutionary reconstruction, a standpoint from below that richly constructs a non-place of revolutionary reality." 6 The French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre had an influence on the Situationists, as well as the later generation of '68 French philosophers including Gilles Deleuze. For example, Lefebvre states: "… the word 'creation' will no longer be restricted to works of art but will signify a self-conscious activity, self-conceiving, reproducing on its own terms … and its own reality (body, desire, time, space), being its own 'creation'." Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, S. Rabinovitch (trans.), New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994. Furthermore, he emphatically pairs the necessity of any ideological change with the accompanying change of space: "'Change life!''Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. … New social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa." Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, D. Nicholson-Smith (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p. 59. 7 Constant, from "Unitary Urbanism," an unpublished manuscript of a lecture by Constant held at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 20 December 1960: "What is unitary urbanism? Unitary urbanism is neither town planning, nor art, nor style; nor does it correspond to concepts like integration and the synthesis of cultural forms. … Yet there is nothing to integrate, because there is nothing! Which is why … I would prefer to define unitary urbanism as a very complex, very changeable, constant activity, a deliberate intervention in the praxis of daily life and in the daily environment; an intervention aimed at bringing our lives into lasting harmony with our real needs and with the new possibilities that will arise and that will in turn transform these needs. … Unitary urbanism is flexible; it respects our freedom to change our way of life; it adapts to every situation, to every need, to every technical, geographical or psychological possibility; it is the objectification of the creative urge, the collectivization of the art work, the materialization of a dynamic lifestyle." R. de Jong-Dalziel (trans.), in Wigley, Constant's New Babylon, p. 132. 8 Constant, "Unitary Urbanism," in Wigley, Constant's New Babylon, p. 9. (My emphasis.) 9 See, for example, the studies done in Philadelphia by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown in the 1970s on cognitive mapping of the city. And of course, most importantly, the 'psycho-geography'dérive studies of Paris done by Guy Debord. 10 See the seminal work of Ernst Block, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Also Franziska Bollery, Architekturkonzeptionen der Utopischen Sozialister, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1991; Frank E. Manuel and P. Fritzie, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979; Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias, New York: Viking Press, 1962. 11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson (trans.), London & New York: Verso, 1994, pp. 99-100. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 101. 13 In the final section of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) entitled "Transcendental Doctrine of Method," Immanuel Kant sets out the method of critical philosophy in "The Architectonic of Pure Reason." By the term 'architectonic' he means 'the art of constructing a system.' Fundamental to his philosophic method is precisely a systematic unity opposed by Deleuze and Guattari wherein all facets of cognition form a coherent 'edifice.' Not only does this edifice comprise a method as systematic unity, but is internally self-sufficient and organic. As a unified whole, the architectonic includes a place for 'filling in the gaps,' yet by definition does not allow for external appendages to the system. Notice that this organism is also opposed to the Deleuzian concept of 'rhizomatic.' 14 "Philosophy is a constructivism …" Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 35. See also especially Chapter 2, "The Plane of Immanence." 15 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 90. 16 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 43. 17 For Deleuze and Guattari chaos is not something that is random or disordered, but rather something productive. "Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence." Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 118. 18 From "On the Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in Daniel Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979, p. 85. "But the concept is not given, it is created." Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 11. 19 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 22. 20 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 82 (my emphasis). 21 Indeed, Deleuze himself, I suggest, could be thought of as the philosopher of rehabilitation. He took up and 're-played' themes from such thinkers as Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Freud, Nietzsche, and Bergson. His philosophy consequently shows deep traces of these investigations embedded within his thought. His oeuvre can be said to be rhizomatic, picking up and restating concepts of earlier philosophers that have been neglected due to the history of philosophy proceeding upon a different tack. In the end Deleuze productively shows that philosophy is not linear and neatly progressive, but is rhizomatic and chaotic in the productive sense. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 76-77. 23 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 143-144. 24 Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 47-48: "… the ruling spectacle of Empire is constructed through a variety of self-legitimating discourses and structures. Long ago authors …[such as Guy] Debord recognized this spectacle as the destiny of triumphant capitalism." 25 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, especially Chapter 1, entitled "Introduction: Rhizome." 26 Cf. Derek Wall, Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements, London: Pluto Press, 2005. 27 Constant, "Autodialogue on New Babylon," reprinted in Wigley, Constant's New Babylon, p. 213. 28 The obvious example being, of course, the globalization of the agriculture industry into vast enterprises. As a comment and critique on the practice, taken to absurd consequences, see MVRDV's proposals for pig farms in Holland, 'skyscrapers' housing pigs in immense structures, thereby freeing up the limited space in Holland for other uses, namely recreation and entertainment industries. Cf. Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Richard Koek (eds.), 'MVRDV,' in FARMAX, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999. 29 Constant, 'Autodialogue on New Babylon,' reprinted in Wigley, Constant's New Babylon, p. 213. 30 In an effort to react positively to the nomadic insecurity of the contemporary environment, in the true spirit of the Situationist International a number of 'architectural anarchies' were proposed recently in order to return self-determination of the habitat to the occupant. See Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (eds.), Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000. 31 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 320. 32 As quoted by Deleuze and Guattari in Thousand Plateaus, p. 557, note 49: "… Nomads pause at the representation of their journeys, not at a figuration of the space they cross. They leave space to space," (my emphasis). 33 See for example, the SENSEable City Lab, MIT Carlo Ratti (coordinator), Daniel Berry, Andrea Mattiello, Eugenio Morello, Andres Sevtsuk, Design team: David Lee, Xiongjiu Liao, Jia Lou, Sonya Y Huang, Daniel A Gutierrez in collaboration with A1 —Mobilkom Austria. This project entitled "Mobile Landscape Graz" by the SENSEable City Lab entailed tracking mobile phone users in order to map pedestrian flows, so-called 'real-time mapping,' available online at http://senseable.mit.edu/projects/graz/graz.htm#rtgraz. Although this project generated quite impressive results, it no doubt also raises questions as to privacy and the 'who' of whoever is tracked, i.e., volunteers from an obviously privileged socio-economic class. 34 Paradoxically, the consequence of the increased access to computers and to the Internet has not been an increase in demographic dispersion. In contrast, urban density continues to increase, and at-home working merely makes the worker available 24/7 for increasing productivity demands. Cf. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. She argues that increased globalization, instead of distributing economic potentiality, has led to even greater concentration of economic and political power in a few centres, global cities such as New York, London and Tokyo. See also Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money, New York: New Press, 1998.