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Books
War on territory The Beach Beneath the Street – the Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International McKenzie Wark Verso, 224pp, £15
Can a marginal fifty-year-old avant-garde anti-capitalist group have lessons for our troubled times? asks Thomas Wensing.
8 • AT220
The Beach Beneath the Street wavers between historiography and a call to action. McKenzie Wark sets the tone immediately, poignantly describing our epoch as a time which offers only ‘spectacles of disintegration’, a time in which we are asked to choose between one of two possible doom scenarios: ‘capitalism or barbarism’. Within this rather bleak world view Wark proposes to go back in time, specifically to the period of the Situationists, in an attempt to reassess this historical moment and ignite new possibilities in the here and now. With the current news making such depressing reading, it has to be said that the discussion of possible alternatives should be welcomed. Initially I was a bit sceptical about investing so much expectation in an avant-garde group whose habits were described as ‘bohemian at best and delinquent at worst’. This ‘group’, moreover, was never more than 10 people at any given time, but I was sufficiently curious to explore the full toolbox of the Situationists and what it has in store for us. The Situationist International was a loose association of left-wing radical artists, writers and architects,
centred around the philosopher Guy Debord, which existed from 1957 to 1972. As with so many radical splinter groups, its membership went through several rounds of purges, and the aims and interests of the group shifted over time. Initially it critiqued the rigidity of modernist city planning and the mono-functionality of the spaces it created. Concepts such as the dérive, drifting and psychogeography were adopted in order to roam through cities and come to a new awareness of urban spaces and its effect on the human psyche. From here it was a small step to attempt to create a complete environment in which situations could occur, and Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys devoted a fair share of his life to creating the utopian city, New Babylon, for playful human beings without a fixed address, a city for the so-called Homo Ludens. By this time, however, Debord had lost his interest in utopian city building and published The Society of the Spectacle (1967), an astute description and pungent critique of late capitalist society. The extent of the role played by the Situationists in the Paris uprisings of 1968 is open to debate, but the title
of Wark’s book refers specifically to this period by paraphrasing the famed slogan ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach’. All this and more is recounted in great detail, at times with gems of insight. Wark explains the rather elusive and somewhat mystifying concepts of the Situationists well, but ultimately the format of the book as a historiography is too constrained to deliver its promise to draw these concepts firmly into the twenty-first century. By contrast, when I picked up The Society of the Spectacle again I was struck by its acute relevance and, I have to say, its hard to beat Debord’s text as a stimulation to jump up on a barricade.
Thomas Wensing studied architecture at Delft and Columbia University. Registered in the Netherlands and UK, he is currently working at David Chipperfield Architects.