In this article McDonough described Debord’s “The Naked City” and how it expressed the ideas of the situationists. Firstly, McDonough claimed that “The Naked City” is a narration instead of a description, just like Scudery’s “Carte de Tendre”. Its allusion to the film with the same name suggests multiple interpretations of path to follow unlike a normal, standard map. The arrows linking up unrelated pieces of the map leads followers to “experience the sudden change of atmosphere in a street, the sharp division of a city into one of distinct psychological climates…” (62) It makes one wonder if one is able to trace out a path, any one at all, on “The Naked City” by connecting the arrows.
This artwork is also an appropriation of the “Plan de Paris”. According to McDonough, the cutting of the original map into pieces and re-assembling it in a random order symbolizes what the social relations in this space has become, called “disentanglement” and “alienation” by the author. (70) I think it meant showing the city in an incoherent, messy manner because the existing “space” itself is contradictory, full of divisions (such as quarters) and fragmented.
McDonough also talked about Debord’s derive, stating its difference from flaneur, which involves removed observation unlike the “simultaneous fragmenting and disrupting” (74) of derive. I don’t quite understand all his arguments about what the derive is attempting to achieve, but it has to do with reconstructing the existing, contradictory social relations.
Q1) Was the city of Paris chosen as the map to be used in “The Naked City” because of Haussmanization? Or was there other reasons to why specifically Plan de Paris was used?
Q2)What is meant by “ludic-constructive behavior”?
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