McDonough: “Situationist Space”

McDonough in describing and analyzing Debord and “The Naked City” makes reference to a few interesting subjects I wish to further explore. First, I really enjoyed this concept of a map as a “performance” – at once literally performing and asking of its viewer to perform with it. This at once reminded me of Borges and his critique of absolute exactness when he describes a map as being useless – “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography” (“Exactitude in Science”). The relevance I find between Debord’s map and Borges’ map lies in this concept of “exactitude”. While a map should be “exact”, “precise”, and “accurate”, too much can at once undermine its purpose – a purpose that for Debord takes the meaning of performance, of an intimate interaction among city and city dweller – “freed from the ‘useful connections that ordinarily govern their conduct,’ the users could experience the ‘sudden change of atmosphere in a street, the sharp division of a city into one of distinct psychological climates (62).”

Also of interest is McDonough’s reference to Saussure’s idea of language when McDonough describes the traditional condition of the map as pure structure (“langue”) without individualism (“parole”). For Saussure, “langue” constitutes the whole system of language, while “parole” constitutes the concrete use of language or the utterances of language, i.e. words. It is interesting because McDonough suggests that a traditional map is all structure, all “langue”, but there is no individual interaction or that which gives the usefulness of a map its proper recognition, the “parole”. I wish McDonough would’ve continue with this idea of “langue” and “parole” because what is the purpose of a map if there is no one to read it, understand it, use it.

Lastly, I was also fascinated by this idea of “social geography” as a response to “academic geography”. Along with this notion of a map “performing”, Debord aggress with Reclus in that geography, like a map, is “not an immutable thing, it is made, it is remade every day; at each instant, it is modified by men’s actions” (66). This concept of “social geography” I see as the ligament between Saussure’s idea of “langue” and “parole” with Debord’s idea of a “performative” map. It ultimately takes men (and women) for a map to operate and perform just like it takes men and women’s utterances for language to exist – one can’t exist without the other in this reciprocal and mutual relationship.

If I had to pinpoint McDonough’s main argument I would say it lies in a map being able to perform and allow others to perform with it. This performance would at once amount to a greater sense of value when compared to map that just displayed a city but allowed to sense of interaction.

Question 1: What would McDonough, while thinking of Debord, think of this new GPS technology and being able to talk and be responded by 3D maps that now come standard in most new vehicles? Would McDonough agree that this is itself a performance?

Question 2: If “The Naked City” had no arrows, would viewers still get this sense of movement, of this spatial relationship between city and its inhabitants, of exploration?