McDonough's Situationist Space

Unlike Jameson or Clark, McDonough seems more interested in explaining a work or body or work of art rather than absorbing a range of works into his own intellectual agenda. If he has a main argument, it is not "his" in the strictest sense, but more Guy Debord's. What, then, is Debord’s main argument? Although it is plainly stated (more or less), his goal still seems obscure to me. More of which later.

Debord’s The Naked City summarizes the central tenets of situationism; that an aerial city map view is not “objective,’ that it assumes, for example, the position of the viewer and the primacy and truth of geographic space, and that there are other, possibly better, approaches to the space we inhabit. Debord chose to approach space from a pschogeographical angle, by which he means that the city is composed of “unities of atmosphere” (65), places defined by their flavor rather than by their geographical location.

McDonough describes the Situationist project, “the exploration of psychogeography and the construction of spaces that accommodated difference” (70). A main element of this project was derive, the “drifting.” He drew an interesting parallel between the derive and flanerie. But what I found most interesting was the similarities he called attention to: the fact that practitioners of both “move among the crowd without being one with it. They are both ‘already out of place’” (73). But this is where the situationist project seems to break down.

If it is a revolt, or protest of sorts (ala Nouveau Theatre D’Operations Dans la Culture), what is its aim? For whom is Paris to be reimagined? If the derive is about reappropriating space, then for whom? McDonough suggests that the ultimate beneficiaries were to be “all participants in the ‘ludic-constructive’ narrative of a new urban terrain” (77). Although I got the sense that the space was to be reclaimed or reimagined for the benefit of the people who inhabit it, it seems like any impact would mainly (only?) be detected by those participating in the narrative, i.e., artists and intellectuals. And Debord’s attitude toward the city’s inhabitants is decidedly snobbish. He holds them at arms length: the derive practitioner is an observer, apart from the crowd, above the crowd. And if Debord considers “the crowd” to be a usefull narrative tool (at best), he is simply disdainful of that which is most popular among them: sports, tourism and conspicuous consumption. Killing all three birds with one stone, he wrote that tourism was that “popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit” (76). Surely he leaves no place for the “everyman” in his project.

If Warhol’s postmodern pop art blurred the line between high-brow and common, Debord clearly redraws it in heavy ink. Also, unlike the postmodernists, he focuses on personhood and the subjective experience. There is no pschogeography without the psyche.

Question 1: Why does Debord critique the surrealists for having “insufficient mistrust of chance?” (74)

Question 2: What is meant by: “Situationist “experimental behavior,” their practice of “inhabiting,” were operations in dominated space meant to contest the retreat of the directly lived into the realm of representation, and thereby to contest the organization of the society of the spectacle itself” (70)?