The Naked City

McDonough’s Situationist Space analyzes the use of various types of maps to illustrate urban space. His most important point is his interpretation of Guy Debord’s The Naked City, in which McDonough sees a map that is meant to be a narrative rather than a tool for universal knowledge or direction. Debord’s version of Paris in his work emphasizes the psychogeography associated with Paris rather than accuracy of the locations within the city. It is clear that his map has other meanings behind it seeing as the fragments have no relation to one another and the distances and positions of each piece are completely inaccurate. Debord explains this logic in his theory of Derive. He describes each fragment as a “unity of atmosphere” whose most important goal is not to limit the subject who is using the map to the concrete architecture that is built within a normal map of Paris. Instead this concept of derive that Debord uses is meant to show that the “city is only experienced in time by a concrete, situated subject, as a passage from one unity of atmosphere to another, not as the object of totalized perception” (64). To him the map is meant to show that exploration should be the reality of actually inhabiting the environment by following the subject through the surroundings disregarding the connections in a map that usually govern how one moves through urban space.
McDonough also mentions that The Naked City is structured through synecdoche and asyndeton. I am not sure exactly what these mean but in the connecting paragraph McDonough seems to reveal that these attributes “open the gaps in the spatial continuum and retain only selected parts of it.” This is part of McDonough’s motivating question. He is interested in arguing why Debord chose to fragment and shape his map of Paris in The Naked City the way that he did, and he makes a very good point arguing that the Plan de Paris and similar maps only act to conceal difference and uniqueness because they are hidden in the “homogenous space” that is created from viewing the entire city laid out before the viewers eyes. The Naked City, however, “brings these distinctions and differences out into the open” (65), suggesting a realness in the fragmented piece. In this way, Debord’s map possesses social life and distinct character because it reveals the process of social groups inhabiting the space. In this way, McDonough believes that Debord’s map is itself a narrative that is open for interpretation and can have various meanings, but that the overall message shows a series of relationships between fragment and unity in various different ways.

1) What was the exact connection to the Situationist in this reading? Was it the use of derive?

2) What is the meaning and relation of the quote, “Both the flaneur and the person on the derive move among the crowd without being one with it. They are both ‘already out of place,’ neither bourgeois nor proletariat” (73)? How do these two terms relate to the social status of bourgeois or proletariat? From Debord’s map can we determine what and where these status’ lie?