Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Internationaleries 33
in which the normative status of geography—one of the easiest to manipulate
of all scholarly disciplines—was grotesquely revealed. Additional unitary
urbanist actions were executed the next year in Brussels that consisted
of a series of unplanned ludic games and détourned maps of the city.
The psychogeographies created in Brussels also produced a drift
or dérive that collectively “discovered” and reframed the city, its civic functions
or its lack of them. Brussels, once the site of the Second International,
was at this moment in the cold war being transformed into the administrative
and political center of NATO and by extension of the West. In theory,
any collective, absurdist activity staged by LI would turn upside-down this
transformed Brussels, recovering whatever remained of its older existence,
and offer its citizens a radical mode of action for retrieving their city from
the grips of techno-bureaucratization. Unitary urbanism was therefore a tactical
rejection of ofWcially imposed forms of urbanism including its covert
policy of colonization, separation, fragmentation, and social isolation. Simultaneously,
it offered the very opposite: a unifying if ephemeral act of serious
festivity that was highly participatory and collectively realized.
One of the main conceptual forces behind unitary urbanism was
a continuing interest in the writings of Henri Lefebvre. Particularly inXuential
was his critique of the techno-bureaucratic regulation of cities, a process
he termed the modernist “production of space.” 60 In different ways the
ultimate goal of unitary urbanism was a restoration of a totally human experience.
This restoration was not unlike Lefebvre’s concept of the festival as
a celebration of the collective ownership of urban space. In this sense the
theory and practice of unitary urbanist action was always conceived of as “a
total critical act,” and not just another “doctrine.” 61 Some of these ideas
percolated through SI writings prior to 1956 including Debord’s 1955 study,
Critique of Urban Geography, or Ivan Chtcheglov’s 1953 text, Formulary for
a New Urbanism. At the same time the critique of functionalism had already
led them to previously denounce the modernist architect Le Corbusier and
to détourne his famous phrase that the house is “machine for living” into
their own interpretation: the “house as the machine for surprises.” 62 In 1957
the “Report on the Construction of Situations” sought to make a clear turn
away from an avant-gardism always controlled by the bourgeoisie and toward
a more engaged form of direct action. 63 It was later that the group planned
an “agitation and inWltration” 64 of UNESCO headquarters in Paris that was
intended to ridicule its techno-bureaucratization of culture at that time.
However the action was never executed. And while the concept of wreaking
havoc on the so-called “international” distribution of “cultural needs”
hoped to set in motion a truly global, if decidedly cultural, revolution, these
radical goals remained in the Wnal analysis merely theoretical.