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Debord’s 1967 pamphlet entitled The Society of the Spectacle. It was effectively
Debord’s attempt at rewriting and updating Marx’s Capital, which had
been published one hundred years earlier. 54 The Society of the Spectacle was
a lapidary totalization or a détournement of not only Situationist theory
that included most of their ideas published in the pages of SI magazines as
well as those taken from congresses and conferences. Which is also another
way of saying that through this text the group’s experimentations and experimental
mode had taken on its own materiality as a very peculiar and
ambivalent critique of cold war political economy: it was avant-gardist, but
with a profound, theoretical ambition unlike any other at that time. In it
Debord argued that “the concrete life of everyone has been degraded into
a speculative universe.” 55 He rejected the often-rehearsed Hegelian “Aufhebung”
scenario in which art Wnally surpasses itself through its own constant
desire to reach beyond formal limitations, while arguing, in a wry
détournement of Althusser’s famous phrase, that practice consisted of “experimenting
with theory.” This experimentation was irreverent and plagiaristic,
yet its objective was serious: to undermine cold war formalism and the
resignation into “everydayness.” Along with Debord, many other SI members
took an active part in theoretical debates that became increasingly
more intense in the sixties. Jorn also published a book-length text critiquing
political economy. 56
The debate in 1957 between Debord and what he termed the
“Italo-experimentalist” artists helps to clarify the importance of theory for
their practice. Debord denounced some members of the former MIBI for
their unintentional specialization 57 and spoke about experimentation as an
alternative mode of action that was opposed to the dominant and highly
commodiWed modernist art and culture. In this context the theoretical, speculative
elements actually impeded specialization, Wnalization, and the creation
of a simple cultural product. It was also this experimental approach to
theory that helped the group mobilize a diverse, extensive audience. 58
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF UNITARY URBANISM
Internationaleries 31
Focusing on a single “case study” or examining one exemplary and “illuminating”
issue in the multifaceted practice of the internationaleries challenges
the very core of their project. They would likely claim that this approach
fetishizes and ultimately invalidates the main precepts of their entire practice
because collectivity, heterogeneity, and experimentation were designed
precisely to act as a guarantee against all forms of normalization and recuperation
including the type of critical anthology to which this essay belongs.
Nevertheless, in the case of “unitary urbanism,” we Wnd a tactic that, while