The Ghost Network (10 page)

In July 1957, in the middle of a warm but dry summer, activist and aestheticist Guy Debord “summoned,”
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eight compatriots to a small town in northern Italy called Cosio d’Arroscia. Attendee Ralph Rumney took some candid black-and-white photographs of the group on the city’s streets. In Cosio d’Arroscia, all the buildings are made out of stone, all the doorways are narrow, and the shadows cling to the structures like skin.
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The city looks so much like a rocky labyrinth that anyone would think the eight women and men chose
Cosio d’Arroscia because the design of the city fell in line with the group’s ideas about architecture, but the draw of the location was at least partially free room and board. They stayed at a hotel run by one of their aunts. The meals were provided; the wine was cheap.

The eight were all members of one or another of several prominent avant-garde groups active at the time: the Letterist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. The goal of their trip was to combine the three groups into a single entity and after a week of drinking, writing, talking, and wandering the streets, they christened their newly formed avant-garde group the Situationist International (SI). For several years, the SI pursued an aesthetics-based approached to social change, but by 1968 the Situationists had transitioned into a completely political group; their early creative concerns had been shed like an ill-fitting coat. The Situationists’ role in the political unrest that gripped French students and factory workers in May of 1968 has been well documented, but is not of interest here. It is with the SI’s early years that Molly Metropolis concerned herself.

The group’s beginnings were inauspicious, but their aims weren’t modest. Debord and the Situationists wanted to tear cities down and rebuild them; they wanted to remake the world. As with so many of us, the Situationists didn’t achieve their lofty goals.

Cosio D’Arroscia barely remembers the Situationists. The bar where Debord and the others drank still stands and is still owned by the same family, who commemorate their Situationist heritage with a little plaque outside the bathroom. That plaque constitutes the entirety of the town’s acknowledgement of the origins of the SI. In the 1980s, the city had gained control of the old hotel the Situationists stayed in and converted it to a nursing home for the town’s rapidly aging population. There are no other Situationists sites to
visit.
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Ultimately, the bar and hotel don’t matter; only the streets matter.
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In the early days of the SI, Debord focused on aesthetic social practices. In late 1950s and early 1960s, in the hours between midnight and sunrise, the Situationists roamed the streets of Paris. They drank wine as they walked, in pairs or in groups of six or seven, getting drunk and talking about architecture. The SI’s drunken nighttime walks through the streets of Paris were not a pastime, but “playful-constructive behavior.”
^ǁ
They put a high value on playfulness and took their walking very seriously.

The walking groups could contain any of the core members of the Situationists: Asger Jorn, who funded much of the Situationists’ activities even after being expelled from the group for being an artist; Ivan Chtcheglov, a wild, charismatic, beautiful, and precocious twenty-three-year-old who was known for his explosive personality, and was at one point committed to a mental hospital by his wife (where he received shock therapy); Jacqueline de Jong, a poised and sharp student of fashion and drama, who was born somewhere in the Netherlands but fled the country as a child with her parents just before the Nazi occupation; Elena Verrone and Verrone’s husband Piero Simondo, whose aunt owned the Cosio D’Arroscia hotel; Constant Nieuwenhuys, who always referred to himself only as
Constant (like Cher or Madonna) and was the immensely gifted artist and architect of the Situationist city New Babylon; Michèle Bernstein, Debord’s wife and the Situationists’ most gifted writer, who authored some of the Situationists’ most important and coherent statements of purpose; and of course, Debord himself.

Debord was tall, wore round glasses, and was more charismatic than physically attractive. He had a loud voice. He liked to drink and argue passionately, preferably at the same time. A French news broadcaster once asked Bernstein to describe Debord’s best attribute and she deadpanned, “He wears a suit very well.” Debord’s clothing was often rumpled, stained, and torn.

A decade younger than most of the Situationists’ other prominent members (not including Chtcheglov, who wrote some of the movement’s most influential early pieces, then missed many of the group’s pivotal moments while institutionalized), Debord asserted his influence on the Situationists through the force of his personality. As a leader, he was both aggressive and enigmatic. He was also charming, well-read, and gentle when he needed to be, but he was ambitious and never backed down from a fight. He devoted himself singularly to the group from the first days of its existence and expected everyone else to have the same level of commitment. Though some historians have argued that Constant or Jorn or even young, crazy Chtcheglov really steered the Situationists during their early years, most people consider Debord the leader of the avant-garde both logistically and ideologically. Through sheer force of will, creating a cult of personality around himself and his writing (each essay carefully edited by Bernstein), he conquered history. When most people think of the Situationists, they think of Debord. It was Debord who wanted to tear down the cities and build new ones.

Understanding the Situationists’ desire to remake the city begins with World War II, specifically with the bombings carried out all
over Europe by both the Allies and the Luftwaffe. After the war, huge swathes of European cities had to be rebuilt from rubble. An architectural design movement called “modernism” or “functionalism,” which favored function and rationality over all else, dominated the rebuilding process. As functionalism took over, art and spontaneity were leeched out of city planning. Even in cities like Paris that didn’t sustain much wartime damage, urban planners developed and implemented new architectural techniques for moving people around like products on a belt in a factory.

One of the first Situationist writings, “Formulary for the New Urbanism,” written by Chtcheglov and heavily based on Debord’s ideas,
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described this “disease” of functionalism and the Situationists’ cure:
unitary urbanism
. Unitary urbanism is the Situationist social theory that art and the movements of everyday urban life shouldn’t be separated into isolated sectors, but continually mixed together as a way of life. By collapsing the boundaries between art and life, work and leisure, public and private, the Situationists wanted to recast the city as a space of fun and play.

In his fantastic analysis of the Situationists’ early years
The Situationist City
, Simon Sadler discusses the Situationists’ desire to “collectively rethink the city.” To fully escape and undo functionalism,
Debord and the SI imagined building a brand new city in the Situationist image, which would eventually span the whole globe. The Situationists weren’t trying to do something simple; they wanted to change the whole world in a massive way. “They were at war with the whole world, but lightheartedly.”
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As an answer to their hunger for a new way to live, in the mid- to late 1950s Constant began developing the plans for this world-changing city, which Debord named New Babylon.

Constant was born in Amsterdam in 1920. His father was a corporate manager and his mother was a music lover. Constant took up the violin at age ten and continued to play until his death. Debord met Constant through Jorn, the Situationist whose art-world success funded most of the SI’s exploits.

In 1957, when the SI formed, Constant was in the midst of his second marriage (of an eventual four). He had a receding hairline, a sharp wit, and by all accounts smiled often. Debord and Constant’s friendship bloomed over long stretches of drinking and talking at late night cafés when they were in the same city, and over the exchange of letters when they were apart. They both dedicated themselves passionately to their various artistic and political projects, and for a time they got along very well because of that shared enthusiasm.

Riffing off Debord’s ideas, Constant’s New Babylon was the only large-scale project to fully incorporate all the Situationist ideas about aesthetics. Constant believed architecture should be playful, and respond to desire rather than urban efficiency. In New Babylon, no one was treated like a statistic on a Traffic & Congestion report. Instead, New Babylon was
“une autre ville pour autre vie”
—another city for another life.

Constant designed models of sections of New Babylon; he depicted
New Babylon in paintings and sketches. He also collaborated with Debord to create collage art, the most famous of which is called “The Situationist City,” which served as an aesthetic guideline for New Babylon. Constant also wrote frequently about New Babylon for
Internationale Situationniste
.

These collected renderings showed New Babylon as a giant playground, a city whose shape was constantly shifting because inhabitants would build and rebuild constantly, using lightweight building materials, like future plastics or fiberglass. The continual building of the city would be like a huge game, with all New Babylonians in a state of perpetual play and leisure. Work, commerce, and culture as we know it would dissolve. The continual game of world building would dominate life.

For New Babylon’s actual physical spaces, Constant designed transitory buildings, which would shift and change based on the whims and desires of the inhabitants: a “restless architecture.” All the residents of New Babylon would engage in an endless drift, their lives defined by an equally endless chain of encounters, both between themselves and other drifters, and themselves and the architecture of the city around them.

Mark Wigley gives the best description of the city in an essay for
Architectural Design
magazine:

New Babylon is to be a covered city, suspended high above the ground on huge columns. All automobile traffic is isolated on the ground plane, beneath which trains and fully automated factories are buried. Enormous multilevel structures … are strung together in a chain that spreads across the landscape. This “endless expanse” of interior space is artificially lit and air-conditioned. Its inhabitants are given access to powerful, ambience-creating resources to construct their own space whenever and wherever they desire. The qualities of each space can be adjusted. Light, acoustics, colour,
ventilation, texture, temperature and moisture are infinitely variable. Moveable floors, partitions, ramps, ladders, bridges and stairs are used to construct “veritable labyrinths of the most heterogeneous forms” in which desires continuously interact. Sensuous space may rise from action but also generate it: “New Babylonians play a game of their own designing, against a backdrop they have designed themselves.”
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Constant intended New Babylon to carefully interact with the structure of the cities and non-urban areas it was suspended above. He and Debord planned to integrate the first vestiges of New Babylon architecture with some existing place—they didn’t mention exactly where, or even vaguely where—and then spread it outwards. In the
Internationale Situationniste
, a writer in an unattributed essay floated the idea of building a base camp, possibly on the Alle des Cygnes, a long, narrow uninhabited island on the Seine. The island connects two bridges, the Pont de Bir-Hakein and Pont de Grenelle. Using the bridges, the Situationists could venture into the actual city, drifting, creating situations, and slowly converting the areas around the Alle des Cygnes until they became part of New Babylon—and so on, until Europe, Asia, and Africa disappeared into New Babylon. Then New Babylon could venture into Alaska, via Russia (perhaps sailing there on some kind of New Babylonian fleet, though the author or authors of the unsigned article weren’t specific on that count).
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Debord and Constant were adamant that New Babylon wouldn’t sequester itself from the rest of the world, but rather integrate itself continuously. He didn’t want to create an isolated utopia, which he called “holiday resorts.” He didn’t want to be
known as that kind of failure. “New Babylon is a
whole world
at play”
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[
italics mine
].

However, New Babylon was also doomed from the beginning, because Constant gestured only vaguely toward the practical matter of building the city. He never explained, in practical real-world terms, what the “ambience-creating recourses” would be. He never described the specific mechanisms that would power and control the city. He only vaguely referred to a co-operative system of repair and public safety. The “how” didn’t matter to Constant or to Debord at the time, only the ideas.