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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
The Beach Beneath The Street (2011)
by George Maddocks
'My only qualification for writing this book is some time spent in a certain militant organisation, then in a bohemian periphery and subsequently in avant-garde formations that met at the nexus of media, theory and action.'
So begins McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street. It is an introduction that does little justice to the dense body of information contained in the 12 chapters that follow. Despite this, The Beach Beneath the Street is not comprehensive. Instead it focuses on 'a large cast of disparate characters' across the 1900s, identifying moments, events and works in order to create a picture of the Situationist International [1957-1972, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International] and, as Wark puts it: 'to salute some comrades... who have taught me invaluable things.'
Wark starts atmospherically, in the existential bohemian grottiness of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1920 - a 'ghetto' of squalor, drunkenness and radical thought. This serves two purposes. The first: conveying a sense of the environment and personalities that will inform us throughout the book. The second: an introduction to the forefathers of the Situationists – The Letterists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterist_International]. Wark's portrayal of Paris and its 'delinquent' artists is exceptional. Vivid and in no way sentimental nor glamorous, the communal values of The Letterists are painted as necessity rather than revolutionary fervour, and the scene is perfectly set for Wark's further explanation of the Letterists progression into The Situationists.
Wark's use of 'Comrades' in the introduction is not a contemporary fashionable moniker: The Situationist International was a heavily Socialist movement. As Wark moves from the descriptive to the theoretical (over the course of the first three chapters), the integral role that Communist ideology plays in the Letterist and Situationist groups becomes apparent. Wark introduces us to 'detournement' which, (over)simply put, is the policy of appropriation / plagiarism of any work and the uncredited adaptation of it to the artist's needs. As the leading proponent of the technique, Situationist Guy Dubord [1931-1994, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Debord], (and Wark) put it:
''Clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions' detournement 'cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of the real class struggle [...] it is the real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step to a literary Communism''
Detournement is a pivotal theory and necessarily complicated. As a result, in the discussions of detournment, Wark's writing and level of analysis begins to become as dense as a philosophical text. This continues throughout large sections of the book and in places can become overpowering for an audience unfamiliar with Marxist theory. There is no flabbiness to Wark's writing, and he admirably avoids any hint of post-modern over-eloquence, but the combination of an outdated ideology and complicated philosophy on occasion make reading very heavy-going indeed.
Wark's philosophical / theoretical assessment of the Situationists is not however without reward. When the discussion moves from often intransigent Communist theory into more accessible ideas, The Beach Beneath The Street becomes fascinating - the most notable chapter being The Thing of Things, which deals with the ideas of Henri Lefebvre [1901-1991, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Lefebvre]:
''The real can only be grasped and appreciated via potentiality.' It is by attempting to transform everyday life that the contours of the real are encountered'
Lefebvre's ideas have a degree of focus on the usual and everyday experience. As a result, The Thing of Things is the highlight of an excellent book, linking Lefvre with the anarchic view of romanticism which feels strikingly relevant and in places revelatory. After an intimidating start this, becomes the book's default: strong and engaging ideas presented with intellectual rigour. It is always a demanding read, but if persevered with, it pays off with great dividend.
Even at a single reading (a text this involved demands several), there are areas in which the Situationist creed seems strikingly pertinent to many aspects of our lives. Sadly, whilst Wark seems to have a good grasp of some of contemporary culture (The Wire and BitTorrent downloads are mentioned), he misses digital phenomena which seem very apposite to the Situationist movement. In the later stages of the New Babylon chapter, Wark imagines that:
'Homo-ludens [sapiens] will no longer make art, but create everyday life, altering the ambience of the world, as easy as programming the jukebox in a Saint-Germain café.'
Internet Memes, re-tweets, globalised music-sharing applications and mash-ups are all explicit manifestations of the above as well as being examples of detournement. It's not clear whether Wark isn't aware of them or doesn't consider them as such. Furthermore some advances seem to be discounted because they are part of a capitalist system that Wark doesn't care for. Describing globalisation as the New Moloch, he postulates that:
'a global division of functions, which banishes the factory to the sites of cheap labour in China and elsewhere, while massively concentrating control over networks in the overdeveloped world. The facist ant-state has gone global.'
Within a page he goes on to observe that:
'it's a question of thinking the possibilities of social and technical transformation together. The essence of technology is nothing technical. But could it be something playful? Could it be a way, not of instrumentalizing nature, but of producing a new relation to it, as a totaility.'
The Arab Spring [2011] and subsequent public protests around the world do seem to suggest that IPhones, Android Phones, Blackberrys, Twitter, Facebook, other social networks and streaming media devices have produced 'a social and technical transformation together'. Whether this is 'playful' or in keeping with the Situationist movement is unclear, but the concern is that these things are discarded out-of-hand as mere manifestations of the 'New Moloch' rather than being properly explored.
The Beach Beneath the Street is a book of fascinating depth on a topic that has a great relevance to the artistic and social situations which we live within. It's not a easy read, but it's not trying to be. Whilst it does leave some of the most contemporary questions frustratingly unanswered, for the most part it is an evocative, fascinating and thoroughly excellent study of a worthy topic.
END
(c) George Maddocks 2011
NOTES - reviewed (c) George Maddocks Monday 17 October 2011 London. The Beach Beneath The Street, The everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist Intenational, by McKenzie Wark (2011). In print and available from eg Amazon, Waterstone. First edition details: Publisher - Verso, 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG. www.versobooks.com. Hardback. 208 pages. ISBN - 978 184467 720. £14.99. Date of publication July 2011.
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012