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.”c
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).d 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”e [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.
The SI also suffered early on from logistical complications: too many strong personalities living in cities and countries too far flung. Conceptually, they could never rally together behind one clear model or goal. Jorn was too preoccupied with his successful career as an artist; Chtcheglov went insane and, besides that, had all the fickleness of youth. Constant wanted to eradicate all artistic work from the moment, while at the same time diving head first into New Babylon, which some members thought of as an art project.
Debord spent an inordinate amount of time policing the minutia of language about the Situationists. From the first issue of the Internationale Situationniste: “There is no such thing as situationism.” In a letter to Simondo, Debord delivered a threat about the misuse of language: “In my Report, I only used the word ‘situationism,’ once—in quotes—to denounce it in advance as one of the stupidities that our adversaries will naturally use in opposition to us. To my knowledge, this term has never been used elsewhere (neither in writing, nor verbally), by any of us. You are the first to pose its existence in your last letter. Happily, it was to oppose it!”f I shudder to think of Debord’s response if Simondo hadn’t been so explicit in his opposition.
The SI had filled their ranks with artists, then when those artists focused on art, they were accused of undermining the basis of unitary urbanism. Constant criticized Debord for not guiding the artists with a firmer hand, and the two men began to squabble. Debord expelled several artist members of the SI, including Debord’s close friend Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizo, who had the audacity to achieve art-world success while referring to himself as a Situationist. As soon as the gallery owners started calling Pinot’s work “Situationist art,” an oxymoron according to Debord, Pinot was out.
The expulsions didn’t satisfy Constant. When Debord began to voice doubts that New Babylon could ever be made and decided to shift the New Babylon project to more metaphorical grounds, Constant quit the SI. Debord and Constant broke up badly, over letters. Their correspondence became passive-aggressive, then aggressive, then it stopped all together. Debord went on with the Situationist International; Constant continued to work on his plans for New Babylon long after they lost their vitality. Without the SI’s appetite for utopia to give New Babylon life, the city started feeling more like Atlantis than NYC.
In the late 1960s, Constant wearily allowed the New Babylon project to wind down. In an interview with architectural journalist Rem Koolhaas for Dutch weekly Haagse Post, Constant said, with just a hint of despair: “I am very much aware of the fact that New Babylon cannot be realized now.”g After Constant left, Debord shepherded the SI away from play and toward politics. By 1964, Debord was “embarrassed by ‘the fantasies left over from the old artist milieu.’ ”h
The SI fell apart in the dawn of the ’70s. In the early days of the SI, Debord had written to Pinot, “Not being declared, the [Situationist International] cannot be officially dissolved.”i It could, though, stop functioning—and it did. Debord stopped writing. Various Neo-Situationist sects persisted until the early 1980s, but Debord stayed silent. He aged bitterly; he considered his life’s work a failure. In 1984, Debord was a suspect in the murder of his friend, publisher and patron Gérard Lebovici. The Police Nationale never brought Debord up on charges, but the ensuing scandal pushed Debord even further away from public life. He and Bernstein divorced and he married someone who had never been a Situationist, a poet named Alice Becker-Ho. When old friends would visit, they were met only by Becker-Ho; Debord refused to leave his room to meet with them.j
In 1987, Paris’s museum of contemporary art, the Centre George Pompidou, in conjunction with the London-based Institute of Contemporary Arts, organized an exhibition about “situationism.” They invited Debord to speak at the French opening in 1988, but he refused, utterly insulted. He wrote the curators of the exhibit a letter brimming with vitriol, concluding, “If you think you like the situationists, you are fucking wrong. There is nothing more antisituationist than putting false situationist ‘art’ in a museum. You are cunts, and I hope your buildings fall apart.”k Following the exhibitions, interest in the Situationists increased exponentially, and has never really waned.
On December 1, 1994, Debord shot himself through the heart. Disturbingly, his death was followed by the “copycat” suicides of two of his friends, his publisher Gérard Voitey on December 3
and the writer Roger Stéphane on December 4.
For a few years, “situationism” was quiet. Then, in the late 1990s, a secretive political activist group emerged out of Chicago, calling themselves the “New Situationists.” They spouted a bastardized and modernized version of Debord and the Situationists’ basic critique of the Spectacle and consumerist culture. They functioned in absolute secrecy and pursued invisibility until, like the original Situationists, the New Situationists were brought down by their own politics. In late 2001, in response to the “fascist government response to the 9/11 attacks,” “blatant presidential war-mongering,” and “disgusting attempts of corporations to capitalize on a national tragedy,” the New Situationists planned a series of bombings at various Chicago L stations. The bombings were planned for the middle of the night, when the stations were closed; the New Situationists meant to take no lives, but destroy transportation only. Eleven members of the New Situationists set off bombs in various L stations throughout the city; Berliner’s girlfriend Marie-Hélène Kraus was one of the bombers. In her station, a drunk and passed out security guard slept through the fire alarm Kraus set off to make sure the subway stations were completely empty, and he died.
Remarkably, despite the legal proceedings and media frenzy that followed the bombings, only three of the members of the New Situationists were ever publically identified: Kraus, Berliner, and a man named David Wilson. None of them could be persuaded, legally or otherwise, to divulge the names of the other members. Berliner, Wilson, and Kraus were all arrested; the Chicago DA’s office handled the criminal prosecution, while the FBI came in to look for the other members of the New Situationists.
Wilson served eighteen months in jail for refusing to answer questions at a Grand Jury trial at which he had been subpoenaed to testify. Because he was still seventeen years old at the time of sentencing, Berliner served five months in a juvenile detention facility for the same reason. Kraus was charged with manslaughter and the destruction of public property. Charges of conspiracy to commit a terrorist activity originally brought against Kraus were dropped due to the court’s inability to produce any conspirators. Berliner and Wilson both had alibis proving they weren’t involved in the bombings, which held up in court.
The media story on the New Situationists focused on the group’s “cult of silence”l; many people were upset that the FBI found no way to force Kraus and her two fellow terrorists to name their co-conspirators. Berliner, Kraus, and Wilson pled ignorance; they insisted that the New Situationists always maintained absolutely secrecy, hiding their real names and identities even from each other, except David Wilson, who, as the New Situationist “Public Relations Liaison,” made his name known, but was kept out of any “real” New Situationist business, whatever that was. He also claimed not to know the names of any other New Situationists, though they all knew his.
During Kraus’s trial, the District Attorney of Chicago asked her questions about the identity of the other New Situationists. In response, Kraus paraphrased Debord: “New Situationism cannot exist because there is no dogmatic doctrine that is called ‘Situationism.’ There is only the possibility of the creation of Situationists that follow a certain pattern.” When she said the word “Situationism,” Kraus used air quotes.
Following a well-argued motion from the highly regarded attorney hired by Kraus’s father, Kraus’s trial remained closed to the public. The judge on the case gave Wilson, Berliner, and Kraus’s family permission to attend. Wilson showed up about half the time, whenever something interesting was bound to happen. Berliner came every day and watched every second of the proceedings.
The trial didn’t go well for the prosecution. The defense proved that the bombs had been built by an amateur, not a professional, which helped refute the conspiracy charges. They showed that New Situationists had never threatened or carried out any acts of violence or terrorism before, and didn’t seem to be planning any others. Only one subway station suffered serious damage; the staircase was completely destroyed, the ceiling caved in, and the tracks ripped out of their hinges in a few places. The defense also presented ample evidence that neither Kraus nor her nebulous New Situationist colleagues intended to kill anyone.
Kraus was found guilty on one count of murder in the second degree and one count of criminally malicious property damage. She was found not guilty on six other property damage counts, for the subway stations the other New Situationists had bombed, for which she wasn’t present. The presiding judge sentenced her to life in prison, with the first possibility of parole after twenty-five years.
After the trial and sentencing were complete and the media firestorm died down, the FBI decided the New Situationists no longer constituted a real threat against America and left Chicago. The government had more important terrorists to chase, ones that weren’t white, blond, suburban girls. While most of the general public moved on, a few people remained obsessed with discovering the identities of the other New Situationists: some true crime nerds, people interested in the minutiae of Chicago politics, and a teenager from New York named Miranda Young.m
The fourteen-year-old proto–Molly Metropolis lived in the North Loop and matriculated at the Chicago Lab Schools, one of the best high schools in the state. According to Molly Metropolis lore, at this time in her life Molly was working as a waitress at a now-closed Italian restaurant in Lincoln Park, using a fake I.D. to get into dance clubs North of the Loop, singing Fiona Apple–esque pop songs while accompanying herself on a small keyboard, starring in a school production of Bye Bye Birdie (which her theater teacher agreed to gender-swap just so Molly could play “Connie” Birdie), and consuming intoxicating quantities of Sex and the City. Molly never told people like James Laksy, author of her first major profile in The New York Times Magazine, that along with all the musical theater and underage tattoos, Molly fantasized about becoming a member of the New Situationists.
Molly didn’t condone the June subway bombings. In surviving AIM chats with her best friend Audrey Benton, Molly disavowed the New Situationists’ violent tactics; her lofty goal was to take over the New Situationists and steer them toward more productive ends. However, Molly’s fascination with the Weather Underground of her time was nothing compared to the full-on obsession she developed when she started reading about the original Situationists and Debord.
According to Berliner, détournement is the first Situationist idea that Molly Metropolis latched onto, like a gateway drug into a deeper, darker world. Détournement is “both the appropriation and the correction of culture as common property” [italics mine]. Détournement isn’t unlike today’s remix and meme cultures, which take pieces of culture, like pop songs or photos of famous actors and actresses, and shove them next to or on top of other pieces of culture or cultural references, to create something new. Sometimes these newly created objects fall into the comedic realm, like the popular Tumblr blog Feminist Ryan Gosling, which took an already existing Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” meme (photoshopping various Ryan Gosling–esque sentiments onto pictures of Gosling, preceded by “Hey girl,” as if Gosling was speaking these things directly to his legions of female fans) and added academic feminist rhetoric. Other times, these new cultural items are created with a political purpose. Elisa Kreisinger, a self-described “pop-culture pirate,” creates remix videos of popular TV shows, re-cutting scenes from Mad Men and Sex and the City to reform the narratives, creating new feminist and queer stories out of the source materials.
Musicians like Greg Gillis, who creates remix music under the name Girl Talk, and writers like David Shields in his book Reality Hunger, are modern détourneurs. Molly practiced détournement every time she drew a gold circle on her forehead, explicitly referencing David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust phase, or stole vocal tricks from Britney Spears, copying the iconic “oh baby, baby” that opened Britney’s first very single “… Baby One More Time” for the bridge of her Cause Célèbrety album cut “Rewind, Repeat.”
The Situationists began practicing dé
tournement by détourning literature, political theory, visual art, and film. Usually they practiced détournement for political reasons, but occasionally they wielded the practice for personal causes. Once, when Debord and the SI were low on funds, Debord asked Bernstein to write a commercial novel with the intention of making a bit of money to fund further Situationist endeavors. She called her two novels of semiautobiographical fiction “détournements of literature, life and love.” (They’re also delightful little reads, though somewhat maligned by both the author and her husband.)
The Situationists took détournement very seriously. They practiced what they preached, freely offering up the contents of their published writing in the Internationale Situationniste for anyone to use and/or alter, without consent or acknowledgement. Détournement wasn’t plagiarism, stealing an idea to pass it off as one’s own. Nor was it quotation, which acknowledged a boundary between various elements an artist or writer wanted to fuse together. Détournement was like welding: two pieces of steel melted, reformed into one singular object, then cooled to solidify the bonds, rendering the prior separation between the previously disparate pieces not just invisible, but also irrelevant.
Détournement was also a political act against corrupt culture, which they called “The Spectacle.” To détourn maps and novels was to raid culture, like politically motivated vandalism, like graffiti. In Debord’s most famous text, The Society of the Spectacle, he described a world and culture corrupted by capitalism, sponsored by business and bureaucracy, creating complacency in the masses rather than creativity. The Spectacle removes authenticity from creation, Debord wrote, and needs to be destroyed. Détournement was the best weapon against it.
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