As I am reading through specific sections
from, The Situationist City, preparing
to make a blog comment, I’m remembering how ridiculous I thought it was the first
time I read it. I honestly thought that these were a bunch of hucksters finding
any reason to legitimize mooching off of others, taking drugs and living like
bums. After my second reading, I took it far more seriously. I saw Debord and
Jorn trying to speak to a truth against a society who in most cases, had no
idea they existed, and for those who acknowledged them in the theoretical
community, they most likely discredited their efforts. It sounds as if they couldn’t
back up their claims with the kind of experimentation and documentation to legitimize
their theories into something credible and valued amongst their peers. It had
to be a challenge to have these sincere concepts and beliefs, set up with
methods for measuring these theories and then to have them fall apart due to
sloppy fact gathering practices and science that
could not be reproduced.
Now that I am revisiting the
material, I have an even deeper appreciation for their efforts. I think that
what Debord and Jorn were driving at is especially important as Western Civilization
advances. The maps that they were creating were about establishing networks to reaffirm
and strengthen the important part of community that develops identity and unity.
Unfortunately, the kind of map that was readily available to the public
then emphasized the city space that was made for consumption, to keep a machine of
consumption fed. Those maps had no interest in the people who were nurturing
the machine, the middle class worker. Ultimately, where have we landed?
Technology has grown at such a rate, and we have fallen under its spell, that
we have unsurprisingly lost touch with the comfort and even the need to network
intimately with one another. And in my opinion, communities/cities are losing their identities as
a result. (San Jose itself has been mentioned many times as an example of this in class discussions.) As city leaders and developers try to expand communities and establish
culturally clear centers, identifying the interests of their communities
becomes difficult to target because groups are so insulated from one another. We
have lost city centers and points of importance that are shared by all city
dwellers, because we don’t all share a common bond due to the surge of our isolation.
This was something that I think Debord and Jorn were possibly seeing as a sad
future for humankind.
So, I have to give credit to Debord
and Jorn for taking a stand and making an elaborate point about what may have
seemed like a pot-induced message at the time. But, its content holds up over time
and the wisdom threaded within it is worthy of our consideration in these times
of rapid change.
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