New Babylonians
Iain Borden & Sandy McCreery (Eds.)

Published by Wiley-Academy, June, 2001 
ISBN 0471499099
Buy this book online

by Ian McKay

According to Sandy McCreery, co-editor with Iain Borden of New Babylonians, this book ‘is about the ways in which situationist ideas are currently influencing architectural design; New Babylonians was never intended as a book about the situationists, or situationist thinking.’ ^* This is an important point, worth stressing from the outset for, undoubtedly, there is a readership out there – largely made up of situationist trainspotters – who will find the texts collected in this volume wholly problematic, if not irritating. That said, it should also be remembered that the repeated failure of numerous writers who have sought to address the legacies of situationism has been largely rooted in their failure to find meaningful architectural references from the contemporary sphere that may render transparent the often impenetrable thinking that lay at the heart of unitary urbanism. If only for their ability to consolidate the available reading with noteworthy contemporary examples, the editors have already made an important contribution. 

The book has been produced, says McCreery, ‘for readers whose primary interest lies in architecture, not radical politics’, and therein lies the all-important antagonism in terms of thinking on the situationist city. Never the less, in the editors’ celebration of the numerous individuals and practices whose work may be seen to stem, however loosely, from situationism, there is an underlying intention that ‘readers will recognise the importance of the situationists not so much through the depth of their original thinking, but through the range of their subsequent influence.’ Paradoxically therefore, we find that a book that was never intended to be about the situationists, actually makes an important contribution to situationist studies too. 

In its refusal to accept the limits of radicalism and maybe even the failed utopias of the Left, such a contribution is all the more meaningful. Preferring to embrace the multifarious array of interpretations that architects and designers have made of situationist ideas it serves to move the debate on somewhat, skilfully sidestepping the well-worn, and somewhat empty arguments of what, today, constitutes a situationist aesthetic in architecture and design. As McCreery adds, if the book sparks greater interest amongst architects in the ideas/activities of the situationists ‘then that would be a positive result.’

Readers of architectural theory and spatial research will already think that they know something of what to expect in light of both McCreery and Borden’s contributions elsewhere. Never the less, the list of contributors does, at times, surprise. As project editor, Helen Castle, writes in her introduction, the editors ‘have done more than revisit the Situationist International […] they have brought together a diverse range of architects, thinkers and cultural commentators, who have sought to reapply situationist thought in a contemporary context, thus extending and stretching current ideas on the city.’ The keyword here is ‘stretching’. If anything it is this stretching that may at times annoy and frustrate, yet it is also the book’s greatest strength. 

Of the surprises – the inclusions that stretch notions of the situationist city furthest – critical essays by Karin Jaschke, on Jon Jerde’s ‘commercial megastructures’, and Colin Fournier on Webbed Babylon, provide necessary and long overdue indications that much can be made by stretching the meaning(s) of situationism to the limit, embracing on the one hand overtly commercial projects, and on the other the phenomenological problems of environments such as cyberspace. In the former case, the inclusion of work that is driven by the market economy and retail investment is a brave departure from the original precepts of situationist thinking and, though unfashionable in some quarters, still allows for a thoroughgoing and wholly logical expression of the true legacy of the situationist critique. Who cares if Jerde’s projects seem so wedded to monopoly capitalism if he actually gets the job done where, in terms of unitary urbanism, the situationists failed? In the latter example, though not new exactly, Fournier’s questioning of how far the situationist paradigm stretches into the labyrinthine world of wired technologies is an equally important, if not essential dimension if the idiosyncratic yet anthological approach of this book is to really succeed. 

There are over twenty texts here – impossible to deal with them all – but most notable are certainly those that, like the above, move debate on. Even Simon Sadler’s essay on The Indeterminate Utopia of the Situationist International seeks to build on his widely referenced third chapter to The Situationist City – itself a useful pre-requisite primer for the lay reader of New Babylonians. Other notable examples have to be those that fail, however, to shift debate at all, instead treading water or at least raking over old ground. Take for example Lorenzo Romito’s flirtation with radicalism in the form of The Surreal Foil and, more worrying, its textual annex concerning the Transborderline project (prominently featured on the book’s cover) by the interdisciplinary Rome-based group Stalker, of which he is a part. Romito writes all too briefly on the manner in which the society of the spectacle has ‘somehow started to speak in a situationist language’ – not surprising though, given the warnings of the situationists themselves. Yet, in some way, Stalker’s text, and Transborderline itself, falls into the very trap that Romito seems mindful of. Though he states that ‘we must be aware that today’s radical research is born in a territory dominated by the spectacle’, (something implicitly acknowledged by the Jaschke text) and that ‘this awareness is useful if we are to avoid delusions and detect mystifications’, Transborderline must be seen as just such a delusion dressed up as radical critique.

Transborderline is, say Stalker, an enclosed spiral structure reminiscent of the impenetrable spirals of barbed wire that ‘often have been the only three-dimensional representation of a border’. With a widened diameter this iconic symbol of containment becomes, it is claimed, a new ludic space through which one can meet, play, inhabit and pass: ‘an infrastructure that can provide both structure and freedom of passage’ – theoretically across borders if we embrace the nomenclature of the project. Installed in a variety of settings (for example; along the border between Italy and Yugoslavia) Transborderline, say Stalker, has become an environment in which to meditate on the most pressing issues of a continent in crisis over its borders as symbols of either containment or liberation. In reality however, Transborderline is a mere restating of similar projects that were ‘played out’ as long ago as the late 60s and early 70s, by groups only too aware of the impact of situationist ideas on the meanings of passage. In short, we have seen all this before in the work of Jeffrey Shaw and Theo Botschiuver, and any claims of a radical avant-garde statement for the 21st Century is therefore not wholly convincing. This is bargain-basement radicalism that reveals the paucity of meaningful ideas at the heart so much contemporary art. As the art critic Peter Fuller once warned, ideas alone do not make great art, and this isn’t even a very good idea.

Reminiscent of the Tube over the Maschsee by Shaw, Botschiuver and the Eventstructure Research Group of 1970 in Hannover (otherwise known as Waterwalk Tube), it is not so much that Transborderline asks interesting questions of those who might pass through it, or even of those States that still so ardently guard what borders it might theoretically cross, but more what meanings it fails to address in a Europe transformed since the idea was first debuted by Shaw over 30 years ago. If Romito is really convinced that we must be aware that today’s radical research is born in a territory dominated by the spectacle, and that this awareness is useful if we are to avoid delusions and detect mystifications, then he should at least address the need to demystify Transborderline in light of the Tube over the Maschsee experience. Otherwise, Transborderline becomes merely one more empty curiosity in the greater Babylonian scheme things; a mere reminder of the failure of the avant-garde to enact any kind of recovery over the past three decades. 

Both Transborderline and Tube over the Maschsee have another thing in common though; they would both seem quite at home in Constant’s New Babylon and the utopian vision that underpins it. With Transborderline Stalker seem to have appropriated the Nieuwenhuys brand of utopianism for there own ends, but unwittingly the project says something of the lie that lay deep within the Nieuwenhuysian schema instead. Scratch at the surface of New Babylon today and you find that the Perspex is cracking as quickly as the rotting stucco on any mid-Victorian end-terrace. The promotion of what amount to mere retro-happenings by Stalker is therefore the necessary jolt required for us to wake up to vacuum at New Babylon’s core. 

Despite the inclusion in New Babylonians of two creditable essays on New Babylon itself – by Mark Wigley and David Pinder, both authorities in the field – there seems a reticence to really engage with the failures of utopianism as they are manifest in so many of the works represented, not least in Constant’s own work. According to Pinder, ‘utopian dreams about cities are often dismissed as irrelevant fantasies or compensatory distractions, or for being necessarily authoritarian with their fixed plans for spatial forms’. Despite his claim that ‘it is important to assert that utopianism need not be about proposing static solutions or blueprints for the future’, the failure, particularly of the Left, to deliver on any of its utopias does beg for such a dismissal.

Echoing an insurgent and here highly relevant radical conservatism, Dan Fox has rightly highlighted that:

If, like Voltaire, you believe that Man is 'false, cozening, faithless, ungrateful, thieving, weak, inconstant, mean-spirited, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloody, slanderous, debauched, fanatic, hypocritical and stupid', what chance does Homo Ludens have? Utopian visions have a tendency to avoid such questions. In their attempt to convince, they concentrate so much on detail that they often go wide of the humanitarian mark, missing the fundamental questions of what makes life happy and bearable.

For Karl Mannheim, utopia was a state of mind incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs (Manheim 1991: 173) and it is not without cause that repeated utopias have been ridiculed and rejected for the very reference to the ‘not yet’ that Pinder celebrates. Not yet? – not ever. The very basis of utopias such as Constant’s New Babylon seems to be one of empty promise, once so lamely blamed by the situationists on the failure of technology to meet their aspirations and needs for bringing about the vision. That is, after all, the stuff of utopias; always speaking of what Pinder terms the ‘still to come’, and so often jettisoning what of value has been.

For the human subject – which, it should be noted, was always glaringly absent from Constant’s drawings and models of New Babylon – the bind has always been that of being caught between the promise of utopia and the reassurance of ideology. If utopias promise something that ultimately cannot be realised then, as Göran Dahl has pointed out, ideologies very often want to prove that utopias have already been fulfilled. (Dahl 1999: 32) In the early years of the 21st Century, we New Babylonians have come to learn to embrace this dichotomy. The situationist city is effectively caught between these two stalls too; it will never be built – nor could it be – and both McCreery and Borden seem to know this – though their contributors sometimes appear not to. 

As McCreery states:

…to claim that any design could ever be situationist (even Constant's New Babylon for that matter) is dubious. We were always aware of that, but were not unduly concerned if some our contributors may not have been. Our interest was in designers and practitioners who have picked up situationist ideas, however partially, and developed/transformed them.

Though the editors may be aware that the situationist city is, for good or bad, a mere illusion, on the strength of the contributions from both theoreticians and practitioners alike, it is clear that some think they come close to it in some way. Implicit to most is an understanding of the central tenet of Constant’s original New Babylon project; that, in Julia Chance’s words, ‘boundaries are only fixed until there is a new idea, a change in mood, or until the game is played out’. 

Though Chance’s observation is here limited to a critical essay on the work of Adriaan Geuze and West 8’s Carrascoplein Shadow Park in Amsterdam and their designs for the Schouwburgplein in Central Rotterdam, it also underpins the juvenile ramblings of General Lighting & Power (What is the Difference between a Situationist and an Essex Girl?), the performance-art-like pedestrian manoeuvres of artist Tim Brennan, the sightseeing-come-trespass initiatives of Laura Ruggeri in Berlin (Abstract Tours Operator), and writer and artist Gil Doran’s inspirational dérives through the in-between spaces of cities throughout the world in the form of a Global Dérive. Here is Constant’s New Babylon played out in the spaces we already inhabit, but does that mean that we are already there? In many ways yes if, on the strength of this volume, one makes the right connections. But that does not mean that we are where Constant would have had us.

Mark Wigley, in his description of the moment in 1960, when Constant revealed New Babylon to an audience in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, writes that, in the extended discussion that followed, opinion was divided. New Babylon might have been the liberating way of the future or it might just as easily have been ‘a nightmarish High Tech pleasure prison’ – either way it was a shock. The truth is that the urban environment that most of us inhabit is all of these things already. Liberating ways open out onto nightmarish visions and High Tech pleasure prisons and all about us is shock. If anything, the collected essays and images here add weight to this idea. The banal media-mongering of General Lighting & Power, the plaza chic of Geuze, even Doron’s ruminations on the architectures of transgression, all these tell us that Constant’s utopia has been with us for a while, but like all utopias, it doesn’t look so good from the inside. 

Endnote

* McCreery, S. (2001) Email correspondence. All subsequent quotes from McCreery refer to this correspondence also.


Works Cited

Dahl, G. (1999) Radical Conservatism and the Future of Politics. London: Sage
Fox, D. (2001) Model Living. in The Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research, Volume 1. No. 1, October 2001
Mannheim, K. (1991) Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge
Sadler, S. (1998) The Situationist City. London: MIT Press

Ian McKay is Editor of The Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research

© Copyright  2002 Ian McKay/The Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research