Situationist playfulness got co-opted into harmless bourgeois amusements
Evidence
But it’s worth pausing and thinking a little more about the Situationists. It’s disastrous that the Situationist insistence upon the ludic has degenerated into a smugonautic celebration of bourgeois circus trickery (juggling and unicylcists as the shock troops of the revolution against Corporate Kapital). You have to reread Ivan Chtcheglov’s astonishing “Formulary for a New Urbanism” — written in the year of our current Queen’s coronation, 1953 — to be reminded of the force of the Situationist critique. How could architecture — i.e. the places in which we live — not be an intensely political matter? And why should we live in boring, utilitarian spaces when we could live in grottoes and crooked caverns? “A mental disease has swept the planet: banalisation. Everyone is hypnotised by production and conveniences…” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 340
Categorization
- SEED: Chtcheglov’s ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ (1953) is a seed for an essay on how radical urbanist manifestos get neutered into festival aesthetics.
- XREF: connects to: Profanation returns sacred things to common, playful use. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 120; Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics; Mass amusement reproduces the mechanized work process in leisure — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Rulers administer enjoyment to subjects until it is extinguished in fixed entertainments
#expands(0.85) - Amusement serves as flight from resistance and thought, not from suffering
#corroborates(0.84) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113 - Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics
#expands(0.82) - The bourgeoisie expropriated working-class games to legitimate its own rule
#expands(0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1254 - Modernity has lost not belief but the art of inhabiting fictional playzones
#corroborates(0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 373 - Mass amusement reproduces the mechanized work process in leisure
#complicates(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107 - Trivialization of politics signals passive nihilism, not genuine playfulness
#qualifies(0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1207