I’ve just finished reading The Beach Beneath the Street, The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of
the Situationist International by Mackenzie Wark; here’s a few ideas from
the Situationists that will act as a bridge to some subsequent posts about a
conceptual re-writing of the historical heritage boards of our town.
‘Detournement, as in to
detour, to hijack,
to lead astray, to
appropriate’ …
‘A powerful cultural
weapon …
the first step towards
a literary communism.’
‘Capital produces a
culture in its own image,
a culture of the work
as private property …
Detournement sifts
through the material remnants
of past and present
culture for materials
whose untimeliness
can be utilized
against bourgeois culture …’
Lefebre:
‘Today, what is the
aim of utopian investigation?
The conquest of
everyday life,
The recreation of the
everyday …’
‘Two types of time
meet and mingle in the everyday.
One is linear time,
the time of credit and investment.
The other is a
cyclical time, of wages paid and bills due.
Linear temporality is
ruling class time;
Cyclical temporality
is working class time.’
Hence, derivee, psychogeography, potlatch,
Literary,
intellectual, political and material potlatch,
And in practical
terms:
A collective rewriting
of the official heritage of Stroud …
And so: derivee,
psychogeography, potlatch,
Collective walking,
recording, inventing and writing,
Reworking Merlin
Coverley’s urban outlook,
By wandering through
both town and five valleys:
“…the predominant
characteristics
of pyschogeographical
ideas – urban wandering,
the imaginative
reworking of the city,
the otherworldly sense
of spirit of place,
the unexpected
insights and juxtapositions
created by aimless
drifting,
the new ways of
experiencing familiar surroundings…”
In and around a mill town
in the Cotswolds …
Watch this potlatch space.
,
No comments:
Post a Comment