Monday 18 May 2015

Situationism and Stroud


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.

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