The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark review – a Situationist work in itself

The Situationists’ story has been told before – but never with such verve, cheek and insight

The title, you may recall, comes from one of the great slogans of the 1968 demonstrations and riots in Paris: a promise of carnivalesque freedom coined by the Situationists, the avant-garde group founded in 1957 by Guy Debord. As McKenzie Wark’s history, subtitled “The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International”, reminds us, it was more than just a slogan: it had its reification in rioters’ habit of tearing out the cobblestones that Parisian streets were then made of, and throwing them at the police. It is why the streets there are now so smoothly asphalted, to stop this from happening again.

You may think that 1968 was a long time ago, and also, if you are Little-British, that the pranks of a bunch of French pseuds from half a century ago have little bearing on contemporary matters; if you do, good luck to you, and don’t let the door bang your behind on the way out. To concentrate on this country alone, without the Situationists, there would have been no Sex Pistols, with all that entails, a distinctly smaller possibility of Iain Sinclair- or Will Self-ian psychogeographical dérives, and a whole tranche of associated cultural inspiration would have gone missing. The movement was also a pre-emptive strike against the way the world was going, a way that had been clearly signposted in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto: “[The bourgeoisie] creates a world in its own image.” The idea behind Situationism was to alert people to that fact, and to subvert it, if necessary, through acts of cultural theft or appropriation (détournement, it was called, an example being the replacing of the speech bubbles in a Tintin cartoon with revolutionary and/or insurrectionary ideas).

Continue reading...