The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.
McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can ...
The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.
Hardback, 208 pages
ISBN: 9781844677207
June 2011
$26.95 / £14.99 / $33.50CAN
Reviews
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Wark is a marvellous guide to the micro-society of the Situationists ... He brings to the task a necessary sympathy, an encyclopedic knowledge, and a certain stylistic irrepressibility.
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Wark is a fine aphorist ... Playful, angry, depressed, celebratory, this is a book for anyone not convinced that there is no alternative to the way we live now
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Wark’s readable explanation of the movement’s ideas[...] is the best I have read.
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[A] smart overview of the situationist movement.
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A sexy book for a sexy movement… This is a beautifully written, exciting and broad study, one that may perhaps become a definitive introduction to the SI for many.
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A playful, smart and occasionally epigrammatic study of the Situationists ... this brilliant account ... is not only an essential work for our own times; it also comes with a cover that, with the minimum of manual dexterity, folds out into a collaborative graphic essay.
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Fascinating.
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The book I read three times back to back was McKenzie Wark’s brilliant study of the Situationists, The Beach Beneath the Street.
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This is no ordinary history. Instead, “it's a question of retrieving a past specific to the demands of the present.” The Beach Beneath the Street rereads that past in a way that prefers not to smooth out its messier edges, refuses to reify (to pick up the jargon) what made it radical, what still makes it relevant.
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Covering the SI's adventures in philosophy, art, architecture, literature and cinema (and suggesting that we should do away with many of the distinctions between these categories), Wark traces a lineage we have apparently lost.. The author's primary proposal is that although we live in serious times we should still have fun with time. We should treat history as a user's manual. This history of the SI shifts with gay abandon between past, present and future tenses, and constantly rattles the boundaries.
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In an alienated, all too knowing world absent of God, art and revolution, Wark’s book dares us to keep our spirits up, asking us to think about how to maintain creative resistance, how to keep fidelity with some detournéed idea of the Marxist and Situationist past, and, following their goal of ideas in action, how best to practise our passionate “solidarity without faith.”
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Wark’s history is timely... with the age of austerity promising more trouble, the Situationists, those alienated prophets of the media age, still tout the most adventurous analysis of 21st-century life – and what happens next.
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McKenzie Wark's engaging narrative could not have come at a better time - last week's riots demonstrated tragically the profound alienation, even despair, of swathes of urban poor and destitute and minorities' worrying descent into hellish criminality.
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One of the best aspects of his pithy, often self-consciously lapidary, book is his intriguing investigation of some of the byways of Situationist historiography.... the Situationists’ attitude towards intellectual property is hugely relevant in an era when digital reproduction has dragged information towards the ‘free’ model, and Wark addresses this well in sections on the implications of détournement – the re-use and modification of fragments of already existing texts and images in the creation of new works – for political practice.
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[Wh]at sets Wark's book apart from those many other failed histories is in its resistance to merely telling the easy story. The familiar watchwords of the SI—dérive, detournément, potlatch—appear as one would expect, but Wark presents them as breathing, charged ideas, not some dead terms once again dusted off and rehashed. When we relegate events to pure history we rob moments, situations, of their power to change. We turn specifics into constants, tactics into rules, and ultimately render radical gestures impotent. Wark wants to give these moments a different history: to show that those theories and practices of the Situationist International aren't done with us yet.
Blog
Verso's guide to political walking
Inspired by Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute, currently on show at the Tate Britain, we present Verso's guide to political walking. We also draw influence from Will Self's Guardian article in which he pronounces that "walking is political" and suggests that the "contemporary flâneur" can be one "who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."
1. Wanderlust - Rebecca Solnit
The first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an ever more automobile-dependent and accelerated world.
2. Savage Messiah - Laura Oldfield Ford
Savage Messiah collects Laura Oldfield Ford's black and white, cut 'n' paste, punk fanzines that document her drift through London's margins. Illustrated with haunting line drawings of forgotten people and places, Oldfield Ford records the beauty and anger at the city's edges.
Verso titles selected as Books of the Year 2011 across UK broadsheets and periodicals
As the year draws to a close, newspapers have been asking the great and the good which books have most impressed them in 2011. Here we have collected the Verso books that were featured.
In the New Statesman, Guardian and Observer Books of the Year round ups, Hari Kunzru selected two Verso books as standing out from other books published this year. He explained the appeal of the titles to the New Statesman:
Hari Kunzru
With the Occupy movement gaining ground throughout the world, McKenzie Wark's smart overview of the situationist movement, The Beach Beneath the Street: the Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, feels particularly timely. For years, Laura Oldfield Ford, who is very influenced by situationism, has produced a fanzine, based on her derives around London, with words and beautiful, confrontational line drawings of the city's forgotten people and neglected places. Now, Savage Messiah has been collected in book form. It is a wake-up call to anyone who can only see modern cities through the lens of gentrification.
In the Guardian feature on the Best Books of 2011, a number of Verso titles were selected by those asked.
Eric Hobsbawm
Among the 2011 books that came my way I particularly welcomed Owen Jones's Chavs, a passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system.
John Lanchester
I loved two very different books of criticism...[one was] Owen Hatherley's furiously pro-Modernist A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain
Pankaj Mishra
Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo stimulatingly uncovers the contradictions of an ideology that is much too self-righteously invoked.
Ahdaf Soueif
I'm reading Chris Harman's A People's History of the World. It's really helpful to zoom out from time to time when you're living massive events at very close quarters.
“A devil for provocative judgement:” McKenzie Wark, Situationism and Occupy
In the age of the Occupy movement, Situationism has become "the stuff of legend," for it was "one of those rare avant-gardes whose radical arts and radical politics were forged in unison," Alex Danchev writes in a review of McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International for the Times Literary Supplement. According to Danchev, the book is a "marvellous guide to the microsociety of the Situationists." "A devil for the provocative judgement," Wark is able to outline the contours of the Situationist history with "a necessary sympathy, an encyclopaedic knowledge, and a certain stylistic irrepressibility," Danchev points out. Wark's account is "excellent on détournement" and "suitably eccentric," because it focuses not just on big names, but also some less famous figures such as the Danish artist theorist Asger Jorn and the Situationist successor of Tristan Tzara, Isidore Isou.
McKenzie Wark is one of the contributors, together with Franco Berardi and Slavoj Žižek, to the special issue of the journal Theory and Event, devoted to Occupy Wall Street. His piece is vividly entitled 'This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit,' after one of the banners of the Occupy protesters. In the article, Wark examines the reasons why the Occupy slogan "We are the 99%" has grabbed so much attention:
It's a way of saying: we are not the ruling class. Our solidarity, that fragile thing, orbits what it is not. ... Nobody is quite ready to call the 1% what they are: a ruling class. Nor are they quite ready to identify what kind of ruling class they are: a rentier class. It's not important. It is only ever a minority who are attracted to an analytical language to explain their circumstances. Popular revolt run on affect, and affect runs on images and stories. Still the instincts of Occupy Wall Street have been pretty keen. It has identified its own problems: jobs and debt. It has provisionally identified the problem causing their problems: the 1%.
Upcoming Events
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June 08, 2012
University of Sussex, Brighton
Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, now
A one-day conference on the Situationist Aesthetics