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7.1.04
The early spring of 431 B.C. witnessed, at Athens, the outbreak of a great war, the commencement of a great book, and the première of a great play.
The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers: Athens, a direct democracy, and Sparta, a militaristic oligarchy. It was, naturally, advertised as a war of liberation (each side claimed to be freeing some injured third party), but it was really a struggle for total domination of the Greek world. It began relatively small—a diplomatic crisis involving Corinth, a Spartan ally; some low-level combat in a town near Athens—but metastasized into a conflict that lasted nearly three decades, involved numerous states, and resulted, finally, in the defeat of Athens and the abolition of its democratic institutions. Because Sparta and its allies dominated the southern peninsula known as the Peloponnese—and because the men who wrote the histories of the conflict were usually Athenians—the war came to be called the Peloponnesian. As the Yale historian Donald Kagan dryly points out in “The Peloponnesian War” (Viking; $29.95), his brisk, if tendentious, new account, the Spartans probably thought of the conflict as the Athenian War; but then there were no Spartan historians to call it that.
The great book was the work of an affluent young Athenian who began taking notes “at the very outbreak” of hostilities, on the hunch that this would be “a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.” About the life of the historian we know relatively little, apart from the crucial fact that he himself commanded troops in the war—something you might guess anyway from the soldierly lack of sentimentality that characterizes his book, which would in time come to be prized for its insistence on letting the reader “see the past clearly.” This soldier-historian gave no official title to his work; it is usually referred to as, simply, the History. He was called Thucydides.
The great play was by an Athenian citizen in his mid-fifties who had been writing for the theatre since the age of thirty. Like the war, the play involved some small-scale violence in Corinth that eventually made its way to Athens; as with the war, it would be some time before people appreciated its magnitude. (When the play was entered in the annual springtime dramatic competition at Athens that year, it took third prize.) The playwright’s name was Euripides. The play was called “Medea.”
Thucydides’ History is the only extant eyewitness account of the first twenty years of a war that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen—“the greatest disturbance,” as he put it, “in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic world, and indeed, I might almost say, the whole of mankind.” The war lasted so long that the author didn’t live to finish his manuscript; it ends in midsentence during a description of the aftermath of a naval battle in 411. (We do know, from references in his text, that he lived to see Athens’ ultimate surrender, in 404.) But such was his achievement that others who wrote about the war—for instance Xenophon, whose Hellenica covers the final decade of fighting—began where Thucydides left off.
Until the Peloponnesian War, warfare among the various Greek city-states had for centuries been a regular, predictable affair—part of the rhythmic cycle of seasons. You planted your crops, went away to do battle with this or that enemy, and (you hoped) were home for the harvest. The entire war, usually a matter of some disputed bit of borderland, would be decided in a single battle fought on a single day.
The war that began in the spring of 431 represented what Kagan rightly calls “a fundamental departure” from this tradition, not only in its scope, duration, and complexity but also in savagery and bitterness. After the Corinthian diplomatic crisis, ties between Athens and Sparta disintegrated. Hostilities began, one night early in 431, with a sneak attack on a small Athenian protectorate called Plataea. This sordid violation of the norms of Greek warfare set the tone for what was to come. As the conflict spread across many fronts, from the Hellespont to Sicily to the coast of Asia Minor, it began to seem frustratingly unwinnable. The result, Kagan emphasizes, was a cycle of cruelty and reprisal that ended in a “collapse in the habits, institutions, beliefs, and restraints that are the foundations of civilized life”: schoolboys slaughtered in their classrooms by mercenaries, civilians murdered and enslaved en masse, supplicants dragged from (or burned at) altars, the war dead left to rot on the battlefield. In the end, the great standard-bearer of Greek civilization itself, Athens, collapsed. Bankrupt and imploding with civil strife after nearly three decades of fighting, it was finally defeated by an alliance of Sparta and Persia, the traditional enemy of the Greeks.
It was impossible to foresee any of this in the spring of 431. Athens was at its peak. Its empire of tribute-paying “allies” stretched across the Mediterranean, disciplined by a massive and well-trained navy. Its special national character—raucously democratic yet with an aristocratic esteem for high culture—was reflected in its leader, Pericles, who had populist appeal despite being a nobleman of what Kagan calls “the bluest blood.” It was Pericles who advised his countrymen, during the first few years of the war, to follow an unusual and, to many Athenians, foolishly passive defensive strategy: to remain within the city’s walls (including the so-called Long Walls that connected Athens to its port, Piraeus, four miles away) when the Spartans came to burn their crops, and to put their faith in their supremacy at sea. This plan took realistic account of Sparta’s vast superiority on land and of the fragility of the Spartan Alliance: the Athenians would simply ship in their grain, while harrying the coastal cities of the Peloponnese until the Spartan Alliance disintegrated.
more
2:05 PM
"A mental disease has swept the
planet: banalization. Everyone is
hypnotized by production &
conveniences — sewage system,
elevator, bathroom, washing
machine...
Presented with the
alternative of love or a
garbage disposal unit, young
people of all countries have
chosen the garbage disposal
unit."
— Ivan Chtcheglov, October 1953,
"Formulary for a New Urbanism"
2:13 AM
character sketch for shot out eye scenes:
Czech novelist, humorist, prankster, natural storyteller, and journalist, creator of the satiric masterpiece The Good Soldier Schweik. Hašek was with Franz Kafka one of the key figures of literary Prague, but more colorful and blasphemous. Once Hašek was prevented from throwing himself off the Cech's Bridge (Cechuv most), he founded a political party called The Party of Slight Progress Within the Limits of Law, and spent the cash collected from this activity in his local pub.
--And so on that memorable day there appeared on the Prague streets a moving example of loyalty. An old woman pushing before her a bathchair, in which there sat a man in an army cap with a finely polished Imperial badge and waving his crutches. And in his buttonhole there shone the gay flowers of a recruit.
--And this man, waving his crutches again and again, shouted out to the streets of Prague: "To Belgrade, to Belgrade!"
(from The Good Soldier Švejk)
Jaroslav Hašek was born in Prague the son of a failed high-school teacher. His father died from drink when Hašek was thirteen. When his widowed mother could do nothing with her son, a pharmacist, Mr. Kokoska, eventually took an interest in him. Hašek was educated at the Prague Commercial Academy, from which he graduated at the age of nineteen. He got a job at the Slava Bank, but was fired - he was already drinking heavily.
also:
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:
Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Sainte Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.
And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.
The hacienda must be built.
All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.
We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.
We propose to invent new, changeable decors. . . .
Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.
The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.
Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.
The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.
Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants. . . .
Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertible mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although I’m not satisfied with that word; I mean that it will be more supple, more “fun”). On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.
A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.
This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.
We have already pointed out the construction of situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for total creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space. . . .
Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.
We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)
In Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums.
This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose, cities assembling — in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security — buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces and events, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.
Everyone will live in their own personal “cathedral.” There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers. . . .
This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens of illusory perspectives [en trompe l’oeiI] — with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time — or with the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which is written (height of absurdity, Ariadne unemployed): No playing in the labyrinth.
This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).
The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.
Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc. And an Astrolarium which would group plant species in accordance with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a planetary garden along the lines the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to have somewhere to live in peace — I’m thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.
The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly lit during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the “Square of the Appalling Mobile.” Saturation of the market with a product causes the product’s market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister Quarter, the child and the adult would learn not to fear the anguishing occasions of life, but to be amused by them.
The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation. . . .
Later, as the gestures inevitably grow stale, this drifting [dérive] will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that of representation. . . .
The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas — and of Reno, that caricature of free love — though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.
IVAN CHTCHEGLOV
1953
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[ABOUT THE AUTHOR]
“Ivan Chtcheglov participated in the ventures that were at the origin of the situationist movement, and his role in it has been irreplaceable, both in its theoretical endeavors and in its practical activity (the dérive experiments). In 1953, at the age of 19, he had already drafted — under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain — the text entitled “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” which was later published in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste. Having passed the last five years in a psychiatric clinic, where he still is, he reestablished contact with us only long after the formation of the SI. He is currently working on a revised edition of his 1953 writing on architecture and urbanism. The letters from which the following lines have been excerpted were addressed to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord over the last year. The plight to which Ivan Chtcheglov is being subjected can be considered as one of modern society’s increasingly sophisticated methods of control over people’s lives, a control that in previous times was expressed in atheists being condemned to the Bastille, for example, or political opponents to exile.” (Introductory note to Chtcheglov’s “Letters from Afar,” Internationale Situationniste #9, p. 38.)
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Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).
No copyright.
2:09 AM
4.1.04
Drinking websites, twelve steps, signs of alchoholism, etc.
Opening line, opening night:
There's only one way to gain the locals' respect in a quick and tidy fashion: drink with them. Drink with them long and hard. Let them know you're one of them: impossible to budge from the stool, no last call that isn't "Too damned early", bond through the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of the drink.
4:03 PM
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