In people all over the world...we find ourselves.

I picked up this lovely little second-hand pamphlet online called The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself while looking for Situationist journals. It was printed in 2003 in the US and the introduction states that the essay therein was originally published in The Spectacle in 1975.

There is one paragraph that gives an excellent example for helping explain Marxist abstraction, alienation or even the Debordian spectacle. Here it is:

Suppose that you want a cup of coffee from the vending machine at work. First, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantation and in the refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have the workers who made the different parts of the vending machine and the ones who assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, and work for the electricity utility which supplies power to the machine. Then all the workers who transported the coffee, cups and machine. Then the clerks, typists, and communication workers who coordinated the production of all things necessary for the others ones to survive. That gives you a direct material relationship to several million people, in fact, to the immense majority of the world's population. They produce your life, and you help produce theirs. In this light, all artificial group identities and special group interests fade into insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of your life that at present is locked up in the frustrated creativity of these millions of workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production, strangled by lack of control over their own productivity, warped by the insane rationale of capital-accumulation which pits one against all and makes life a mad scramble for economic survival. Here we begin to discover a real social identity - in people all over the world who are fighting to win control over their own lives, we find ourselves.

Links:
AK Press and Distribution

The Cootie Catcher Dérive or A Walk With Some Really Interesting Dutch Chaps

A Device for a Chance Route
A few weeks ago I was very fortunate to be invited, along with a number of other Leeds-based organisations, to take some visitors from Holland on an urban walk around Leeds. So, on Monday October 11th I headed off to Temple Works in Holbeck to meet them.




Along with a dice, which I had made specially for the event, that gave instructions on turning in particular directions (e.g. first left), I also made the above device. We used to play with these at school, but I couldn't remember the name of them - neither could anyone else. Having searched for it on the web, it appears to be a Paper Fortune Teller. How dull! I thought it was going to have a much more exciting name. . . But then I found out it was also called a 'Cootie Catcher', which sounds a bit dodgy, yet much more interesting!

Paper Fortune Teller

My own paper fortune teller has numbers on the outside, then small symbols representing urban phenomena on the next face (motorway, trains, etc.), and inside, various instructions such as: head towards the nearest blue object, or look for the nearest railings.

On the walk, while I took my usual photos of prohibition signs, etc., I decided to concentrate my attention on images that were aesthetically pleasing (click on the images to get the full advantage of them).


Discarded Objects






One of the things I believe is important for someone exploring urban space is to reconsider the detritus of everyday life by reframing it. For instance, when looking at the above chairs it is hard to understand why, when they look perfectly fine, they have been thrown away. However, the side-effect of this casual act is that it enables a recontextualisation to occur, the product of which is the above photo.

While I understand this is not a new way of looking at the phenomenon in space, I think it enables discussions that digress from those that tend to begin in the area of whether you 'like' something or not; in other words it encourages a non-dialectical discussion. To me, liking something or not is, kind of, irrelevant: as this means attaching positive or negative terms to these objects, which always end in an impossible impasse (see discussions on classical v contemporary architecture). Of course, these images are of rubbish: however, there is rubbish everywhere and attempting to reframe it, aesthetically - as in, is it interesting?, what does this rubbish say about contemporary society? - may be a way through this problem.



What I try to do with the refuse that I see when walking is look for patterns, or seek an attractive composition, or engage with it on some theoretical/philosophical, if possible. After all, it is a product, well actually a by-product, of our postmodern age, and is hugely significant and should not be ignored. In a way it is the outcome of the spectacle of which Debord spoke. We all have too much 'stuff', we don't need all these consumer products - we discard perfectly useful objects without considering the repercussions: and I don't just mean that in an ecological way



The above image is interesting for a number of reasons: why did the trees get cut down (this area hasn't even really been redeveloped properly); also, if it were a rural area, there would likely be some local pressure group that would prevent the sawing down of these trees (in other words, dare I say, a regional middle-class demographic that had some power). Anyway, it provided me with a lovely, organic image...


In Conclusion
I'm obviously not the first person to have recognised the significance of these liminal areas such as Holbeck. Nevertheless, to prevent it from being just another theoretical discussion (either locally or nationally) it should be visited and (re)considered in the context of postmodern space and in the light of capital accumulation...


Relates websites:
Fonds BKVB
What's Up, What's Down