Article published in «October» — 2006 — Vol. 115 (Winter) — pp. 13-30.
The radical refusal of official urbanism and architecture in the polemics of the Lettrists and Situationists, together with the direct opposition to figures like Le Corbusier and Paul Chombart de Lauwe evinced by Guy Debord, AsgerJorn, and Raoul Vaneigem, among others, has obscured the extent to which their call for a new architecture and a "unitary" urbanism relied deeply on the professional approaches to which it was nonetheless opposed. This was so, not only in the ambiguous stance of Jorn to the work of Le Corbusier, and the architectural propositions of Constant, themselves springing from the critique of CIAM orthodoxy by Team X architects such as Aldo van Eyck, but also in the ways in which Debord and his colleagues analyzed the problem of urbanism in itself, drawing on cartographic and photographic techniques, and even the "evidence" put forward by planners themselves. On the one hand, this was the result of the entirely self-conscious strategy of détournement, of using the enemy's material against itself; but on the other hand, it also represented a kind of collusion based on a mix of nostalgia for the original aims of a modern urbanism—for what avant-garde urbanist did not dream of a unitary solution?—and a historical sense that alternative traditions, rooted in the seventeenth-century conflict between Cartesians and Pascalians, had been suppressed. For Debord, in particular, the maps, ideal and real, that traced the settlement of the earth, and the aerial photographs that viewed these settlements in all their three-dimensional complexity, were charged with more than their official origin. From the outset they acted as objects of memory, reflection, and strategic plans. In the following essay, I trace only a few of the themes that linked Debord's thought to that of cartographic representation—representation that, in its faithful- ness to the real somehow escaped the label of the spectacular, and that might still work as a ground for the reconstruction of the real.
