Constant intended New Babylon to carefully interact with the structure of the cities and non-urban areas it was suspended above. He and Debord planned to integrate the first vestiges of New Babylon architecture with some existing place — they didn’t mention exactly where, or even vaguely where — and then spread it outwards. In the Internationale Situationniste, a writer in an unattributed essay floated the idea of building a base camp, possibly on the Alle des Cygnes, a long, narrow uninhabited island on the Seine. The island connects two bridges, the Pont de Bir-Hakein and Pont de Grenelle. Using the bridges, the Situationists could venture into the actual city, drifting, creating situations, and slowly converting the areas around the Alle des Cygnes until they became part of New Babylon — and so on, until Europe, Asia, and Africa disappeared into New Babylon. Then New Babylon could venture into Alaska, via Russia (perhaps sailing there on some kind of New Babylonian fleet, though the author or authors of the unsigned article weren’t specific on that count).d Debord and Constant were adamant that New Babylon wouldn’t sequester itself from the rest of the world, but rather integrate itself continuously. He didn’t want to create an isolated utopia, which he called “holiday resorts.” He didn’t want to be known as that kind of failure. “New Babylon is a whole world at play”e [italics mine].
However, New Babylon was also doomed from the beginning, because Constant gestured only vaguely toward the practical matter of building the city. He never explained, in practical real-world terms, what the “ambience-creating recourses” would be. He never described the specific mechanisms that would power and control the city. He only vaguely referred to a co-operative system of repair and public safety. The “how” didn’t matter to Constant or to Debord at the time, only the ideas.
The SI also suffered early on from logistical complications: too many strong personalities living in cities and countries too far flung. Conceptually, they could never rally together behind one clear model or goal. Jorn was too preoccupied with his successful career as an artist; Chtcheglov went insane and, besides that, had all the fickleness of youth. Constant wanted to eradicate all artistic work from the moment, while at the same time diving head first into New Babylon, which some members thought of as an art project.
Debord spent an inordinate amount of time policing the minutia of language about the Situationists. From the first issue of the Internationale Situationniste: “There is no such thing as situationism.” In a letter to Simondo, Debord delivered a threat about the misuse of language: “In my Report, I only used the word ‘situationism,’ once — in quotes — to denounce it in advance as one of the stupidities that our adversaries will naturally use in opposition to us. To my knowledge, this term has never been used elsewhere (neither in writing, nor verbally), by any of us. You are the first to pose its existence in your last letter. Happily, it was to oppose it!”f I shudder to think of Debord’s response if Simondo hadn’t been so explicit in his opposition.
The SI had filled their ranks with artists, then when those artists focused on art, they were accused of undermining the basis of unitary urbanism. Constant criticized Debord for not guiding the artists with a firmer hand, and the two men began to squabble. Debord expelled several artist members of the SI, including Debord’s close friend Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizo, who had the audacity to achieve art-world success while referring to himself as a Situationist. As soon as the gallery owners started calling Pinot’s work “Situationist art,” an oxymoron according to Debord, Pinot was out.
The expulsions didn’t satisfy Constant. When Debord began to voice doubts that New Babylon could ever be made and decided to shift the New Babylon project to more metaphorical grounds, Constant quit the SI. Debord and Constant broke up badly, over letters. Their correspondence became passive-aggressive, then aggressive, then it stopped all together. Debord went on with the Situationist International; Constant continued to work on his plans for New Babylon long after they lost their vitality. Without the SI’s appetite for utopia to give New Babylon life, the city started feeling more like Atlantis than NYC.
In the late 1960s, Constant wearily allowed the New Babylon project to wind down. In an interview with architectural journalist Rem Koolhaas for Dutch weekly Haagse Post, Constant said, with just a hint of despair: “I am very much aware of the fact that New Babylon cannot be realized now.”g After Constant left, Debord shepherded the SI away from play and toward politics. By 1964, Debord was “embarrassed by ‘the fantasies left over from the old artist milieu.’ ”h
The SI fell apart in the dawn of the ’70s. In the early days of the SI, Debord had written to Pinot, “Not being declared, the [Situationist International] cannot be officially dissolved.”i It could, though, stop functioning — and it did. Debord stopped writing. Various Neo-Situationist sects persisted until the early 1980s, but Debord stayed silent. He aged bitterly; he considered his life’s work a failure. In 1984, Debord was a suspect in the murder of his friend, publisher and patron Gérard Lebovici. The Police Nationale never brought Debord up on charges, but the ensuing scandal pushed Debord even further away from public life. He and Bernstein divorced and he married someone who had never been a Situationist, a poet named Alice Becker-Ho. When old friends would visit, they were met only by Becker-Ho; Debord refused to leave his room to meet with them.j
In 1987, Paris’s museum of contemporary art, the Centre George Pompidou, in conjunction with the London-based Institute of Contemporary Arts, organized an exhibition about “situationism.” They invited Debord to speak at the French opening in 1988, but he refused, utterly insulted. He wrote the curators of the exhibit a letter brimming with vitriol, concluding, “If you think you like the situationists, you are fucking wrong. There is nothing more antisituationist than putting false situationist ‘art’ in a museum. You are cunts, and I hope your buildings fall apart.”k Following the exhibitions, interest in the Situationists increased exponentially, and has never really waned.
On December 1, 1994, Debord shot himself through the heart. Disturbingly, his death was followed by the “copycat” suicides of two of his friends, his publisher Gérard Voitey on December 3 and the writer Roger Stéphane on December 4.
For a few years, “situationism” was quiet. Then, in the late 1990s, a secretive political activist group emerged out of Chicago, calling themselves the “New Situationists.” They spouted a bastardized and modernized version of Debord and the Situationists’ basic critique of the Spectacle and consumerist culture. They functioned in absolute secrecy and pursued invisibility until, like the original Situationists, the New Situationists were brought down by their own politics. In late 2001, in response to the “fascist government response to the 9/11 attacks,” “blatant presidential war-mongering,” and “disgusting attempts of corporations to capitalize on a national tragedy,” the New Situationists planned a series of bombings at various Chicago L stations. The bombings were planned for the middle of the night, when the stations were closed; the New Situationists meant to take no lives, but destroy transportation only. Eleven members of the New Situationists set off bombs in various L stations throughout the city; Berliner’s girlfriend Marie-Hélène Kraus was one of the bombers. In her station, a drunk and passed out security guard slept through the fire alarm Kraus set off to make sure the subway stations were completely empty, and he died.