ILAS/CITY Final Paper, Spring 2020

Due on August 3^rd Aug 11th(Tuesday), whole day

35% Final Paper

Word limit: 1,000 (if you are from the Science)-1,500 words. The annotation style of the Paper will be Harvard (I need to see the page numbers, and please do the self-study if you have never done this OK?);

see https://www.citethisforme.com/harvard-referencing; citation tools like Zotero will also help). Don’t be overly concerned with grammar (although spell-check will be helpful! See the separate list of recommendation for self-grammatical check).

Please submit the Final Paper to the lecturer’s email address

maran@nagoya-u.jp with the subject “final paper CITY”. The submitted WORD file should contain “CITY” + the student’s name in its file name; otherwise it’d be difficult to track your work; I’d send out confirmation email once your assignment is received. Late submission is not accepted unless emergency happens.

Format

Include the following information at the top of each assignment:

Your Name Course Title Submission Date Final Paper Title of the article (would be a good idea to include some keywords here) Works Cited

Note on Plagiarism:

A writer who presents the ideas of words of another as if they were the writer’s own (that is, without proper citation) commits plagiarism. Plagiarism is not tolerable in this course or at Nagoya University. You should avoid making quotes or drawing on figures from nowhere—you must provide sources of reference for quotation and/or citations you use in the paper. This applies to images and media clips as well. Failure to observe this would risk being charged of plagiarism. [All assignments/papers will be checked with professional software]

AIM AND CONTENT:

1)     You should engage with at least ONE reading from our syllabus, and external academic readings (no Wikipedia please) will be welcomed too.

You are expected to review, evaluate and even critique certain concepts (such as keywords proposed by scholars) and/or arguments (much detailed explanations). Specifically, we encourage you to highlight the keywords and key frameworks outlined in the syllabus, for instance, you could work on a very specific topic/research question (e.g., ‘modernity’; ‘flaneur’; ‘monuments’; ‘the uncanny’; ‘the other and Zainichi experiences’, ‘film festival network and global city’ etc.);it is possible to use your reading journal topics for this final paper;

2)     Keep your discussions SMALL-SCALE (read=no need to review EVERYTHING in one take, and please do NOT do that, it may get your discussions diffused), and SPECIFIC (read=you need to contextualize/historicize your case studies).

We expect you to be able to present your own interpretation and viewpoints by offering an appropriate case study (could be multiple), for which you could use examples from our lectures, or visual TEXTS such as films, images, photographs, or other related cultural phenomenon etc.

If you have any problem, please email me or make appointment to meet me at ZOOM. 

3)    What we do for the final session titled ‘Thesis Workshop’ on July 31^st:

Please get one A-4 handout ready for sharing, and it should contain:

a.     A one/two-line arguments of your essay;

b.     Keywords (5-8);

c.     Your case studies (title of films etc.)

Upload address will be updated online at the Blog. Please remember that since the final paper is due on Aug 3^rd, try NOT to start working on the final paper AFTER the workshop.

SAMPLE Final Essay

July 29, 2019

The Dérive After Debord: A Postmodern Psychogeographic Landscape

            In his 1953 essay titled “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” the 19 year old situationist Ivan Chtcheglov imagined a new type of modern city in which passion, imagination, and the emotional nature of humanity’s past become manifest, overtaking the sterility and coldness of modern architecture and urban design. In the modern world, Chtcheglov declared, “everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future” (Chtcheglov). He was imagining what Situationist International (SI) cofounder Guy Debord would term “psychogeography” two years later, defined in his “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (Debord). To put this concept into practice, Debord expanded on Chtcheglov’s vision of “CONTINUOUS DRIFTING,” writing a short treatise on the theory of the dérive (drift) and describing it as a “mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (S.I. Online).

In line with SI aspirations to create society-wide ruptures in the structure of advanced capitalism, particularly through dismantling what Debord called the spectacle, psychogeography and the drift were intended primarily to provoke “situations,” or “the construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality” (Debord). Only by intervening in the domination of urban capitalism and breaking free of habit, according to him, could we all hope to bring about a new and revolutionary order. And one of the most critical methods of doing so was by breaking the hold of capitalism on the city itself. As Debord writes in his ultimate philosophical treatise, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), “urbanism – ‘city planning’ – is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor” (Debord 64). The purpose of psychogeography, then, is to reclaim the totality of space by better understanding the nature of its existence. 

These ideas are by no means dead, and today, “in a capitalist world which seems immune to transformation” (Plant 7), it is as important as ever to confront and reject our own domination. In our postmodern society, the ever increasing complexity of visual culture and digitally mediated social relations certainly complicate any approach to disrupting the spectacle – in fact, postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard have concluded that it has evolved into a simulacrum, meaning it has completely absorbed and replaced reality, seamlessly blocking off any attempt to navigate outside of it. This vision, while intriguing, is only a form of academic nihilism in a postmodern veneer. We certainly do “live in the midst of codes, messages, and images which produce and reproduce our lives.” And it is also true that these codes and images “may have had their origins in commodity production, but have since won their independence and usurped its role in the maintenance of social relations” (Plant 6). But no matter the evolutionary stage of capitalism, critically exploring the urban spaces that surround us will always be important. “It should come as no surprise that claims, ideas, and actions formulated to contest a particular mode and moment of capitalist development would not necessarily have the same importance or value within the present. But that does not mean they possess no value; rather, what is necessary is working out and reformulating them in ways that address the present conjuncture(s)” (Shukaitis 49). So, the challenge is to reformulate psychogeography and the dérive in order to utilize them effectively in our own age.       

…(skipping the middle discussion part)

The peak of SI activity was over half a century ago. There are enormous differences between 1950s Paris and the cities we live in now. There is also now the digital world – an entirely new dimension of experience and information that the situationists could never have imagined. But situationist concepts continue to pervade cultural thought, particularly the practices of psychogeography and drifting. This is clearly illustrated by the existence and influence of numerous contemporary psychogeographic organizations and festivals, such as the London Psychogeographical Association and New York’s Psy-Geo-Conflux. Many still yearn to understand what it means – socially, psychologically, emotionally – to live in the city.

Postmodern thought, however, tends to discount the agitational, modernist and comprehensive approach of the situationists: “such all-encompassing revolutionary theories are said to be no longer possible.” Postmodernists would condemn their “illegitimate arrogance of political totalitarianism” as ignorant and presumptuous. And yet, as Plant tells us, “all theoretisations of postmodernity are underwritten by situationist theory and the social and cultural agitations in which it is placed. The situationist spectacle prefigures contemporary notions of hyperreality, and the world of uncertainty and superficiality described and celebrated by the postmodernists is precisely that which the situationists first subjected to passionate criticism” (Plant 5).

This is not to say that the urban and capitalist environment of today should be understood in the exact same way. Most agree that many of the radical ideas of the 20th century have been recuperated (a concept also formulated by the SI) by contemporary mass media and and the indirect nature of post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism to the point of sterility. Shukaitis provides insight into the transformation of cultural labor after the modern avant-garde: “the forms of play, desire, and collectivity the Situationists worked from have been rendered into new forms of capital accumulation. Imagination, creativity, and revolt itself have been put to work through the cultural industries… capital increasingly relies upon forms of free labor and self-directed sociality that are necessary to its reproduction even while not directly controlled by it” (Shukaitis 48). Things are even more complex now than they were for the SI. It’s still unclear how exactly we might approach the slippery conditions of postmodern culture and late capitalism. There isn’t a single enemy as concrete as the spectacle for us to struggle against, and digital communication media don’t offer the same kind of immediacy which the Situationist print journal possessed.

Despite all this, cities still exist, urban dwellers are still overstimulated, bored, and stuck in routines, and situations still remain to be constructed. “More than ever, well-developed psychogeographic investigations are needed to comprehend the shaping of the metropolis and the possibilities for political action this offers. But this is not a task for the carefree wanderings of the flâneur” (Shukaitis 50). This is a task for any postmodern urbanite with the same kind of fiery drive as the situationists. Even if we really have lost all true political agency, even if we are hopeless in the face of pure and total simulation, as Baudrillard envisions, nothing stops us from going out to drift around our own cities, and learn something of ourselves and of humanity in so doing.                       

Works Cited

Chtcheglov, Ivan. “Formulary For a New Urbanism,” 1953. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/formulary.html.

Debord, Guy. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 1955. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Ken Knabb. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2002.

Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive,” 1956. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. 

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. London: MIT Press, 1998. Print.

Shaya, Gregory. “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910,” American Historical Review 109. 2004. pp. 41-77.

Shukaitis, Stevphen. The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-Garde. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. Print.

Situationist International Online, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html