No offence to anyone, but I knew there was a reason I didn’t like these guys. Their plans for radical overhaul of the city sound a lot like extreme right wing versions of the same thing - I for one prefer a Berlin with "Karl-Marx-Straße" to one without.
And can someone please tell me what "religious content" means? What would it mean to divest a city of its "religious content"? Paris and Rome would have to be completely destroyed (literally ground down to rubble), for starters…
If you don’t like the Lettrists you might enjoy the anti-situ perspective of “Guy Debord is really dead,” here:
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/79
Religious content means all the accoutrements of the church that makes it a church. Presumably this would include all books on the subject, any iconography, etc. Debord at least would have likely not had many reservations about the razing of Paris, or Rome. He would have probably suggested salting the earth as well. Thesis Ten from the Theses On The Paris Commune reads: “The story of the arsonists who during the final days of the Commune went to destroy Notre-Dame, only to find themselves confronted by an armed battalion of Commune artists, is richly provocative example of direct democracy. It gives an idea of the kind of problems that will need to be resolved in the perspective of the power of the councils. Were those artists right to defend a cathedral in the name of eternal aesthetic values — and in the final analysis, in the name of museum culture — while other people wanted to express themselves then and there by making this destruction symbolize their absolute defiance of a society that, in its moment of triumph, was about to consign their entire lives to silence and oblivion? The artist partisans of the Commune, acting as specialists, already found themselves in conflict with an extremist form of struggle against alienation. The Communards must be criticized for not having dared to answer the totalitarian terror of power with the use of the totality of their weapons. Everything indicates that the poets who at that moment actually expressed the Commune’s inherent poetry were simply wiped out. The Commune’s mass of unaccomplished acts enabled its tentative actions to be turned into “atrocities” and their memory to be censored. Saint-Just’s remark, “Those who make revolution half way only dig their own graves,” also explains his own silence.”
As for Berlin, it’s interesting to see the Marx references there paralleled to religious names in Paris. State religious icon is a fair description of the use of Marx by the DDR.
It would be interesting to know what Debord would have said about retaining DDR era names in Berlin. Probably similar to what he said about Paris’s religious content. Following Socialisme ou Barbarie, he had nothing but venom for the DDR and the like.
See, for example, the telegram sent during the 1968 May events:
POLITBURO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USSR THE KREMLIN MOSCOW
SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE MAKHNOVSHCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE PEOPLE’S FREE SORBONNE
Comment by Noi — May 26, 2006 @ 12:06 am