Avant-Situ: Apollinaire, the Dérive, & the Politics of the Third Dimension

The talk of poetry is everywhere in the SI writings of the Fifties; one wishes they had mentioned dance instead, so that unitary urbanism could be described as "dancing about architecture." But it was far closer to poem-ing about architecture, and here we intend "about" not as in "lie about your age" but as in "lie about the house." "Let us say," concluded Guy Debord, the prose stylist who seems to have written no poems, "that we have to multiply poetic objects and subjects, and that we have to organize games of these poetic subjects among these poetic objects. There is our entire program, which is essentially ephemeral."