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Angus McDonald, "The New Beauty of a Sum of Possibilities", Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 141-159: This paper argues for the continuing significance of the critique of urbanism advanced by the Situationist International. The city, or more abstractly, the urban, is located as the site of a struggle between coerced order and anarchy, exemplified in five brief investigations. The opinion of the Scottish enlightenment figure, Lord Kames, that the city is an evil, is contrasted with the view of Roland Barthes that the city be considered as poetic, ludic and erotic. The analysis of Venice and Thomas More's Amaurot, capital city of Utopia, advanced by Lewis Mumford is employed to clarify an idealism and a materialism of the city. The Situationist critique of the city, particularly the work of Guy Debord, is identified as establishing the concepts of the quotidian or everyday life, the urban, and psychogeography, as developments out of the project of surrealism. What the Situationists struggled against was a city of domestication, pacification and suburbanisation, exemplified in the language of Athenian tragedy by the fate of the Furies, the Eumenides in the Oresteia, who surrender their passion to the order of law, thereby stabilising the community identity. The vitality of the Situationist perspective is proposed, against efforts to consign it to history.

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