i came in the cobblestones

19Aug08

WIKI:PSYCHOGEO

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive (“drift”).

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In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.^[8]

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In the SI’s 6th issue, Raoul Vaneigem writes in a manifesto of unitary urbanism, “All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops – the geometry”.^[9] Dérive, as a previously conceptualized tactic in the French military, was “a calculated action determined by the absence of a greater locus”, and “a maneuver within the enemy’s field of vision”.^[10] To the SI, whose interest was inhabiting space, the dérive brought appeal in this sense of taking the “fight” to the streets and truly indulging in a determined operation. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city.

[edit]Psychogeographic maps

In their memoirs, Jorn and Debord addressed a metaphor of the landscape as a female body, updating it in the form of a paint-splattered collage of pin-up models. The erotic charge of psychogeography was undeniable, the rousing sexual conquest of having fully explored and overcome the exoticism of the city – this was accentuated by a famous piece of situationist graffiti, “I came in the cobblestones.” The SI promised, “We will play upon topophobia and create a topophilia.”

The connection between psychogeography and sexuality may be one of the reasons Jorn and Debord chose to title their famous topographic collage as The Naked City, one of their two famous psychogeographic situationist maps, alongside Guide psychogeographique de Paris. Both maps served as reconstructed guides to Paris, focusing exclusively on areas that Jorn and Debord felt had not yet been spoiled by capitalist-motivated redevelopments, areas still worth visiting; these conclusions were, of course, based on the result of a derive. The arrows drawn on the collaged map were used to demonstrate the psychogeographic “flow” between each locale – true to psychogeographic form, the “flow” could not be objectively deconstructed to common terms, remaining merely as an abstraction. The maps represented Jorn and Debord’s conquering of the urban areas yet undefiled by bureaucracy. Aside from its erotic undertones, Debord’s use of the name was a direct tribute to the 1947 crime film of the same name, directed by Jules Dassin, itself a direct reference to renowned New York photographer Weegee. Debord and Jorn compared their drifts around Paris to the legwork of the film’s detectives.

More recently psychogeographical maps have been used in political actions, drifts and projections, distributed as flyers and in journals and magazines such as Transgressions: A journal of urban exploration or Mute Magazine.

[edit]Contemporary psychogeography

From 1980 to today, psychogeography has flourished and diverged. As situationist theory became popular in academic circles, avant-garde,neoist and revolutionary groups emerged, developing the praxis in various ways. This interest survives today, manifested in a number of groups practising contemporary psychogeography. The journal Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration (which appears to have ceased publication sometime in 2000) collated and developed a number of post-avant-garde revolutionary psychogeographical themes.

Between 1992 and 1996 The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture undertook an extensive programme of practical research into classic (situationist) psychogeography in both Glasgow and London. The discoveries made during this period, documented in the group’s journalViscosity, expanded the terrain of the psychogeographic into that of urban design and architectural performance.

Since 2003 in the United States, separate events known as Provflux and Psy-Geo-conflux have been dedicated to action-based participatory experiments, under the academic umbrella of psychogeography.

Psychogeography also become a device used in performance art and literature. In Britain in particular, psychogeography has become a recognised descriptive term used in discussion of successful writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and the documentaries of filmmaker Patrick Keiller. The popularity of Sinclair drew the term into greater public use in the United Kingdom. Though Sinclair makes infrequent use of the jargon associated with the Situationists, he has certainly popularized the term by producing a large body of work based on pedestrian exploration of the urban and suburban landscape. Sinclair and similar thinkers draw on a longstanding British literary tradition of the exploration of urban landscapes, predating the Situationists, found in the work of writers like William Blake, Arthur Machen, and Thomas de Quincy. The nature and history of London were a central focus of these writers, utilising romantic, gothic, and occult ideas to describe and transform the city. Sinclair drew on this tradition combined with his own explorations as a way of criticising modern developments of urban space in such key texts as Lights Out for the Territory. Peter Ackroyd’s bestselling London: A Biography was partially based on similar sources. Merlin Coverly gives equal prominence to this literary tradition alongside Situationism in his book Psychogeography (2006), not only recognising that the situationist origins of psychogeography are sometimes forgotten, but that via certain writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe and Charles Baudelaire they had a shared tradition. Psychogeography, as a term and a concept, now reaches more British eyes than ever before, as novelistWill Self has a column of that name which started out in the British Airways in-flight magazine and now appears weekly in the Saturday magazine of The Independent newspaper.

The concepts and themes seen in popular comics writers such as Grant Morrison and Alan Moore in works like From Hell are also now seen as significant works of psychogeography. Other key figures in this version of the idea are Walter Benjamin, J. G. Ballard, and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Part of this development saw increasing use of ideas and terminology by some psychogeographers from Fortean and occult areas like earth mysteries, ley lines, and chaos magic, a course pioneered by Sinclair. A core element in virtually all these developments remains a dissatisfaction with the nature and design of the modern environment and a desire to make the everyday world more interesting.

In a practical sense the many flourishing groups of urban explorers often are practising psychogeography, perhaps unknowingly; they certainly often draw on modern pyschogeographic writers as an inspiration.

Urban Squares Project through their practice came up with their own definition of psychogeography: The subjective analysis – mental reaction, to the neighbourhood behaviours related to geographic location. A chronological process based on the order of appearance of observed topics, with the time delayed inclusion of other relevant instances.