created 2025-03-21, & modified, =this.modified
Why I’m reading
Further Situationist, Walking, Survey of Being Lost reading.
Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage.
Psychogeography originated with the Lettrist Group, meaning from Debord, “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”
The term so often seems nebulous today and resistant to definition as it seems to harbor seemingly unrelated elements, but there are connective elements.
- Walking - such as derive, wandering, strolling. As an urban affair cities are often hostile to pedestrians.
- Provocation, and Trickery - its practitioners provide a history of ironic humour that is often a welcome counterbalance to the portentousness of some its more jargon-heavy proclamations.
- Subversion
Psychogeography seeks to overcome the processes of ‘banalisation’ by which the everyday experience of our surroundings becomes one of drab monotony.
Genius Loci: Elsewhere this sense of an eternal landscape underpinning our own has been termed genius loci or ‘sense of place’, a kind of historical consciousness that exposes the psychic connectivity of landscapes both urban and rural.
De Quincey is the prototype psychogeographer. His obsessive drifting affording him new insights into the life of the city and granting him access to the invisible community of the marginalised and dispossessed. For de Quincey the city becomes a riddle, a puzzle still perplexing writers and walkers to this day.
Flâneur became the Dérive.
And yet both these writers acknowledge an earlier portrayal of the detached observer walking the streets, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd. This story returns to the streets of London and it is here that the crowd first comes to symbolise the changing nature of the modern city. It was through Baudelaire’s translations of Poe that this figure first became equated with a specifically European tradition, for the flâneur is not to be associated with the frantic bustle of the London street but with the elegant arcades of Paris. These arcades were soon to be demolished in favour of a more strictly regimented topography and even as the flâneur first emerges, he is recognised as a nostalgic figure symbolising not only the birth of the modern city but also the destruction of his former home. The fate of the flâneur is bound up with the fate of the city he inhabits and his very existence acts as an indication of the struggles later generations of urban walkers will have to face as the city is redeveloped in a manner increasingly hostile to their activities.
For Breton and Aragon, the surrealist walks seemed to revolve unerringly around the pursuit of beautiful women.
Author is critical of the early Lettrist texts on psychogeography.
Indeed the Lettrist movement as a whole, while providing a debut for many of the terms later made familiar by the Situationists, remains difficult to take seriously.
When the Lettrists merged with other groups, they became the Situationist International, which under Debord’s leadership “the playful but harmless” Lettrist activities gave way to the serious-minded attempts to challenge bourgeois orthodoxies of the day.
Navigating the old cities
Defoe and the Plague Years
Navigating this urban space in the 1660s could be tricky, both physically and conceptually… There were no maps for ordinary people to guide them through the city. You made your way by sight, by memory, by history, by advice, by direction – and by luck.’
NOTE
The act of navigating a city space was very different. Once again, how many of us are actually lost without our phones on a day to day? Even the return to work, should a detour like an accident be encountered.
Humans will follow one another down different side streets, attempting to get around the blockage and return to the expected route.
In the London of this period one traversed the streets through recourse to a mental map established through trial and error and by reading the signs that the environment displayed to you. This alertness to topographical detail and the construction of a mental overview of the city would later form the basis of psychogeographical technique, but in the time of the plague, these techniques became less a choice than a necessity.
The Visionary Tradition
William Blake is described as the Godfather of Psychogeography.
Blake was a walker, a wanderer whose poems describe the reality of eighteenth-century street life, but they are overlaid by his own intensely individualistic vision to create a new topography of the city.
The drug-fuelled journeys through the London of de Quincey’s youth seem to capture exactly that state of aimless drift and detached observation which were to become the hallmarks of the situationist dérive some 150 years later.
Opium of the time was not illegal, and was cheaply acquired. ”The Confessions should not then be read primarily as an account of drug use but as an exploration of the role of the imagination and the power of dreams to transmute the familiar nature of our surroundings into something strange and wonderful.”
Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney- coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience
Arthur Machen, “So, here was the notion. What about a tale of a man who “lost his way’’; who became so entangled in some maze of imagination and speculation that the common, material ways of the world became of no significance to him?”**
Also,
And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. … For the essence of this art is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts
Ley Lines
… imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could reach, and paid out until it touched the “high places” of the earth at a number of ridges, banks, and knowls. Then visualize a mound, circular earthwork, or clump of trees, planted on these high points, and in low points in the valley other mounds ringed round with water to be seen from a distance. Then great standing stones brought to mark the way at intervals, and on a bank leading up to a mountain ridge or down to a ford the track cut deep so as to form a guiding notch on the skyline as you come up… Out from the soil we wrench a new knowledge, of old, old human skill and effort, that came to the making of this England of ours.
Alfred Watkins, ley lines are less a precursors to psychogeography, and more a sign of psychogeography becoming entangled with new age ideas and esoterica, bearing little resemblance to SI and Debord.
With an interest of local history, at the age of 65, Watkins perceived the familiar landscape to be covered by a vast network of straight tracks, aligned through the hills, mounds and other landmarks.
These ideas were seen as heretical, but after the controversy died down, they were forgotten. But with the rise of new age philosophies they were unearthed.
Paris and the Rise of the Flâneur
Poe as the creator of the new Urban type:
Baudelaire and, later, Walter Benjamin specifically cite Poe’s story as inaugurating a new urban type, an isolated and estranged figure who is both a man of the crowd and a detached observer of it and, as such, the avatar of the modern city. A man sitting in a coffee house watches the passing crowds as they throng a busy London street. This passive observer catches a glimpse of a man with a strange visage and, his curiosity aroused, he sets off in pursuit. As he follows, he is led on a seemingly aimless and haphazard journey across the city from its centre to its less salubrious suburbs. Night follows day and this pursuit continues until finally, feeling that the journey will never end, our narrator approaches his quarry and stops him. The man barely notices him and simply continues on his way: ‘This old man, I said at length, is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor his deeds.
Baudelaire on Poe:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for a passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heat of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world…
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying.
The flâneur died with the Department store:
The role of window-shopper is thus both the high point and the death knell for the flâneur, but once the crowds have thinned and the mystery evaporated, the flâneur remains vigilant, and behind his indolent and narcissistic image, he retains his subversive nature: ‘The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace.’
The flâneur remains in motion, a nonpaying customer.
Robinson and the Mental Traveler
Xavier de Maistre, A Journey Around My Room
In the spring of 1790, Xavier de Maistre, confined to his room under house arrest, embarked upon a voyage around his bedroom, a trip every bit as arduous as that of Magellan and Cook but one that took place almost entirely within the boundaries of his own imagination. The result was A Journey Around My Room and it was followed by the equally adventurous A Nocturnal Investigation Around My Room. These accounts, as de Maistre was to proudly proclaim, would introduce the world to a new form of travel involving little of the risk or expense facing the conventional traveller. ‘There’s no more attractive pleasure,’ claims de Maistre ‘than following one’s ideas wherever they lead, as the hunter pursues his game, without even trying to keep to any set route. And so, when I travel through my room, I rarely follow a straight line: I go from my table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado.’
Robinsonner
Reputedly coined by Arthur Rimbaud, robinsonner, which means ‘to let the mind wander or to travel mentally.’
Surrealism
Breton’s Nadja - Andre Breton and Aragon’s Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon.
Breton: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.’
Surrealistic automatism extended to walking, which later became the SI derive.
Guy Debord and SI
Responding to the need for a society, free of the homogenizing effects of capitalist development.
Pre-SI text Formulary for a New Urbanism] seems to display ample evidence of his oncoming mental illness and, although it does not mention psychogeography, it does provide a familiar outline of how the city must be rebuilt upon new principles that replace our mundane and sterile experiences with a magical awareness of the wonders that surround us.
Districts in Chtcheglov’s formulary are segmented by spectrum of diverse feelings, and calls for a continuous derive (ambient drifting.)
X is Psychogeographical on Y:
The essential emptiness of modern life is obscured behind an elaborate and spectacular array of commodities and our immersion in this world of rampant consumerism leaves us disconnected from the history and community that might give our lives meaning.