L OITERING WITH I NTENT The Histories and Futures of ‘Psychogeography’ The New School for Social Research Department of Liberal Studies - Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts Witold Jerzy van Ratingen June 2017 !  Page intentionally left blank ! 2 Acknowledgements All those who have been involved closely or remotely with the production of this thesis will be aware that it took significantly longer than planned, and that this text has proved a reliable source of mental anguish for all of three semesters. That I was nonetheless able to deliver a readable product can only be attributed to the kindness and inspiration offered by some of the dear people around me, both in New York City and the Netherlands. First, I want to thank my mother, Inez Bosch, for her moral support throughout the writing process; and Antoinette Wieman, who was so kind to grant me a little writing stipend to keep me fed and clothed over the last stretch of work. I also owe sincere gratitude to my professors at the New School; especially McKenzie Wark, whose lectures and books on the Situationist International inspired this work and were a significant aid to my research; and Dominic Pettman for his unforgettable classes and his revival of the Institute of Incoherent Geography, which has provided me with many helpful sources and connections for the completion of this text. Tina Richardson of the University of Leeds, whom I met at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography in Huddersfield, has been generous in answering my e-mailed questions and sharing her admirable knowledge. I am also indebted to Morag Rose of the Loiterers’ Resistance Movement for lending this work its title, first used for a psychogeography-themed exhibition in the People’s History Museum. Finally, I want to thank my brother Lupe for his contribution to the lay-out and design of this text, as well as my dear friends Irina Chiaburu and Joël Zwaan for their inspiring conversations on the ideas explored below. I hope we’ll all share many more walks in the future. ! 3 Declaration of own work I declare that this thesis, submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the department of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research in the summer of 2017, has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Except where this text states otherwise by reference or acknowledgement, the work presented is entirely my own. Witold Jerzy van Ratingen Utrecht, June 12th 2017 ! 4 “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 crackling 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 center. Paris taught me this art of straying; it fulfilled a dream that had shown its§ first traces in the labyrinths on the blotting pages of my school exercise books." -! Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle -! Ariadne unemployed At one sole glance, one can discern the Cartesian layout of the so-called "labyrinth" at the Botanical Gardens and the following warning sign: NO PLAYING IN THE LABYRINTH There could be no more succinct summary of the spirit of an entire civilization. The very one that we will, in the end, tear down. - Potlatch, August 1954 “Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.” - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle ! 5 Index INTRODUCTION! 7! ORIGINS: FROM FLÂNERIE TO PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 11! THE FLÂNEUR: A BRIEF HISTORY OF A MODERN MYTH! 11! THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL! 16! THE THEORY OF SITUATIONIST PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 19! MOVING PICTURES: THE SITUATIONISTS AND FILM! 22! PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC MAPS! 25! PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AS A LITERATURE! 27! BEYOND PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: POST-SITUATIONIST SPATIAL THEORIES! 30! THE URBAN SEMIOTICIANS: BARTHES, PEREC, AND DE CERTEAU! 32! LEARNING FROM LOS ANGELES: THE SPATIAL TURN AND PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 35! THE BRITISH REVIVAL: CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES! 39! A.! OCCULTISM, LITERATURE, AND THE AVANT-BARD! 39! B.! MATERIALIST PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 42! C.! MYTHOGEOGRAPHY AND THE WALKING ARTS! 44! STROLLING IN SOLIDARITY: STEPS TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 47! OF FLÂNEUSES AND LOITERERS: FEMINIST PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 47! BEWARE THE WHITE WALKERS: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND RACE! 52! WALKING FOR EVERY BODY: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND DISABILITY STUDIES! 55! WANDERING THE WEB: CYBERFLÂNERIE AND VIRTUAL PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 59! NEW BABYLON AND THE ORIGINS OF VIRTUAL PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY! 59! CYBERFLÂNERIE AND THE DIGITAL CITY! 60! VIRTUAL PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: SITUATIONIST WEB ART AND THE DRIFT IN VIRTUAL SPACE! 63! PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IN GAMESPACE! 66! AFTERWORD! 69! BIBLIOGRAPHY! 71! ! 6 Introduction When I tell people that I write about psychogeography, I am often met with a set of raised eyebrows. Any description or explanation subsequently raised tends to result only in an aggravated confusion rather than producing the desired clarity. It’s understandable, I think. The reality is that nobody seems able to provide an unambiguous and simple description of what psychogeography is, and to some extent, the “pleasing vagueness” of the term seems to be part of the charm. The most well-known definition – "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals" (Debord 1955) – is also one of the least accurate, since psychogeography is certainly more than a “study” while it generally fails to attain any understanding of “precise laws.” In fact, the expressions of psychogeography today range from site-specific theater to occult local history, from environmental psychology to critical philosophy, from political activism to mobile art projects, and sometimes all of these things at once. Most experts on the topic would agree that psychogeography was developed under the auspices of the Lettrist International, a French avant-garde operating in the 1950s. Its original purpose, as envisioned by the Lettristes and their successors, the Situationist International, was as follows: first, psychogeography was concerned with the survey of the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual effects of the urban environment. Afterwards, the information gathered could be used for the the hijacking of existing urban sites and the creation of new cities, designed to privilege play and radical political activity rather than naked economic productivity. Along the way, the Situationist psychogeographers developed a number of highly creative methods: the dérive (a free urban exploration on foot, in which the practitioner allows herself to be guided by the city's ambiances), the détournement (a kind of culture jamming avant la lettre, in which cultural products are subverted and weaponized as a means of ideological sabotage), and the construction of situations - temporary site-specific ‘performances’ that aimed to unify art and everyday life. The original practitioners of psychogeography didn't stick to the program for very long; they were soon forced to conclude that straightforward narrations of psychogeographic ! 7 activity for the most part weren't particularly interesting, and ended up abandoning their radical walks and dadaist maps in favor of more ‘serious’ philosophical efforts. Still, their early ideas continued to simmer on the margins of counter-culture, and both the theory and practice of psychogeography eventually underwent something of a popular revival. The radical anti- capitalist vision of the French avant-gardes isn't always central to the contemporary practice of psychogeography; over time, the notion has become a veritable bricolage of practices and methods, some of which prefer the names of radical walking, or walking arts. What they tend to have in common, however, is the practice of walking as a political act: psychogeography frequently positions itself in opposition to authority, be it the commodifying and alienating forces of capitalism, the privatization of public space, the encroachment of the urban upon the natural world, or the kinds of urban design and zoning policies that marginalize people on the basis of their skin color, social capital, or physical ability. Because of the relative marginality of psychogeography – the Lettrists’ writings had a decidedly playful and subversive bent, complicating any argument for the practice having serious academic or political relevance – as well as its amorphous nature, encompassing a wide variety of divergent practices and textual genres – there has been comparatively little historical work on the subject. My main colleague/competitor in the field of the history of psychogeography is Merlin Coverley, whose 2006 survey is frequently cited but at times threatens to reduce psychogeography to a sub-genre of British Romantic literature. The ambition of this thesis is to present a significantly broader overview, covering some 250 years of political walking ranging from the flâneurs of early modern Paris to contemporary video games and urban activism. The work below, then, should offer what is currently the most expansive literature review available in the field, weaving together most of the significant ‘psychogeographical’ writing of the capitalist era. The first two chapters of the thesis will cover the histories of psychogeography. This is a story that begins with the flâneur: a rather elusive figure, whose modest origins in the popular literature of the 1840s would be supplanted by an increasingly trendy position in modernist urban mythology. His (he is almost without exception male, an issue I will return to) first cameo appears to be in Edgar Allen Poe's short story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a mysterious solitary man on a lengthy drift through nocturnal London. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, who translated Poe, proposed in an 1863 essay that this "man ! 8 of the crowd", a roaming dandy who joyously dissolves into the urban masses, would be exemplary of the modern artist’s spiritual condition. Half a century later, it was through his readings of Baudelaire that Walter Benjamin finally established the flâneur as the tragicomic protagonist of the momentous socioeconomic changes heralded by “high capitalism.” Benjamin’s flâneur would spawn numerous descendants, and it was only a couple of decades later, in the cafés and streets of Paris, that their activities were first formalized as psychogeography. The Lettrists' and Situationists' endless barrage of manifestos and declarations would equip the urban wanderer with a revolutionary political edge. Their unitary urbanism would mark the end of the “capitalist domestication of space" (Vaneigem & Kotányi 1961), offering in its stead an everyday life of leisure, play, and creative work. The point was no longer merely to be a stroll around in the city, but also to co-opt and change it. In the second chapter, I will describe how Situationist thinking on the city influenced their contemporaries – especially Henri Lefebvre, whose thinking was for several years closely aligned with Debord’s. I will also take note of the work of Georges Perec and Roland Barthes, two French authors not commonly associated with the Situationists, but who display a kindred interest in spatiality and everyday life. Conversely, I will evaluate the work of Michel de Certeau, who is frequently described as a fellow traveler, but in my view a theorist whose allegiances diverge in significant ways from the Situationists. The second chapter also covers the ramifications of psychogeography for a number of American theorists commonly associated with the “spatial turn”, before exploring the various tangents present in contemporary British psychogeographical writing: the occultists, whose writings harken back to a gothic tradition founded by Thomas de Quincey and William Blake; the materialists, whose engagement primarly took the form of urban political activism; and, thirdly, the walking arts of the contemporary art and theatre world, who have adopted the methods of psychogeography to produce a wide variety of innovative ambulatory work. The third and fourth chapters, then, will proceed to explore what I think will represent the futures of psychogeography. A prominent issue in current psychogeographical writing is the problematic historical exclusivity of flânerie and the dérive, whose devotees were overwhelmingly white European men. Today, many authors and practitioners are asking themselves how psychogeography can be made more inclusive: what steps can we take to open up the city and radical walking practices to those who have been historically barred from ! 9 them, including women, people of color, and people with reduced mobilities and non- neurotypical psychologies? The third chapter will first focus on issues in feminist psychogeography and spatial theory. What’s happened to the flâneuse? Is there something sexist about the Situationist approach to the city? And how might a feminine mode of walking be different from a masculine one? Next, I will move on to questions of race and colonialism: why is practically all psychogeographical practice situated in London and Paris? Where are the non-Western drifters? Finally, I will shine a spotlight on what I find to be one of the most undervalued applications of psychogeography: the field of disability studies. While perhaps historically an ableist praxis, I will suggest that psychogeography has important implications here both as a form of therapy and as an educational tool. In the fourth chapter I will move on to the ‘final frontier’ of contemporary psychogeography: the jump into virtual landscapes. Our first topic of inquiry here is Constant, whose concepts for New Babylon remain some of the most captivating work done in the interest of unitary urbanism; his architectures, I will suggest, represents psychogeograpghy’s first steps into the virtual realm. The chapter will also cover a variety of digital practices, ranging from so-called cyberflânerie to Google Maps-based art projects and from “walking simulators” to MMORPG psychogeography. The question to ask ourselves, I will suggest, is whether a deeply commodified gamespace – enveloped in its entirety by the tentacles of the Spectacle – could lend itself to a supposedly non-alienated, even potentially revolutionary, praxis such as psychogeography. Without further ado, I would like to invite you to tie your shoelaces and put on your raincoat. Would you go on a drift with me? ! 10 Chapter 1 Origins: from Flânerie to Psychogeography “The flâneur is nothing but a lazy person who seeks to deceive himself about his essential defect.” (Boitard) The one and only veritable sovereign of Paris is the flâneur. (Bazin) Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1861 The Flâneur: a Brief History of a Modern Myth Paris, 1840. Imagine that we’ve been following a solitary man, touting a pipe and perhaps, if you’re feeling particularly imaginative, an exotic animal on a leash. The object of our interest is a handsome fellow, hoary but not quite old, well-dressed, traipsing the streets at his evident leisure, only stopping occasionally in front of a shop’s window to scrutinize the wares. As we pass through the tree-lined streets, there are times where we ourselves are for a moment distracted by Paris’ charms and diversions, and the man is completely assimilated by the crowds – we have to pay attention, lest we lose track of him prematurely – only to emerge again browsing the dog-eared paperbacks at a second-hand book stall. Crossing the Seine he leans against the bridge railing, striking up a conversation with one of the anglers: a fellow idler by profession. The two men stand around waiting patiently for a catfish or carp to bite. The smells of the river, a hint of cigarette smoke, the perfume of a young woman with a small nervous dog trailing close behind. Parisians of all walks of life have gathered by the river on this warm afternoon, sharing bottles of table wine and exchanging detective novels, but our friend is uneasy standing still – he resumes his stroll, passing the cafés on the boulevard, accelerating his pace as he grows increasingly intoxicated with the sights, sounds, and smells of his vast and ever-changing territory. Only as night falls do we lose track – perhaps some ! 11 dark alleyway called to him – and at any rate, our feet ache and our legs are tired. So let us sit down here, on this porch, and rest our legs while I tell you about the flâneur. The flâneur – flâner, in French, tends to best translate as “idle strolling” – started out as a literary type in the 19th century. He was popularized in the so-called physiologies, a highly popular genre at the time, consisting of illustrated books cataloguing in a light-hearted fashion the various characters that could be observed on the Parisian streets. Walter Benjamin connects the sudden popularity of physiologies to the advent of the September Laws of 1836, which tightened censorship and apparently drove satirists and caricaturists to concern themselves with more innocuous topics than the habits of the ruling class. For that reason, Benjamin condemns these writings as socially dubious: “The long series of eccentric or simple, attractive or severe figures which the physiologies presented to the public in character sketches had one thing in common: they were harmless and of perfect bonhomie. Such a view of one’s fellow man was so remote from experience that there were bound to be uncommonly weighty motives for it. The reason was an uneasiness of a special sort. People had to adapt themselves to a new and rather strange situation, one that is peculiar to big cities.” (1999: 37) Benjamin’s wasn’t a novel concern. The nineteenth century carried along with it an explosive growth of the metropolis: London and Paris easily doubled their population in the first fifty years. And the rise of the modern city was not merely quantitative: tramways and passenger trains had conquered their place alongside the horse-drawn omnibuses Paris by the 1850s, and Napoléon III would contract the Situationists’ arch-villain Hausmann to bring “air, light and healthiness and [procure] easier circulation in a labyrinth that was constantly blocked and impenetrable, where streets were winding, narrow, dark and unhealthy.” (de Moncan 2012: 64) The increase in population and corollary intensification of traffic, the centralization of state functions, and the sweeping urban renewal all contributed to a rapidly changing environment. Crowds, boulevards, and traffic jams became a universal phenomenon in Paris, ousting the little streets, gardens, and shopping arcades that were the flâneur’s conventional turf. As such, by the time the physiologies popularized the flâneur on the threshold of modernity, he was already on the cusp of disappearing. While the ‘really existing flâneur ’ faded gently into history, however, his popularity as a myth would rapidly gain currency over the subsequent century. An entry for “flâneur” in Larousse’s Encyclopedie Universel du XIXe Siècle – the French equivalent of the Encyclopedia ! 12 Britannica – provides a lengthy description of the various types of flâneurs that could be observed in Paris, as well as offering a wealth of paltry moral condemnations of their uselessness. “One finds a thousand forms and a thousand causes of flânerie in Paris, where a barking dog, a crying woman, or a stumbling drunkard suffices to amass a crowd of curious onlookers; and this city, where life, circulation, activity without equal reigns, is also, by a singular contrast, the place where one finds the greatest number of bums and idlers.” (1874, trans. my own) Yet the flâneur’s endurance as a cultural phenomenon into the twentieth century must primarily be attributed to Charles Baudelaire, who drew upon the type in both his poetry and his essays. In a piece titled The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire illustrates his conception of the flâneur as a mixture of the wandering illustrator and war correspondent Constantin Guys and Edgar Allan Poe’s “man of the crowd” from the eponymous 1840 short story. For Baudelaire’s flâneur, the rapid growth of the urban population is only a source of ecstasy: “just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.” (2005: 9) Here, the flâneur becomes not so much defined by his idle wandering as rather by his spiritual condition: in the crowd, the flâneur becomes a “kaleidoscope” gazing upon the enchanting multiplicity of life. This Baudelairean aspect of the flâneur would become a key inspiration for Walter Benjamin, widely viewed as the most prominent theorist of flânerie. Benjamin takes Baudelaire’s flâneur and utilizes him as his own kaleidoscope, through which he analyzes urban modernity and mounts a critique of commodity fetishism. Besides the inspiration offered by Baudelaire, Benjamin’s critical project was strongly influenced by sociologist Georg Simmel, whose lectures he followed in Berlin in 1913. Simmel wrote his best known essay, The Metropolis and Modern Life, a decade before, offering an analysis of the “historical antagonism” between the city’s stimulating effects on freedom, individualism, and independence on the one hand, and its psychological pressures and tendency towards spiritual ! 13 homogenization on the other. While Simmel did not explicitly identify as a Marxist, his attribution of city life’s alienating effects to its “money economy” reads as a spin-off to Marx’ classic critique of commodity fetishism. Furthermore, the arguments brought forth by Simmel are clearly presented in a dialectical fashion; the city’s various tendencies amplify and conflict with one another, and resist any unified interpretation or resolution. Benjamin takes from Baudelaire the use of the flâneur as the viewing device through which the modern city could be scrutinized in all its alienating and intoxicating complexity; he draws from Simmel the application of dialectical materialist critique to the city; and he finally mixes in a Lukácsian twist on commodity fetishism. The final product of this synthesis would become known as the Arcades Project: a voluminous collage of quotes, newspaper snippets, and reflections composed by Benjamin between 1927 and his death in 1940. The Arcades Project situates the flâneur in the glass-covered, gas-lit shopping passages of Paris, which exercised an immense appeal on Benjamin. Here, Benjamin writes, the flâneur teetered for a moment on the threshold of modernity, on the precipice of total assimilation into late stage capitalism – being reduced purely to his labor power. But while already partially transformed by the commodity form, indeed circulating himself through these commercial spaces in the manner of a commodity, the flâneur in the arcades remains for Benjamin an ambivalent figure, an unwitting “spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers” who finds himself in a privileged position to register the signs of modernity emerging. (2002: 427) “The flâneur still stands on the threshold of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd.” (10) Ultimately it is not the flâneur himself who in a moment of profane illumination tears the veil of false consciousness, represented by the comforting phantasmagoria of the urban masses; but rather the Marxist theorist adopting his gaze a century later, equipped with an understanding of commodity fetishism and alienation, walking the same sets of streets. Benjamin’s work on the city – besides the Arcades Project, he wrote essays on Berlin and Naples, as well as narrating a hashish-fueled drift in Marseille – would thus combine Baudelaire’s poetic self-loss and tendency towards chemical and/or spiritual intoxication with a surrealist aesthetic and Marxist sociopolitical critique. An argument might be made that many tenets of what after the war would be termed “psychogeography” are already encompassed in these texts: a focus on emotional disorientation and a critical approach to ! 14 commodity fetishism would be enduring traits in the Situationists’ writing. Due to Benjamin’s untimely death, however - overdosing on morphine thinking himself cornered by the Gestapo in a tiny hamlet on the Franco-Spanish border – the Arcades would remain unfinished, plagued by redundancies, theoretical inconsistencies, and editorial quagmires. As a sharply reasoned if somewhat uncharitable essay by Lauster points out, the unpolished nature of Benjamin’s treatment of the flâneur in Arcades “is not only of limited value for an understanding of nineteenth-century urban experience, but can be seen positively to hamper it.” (2007: 139) It is hard to deny that the flâneur today has become a monstrous and rather infertile amalgamation of monument, academic hype, nostalgic sentiment, and urban myth. One might retort in Benjamin’s defense however, as Andy Merrifield has, that “maybe it’s better we read Arcades as Benjamin raw, his method of inquiry as opposed to his mode of presentation, his Grundrisse rather than his Capital.” (2002: 67) Concerning the flâneur, we must conclude by mentioning Benjamin’s friend and close collaborator Franz Hessel, who accompanied Benjamin on his first strolls in Paris in 1926. The two men frequently referenced and reviewed one another’s work, and Benjamin’s ideas on the flâneur and modernity may well have developed through his interactions with Hessel. There are key differences between their conceptions, however. While Benjamin turns the flâneur into an ambiguous blend of “at once a genuine [if, we must add, extinct] historical manifestation and a personal emblem, the representation of a sympathetic sensibility” (Birkerts 1982: 167), Hessel views flânerie as a phenomenon that is decidedly well suited to modern times. The flâneur, for Hessel, is the pedestrian who resists the pressures of efficiency and time-management, opting instead for a deliberately anachronistic and unprofitable mode of transport. In doing so, the flâneur is in a position to leisurely ‘read’ the city as if it were a text, situating it in a historical tradition and using any collected impressions in the service of art and social criticism. Critics have noted that despite this view of modern flânerie as a political project, Hessel’s own flâneries betray half-hearted commitments at best, often treating politics as merely a visual spectacle rather than something he might actively participate in. “Walking in the newspaper district of Berlin, [Hessel] flirts with the feuilletonistic airiness that often marks the self-imposed limit of efficacy in many essayistic genres of Weimar literature. “Let’s not go into the serious areas,” he tells us, “where politics, trade, and local affairs are carried ! 15 out. We belong below this straight line and in the entertainment section.” (Gleber 1999: 80) Be this as it may, Hessel’s conception of flânerie makes significant strides in the direction of a more activist walking practice. For in Hessel, walking itself becomes (at least in theory if not always effectively in his personal praxis) an act of political resistance – something that Benjamin’s flâneur would never consciously pursue. And this thread is one that would be gratefully picked back up after the war, by the psychogeographers of the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals. The Situationist International “It is known that the Situationists wanted at the very least to build cities, the environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more. Could one not have appeased the situationists around 1960 by means of a few lucidly conceived recuperative reforms, that is, by giving them two or three cities to construct instead of pushing them to the edge and forcing them to unleash into the world the most dangerous subversion there ever was?” -! Guy Debord, “On Wild Architecture”, 1972 We have noted that for Walter Benjamin, the flâneur was already a disappearing species: the ambivalence of his class position, as well as his natural habitat, would come under increasing strain as modernity and late capitalism strengthened their grip on the city. Furthermore, the devastation wrought by the Second World War would radically alter the context of urbanism and the politics of public space. Cities were left in shambles, rendering the rebuilding of housing an issue of the utmost priority. Postwar redevelopment moved at a furious pace and a scale not seen since Hausmann: n the decade between the early 1950s and 1960s, almost a third of the old city of Paris was replaced by or interspersed with unsightly and monotonous housing blocks derivative of modernist architects like Le Corbusier. (Sadler 1998: 58) Urban poverty in these years was rampant: anything resembling a flâneur in those years was far less likely to be a comfortable dandy window-shopping his way through the boutiques than a broke communist shacked up with five others in a two-room cold-water pad. ! 16  With city planning and the use of public space driven into the limelight by a burgeoning bohemian left-wing culture, the philosophy of urban wandering would turn more overtly political and revolutionary in the 1950s. Of particular significance here was the Situationist International, which developed in 1957 out of a smattering of small, subversive avant-gardes. Foremost among these was the Lettrist International, a radical splinter group from the Dadaist-surrealist Lettristes founded in 1946 by the Romanian poet Isidore Isou. The L.I. was well known for its extremely provocative public interventions and included, besides its de facto chairman Guy Debord, the likes of Ivan Chtchglov, Michèle Bernstein and Gil Wolman. The second group involved in the SI consisted of various members of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, most prominent among which were the Danish painter Asger Jorn and, from 1958 to his expulsion in 1960, the Dutch radical architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. The third founding ‘group’ was supposedly the London Psychogeographical Association, of which Ralph Rumney notoriously remains the sole known member. The Situationists’ legendary inauguration involved the nine founding delegates meeting in a remote bar in the town of Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, getting rather plastered and setting the equally pompous as incendiary tone of what would become one of the most significant avant-garde groups of the twentieth century. The core tenet of Situationist thinking on the city was that the appropriation and refashioning of urban space could bring about political revolution. In the context of the modernist redevelopment of Paris, this mission took on a great deal of urgency: the Situationists were highly suspicious of “Cartesian”, rationalistic ‘improvements’ to the city, arguing that “from any standpoint other than that of police control, Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Debord 1955) Sympathetic to the irrationalist bent of Dadaism and surrealism as well as the popular “ludic” theories of Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, the Situationist position may be characterized as romantic extremism: convenience, productivity, safety, and predictability were values they fundamentally abhorred, insisting instead on an ethos of play, subversion, cheap thrills, and hard-left politics. It was an explosive cocktail, already deeply provocative in the earliest proto- Situationist writings on the city: Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism, which he wrote in 1953 at a precocious twenty years old, calls for the immediate abandonment of “the ! 17 mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure,” in favor of a “a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and inventing entirely new ones.” The means to do so, then, would be architecture: “Everyone will, so to speak, live in their own personal ‘cathedrals.’ There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers. … A new architecture can express nothing less than a new civilization..." Significantly, Chtcheglov’s text also makes mention of the new leisure activity – and coincidentally a key Situationist tactic – that would characterize this new civilization: “the main activity of the inhabitants would be continuous drifting. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation. Experience demonstrates that a dérive is a good replacement for a Mass: it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.” While Chtcheglov’s text is short on theoretical detail and altogether probably belongs to the genre of utopian manifesto, the methodological root of what would two years later be termed “psychogeography” is here already apparent. Chtcheglov posits architecture as both a “means of knowledge” and a “means of action.” This duality would remain intact: Situationist urban theory would use the dérive (or drift) to understand which particular aspects of an urban environment would be conducive to the construction of a new civilization, and subsequently weaponize this knowledge through their practice of détournement and the construction of situations. Between 1955 and 1961, Guy Debord and his fellow Situationists would publish a series of methodological guidelines in their bulletin Potlatch and its successor Internationale Situationniste. Here we find their most detailed theorizations of psychogeography, dérive, détournement, the situation, and unitary urbanism. ! 18 The Theory of Situationist Psychogeography The corpus of Situationist concepts and practices The above diagram, from a 1957 Situationist poster titled “New Theater of Operations for Culture,” outlines some of the interconnections between various Situationist practices and concepts. (in Wark 2008: 10) The focal point of the Situationists political efforts was the notion of the situation, which also lends its name to the group as a whole. It was a concept derived from Sartre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness, which states that “there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom... There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determination, of necessity lose all meaning.” (1992: p.629; 621) The Situationists re- envisioned this act of authentic engagement as a temporary autonomous zone of anti- ! 19 spectacular resistance, a spontaneously emerging performance in public space, seducing the public to participate in ‘experimental behavior’ and revive the poetic potential of everyday life. The Situationists were strongly inspired by the Marxist tradition, but would take their critique of commodity fetishism beyond Benjamin and Lukács. For the SI, it was not simply capitalism that needed to be fought but rather a highly advanced stage of it, which Debord called “the society of the Spectacle.” The Spectacle, he writes, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” (Debord 1967: thesis 42). The condition of late capitalism, Debord proposes, entails the total collapse of reality into appearances – a series of images, commodity auras, and ritualistic forms propped up by corporate, state, and civil society bureaucracies. The primary means to pierce the Spectacle and restore something of the delicious and delirious possibilities of the unalienated everyday, would be the construction of situations. Situationists would aim to tactically induce a non- or anti-spectacular collective action through the techniques of experimental performance on the one hand (the “experimental behavior” on the left of the diagram”) and architecture, or rather “unitary urbanism,” on the other. Unitary urbanism was the most ambitious formulation of the Situationists’ architectural project: the creation of a city that first and foremost served a radical aesthetic of everyday life, to supplant the rationalized city designed for the optimal circulation of motorized vehicles or maximum extraction of surplus value. Unitary urbanism had its roots in French utopian philosophy, especially the socialist thinker Charles Fourier, who had proposed the construction of self-contained communities in buildings that would be a mix of barracks and monasteries: the so-called phalanstères. The phalansteries were envisioned to combine domestic, industrial, leisure, and spiritual activities in one building. It was a vision that would strongly inspire the Situationists, whose primary critique of modern urban planning concerned its submission to “separation” – of separate living, working, and leisure zones ruptured by massive motorways, destroying the collective social forms and public spaces that would offer fertile grounds for the construction of situations. Some Situationists believed that this unitary city could be designed from scratch: Constant, who joined the Situationist International as a fully fledged member in 1958, would work for over a decade on his designs for New Babylon, a radically experimental city of floating decks and movable partitions. New Babylon would be raised above the earth’s surface ! 20 on massive pillars, covering the earth’s surface like a second, concrete skin. As Constant describes it, his design “is one immeasurable labyrinth. Every space is temporary, everything is discovery, everything changes, nothing can serve as a landmark. Thus psychologically a space is created which is many times larger than the actual space.” (in Sadler 1998: 103) Other Situationists, Debord foremost among them, believed that the appropriation of existing architecture through revolutionary activity should take priority. The question of radical design versus co-option soon became a point of ideological contention: Constant resigned from the Situationist International and as head of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism in 1960 after published accusations in Internationale Situationniste of “plagiarizing two or three poorly understood fragments of Situationist ideas.” (Sadler 1998: 122) The Debordian faction, including Constant’s successors in the Bureau, Vaneigem and Kotányi, would proceed to shrink unitary urbanism down to the practice and theorization of détournement, in which there was little place for actual architectural creation. As the diagram above shows, the original conception of unitary urbanism envisioned the use of a multiplicity of tactics. Besides the design of a wholly new architecture – the strand found most prominently in the work of Chtcheglov and Constant – détournement was the second significant approach. A somewhat untranslatable word denoting something like ‘diversion’ or ‘hijacking,’ détournement could be described as the pilfering of cultural products and their subsequent deployment as subversive weaponry through the clandestine modification of their original context or content. Termed by Debord and Wolman as “the first step toward a literary communism,” détournement consciously treats all culture as commons; its utility would vary from the playful plagiarism of well-known poetry and philosophy to the propagandistic sabotage of ‘spectacular’ messaging. Any creative product could be subject to détournement: texts, images, objects, and, indeed, places: “the architectural complex…will make plastic and emotional use of all sorts of ‘détourned’ objects: calculatedly arranged cranes or metal scaffolding replacing a defunct sculptural tradition. This is shocking only to the most fanatic admirers of French-style gardens.” (Debord & Wolman 1956) In order for architectural détournement to be successful, it would have to be combined with psychogeography, intended as a form of research that could determine which urban sites would be conducive to it. “The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path ! 21 of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account.” (Debord 1955) Such influences could not merely be determined purely through the analysis of architectural styles or the critical examination of urban planning. Rather, psychogeography would mobilize radically subjective and playful instincts, to induce the requisite state of mind to prospect the city for places that could lend themselves to détournement or the construction of situations. The dominant form of psychogeographical praxis was be the dérive, or drift, already found in Chtcheglov’s Formulary. In a text titled Theory of the Dérive, Debord would define the tactic as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful- constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” Thus, dérives typically consist in unguided, spontaneous urban wandering during which the participants would surrender to the psychogeographical influences of the terrain and engage playfully with the urban environment as it is encountered. Dérives could vary in their number of participants (although the recommended group size would be two or three) and their length (typically within one day, although Chtcheglov would claim to have embarked on a dérive for three or four months in 1953, commenting dryly how “it’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.”) Few detailed written documents of these dérives remain, although one can look towards Abdelhafid Khatib’s psychogeographical survey of Les Halles or Michèle Bernstein’s short pieces in Potlatch to get an impression of their general tone. Documents of the Situationist drift would not be restricted to these sparse written reports, however. The group would experiment with a variety of media in their psychogeographical practice: film, cartographical collages, and fiction. Moving Pictures: the Situationists and Film The Situationists’ general attitude towards cinema appears to have been characteristically wary: in one of his early films, Debord even calls for cinema’s destruction, condemning it as just another “alienated form of communication.” (1959) To the Situationists, film’s ability to ! 22 capture and commodify time in “an illusory order of permanently available present” (I.S. 2, Oct. 1967, 57) was considered deeply suspect and symptomatic of the Spectacle’s general withering of life. Nevertheless, the medium was not deemed beyond salvation: cinema could be détourned to turn the Spectacle against itself. As Debord would argue in his 1978 film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, “It is society and not technology that has made cinema what it is. The cinema could have been historical examination, theory, essay, memoires. It could have been the film which I am making at this moment.” Hence, Thomas Levin (1989: 75) suggests, the Situationists had always left open “the possibility of an alternative sort of cinematic activity, a nonspectacular, anti-spectacular, or other-than-spectacular cinema.” Debord’s two films made in the Situationist International years, On the Passage of a Few Persons in a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959) and the 1961 Critique of Separation, must then be viewed in this light: they are experimental productions aiming to critique Spectacular society by détourning the representations which characterize its social relations. The films withhold from viewers any coherent narrative that ossifies memory and time into a marketable commodity, instead rolling out a radical, fragmentary, and deliberately incoherent critique of the entire Spectacular system. The Situationists imagined such antispectacular cinema would serve two main purposes: “first, its employment as a form of propaganda in the pre- Situationist transition period; then its direct employment as a constitutive element of an actual situation.” (IS 1, June 1958, 8-9) The films share a number of qualities. Both adopt a host of formal elements from Lettrist cinema, using techniques like “the use of flicker, radical sound-image discontinuity, negative sequences, multiple simultaneous acoustic inputs, direct manipulation of the celluloid surface through tearing, writing, and scratching, and an active engagement of the spectator à la “expanded cinema.” (Levin 1989: 79) Both also employ voiceovers, which present mostly détourned citations of works of philosophy, science fiction and popular sociology. Of psychogeographical relevance is the inclusion of a great many shots of the Parisian landscape, including several of the Lettrists’ most cherished psychogeographical unities of ambiance: the bohemian cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the markets of Les Halles, and the banks of the Seine. In keeping with antispectacular psycheogeographic doctrine, monuments were deliberately avoided in the filmmaking. Both films contain references to psychogeographical concepts like the dérive and unitary urbanism. On the Passage – which is haunted by a rather ! 23 nostalgic tone – speaks longingly of “the search for an alternative use of the urban landscape, in search of new passions,” and “the future powers of an architecture it would be necessary to create as the support and framework for less mediocre games.” Critique of Separation, on the other hand, presents a rather pessimistic final judgement on the potential of psychogeography: “Here we see daylight, and perspectives that now no longer have any meaning. The sectors of a city are to some extent decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.” At the time of the film’s production in 1961, the Situationist International’s shift away from psychogeographical praxis and unitary urbanism towards a more critical and theoretical bent was fully underway. The ultimate acceptance of the incommunicability of the subjective perceptions that the dérive was built on, then, signal psychogeography’s premature declaration of death. We will return to this question momentarily, but only after looking other Situationist media of psychogeographic practice: cartography and literature. ! 24 Debord & Jorn, “Guide Psychogeographique de Paris: Discours sur les Passions de l’Amour,” 1956b. Psychogeographic Maps Jorn and Debord made their most famous psychogeographic maps, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris (see above) and The Naked City (below) in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Subverting the traditionally rationalistic, top-down, “objective” and totalizing perspective of city planning maps, the Situationists would cut chunks of Paris out of monumental city atlases and détourn them into complex collages full of psychogeographic information. The maps portray the psychogeographically surveyed unities of ambiance, plaques tournantes or turntables, as well as a great many “slopes” or pentes, depicted as red arrows, which, according to the helpful ! 25 instructions printed on the back of The Naked City “naturally link the different unities of ambiance; that’s to say the spontaneous tendencies for orientation of a subject who traverses that milieu without regard for practical considerations.” In both maps, the chunks of the city are carefully cut and placed, turned in such a way as to evoke the “psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” (Debord 1957) Sadler (1999: 82-91) describes in detail how the precision with which the unities of ambiance are demarcated, deliberately including or excluding specific (partial) streets, suggests that the contours of the maps were indeed reached by means of psychogeographical survey in the form of dérives. One can observe the Situationists’ developing proficiency at representing psychogeographic information by comparing the relatively disorderly arrangement on the Guide psychogeographique to the much more focused and precise composition in The Naked City. Debord & Jorn, “The Naked City,” 1957. ! 26 Psychogeography as a Literature Psychogeography as a coherent, theoretically informed praxis may have developed under Situationist auspices, but this of course does not mean that no psychogeographic sensibilities were expressed in prior literature. We have already noted Benjamin’s interest in Baudelaire, and as their magazine Potlatch attested, the Situationists were familiar with both authors. (Sadler 1998: 76) Although they did not care to engage with Benjamin in any explicit fashion, Debord’s inner circle was well versed in Marxist theory; furthermore, Situationist texts and techniques like détournement show remarkable similarities to Benjamin’s “surrealist collages” and the provocative use of footnotes in the Arcades Project. (La Durantaye 2009: 146) Other “psychogeographic” authors that were popular with the Situationists included Thomas de Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium Eater contains radiant opium-induced reveries of “such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld in the waking eye” (1971: 106) and describes the protagonist’s drifts through London’s streets, parks, and markets. Psychogeographical sensibilities were also found in surrealist literature, which, despite all his fierce refusal to align with any thinker prior to him, Debord seems to have appreciated; especially André Breton’s Nadja (1927) and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1928) were highly regarded. The former novel, a semi-fictionalized account of Breton’s brief relationship to a prostitute who embodies the surrealist style of everyday life, turns Paris into a site of intense libidinal investment; the text is intersparsed by photographs of the various urban locations in which the story develops. Paris Peasant is both a poetic love letter to the ambiguous, liminal zones of Paris – its brothels, its parks by night – as well as a fierce condemnation of the Hausmannian mania for the city’s rationalization and sanitization. While these novels were regularly acknowledged, acclaimed, and détourned by the Situationists, precious little psychogeographic fiction emerged out of the camp of the Situationist International itself. An exception in this regard is the work of Michèle Bernstein, whose novels Tout les chevaux de roi (All the king’s horses) and La Nuit present, as Wark (2008: 33) puts it, “in fictional form a practice, perhaps even an ethics, for a Situationist conduct of everyday life.” It comes as no surprise, then, that the psychogeographic drift serves as a motif in these novels, as well: Gilles, a character modeled after Guy Debord, initiates a young woman into the Situationist world through a dérive in the labyrinth of Paris. ! 27  The Situationists may have enjoyed – and in Bernstein’s case even written – psychogeographic fiction, but in the end their vision of unitary urbanism demanded more than words: rigorous praxis as a distinctive form of analysis, the détournement of existing urban elements, and, until 1961 at least, the experimental design of entirely new forms of Situationist architecture. The Situationist conception of psychogeography is inseperable from these practices. Nevertheless, there is a contemporary and overwhelmingly British strand of thinking about psychogeography which argues that the field should primarily be viewed as a literary tradition, to which the Situationists only relate in a marginal fashion. This is the view proposed by authors such as Solnit (2000: 212) and Coverley (2008), the latter of whom traces the psychogeographic literary sensibility back even beyond Baudelaire and Poe to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (1722), which he argues “foreshadows the Situationists’ subjective reappropriation / imaginary refashioning of the city [and] posits the figure of the urban wanderer as one of the core tenets of this tradition.” (15) Coverley thus proposes a “British ‘home-grown’ tradition that circumvents the Situationists but is clearly concerned with the same ideas,” (18-19) which may be pursued through various urban romantic writers – William Blake, Thomas de Quincey, Alfred Watkins, up to its present figureheads Iain Sinclair, Peter Keiller, and Peter Ackroyd. While he is careful to acknowledge the Situationist origins of the term ‘psychogeography’, Coverley rather abruptly sidelines the S.I. when it comes to any other of their contributions: “behind the endless theoretical statements and manifestos there appears to be next to no actual psychogeographical activity taking place … Psychogeography's arbitrary containment to 1950s Paris must be attributed to revolutionary theorists' anxiousness to be recognized as promoting something truly new.” (23-31) While there is some truth to the accusation that the Situationists’ psychogeographic praxis fell significantly short of its theoretical ambition (a criticism that, we must note, applies uniformly to all Situationist endeavors), it appears to me a distortion of history to reduce the unity of ideas that underpinned Situationist psychogeography merely to “the stifling orthodoxy of Debord’s dogma”, as Coverley perpetrates. (2008: 10) Other theorists of psychogeography, such as Phil Smith (2010a) have criticized such a reductive reading, as it “wrenches psychogeography from its theoretical frame in the critique of the Spectacle,” emphasizing romanticist defamiliarization of the city at the cost of the political activism which remains core to a significant amount of contemporary ! 28 psychogeographical praxis. This is not to deny that the sensitivity to the urban ambiances and subjective appropriation of the city associated with psychogeography can indeed be found in literary fiction both prior and subsequent to the Situationist International. I would argue however where these works fail to engage with the revolutionary politics of everyday life, they can be defined at best as ‘psychogeographic literatures.’ I do not intend by my insistence on Situationist primacy within the psychogeographic tradition to convey the impression that psychogeography has remained frozen in time since its declared demise in 1961. Certainly important theoretical advances have been made, in part driven by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ generating renewed interest in urban thinking. In France, Henri Lefebvre would be the main torchbearer of radical urbanism and everyday life for many years after the Situationists abandoned the subject. Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec would expand on the debanalizing tactic of “reading and writing” the city, tapping into the same radical-romantic sensibility that drove the dérive. Meanwhile, Anglo-American theorists like David Harvey and Andy Merrifield would carry Lefebvre’s thought across the ocean to a new audience and still others, like Frederick Jameson and Edward Soja, would reconceptualize space through a postmodern prism, in ways that reverberated in the use of psycheogeography in site-specific and ambulatory art. Thus, in the next chapter, I will explore how post-Situationist spatial theory built on psychogeographic insights, and how new theories impacted psychogeography’s diverse contemporary landscape. ! 29 ! Chapter 2 Beyond Psychogeography: Post-Situationist Spatial Theories Situationist psychogeography fulfilled its political and critical functions within the context of a broader corpus of Situationist ideas. Although it was a playful practice, sometimes undertaken as a lark under the spell of a late-night drinking affair, one could say that the dérive primarily served to survey urban space for ambiances and spaces that would be conducive to other Situationist tactics, such as détournement or the construction of situations. A psychogeographic ambiance was not merely the result of urban planning and architecture: the Situationists had a particular interest in those ‘soft’ factors that constituted the urban experience, like noises and smells, the non-alienated human activities playing out on the streets, and so on. In Situationist thought, then, the city was not approached as a stable landscape of architectural configurations, but rather as a social process that was continually reproduced and in which interventions could be staged at critical points, so as to divert its flows against the Spectacular interest. For the Situationist view of the city as at least partially a product of its inhabitants’ urban practices, an important inspiration was the work of Henri Lefebvre, whose interest in questions of urban space, everyday life, and revolutionary praxis both predated and outlasted the Situationists’. While never a member of the Situationist International, Lefebvre gravitated nevertheless for a long time in its orbit; and at between 1957 and 1961 he would be a “warm, intimate friend” of Debord’s, often spending nights with him and Bernstein drinking (“tequila with a little mescal”) and developing his thinking parallel to theirs. Sadler (1999: 44) goes so far as to argue that Lefebvre’s work was “so seamlessly assimilated by situationism, and vice versa, that for the purposes of this discussion it is hardly possible or useful to distinguish the two,” although that conflation is contestable (Brown 2011). At any rate, relations soured – a recurring pattern in Debord’s friendships – in the early 1960s. Some twenty years later Lefebvre would wistfully speak of the Situationists as “a delicate subject, one I care very deeply about… In the end, it was a love story that ended very, very badly.” (Lefebvre 1997) Lefebvre’s writings throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially the second volume of the Critique of Everyday Life (1961) as well as Introduction to Modernity (1962), reveal a panoply of shared theoretical interests with the Situationists. They found a mutual inspiration ! 30 ! in the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, whose Homo Ludens (1938) had posited play and playfulness as the foundation of culture. Permanent play was core to the Situationist ethos – where it could be found in the “playful-constructive behavior” of the dérive and the cheek of détournement – but also to Lefebvre’s notion of the fête, the festive, as a radical rejection of capitalist social relations, arising from, and yet transcending, everyday life. The fête, the premodern town festival, was, for Lefebvre, “the eminent use of the city” (1996: 66): a total expenditure of surplus, a potlatch eluding all productive logic, in which everyone may participate. The festival unfetters the city from the dominance of exchange value and resembles in that sense a revolution; and in fact, Lefebvre would propose, the Paris Commune and the later events of May 68 should be viewed exactly in that light. Festival, however, was but one type (if, perhaps, on the largest historical scale) of moment – a concept that was intimately close to the Situationist situation, yet differed on important nuances. For one, Lefebvre was skeptical about the possibility of ‘constructed’ situations, which relied on the spontaneous and willing involvement of unwitting participants. The “moment”, on the other hand, relies on some degree of planning and ritual to come into being. (Wark 2011: 93-108) Consequently, the moment in its original conceptualization emphasizes the temporal over the spatial: moments crystallize over time out of everyday life, and may include besides the fête such diverse elements as love, poetry, play, and political conflict. What defines the moment is “the attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility,” the pursuit of a non-alienated form to its full unfolding. (Lefebvre 1991b: 348) Such opportunities, then, could be grasped to reclaim everyday life from its encroaching colonization by the commodity form. Everyday life was at the heart of Lefebvre’s Marxist project: “To change the world is above all to change the way everyday, real life is lived.” (1991b: 35) It was everyday life – that residue which remains once all specialized activity is removed from view – which he to be “defined as a totality,” encompassing all activities and “…relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc.” (ibid. 97) This definition, drawing on the early Marx, Lukács, and Benjamin, allowed Lefebvre as well as the Situationist International to posit a microlevel of culture as a fertile ground from which a revolutionary subjectivity could emerge. For the Situationists, the praxis that could facilitate ! 31 ! that emergence – dérive, détournement, situation-construction – was generally more explicitly urban and spatial than for Lefebvre, at least originally. But the Situationists had Lefebvre to thank for theorizing the “frontier between dominated and undominated sectors of life,” (Debord 1961: 52) that final vestige from which the all-consuming Spectacle could be resisted. Lefebvre dabbled little in psychogeography himself; some thirty years older than Debord and an established professor by the time of the S.I.’s formation, he never wholeheartedly shared the Situationists’ enthusiasm for pranks and property defacement. In the waning years of their friendship, Lefebvre would describe Debord’s group as a “youth movement,” proponents of “a new romanticism” (1962, Prelude XII) that he himself could not fully underwrite. Thus the psychogeographic drift, with its aleatory aspects, its affectionate embrace of marginal characters and consciousness-altering drugs, and its playful disregard of public decency probably did not appeal much to Lefebvre’s bucolic sensibility. But perhaps the reasons for his abstinence went further; Lefebvre was always as deeply interested in temporality as he was in space. Rather than a dériviste, Lefebvre (like Bachelard before him) preferred to style himself a rhythmanalyst, an observer uniquely sensitive to the rhythms of nature, the body, and street life. That sensitivity seemed to him suited to resisting the alienation of the Spectacle in a similar way to the dérive. One can look to Lefebvre’s posthumously published essay on rhythmanalysis in Paris for an impression of this equally obscure discipline, the temporal twin sister to the Situationists’ spatial phenomenology: “Sometimes, the old cars stall in the middle of the road and the pedestrians move around them like waves around a rock, though not without condemning the drivers of the badly placed vehicles with withering looks. Hard rhythms: alternations of silence and outburst, time both broken and accentuated, striking he who takes to listening from his window, which astonishes him more than the disparate movements of the crowds...” (Lefebvre, “Seen from the Window”, 1992) The Urban Semioticians: Barthes, Perec, and de Certeau ! 32 ! Lefebvre’s theorization of everyday life and its spatial practices took a slow amble across the pond, reaching the Anglo academic world only with the published translation of The Social Production of Space in 1974. Even then, it arrived in a fragmented fashion: Marxists like David Harvey engaged with Lefebvre’s work primarily through the lens of human geography, emphasizing the capitalist production and accumulation of urban space over the ‘everyday’ practices that could constitute a mode of resistance to it. In France, however, Lefebvre’s notion of the everyday inspired significant and loosely psychogeographic writing by a number of authors, the most important among which are the (post-)structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes, novelist Georges Perec and theorist Michel de Certeau. Perec, a friend of Lefebvre’s best known for his experimental ‘constrained’ writing as a member of the OuLiPo (Workshop of Potential Literature) group, engaged with everyday life and psychogeography in several his works. In his Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, Perec ‘embarks’ on a “static dérive” (see Debord 1958a) at Place Saint-Sulpice, a ‘unity of ambiance’ invariably included on Situationist maps. He then returns to the same terrace for three subsequent days while exhaustively describing the goings-on, ranging from the constant circulation of buses to the dress of the pedestrians and the signs that could be read on the surrounding buildings. In Species of Spaces (1974), a precursor to his best known novel Life: a User’s Manual, Perec playfully examines the spaces we inhabit, ranging from the domestic sphere to the universe as a whole, while traversing streets, small towns, cities, and the countryside. In these short chapters Perec notes the various infraordinary qualities of these environments, their “…everydayness that requires a kind of quixotic or excessive attention,” (Highmore 2002: 176) rather elegantly describing the drifter’s sensibility. Like in Perec’s case, the relevance of the work of Roland Barthes to psychogeography and related fields like critical urban studies rarely receives much consideration. The connection was suggested to me by Tina Richardson, who provocatively termed him a “closet psychogeographer.” Not only may we consider Barthes’ text on urban semiology (1967) a precursor to Michel de Certeau’s (see below) later linguistic theories of pedestrian signification, but in addition, Barthes developed a way to analyze architecture’s ‘mythological’ charge. That is to say, for Barthes, the urban landscape can be a type of ‘speech’ on two levels: not only can a built form (signifier) communicate a signified (say, a Hausmannian apartment building) – but beyond that, it may function on the level of myth as a magical object calling ! 33 ! attention to itself, “interpellating” (1972: 124) the urban stroller and demanding the recognition of “the body of intentions which have motivated it and arranged it there as the signal of an individual history, as a confidence and a complicity.” (123) This mode of mythological analysis could be deployed by psychogeographers to explore the connections between, on the mythical level, the city’s ideological functioning and, on the level of language- object, the corresponding aesthetic effects upon the ambulant subject. Barthes’ work on urban semiology in several ways prefigures the writing of Michel de Certeau, whose two-volume The Practice of Everyday Life presents a complex theory of urban semiotics. De Certeau was strongly influenced by Lefebvre’s Critique, which he described as “a fundamental source” for his book (1984: 206), as well as by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which explores the emergence of space and architecture as disciplinary tools in the seventeenth century. Lefebvre understands the social production of space as a ‘trialectical’ process involving, first, ideologies or “representations of space;” second, the lived space of everyday life or “representational space;” and third, the molecular spatial practices of dwellers and pedestrians. De Certeau’s framework, in contrast, is binary, positing the view from above – the “celestial eye” (92) as can be seen on maps or from the top of a skyscraper – as an “exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive,” a dangerous “erotics of knowledge,” in opposition to a the everyday trajectories of walkers and their everyday spatial tactics. The top-down voyeurism of urbanistic ideology may be then opposed by a bottom-up rebellion of pedestrians, whose everyday spatial practices are a form of popular resistance. De Certeau views walking as “a pedestrian speech act,” which has its own rhetorics: “turns of phrase or stylistic figures, implying and combining styles implying and combining styles (individual - symbolics) and uses (collective – code) … The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them.) It creates shadows and ambiguities within them." (1984: 101). This semantic theory of walking, however, offers precious little in way of signposts towards a distinctive psychogeographic praxis; in a rather reductive fashion, all forms of individual walking are posited as inherently subversive to the totalizing and voyeurist forms of urbanism. In collapsing Lefebvre’s categories of representational space and spatial practices, de Certeau ends up viewing the consumption of Spectacular images and products as unproblematic, ! 34 ! arguing that such things as “talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking” (xix) could serve as a mode of antidisciplinary resistance merely by virtue of their molecular individuality, regardless of the ideological bearing of their content. This is one reason that, despite the frequent portrayal of Lefebvre and de Certeau as kindred spirits, Goonewardena argues that “de Certeau has little to do with either Lefebvre or Debord, given his deeply anti-Marxist and anti-totalizing view of history as much as everyday life.” (2008: 130-131) Learning from Los Angeles: the Spatial Turn and Psychogeography As I have noted, the Situationists had abandoned their work on unitary urbanism and psychogeography in 1961, citing the problematic of an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivities: “The sectors of a city are to some extent decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.” Lefebvre, however, in an interview with Kristin Ross, suggests a different cause of death, arguing that it was the transformation of urbanism itself that rendered the project obsolete. “[The Situationists] abandoned the theory of Unitary Urbanism, since Unitary Urbanism only had a precise meaning for historic cities, like Amsterdam, that had to be renewed, transformed. But from the moment that the historic city exploded into peripherics, suburbs -- like what happened in Paris, and in all sorts of places, Los Angeles, San Francisco, wild extensions of the city -- the theory of Unitary Urbanism lost any meaning.” (Lefebvre 1997) A Situationist psychogeography in its purest form, then – surveying cities for unities of ambiance available for détournement or the construction of situations – would be, according to this view, impossible in much of the United States. Certainly there are few better- documented examples of urbanism’s ideological tendencies than the symbiotic union of Los Angeles’ notoriously sweeping sprawl and the private automobile. In Lefebvre’s understanding, there would be little poetic or historical association to comprehend in such environments, contrary to the traditional towns and cities of Europe, which were secreted over the ages, as Lefebvre so elegantly puts it, like seashells around their mollusks. Thus, the difficulties facing unitary urbanism in America would inevitably raise the question of “how to reproduce what was once created spontaneously, how to create it from the abstract?” (1962: ! 35 ! 125) This is a question to which the answer would never materialize on the same urban scale on which it was posed. In the United States, the use of psychogeography would instead take the dual paths of architectural critique on the one hand, and theory of space on the other. In the ‘postmodern’ (or late modern) age of architecture emerging in the mid-1960s, architects like Venturi, Gehry, and Portman would begin to construct what the Situationists may have called “unities of ambiance” on a micro-scale, entirely insulated from the surrounding urban environment. Debord (1958a) already raises the possibility of a dérive in an apartment, citing a fictional construction of a helicoidal skyscraper with moving partitions in New York City. It is clear, however, that traditional architecture would not lend itself to the necessary level of disorientation for a dérive – and the rationalist megalomania of modernism could never meet with the Situationists’ approval, tainted as it was by Cartesian banality. With the rise of postmodern architecture and its unique spatial properties, however, the building would become an object of psychogeographical interest, leading to hybrid forms of walking and architectural critique. The most famous example of a dérive in architecture is Frederic Jameson’s analysis of the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles, which represents a meaningful if temporary turn away from historicism and towards spatiality as the dominant analytical category. Admittedly, it is somewhat inaccurate to term Jameson’s text a ‘drift’ of any kind – his bodily presence in the hotel is only hinted at, and there is not much walking going on either, as pedestrianism “has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine [namely, elevators and escalators] which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own.” (1998: 14) Jameson’s narration leads us from the “glass skin [which] repels the city outside” to the hotel’s lobby (where “it is quite impossible to get your bearings”) and finally to the balconies, whose utter lack of navigability poses a significant commercial challenge to the storeowners located on them. The entire hotel is presented as a maze of mirrors, a “postmodern hyperspace…transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and to map cognitively its position in a mappable external world.” This “alarming disjunction between the body and its built environment,” then, “can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma, which is the incapacity of our minds…to map the great global, multinational, and ! 36 ! decentred communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.” (16) Jameson’s exploration of the Bonaventure is reminiscent of the Marxist flânerie of Benjamin and Hessel fifty years earlier – treating ambulatory analysis not so much a mode of ‘playful-constructive behavior’ (as in the dérive) but rather as an ideological critique of late capitalist commodification, albeit here specifically aimed at a single architectural product. We must, however, acknowledge that critique was always one of the constituent parts of the dérive: after all, before a space could be détourned or improved in accordance with Situationist principles, it would first have to be established what was absent or deficient. The Bonaventure hotel clearly lacks all human scale, navigability, all relationality to the city surrounding it – this Jameson’s critique serves well to establish. The next step for psychogeographers would naturally consist in imagining another future for the hotel, a ‘program of rational improvements,’ but Jameson’s treatment of the space is brief and rapidly collapses back into the historicism with which he is more familiar.1 Nevertheless, his mode of architectural examination – tentative as it may have been – would become famously representative of a broader ‘spatial turn’ in cultural theory. The spatial turn denotes a period in the second half of the twentieth century during which the spatial emerged as a significant critical and analytical category in social and cultural theory. The shift posited spatiality as an equally important (or anyway, additionally important) analytical angle to temporality. After all, as Michel Foucault famously noted, “the great obsession of the nineteenth century…was history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.” (1984: 22) The traditional inclination to privilege time over space found expression in Marxist dialectics, some of the less sophisticated interpretations of which largely ignored the role played by space in the history of social arrangements. Spatiality would however return with a vengeance in post-structuralist thought, drawing primarily on Lefebvre’s work and Bachelard (1957) to reinstate space as a category of equal primacy to time. On the Continent, we may further consider Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, the later Heidegger, and 1 Jameson himself did not propose any; but a 1989 exhibition in Los Angeles would later suggest that the Bonaventure be merged with the Bastille prison in Paris (see Soja 1996: 196), which is the kind of deliriously incoherent proposal that the Situationists might have applauded. ! 37 ! Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as representative of this shift, along with thinkers like David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja in the Anglo sphere. It would take a whole book to trace their conceptions of spatiality individually in the detail that they deserve; for now let it suffice to say that, while none of these thinkers explicitly identifies as a psychogeographer or engages with the tradition beyond the occasional wink, the spatial turn would incorporate many of psychogeography’s basic tenets and generally serve to magnify the popularity of “intimate ethnography-geography of everyday life [as] exemplified best in the individual voice of the intensely localized flâneur,” sometimes to the exclusion of all broader, more holistic perspectives. (Soja 1996: 312-313) In critical urban studies, then, the spatial turn brought to bear the incorporation of a psychogeographic level of analysis and phenomenological method. This ‘recuperation’, however, also resulted in the loss of psychogeography’s ludic praxis, romantic reverie, and architectural utopianism. ! 38 ! The British Revival: Contemporary Psychogeographies a.! Occultism, Literature, and the Avant-Bard The Situationist International – both the core group around Debord and the breakaway Second Situationist International of Jørgen Nash and Jacqueline de Jong – had gradually crumbled and eventually dissolved in the early 1970s, as the revolutionary spirit of May 68 faded in the rear-view mirror and a decade far less tolerant to utopian thinking announced itself. While theoretical work on spatial phenomenology, architecture and urbanism continued, it tended to veer away from radical politics in favor of the kind of ‘recuperated’ theory that the Situationists considered tainted by the Spectacular institutions of the academe. For most of the 1960s and 70s it must be concluded that psychogeography lay dormant. Some psychogeographical games would emerge from the ‘zines of post-/pro-situ groups like King Mob, Here and Now, and Anti Clock Wise (Lee, 2017: 169); and a case could be made for JG Ballard’s ‘technological landscape’ novels, Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975). The dominant interpretation holds, however, that the true resurrection of psychogeography would come at the hands of Iain Sinclair, the necromancer and unquestioned ruler-priest of occult psychogeographic literature. Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) was the first of his works to deal extensively with the city, exploring in a mixture of poetry and prose the ‘ley lines’ underlying the six London churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The ley line is a concept proposed in 1921 by the self- taught archaeologist Alfred Watkins, who believed that the locations of British towns and landscape features was connected to certain very ancient straight lines across the landscape – trade routes or other “old straight tracks.” The idea would gradually become invested with a host of new-age undertones, especially at the hands of esotericist John Michell, leading to a polyvalent understanding of ley lines as prehistoric signposts for extraterrestrial visitors and as channels for the earth’s electromagnetic energy. Sinclair’s work (alongside that of his ‘conservative’ counterpart, Peter Ackroyd) builds on these and other new-age mythologies, founding an ‘occult’ psychogeographical tradition expressed primarily in neo-gothic literary explorations of London. However, while Sinclair doesn’t share the Situationists’ theoretical radicalism, he remains firmly on the political left, as demonstrated by his novel Downriver ! 39 ! (1991): the story is set in an authoritarian Britain ruled by “The Widow,” a literal witch quite unmistakably modeled after Margaret Thatcher. His most famous psychogeographic work is London Orbital, a massive non-fiction book and concomitant film depicting Sinclair’s walking and driving (respectively) around London’s M25 ring road while inscribing obscure literary references and arcane magical theories on the battered post-industrial landscape. Sinclair may have pioneered contemporary psychogeography’s engagement with magic and the occult, but he is far from alone in his use of the concept as an inspiration for his literary project. A comprehensive summary of British psychogeographical authors would, I fear, inevitably exhaust my readers’ patience – in addition to being redundant next to the ongoing efforts of Phil Smith (2015, 2016) towards the construction of an inclusive and ever- growing bibliography of psychogeography-inspired literature. I will note just three authors whose work is particularly noteworthy and frequently referenced. First there are the Savage Messiah ‘zines of Laura Oldfield Ford, which use the techniques of dérive and détournement to present a critique of capitalist urbanism. Each issue is set in a different part of London, where Oldfield Ford gathers urban vistas on dérives. She subsequently renders these sights in ballpoint and spray paint, supplementing them with found and détourned texts and images Second, Nick Papadimitriou is widely viewed as Britain’s leading writer on landscape: he specializes in the peripheries of London, where the desolate worlds of JG Ballard meet the untouched rural scenery of the English countryside. He identifies as a ‘deep topographer’ rather than a psychogeographer, with a specific focus on the poetics of the hyper-local, personal history, flora and fauna, the small and forgotten events that constitute a genius loci. Thirdly, if only for his contribution to psychogeography’s newfound ‘mainstream’ visibility, we must touch upon the writings of Will Self, who wrote a regular column on psychogeography in The Independent and later published a book by the same title. Although Self’s wanderings result in pointed portraits of place, they are frequently divorced of any explicit political project or deliberate technique, leading them to have been only reluctantly embraced by those aiming to defend psychogeography’s theoretical legitimacy. Dabbling liberally in obscurantism yet much closer to the Situationist conception of psychogeography is the work of Stewart Home, an English radical artist-filmmaker-writer whose ‘avant-bardism’ satirizes both new age/occult conspiracies and the extravagant rhetoric of the Situationist International. Home argues that “while occultists spend a great deal of time ! 40 ! faking the antiquity of the activities in which they are engaged, the avant-garde’s insistence on the element of innovation within its creations leads to a spurious denial of its historic roots…By bringing together the avant-garde and the occult (in its Celtic-Druidic form) under the rubric of the avant-bard, the Neoist Alliance is dissolving both these phenomena, and simultaneously destroying the false community engendered by capitalist social relations …” (Home 1997: 149) Home’s psychogeographic style is a hodgepodge of punk zine aesthetics, ultra-left militancy, détournement, and relentless satire of all bourgeois culture. His brief membership of the Neoist movement in 1984 – an avant-garde mashup of Dada, surrealism, Situationist thought, Fluxus, and Mail Art – would inspire Home to found his own Neoist Alliance, which was active on the psychogeography scene between 1994 and 1999. Throughout those years, Home – alongside his “fellow travelers…Richard Essex, Fabian Tompsett, and Tom Vague” (Coverley 2008: 129) – would found a wide variety of ‘groups’, such as the revived London Psychogeographical Association, the Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture, the Luther Blissett project in Italy and the Association of Anonymous Astronauts. Home and Tompsett (who resurrected Ralph Rumney’s LPA) also moved to found a New Lettrist International, which appears not to have published much of anything beyond its rather flimsy original program proposal. As Home would later acknowledge, “most of these 'organisations' only exist on paper, they don't have any members - just a stream of publications issued by one or more individuals. Thus these 'groups' can be viewed as parodying debates about organisation initiated by both Marxists and anarchists.” (1998: n.p.) An example of a Neoist tactic was “Decadent Action,” a parodic activist cause which sought to destabilize the capitalist system through collective insolvency, to be achieved by a sort of mass potlatch of credit-card spending on useless luxury goods. Home also made frequent use of collective pseudonyms such as Luther Blissett, under which an unknown number of ‘cultural terrorists’ published pamphlets and engaged in psychogeographic pursuits, notably pranking a prime-time show on Italian state television. The non-state and non-corporate construction of space-ships through the Association of Autonomous Astronauts and the organization of three-sided football matches, a game invented by Asger Jorn, were also among Home’s endeavors. Neoist psychogeography represents a sort of détournement of both Sinclairean occultist and Situationist antispectacular psychogeography at once; it eludes ! 41 ! the materialist-occultist binary with the singular effect of turning everything into a ridiculous game. Who exactly was involved in Home’s many projects is exceedingly difficult to retrace, due to the prodigious use of deception as an inherent part of his practices; nevertheless, the use of psychogeography as a means of ideological sabotage took on new heights under his (and his accomplices’, to the extent that they existed) auspices. b.! Materialist Psychogeography In addition to those authors who have incorporated the occult as a productive element of psychogeographical praxis – or at the very least something that could be détourned to subversive effect – one may find a parallel tradition of what I will call “materialist” psychogeography. Its proponents, generally employed in academia or otherwise connected to it, have sought to preserve psychogeography’s political potency and/or the theoretical integrity of its philosophical roots against the encroaching expansion (or ‘watering down’) of the term. Illustrative of this project is the Materialist Psychogeography Affiliation, a group founded by Steve Hanson and Mark Rainey which was active in the UK between 2007 and 2011. Their founding manifesto presents the materialist psychogeographical project in a particularly succinct manner: 1. Psychogeography must be a platform for social critique; 2. Psychogeography must inspire a new creative production. The extent to which psychogeography strays from these two points is the extent to which it loses its relevance.” (Rainey in MPA 2, 2007: 2) Materialist psychogeography explicitly rejects the mysticism (or “magico-marxism”) of Sinclair as well as earlier occultist-friendly authors as Watkins. Contrary to the groups revolving around Stewart Home, which would gather in Manchester to levitate the Corn Exchange or walk pentagrams between London churches, the MPA did not view the occult as a potential object of productive détournement. On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Situationist International, the MPA organized a mass survey of Caffé Nero (a British ! 42 ! Starbucks clone) establishments in Manchester, exploring the spatial practices, the organization of the interior, the social capital and bodies of the visitors, and so on. To this brand of psychogeographical praxis one could easily object, as Phil Smith has, that the MPA’s determination to exorcise the occult from the body of psychogeography has tended to result in a “dull algorithm and an unremarkable localist reformism.” (2015: 42) Certainly not all materialist psychogeograpy could be accused of such blandness, however. For the last decade, the torch of materialist psychogeographical activism has been carried by “anarcho-flâneuse” Morag Rose and her Loiterers’ Resistance Movement. The LRM have pursued radical critiques of separation and urban exclusion through monthly dérives, gradually developing into something of a mobile fixture on the Manchester streets – a legacy recently celebrated with an exhibition and festival in the People’s History Museum. Rather than occult histories or avant-garde ludibria, the LRM has emphasized ambulatory resistance against the privatization of public space – in Lefebvre’s words, defending the ‘right to the city’ – as well as exploring issues of gender and (dis)ability through psychogeographic praxis. A theoretically highly sophisticated proponent of materialist psychogeography today is Tina Richardson, whose volume Walking Inside Out (2015) presents an excellent anthology of the various literary, theoretical, and artistic forms of psychogeography in contemporary Britain. Richardson’s own psychogeographic methodology, termed “schizocartography,” builds on the work of Harvey, Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi to “[challenge] authoritative arrangements and [offer] a process for remodeling their structures not only to suit multiplicity but also to reflect a social history that may be counter to the dominant one.” (2015: 132) Schizocartography is thus a means of criticizing neoliberal, hegemonic spaces (Richardson’s subjects of choice appear to be Britain’s increasingly corporatized college campuses) by “reveal[ing] the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression.” (181) Richardson’s psychogeography is clad in an explicitly poststructuralist guise: walking becomes a transversal act, “a particular form of communication that forms a bridge that takes unconventional routes between systems.” Thus, in what Richardson terms “the new psychogeography,” of which schizocartography is only one example, walking itself is no longer merely a means of urban ! 43 ! scrutiny in the service of situation-construction. Rather, it has evolved into a radical act with the capacity to transform the practitioner’s relationship to space. This conceptual permutation was already visible in Michel de Certeau, however hampered by the “structuralist passivity of [his] everyday tactics.” (Smith 2015: 25). Today, the diffuse and heterogeneous approaches used in the (performing) arts are in the process of discplacing to an increasing degree the occult/avant-bardic style of the 1990s. It is to these walking arts, pioneered by the Wrights and Sites collective in the mid-2000s, that we will now turn. c.! Mythogeography and the Walking Arts Founded in 1997, Wrights and Sites is a group of four UK-based artists and researchers, whose initial focus on site-specific performance gradually evolved towards Lettrist/Situationist-inspired walking practices. The collective is noteworthy for its serious theoretical engagement with the dérive: it has brought forth a wealth of sophisticated writing on the links between psychogeography on the one hand and site-specific and ambulatory arts on the other. Arguably the most significant strategic shift in early 21st century psychogeography lies in their productive reconceptualization of the dérive and the situation: Wrights and Sites “attacked the usual functionalist role of the dérive, a gathering of information about affordant spaces in order to make ‘situations’ (…).” (Smith 2015: 25) Moving beyond Debord’s conception of psychogeography, in what Wrights and Sites have termed the situational dérive, the walk itself becomes the situation: rather than deferring the moment in which the revolutionary potential of everyday life at last presents itself, the situational dérive becomes a reservoir of what de Certeau might have called pedestrian tactics – divorced, however, from his opaque rhetorical approach to walking. The significance of this movement is not to be underestimated, for it enabled a cross- fertilization between the concepts of the Situationists and a wide variety of performative walking practices. The ‘situation’ was no longer expected to arise as a spontaneous mass performance – which, given the poverty of actual situations that the Situationists managed to inspire, was clearly a problematic demand. Instead, a ‘situational dérive’ may be a choreographed walk, which draws participants and bystanders into consciousness of everyday life’s radical potential; or it may be an open-ended drift, with the aim of re-inscribing a ! 44 ! multiplicity of trajectories and sited identities onto a space. In the first instance, the terrain of psychogeography expands to encompass an abundance of ambulatory practices, including those with no explicit Situationist theoretical grounding. In the second, the drift is rendered a means of individual ‘psychic’ struggle to subvert the monolithic, restricted sign systems of the Spectacle through the projection of “multiple and variegated narratives: personal associations, histories of signage, geology, crime statistics, dreams, mistakes, micropalaeontology and misspelling…” (Smith 2010a: 119) The situational dérive became the primary technique of what Smith (2010b) has termed mythogeography: “a detailed and accumulative practice of dérive – [which is] about a meshing of geographical spaces, and their ghostly bathing in cultural motion pictures, about the geometrical connectivity of a fragmented self, the integrity of which is constantly modulated by neurological research, critical theory, and speculations about consciousness and transmission, and about direct experience of the unplanned route.” (120) In its reformulation as mythogeography (or, more frequently, walking arts or radical walking), psychogeographical practice is at last emancipated from some of the most pressing limitations of Situationist theory – its failure to grapple with questions of identity, intersubjectivity, and the instrumentality of the dérive, problems which arose from the methodological ambiguity of Situationist psychogeography as well as Debord’s dominant personality. The theoretical advances made in the early 21st century have led to a renewed emphasis on the importance of inclusive forms of psychogeography – after all a tradition which has, at times, been myopic in its insistence on reproducing Situationist discourse and the corollary masculinist drifter mythology. The Situationist dérive was, as we know, ideally practiced alone or in very small groups (Debord 1957a) and inclined to privilege ‘marginal’ spaces of the city, with a certain callous disregard for the dangers this posed to especially women and less mobile practitioners. Reformulating the practice as a ‘situational’ walking arts, open to spectators and participants without prior theoretical knowledge, has allowed for psychogeography to overcome some of this problematic legacy. One needs only to look at the Walking Artists Network – an informal association of several hundreds of ambulatory practitioners, many of them women – to observe the beneficial effects. Whereas Situationist and Sinclairean psychogeographies at times betray traces of deep-rooted sexist and colonialist habits, the contemporary walking arts are increasingly sensitive to the issue and have taken ! 45 ! significant strides in reframing these origins in more open ways. In the next chapter, I will look at the problems psychogeography has experienced concerning gender, race, and (dis)ability and point toward some of the unfurling paths that may lead to a yet more inclusive praxis. ! 46 ! Chapter 3 Strolling in Solidarity: Steps towards an Inclusive Psychogeography When we walk, we always walk as embodied subjects: our experience of the streets is impacted by the abilities, limitations, and the reception of our bodies. It is hardly controversial to say that any given city may induce rather different psychogeographical affects for men and women, for athletes and people in wheelchairs, for black and white people. The body is the smallest spatiality, and an inescapable one: we bring it along wherever we go. As such, an awareness of one’s own “situation” – in the sense of the restrictions and privileges that circumscribe one’s embodied subjectivity – are of great significance to psychogeography: it would be fruitless to speak about the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual effects of an environment while erasing the subject who actually experiences, mediates, and transforms them. When the Situationists abandoned psychogeographical methods out of frustration with the incommunicability of their observations and “the secrecy of private life in general” (Debord 1961), was it not a failure of imagination to treat their own subjectivity as an isolating idiosyncrasy, rather than a potential source of political solidarity? Thus, I would suggest – along with many feminist psychogeographers – that a politically relevant psychogeography must proceed with an awareness of the ways in which our bodies are territorialized and affected by power. Moreover, as spatial theorist Doreen Massey has argued, we must consider any space under investigation to be at least partially constituted by the relationships between its dwellers. Space is not a neutral given to be conquered or explored by the psychogeographer – rather, the psychogeographer is always implicated in the construction of a place as a “sphere of relations” (2005: 147). The consequences for psychogeography of this shift are significant, for the political value of space can no longer be reduced merely to its degree of Spectacular contamination: the psychogeographer’s embodied experience and her relationships the wider society become both an object of critique and a tool for the construction of ‘situational dérives’ or performances. Of Flâneuses and Loiterers: Feminist Psychogeography ! 47 ! The history of women’s walking in the European capitals of the dérive is, unfortunately, fraught with difficulties. When the flâneur first rose to notoriety in the feuilletons of the 1830s and 1840s, his masculinity was so self-evident that it warranted no further discussion; women of the classes whose financial comfort allowed for the leisurely pursuit of flânerie would be regarded with suspicion were they to appear on the streets alone and without manifest purpose. As Janet Wolff (1990: 58) argues, a flâneuse was a social impossibility at the time: “anonymity in the city…the possibility of unmolested strolling and observation…were entirely the privilege of men. (…) The public world of work, city life, bars, and cafés was barred to the respectable woman…” The only women to whom such a world was somewhat accessible at all, Elizabeth Wilson suggests, were prostitutes: “perhaps [they] were even the working-class flâneuses, since they were often represented as the female equivalent of the flâneur, just as the grisette was the counterpart to the bohemian.” (2000: 85) But this reading too, Wilson acknowledges, is problematic: ‘working girls’ never had the same freedom in the city as the male flâneur, since they were barred from many ‘respectable’ establishments; their movements, as well as the territories where they worked, were tightly circumscribed. Although the twentieth century brought women more liberty to stroll the streets when it pleased them, the flâneuse’s association with the prostitute would prove tenacious. The eponymous character in André Breton’s Nadja is also a prostitute, whom the male narrator stalks through the city, alternating his descriptions of her features with those of Paris. Walter Benjamin, who saw the metropolis as the prime site of late capitalist commodification, also noted the (sexual) commodification of women – although, as Susan Buck-Morss suggests (1986), Benjamin inadvertently objectifies them and, “in emphasizing the ‘heroism’ of ‘unnatural’ types of womanhood, he surrounds them with the isolating aura of bourgeois tragedy.” (Wilson 2000, 85) The Situationists, if anything, fared worse: Ralph Rumney called the group “extraordinarily anti-feminist in its practice. Women were there to type, cook supper, and so on.” (in Bridger 2013: 288) As another example, in their Memoires, Jorn and Debord indulgently compare the city to a woman’s body, whose chopped up and reconfigured parts they consider “moving accidents,” reducing the female body to shapes from which an agreeable figure can be constructed at will. Debord was also oddly captivated by the mythology surrounding Jack the Ripper, whom he called “psychogeographical in love,” ! 48 ! apparently comparing the dériviste’s relationship to the city to a violent rapist’s stalking his victims. (Sadler 1998, 80) Fortunately, attention to feminist issues has been on the rise in the field of psychogeography. Lauren Elkin’s monograph Flâneuse (2016) explores urban walking from a female perspective, through the eyes of artists and writers across the globe. In Spain, groups like Precarias a la Deriva and Grup de Lesbianes Feministas have used Situationist techniques like the dérive and street theatre in order to challenge sexist policy and the privatization of public space. (Bridger, 2013) I have already noted the prominence of Tina Richardson and Laura Oldfield Ford in contemporary British psychogeography. The Loiterers’ Resistance Movement led by Morag Rose, too, displays an acute awareness of the effects of gender and (dis)ability during their drifts; and Phil Smith (2014) has written sharply on psychogeography’s latent masculinist ideology and women’s contributions to the contemporary walking arts, suggesting that male writers’ laments of a supposed lack of women’s participation in the field are not only inaccurate, but above all a sordid excuse for their failure to move beyond the traditional genealogy of old farts. While progress has thus undeniably been made, psychogeography may not have fully overcome the endless parade of phalluses in its roots. Will Self has (in my experience painfully accurately) described the community as a “fraternity [of] middle aged men in Gore- Tex…prostates swell[ing] as we crunch over broken glass, behind the defunct brewery on the outskirts of town.” (in Elkin 2016: 19) As a consequence of the gender imbalance in the scene, the city in psychogeographical writing frequently “appears as something feminine, passively there for the taking, a wilderness-like space of adventure to be conquered or possessed.” (Bassett 2004: 403) Laura Oldfield Ford has raised similar concerns, claiming that “a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot… I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different from theirs.” (in Richardson 2015: 15) Moving beyond psychogeography’s masculinist and colonialist biases and towards a positive and feminist practice will require a refusal to reproduce the traditional clichés and an active subversion of our conceptions of what “men’s walking” and “women’s walking” would look like. Helen Scalway (2008) is one female psychogeographer who has engaged with this question. In her essay “The Contemporary Flâneuse,” she explores the difference between ! 49 ! masculine and feminine modulations of the drift. Women walkers, Scalway argues, are trapped in a binary that reduces them either to consumers (the very innovation that opened public space to solitary women was, after all, the department store) or prey, at all times potential victims of male violence. To walk the city as a woman is to experience a profound gendered alienation: “Banks, financial institutions, museums, monuments. These embody dreams - overwhelmingly in the masculine - uttering in brick, stone and glass, the ideas, desires, meanings of successive generations of clients who could command or negotiate built expressions of their power and desire.” (168) How are the feminine gaze and gait different from their masculine counterparts? Without falling into essentialism, Scalway presents a compelling walking practice in the feminine, emphasizing the visual caress over the controlling gaze, foregoing urban conquest for a tacit and fragmentary knowledge. For Scalway, drifting in the feminine mode is not only modulated by gendered alienation and risk, but also by certain privileges: a woman, herself less quickly perceived as a potential threat, may find herself more free, if she dares, to engage fellow pedestrians, photograph them, destabilize the bubbles of their private space. “Walking Women”, by Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner (2012) is another important contribution to feminist psychogeography, as it explores the fault lines between the traditional masculinist psychogeographical tradition and contemporary women’s walking. Heddon and Turner point out that the dual roots of psychogeographic walking (in Romanticism and the avant-garde) implicitly presume historically masculine privileges of security and freedom from any domestic demands. “Irrespective of historical and geographical location, two related imperatives recur: seek out adventure, danger, and the new…and Breton’s command to ‘Leave everything’ – including Dada, wife, mistress, children, and ‘easy life.’” (225-226) This ‘heroic’ narrative of psychogeography thus marginalizes a great deal of walking that is concerned more with questions of community, intimacy, relationality; issues, in short, that are traditionally coded as feminine. This leads the authors to conclude that the celebrated detachment of psychogeography from the social realm implicates an unfortunate refusal “to recognize or take any responsibility in its implication in the construction of asymmetric power relations.” (228) A feminist psychogeography, they suggest, should aim to restore awareness of these relations and their impact upon walkers’ experience. ! 50 ! Thus, the first faultline raised by Heddon and Turner concerns the question of relationality. Unlike the solitary drifter of lore leaving everything behind, many women artists have made personal human connections into a core aspect of their practice. Elspeth Owen, who embarks on long-distance, cross-country walks to deliver messages from one person to another on foot, is an example of a practitioner who blurs the binaries between the epic and the intimate, the call of the wild and the everyday significance of the domestic. Turner herself, in a project with Wrights and Sites, attempted a drift with her newborn baby within her own house in 2006. These are practices betray a Masseyian understanding of spatiality as a web of relations, rather than a singular (outbound) trajectory, and they “encourage us to consider the ‘relational politics of the spatial’, as the artists engage and examine spatial relations, including their own position within those relationships.” (235) Thus, the asymmetric power relations between gendered subjects not only impact women’s experience of space in a direct way (for example, being whistled at while out on a stroll); but they also impact our cultural conceptions of space, and which spaces we generally find suitable for men’s and women’s walking. Heddon and Turner cite Susan Stewart’s study of the ideological coding of scale (1993), which suggests that the miniature (the local) is frequently superimposed with the domestic, cultural; whereas the gigantic (the wild) carries connotations of infinity, the public, the natural. Both these codings are, of course, gendered and differently valued: psychogeography has tended to discard the local and habitual in favor of heroic ourdoors adventures. This gendered ideology of scale is not only harmful to woman walkers, whose traditionally assigned ways of dwelling and wandering have become historically marginalized; the perceived unsuitability of the “wild” to women walkers is also at least partially linked to a dominant and oppressive cultural narrative of uncontrolled predatory masculinity. Crucially, then, feminist psychogeography would seek to resist the temptation to glorify a “greater scale of heroism for the woman walker” (229), instead aiming to reframe the outdoors as a space equally safe for women as for men. Reinscribing the gender relations that underpin particular spaces – in this case, the tension between predatory masculinity and victimized femininity that acts as a constitutive element of our cultural conceptions of the great outdoors – could be one of the projects that feminist psychogeography sets for itself. ! 51 ! The March of the White Walkers: Psychogeography and Race The observant reader will have noticed that the history of psychogeography narrated above is an almost exclusively Western and white one. The canon of radical walking is indeed painfully and problematically homogeneous. While the flâneur was first spotted in Paris and in the twentieth century became something of a buzzword in Anglo cultural studies, it has proven near impossible to find (translated) work on flânerie originating from the Asian, African, or South American continents. I have only been able to locate two exceptions. Indian novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri has commented on the flâneur, arguing that this supposed mobile embodiment of European modernity was never exclusively Parisian or Western but widely present in Calcutta as well. (2008: 57-69) In Africa, Heather Acott has suggested, the suave, cosmopolitan journalist Nat Nakasa, writing in Johannesburg in the late 1950s until his exile in 1964, had every appearance of a flâneur easily sliding back and forth between the city’s white and black districts, describing their goings-on as an “allegorist, narrator, and fabricator.” (2009: 10) These contributions aside, for a topic as trendy as the flâneur, this is doubtlessly a disappointing haul. Psychogeography, at least its practice, is more widespread: Denis Wood (2010: 175) claims that “almost no country in North America, South America, or Europe is without its affiliation…and there are active psychogeographical cells in Japan, China, Australia, and elsewhere in Asia.” When it comes to published work beyond the blogosphere, however, the landscape remains barren, and the Paris-London axis nearly inescapable. Why do we have so few non-Western flâneurs and psychogeographers to celebrate here? I can only make an educated guess as to the problem. On the one hand, perhaps practitioners outside of the European cities would have been less familiar with the mythology of these traditions, as produced by Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Situationists. Thus, when non-Western authors and wanderers engaged with the city, their alienation from the theoretical discourse may well have resulted in their exclusion from the debate altogether. Many potential flâneurs and psychogeographers furthermore may have suffered from never having been translated; unfortunately, publication in English or French was (and essentially remains) a prerequisite for consideration in the psychogeographical canon. The author of the work you are currently reading is, unfortunately, not exempt from this shortcoming: I can ! 52 ! take no further steps towards revealing the obscured walkers of world literature. The second reason as to why non-Western psychogeographical work is scarce, I would propose, may have something to do with the particular urban backdrop to 20th century psychogeography. As I’ve noted before, Henri Lefebvre pointed out in a 1983 interview with Kirstin Ross that the Situationists abandoned psychogeography in the early 1960s, precisely when suburbanization began to transform Paris from a traditional European city to a massive global metropolis. To the Situationists, Lefebvre suggests, it is this acceleration of fragmentation and separation of the city that may have led to their abandoning the dérive: the emphasis shifted from envisioning a new unitary urbanism to the condemning of all urbanism as bourgeois ideology. Cities in the developing world have frequently seen an accelerated version of Paris’ development in the last century: many a traditional town center has been entirely erased by the ‘creative destruction’ of globalized capital, speculation and development. Is it possible that these urban landscapes beset by separation and laissez-faire expansionism are simply unsuited to psychogeography? As a counterpoint, there are certainly authors and filmmakers in the field, like Iain Sinclair, JG Ballard, and Patrick Keiller (known for his Robinson film trilogy), who have produced stimulating psychogeographical material even in the soulless industrial borderlands of London’s M25 orbital motorway. There seems to be no insurmountable reason why a set of eyes of similar acuity could not do so in the outskirts of Shenzhen. And yet a disproportionate amount of psychogeographical writing continues to emerge from London alone, and other old European cities to a lesser extent. Are there historical reasons why non-Western authors are underrepresented in the field? For one, the Situationists’ history concerning issues of race and colonialism has recently been a point of fierce debate, sparked by an incendiary 2015 article by Andrea Gibbons in Salvage Magazine which condemns what she perceives as the group’s “failure to confront race and colonialism,” especially with reference to the fate of Abdelhafid Khatib. A member of the Situationists’ Algerian faction, Khattib authored a psychogeographic exploration of Les Halles – the indoor wholesale market of Paris, demolished in 1971 to make room for an underground shopping mall – and thereby became responsible for perhaps the sole sober and sincere Situationist effort to rigorously document a dérive. Unfortunately, Khattib never managed to complete his survey: a curfew imposed on Arab citizens in the context of the NLF riots in August 1958 led the situationists’ sole psychogeographer-of-color to suffer repeated arrests ! 53 ! and police harassment. It is in this context that Khatib’s report includes an editorial note excusing the psychogeographical study’s “incompleteness on several counts.” (I.S. 2, Dec 1958) Gibbons censures the Situationists’ response to these events, arguing that the group failed to reconsider psychogeography in light of the specific challenges to colonial subjects and in fact was very little concerned with the Algerian war at all, a failure that, she writes bitterly, “tastes…of betrayal.” It is true that the Situationist International wrote basically nothing at all on the impact of racial difference and colonial power relations on psychogeography specifically. However, Gibbons’ broad condemnation of the S.I. as displaying insufficient solidarity with the Algerians in the tumultuous years of the War of Independence has been characterized by Anthony Hayes (2016) as rooted in shoddy scholarship, resting on inaccurate dating and ignorance of the contributions of Algerian Situationists like Mustapha Khayati. Significantly, Hayes points out, Gibbons completely misunderstands Debord’s and Bernstein’s signing of the Declaration on the Right to Subordination in the Algerian War (1960), not only dating it some two years later than it was published, but also failing to appreciate its “extremely controversial [reputation] in French public life.” (5) Hayes further digs up a later (1962) Situationist communiqué condemning the cover-up by the French Communist Party of the massacre of Algerian citizens in 1961. All in all, while the Situationists never incorporated an understanding of race and colonialism into their psychogeographical work, the accusation of indifference to the broad issues of racism and colonial oppression would be misplaced. Today, the problem of psychogeography’s eurocentrism remains to a large extent unresolved, in practice as much as in theory. My own group dérives in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have been overwhelmingly populated by Self’s posses of swelling prostates. Meanwhile, scholarly work on black and indigenous space has been more diverse, ranging from the postcolonially inflected spatial theory of bell hooks (1990), black literary geographies, ethnic sociology, and counter-cartographies (e.g. Peluso, 1995). Such accounts are certainly valuable in understanding the challenges non-white subjects face in urban (and rural) life, but they frequently lack the specific attention to urban aesthetics and the micro- politics of everyday life that set psychogeography apart. An exception worth emphasizing here is the work of Garnette Cadogan, whose excellent essay “Walking While Black” (2015) explores the joys and dangers of urban pedestrianism as a black man. His forthcoming book ! 54 ! on walking (t.b.a.) deserves to be anticipated as a potentially momentous contribution to black psychogeographic literature. I have spoken at such length about walking – you see, the sun has nearly set – and yet have never stood still to consider that walking, and seeing, for that matter, is a privilege not granted to everyone. In the next subchapter, I will proceed to an overview of psychogeography in the context of disability studies. The issues to be explored here are, I propose, twofold: first, in which ways does the physical and mental ability of the psychogeographic practitioner impact their experience? And secondly, is there any potential to the use of psychogeography not, as we have treated it, as play and politics; but rather as a therapeutic technique? Walking for Every Body: Psychogeography and Disability Studies The intersection of psychogeography, disability studies, and therapy is, to my mind, one of the most promising interesting ones in psychogeographical writing and research today. A serious exploration of psychogeography’s potential in this regard also serves to combat the frequently encountered prejudice of the field’s triviality, as it is not so difficult to envision the effective use of dérives as a therapeutic and awareness-raising method allowing people to discover how alterations of their physical and sensory abilities could impact their spatial experiences. Such experiments and the resulting narratives could then be deployed in an educational context to strengthen students’ understanding of disabled mobilities, and to emphasize the importance of inclusive architecture and infrastructure. What is it like to navigate a city as a blind, deaf, or partially paralyzed person? The psychogeographic drift offers an opportunity for practitioners to seek out sympathetic urban experiences. One could envision, for example, architecture students navigating their cities in a wheelchair to enhance their awareness of the problem of architectural disability. But sometimes, psychogeographical text can be just as impactful. An especially interesting drift in this regard is the one undertaken by John Hockenberry, a prominent wheelchair-bound foreign correspondence journalist who has written expansively about his experiences navigating New York City, among other hostile terrains. In a chapter (1995) focusing on Manhattan’s public transport system, Hockenberry attempts to take a train from his local ! 55 ! subway stop (incidentally lacking an elevator), hoping to narrate the experience afterwards on a radio program. It is a dérive that begins as merely impractical, but soon impinges upon the realm of the absurd; Hockenberry’s palpable frustration with the train system’s unwelcoming spatial layouts, the neglect of his fellow passengers, and eventually the infuriating heartlessness of taxi drivers who consider the folding of his wheelchair too much of an effort, is highly infectious. A second valuable work on psychogeography and reduced mobility isWalking Stumbling Limping Falling, the recent bundle of e-mails between Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith about the poetics of slipping up and falling down; the development of a non- normative drift; about fragility, surgery and recovery; and the intimate, invisible bravery of learning to walk with a body that has suddenly become unfamiliar. Hallett and Smith’s exchanges resist what they call “the fascism of normality” (70), seeking instead to celebrate those uncoordinated and hesitant choreographies that deserve an equal place in the canon of walking. Psychogeography’s relationship to disability studies is not limited to questions of mobility, but also concerns the realm of the senses. Traditionally, a great deal of urban walking has suffered from ‘ocularcentrism’: the privileging of the visual (both aesthetically and epistemologically) over the senses of hearing, smell, taste and feeling. We have casted the flâneur as a privileged observer of the urban spectacle, gazing at the arcade windows and the throng of the crowd; neither Benjamin nor Hessel frequently mentions the flâneur’s use of his other senses beyond the eye. Much has been written about the purported ocularcentrism or anti-ocularcentrism of the Situationist conception of the Spectacle (“…not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”, Debord 1967: § iv; see especially Jay 1993: 416-35; Crary 1989: 97-107) and while Debord’s relationship to vision and the image is more complex and ambiguous than I can do justice to here, we must admit that the Situationists’ preferred media for the reporting of their dérives – written text, film, cartography – lean decidedly more on the eye than on any other bodily sense. In recent decades, however, psychogeographic walking has increasingly emphasized a diversity of senses. Southworth (1969) has subjected willing accomplices in Boston to “various states of sensory depravation…Some participants were blindfolded and pushed in wheelchairs; others had their ears covered; and some, both. Participants were provided with ! 56 ! portable voice recorders and encouraged to record their impressions of the sites through which they travelled." (Henshaw in Richardson 2015: 195) In another example, the disability services and awareness charity Sense Scotland (2014) set up a sensory mapping project which challenged artists with sensory impairments to “[investigate] the natural surroundings through collecting natural materials, creating temporary works and developing individual artistic interpretations and collective responses to the environment.” While such endeavors may be significantly less ambitious than the Situationists’ project of destabilizing the capitalist order in its entirety, the theoretical affinity with situation-construction is apparent. Such forms of psychogeographic experiment can limit and alter the sensory abilities of their participants in order to achieve both novel aesthetic experiences and, one hopes, a heightened state of political solidarity with differently abled people on the streets. Sensory walks can also make for interesting group dérives. In New York City, I participated last year (2016) in a group walk between the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue to the then recently opened Met Breuer dependance several blocks away – a distance that took composer John Luther Adams nine minutes, nine seconds to traverse, to which he had written a score of precisely that length. The ‘soundscape’ was an ethereal mixture of city noises, including human voices, the chirping of sparrows, the air breaks of a passing bus, the engines of accelerating cars, and “the melodic contours of a jackhammer.” All these were then “sculpted and filtered…to reveal resonances that lie hidden around us all the time.” Smell walks, too – emphasizing the importance of the most undervalued of the senses to urban experience, memory, and identity – have undergone a resurgence in recent decades, with artists and practitioners like Kate McLean (2012-2016) and Victoria Henshaw (2013) as well as writing by environmental psychologist Douglas Porteous (1985) and performance theorist Jim Drobnick. (2002; 2006) Finally, some of the most unique and therapeutically relevant applications of psychogeography appear to have sprouted in the field of psychology. Particularly striking in my view have been papers by Steve Graby (2011) and Andrea Capstick (2012), who have deployed psychogeography as a critical tool for the understanding of autism and dementia, respectively. Graby has argued that recent CDC efforts to pathologize the ‘wandering’ behavior of people with severe autism and other cognitive impairments are harmful, given that they reproduce the dismissal of behavior by autistic people as not rationally or meaningfully ! 57 ! motivated. Instead, he suggests, such activity should be understood through the lens of psychogeography as “a form of political resistance … to the particular social and political conditions of disablement experienced by autistic people.” (n.p.) Capstick, meanwhile, has used the dérive as a means of restoring long-lost memories of people who have dementia in the interest of a narrative biography project. In her text, she observes that people who have dementia often show a surprising capacity for navigation and recollection in the familiar spaces of their childhood and adolescent years. The walking interviews she conducts show remarkable therapeutic potential, but also raise the question whether the amnesia and disorientation experienced by the interviewees may be exacerbated by the accelerating rhythms of demolition and urban renewal under late capitalism. I have emphasized these three angles of gender/sex, race, and (dis)ability because I expect it is through these lenses that a politically aware and inclusive psychogeography will continue to develop. By presenting opportunities to walk side by side with people very different from ourselves, and by reading about their everyday experiences in the urban environment, psychogeography can serve to instill in practitioners an enhanced degree of awareness and empathy. The ambition of psychogeography to construct full-scale revolutionary situations may have turned out to be overly ambitious, but there is no doubt in my mind that ‘situational dérives’ may temporarily destabilize our personal beliefs and identities, opening them up, within the context of our everyday lives, to thought-provoking whiffs and whispers of otherness. If psychogeography is to have a future beyond the playing of what to Debord were already “mediocre games,” it is my firm conviction that walking in solidarity with the Other will be one of its pillars. ! 58 ! Chapter 4 Wandering the Web: Cyberflânerie and Virtual Psychogeography In the last chapter, I’ve treated what I think is one necessary future for psychogeography as a useful political practice: an increased attention to inclusivity in terms of gender, race, and (dis)ability. The subtitle of this thesis, however, is the pasts and futures of radical walking – both pasts and futures in the plural. I mean to reference thereby not only the complex and intertwined histories of flânerie, Situationist psychogeography, and what is today called ‘radical walking’; but also those dual futures of the expanding of psychogeography’s audience and the diversity of its practitioners on the one hand, and the unfolding of psychogeographic work into the virtual realm on the other. It is to this final frontier, of net-wandering, cyberflânerie, and game space that we will now turn. New Babylon and the Origins of Virtual Psychogeography Psychogeography took its first steps into the virtual realm perhaps decades before we first spoke of and on the Internet. Of course, machinery has been used for as far back as humanity’s collective memory reaches to enhance our towns and cities in functional ways: to improve drainage, traffic, fire safety, and so on. But it was the Situationist architect Constant Nieuwenhuys (whose preference for the shorthand “Constant” I will henceforth honor) who first took seriously the opportunities that modern technology offered in a psychogeographical capacity. Constant’s famous models of New Babylon, a built environment designed in accordance with the Situationist concept of unitary urbanism, were the first architectural project to deploy electronics and computers in the service of the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual potential of the city. As I noted in Chapter 1, Constant worked on New Babylon between 1959 and 1974, at first closely with Debord and the other Situationists, and after his expulsion in 1961 increasingly omitting explicit reference to their thinking. The idea behind New Babylon was to apply unitary urbanism to a wholly new city, using all of humanity’s advanced technology to enable the development of a wholly new way of living together. It was truly a vision of science fiction urbanism. In the absence of any private or permanent space, the city was to ! 59 ! lend itself to infinite drifting – as Chtcheglov foresaw the inhabitants of the city of his dreams to spend their time – and the construction of situations. “It is not sufficient,” Constant would write, “to transform the city in a technical or practical sense.” Above all, the transformation would have to be qualitative, social, cultural, spiritual: “[t]he future city should not be accentuating dwelling (which is nothing more than the opposition between inside and outside) nor displacement (search for needs), but a new use for social space (ecology).” (Constant in Wigley 1998: 40) Machines, electronics and computers were a fundamental element of what would make this new ecology possible: not only would they liberate New Babylon’s citizens from the compulsion to work, but they would also be deployed to generate new experiences, disorientation, “enveloping sensuous eccentric rhythms of light, sound, smell, and color.” (ibid, 28) It is in New Babylon, then, that mechanization and computers were first used for the creation of psychogeographical affect. And while imagination sometimes remained the only available phenomenology to experience these affects in a virtual architecture, Constant built numerous partial models of New Babylon and other Situationist-inspired labyrinths and architectures allowing people to experiment with his ideas in real space, as well. Wigley (1998: 65) suggests that Constant was always sensitive to the concept of virtual space and the ways in which psychogeographical play could produce it: he was an enthusiastic proponent of technological innovations within the dérive, introducing, for example, the use of walkie-talkies and recording devices. In accordance with Situationist thinking on technology, it was not so much the media themselves that were suspect but rather their specific appearances and uses within Spectacular capitalism. Computers could, and should, be détourned – they were inherently no worse or better than the pen or the paintbrush. And while New Babylon never came to material fruition on a habitable scale, Constant’s ideas were to prove influential later in neo-Situationist thinking on the internet, in the 1990s and beyond. Cyberflânerie and the Digital City I have discussed in our first chapter the flâneur as conceived by Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Hessel: a complex and ambivalent figure on the threshold of high capitalism, simultaneously seduced and at risk of being erased by the emerging world of department stores and ! 60 ! hyperaccellerated global commerce. Writing on flânerie after the Second World War would often be of the nostalgic kind: rueful reveries of a disappeared form of life so poetically described by that sensitive philosopher Benjamin, the trauma of whose early death became a wellspring of exhaustive rumination on his ideas. Some decades after, however, as mass media increasingly began to dominate the social world, the figure of the flâneur as a fin-de-siècle urban mythology was transformed. The arcades may have been long gone and Paris itself firmly nestled in the suffocating embrace of its banlieues, but the specter of the flâneur would continue to haunt academic writing in the 1980s and 1990s, proving no less tenacious than late capitalism itself. Some authors – like Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman (1992: 154) – would make comparisons between the flâneur of old and the modern-day zapper, switching between viewpoints of the world at the press of a button. Commenting on their work, Susan Buck- Morss argued that the postmodern flâneur was characterized by the same “consumerist mode of being-in-the-world” – it was not so much that the flâneur had died, but rather that his way of seeing had become universal. (1989: 344-345) Of course, this reframing would lead the flâneur to lose much of the ambivalence that originally made him so beguiling; not to mention that Benjamin’s flâneur always retained more creative agency than the rather passive mass media of radio and television allow for. The argument of a ‘postmodern flâneur’ is more seductive, however, in the case of the internet: a medium that we can ‘be within’ in a similar way as we find ourselves within the city; a medium offering “addresses” that we can stroll at will. This comparison would lead in the mid-1990s to a flood of writing on cyberflânerie, applying Benjamin’s concept as well as Situationist thinking to the then seemingly endless possibilities of the World Wide Web. The so-called cyberflâneur’s first appearances, Maren Hartmann (2004) suggests, can be retraced to obscure web art and hypertexts. The German artists Heiko Idensen and Matthias Krohn, also known collectively as Pool Processing, have been suggested as one possible point of origin for the concept, specifically in their 1994 web-art project “Imaginary Library”: a rhizomatically organized e-mail exchange dealing primarily with hypertextuality. According to Idensen and Krohn, hypertexts of the kind that were common in the early days of the web; Rhizome.org and similar addresses would be the digital arcades of the cyberflâneur. Other writing on the cyberflâneur in the mid-‘90s includes Mitchell’s City of Bits, ! 61 ! which – with a retrospectively endearing naiveté – suggests that “the online environments of the future will increasingly resemble traditional cities in their variety of distinct places…their capacity to engage our sense, and in their social and cultural richness.” (1995: 121) As an example of environments conducive to cyberflânerie, Mitchell suggested the MUD (Multi User Dungeon) – a distant text-based ancestor of the contemporary MMORPG. Unfortunately, as Hartmann (134) rightly points out, MUDs (and the same goes for MMORPGs) are built to stimulate interaction and commerce between players; the concept of a cyberflâneur in such spaces thus bulldozes the complex and subtle interplay between engagement and disengagement as it was present in Benjamin’s concept. Other authors, like Steven Goldate (1998) – saw the cyberflâneur primarily as a postmodern specator of newsgroup or listserv virtual forums; basically, a so-called “lurker.” Goldate also points towards “De Digitale Stad” (The Digital City), a “freenet initiative” initiated in 1994 by an Amsterdam cultural center. The Digital City represented the first Dutch online community, with the city plan of Amsterdam acting as a pixelated graphic interface offering links to an online local newspaper clipboard, a schedule of performances and exhibitions in the city, a forum for inhabitants and anonymous chatroom, municipal information postings, and so on. Since it presents the most explicit link between the internet and the city, perhaps the Digital City is the most obvious or ‘natural’ space to locate cyberflânerie. But on the other hand, this might give undue weight to a rather superficial metaphor, while ignoring other constitutive elements of the original flâneur, such as his complex relationship to the spectacular power of the commodity. Evgeny Morozov, in turn, has sought to locate the cyberflâneur primarily in the web- spaces that most closely resembled the original arcades: sites such as E-Bay, Geocities, and Tripod, which until recently could rather successfully recreate the sensation of strolling through a deeply peculiar garage sale. At the time of my writing this, of course, the cyberflâneur already feels like a deeply outdated and impossible concept, inseparable from a paradigm of the web that appears to have been irrevocably recuperated. Morozov also notes this, pointing out that “[t]ranscending its original playful identity, [the Internet] is no longer a place for strolling – it’s a place for getting things done.” (2012: n.p.) The rise of the app paradigm, Google’s algorithms working behind the scenes to present users with personalized suggestions, Facebook’s universal dominance of the online social realm, the hyperefficiency of ! 62 ! online shopping – all these developments have rendered the cyberflâneur basically nonexistent. Perhaps, like the original flâneur, the cyberflâneur was a figure who could only exist on the cusp of losing his condition of possibility; a bipedal dinosaur marveling at the dawn of his own extinction. Virtual Psychogeography: Situationist Web Art and the Drift in Virtual Space The rise of the Internet was accompanied by a revival of Situationist theory in the 1990s: hacker culture was quick to embrace the use of détournement as a subversive practice. Post- Situ groups of the early Internet understandably emphasized culture jamming, ad-busting and situation-construction over psychogeography and dérive, concepts the application of which to the world wide web is perhaps less immediately obvious. Still, Situationist psychogeography did eventually make it to the virtual realm. The year 2002 saw the birth of the Virtual Psychogeographic Association, a group whose membership is unclear but which operated, at least for a while, a website and mailing list exploring the possibilities of online drifting. Information on their activities is scarce: the site is barely compatible with an up-to-date internet browser and scrambled into illegibility, while the mailing list, of course, is long defunct. Whether their concept of a virtual dérive ever expanded beyond the construction of a series of URLs is hence an open question. While I believe a case could be made for ‘cyberflânerie’ as a possible activity at least in a certain brief era of internet history, I would argue that the notion of an online ‘dérive’ – at least in this limited sense of ‘wandering’ from one web page to another – is unconvincing. There are a number of reasons for this. The first goes back to the difference in political identity between the flâneur and the dériviste. To specify, the flâneur is simultaneously starstruck by the Spectacle of commodities and threatened by the emerging social order heralded by their appearance. His state of mind is primarily one of intoxication; but to the extent that he can be thought to embody a politics, it is essentially a conservative one. Conquering his separateness from the crowd becomes a source of hedonistic pleasure, but it is an ‘escape from freedom’ achieved rather by dissolving into the crowd than by mobilizing it towards the construction of a revolutionary society that would transcend separation altogether. ! 63 ! The dériviste, on the other hand, seeks not so much hedonistic intoxication as emotional disorientation, as a counter to everyday alienation under late capitalism. Beyond this, the dériviste creates opportunities to introduce revolutionary elements and behaviors into urban space, thereby dissolving the separation between public and private spheres altogether. Engagement with other people to facilitate the spontaneous performance of situations is inherent to the dériviste’s practice – while the flâneur does not move beyond voyeurism and submission to the masses. It is clear to me – certainly now – that the web lends itself far more easily to the practice of a kind of flânerie (enchantment with the commodity, voyeurism) than to the Situationist drift (emotional disorientation in the service of revolutionary political practice). If the flâneur is content to merely dissolve into the crowd, the dériviste aims to destroy alienation altogether. And the internet today, if anything, seems to facilitate alienation. As Amy Elias puts it, “…correspondences between SI concepts and the WWW as an entity are usually metaphorical rather than substantive. If anything, the web is increasingly part of the Spectacle rather than a challenge to it.” (2010: 822) Perhaps the cyberdériviste’s habitat is after all not the ‘city’ of the web as a whole – to the extent that such a metaphor is even convincing in the first place. The cyberdériviste may still walk the ‘real’ city, but only a virtual simulation of it; or do so assisted by virtual tools. This is the argument of Kevin Kvas (2014), whose paper explores the possibilities of Google Street View and the Dérive Urban Exploration app for Situationist-inspired drifting. Kvas cites 9-eyes, a photography project by Jon Rafman, for which he ‘drifts’ through Street View to find images displaying the uncanny beauty and disturbing quality of everyday life. 9-eyes (named after the omnidirectional cameras deployed by Google’s cars, and also a term used to refer to an expanded version of the Five Eyes supranational intelligence alliance) presents urban life in a detached, indifferent fashion, offering a cultural text ready for eager dérivistes to inscribe politically subversive meanings upon. Of course, this drift through Google’s online repository of a photographed world hardly offers opportunities for the construction of situations – at best for stumbling upon the makings of them. But it cannot be denied that Rafman’s work succeeds powerfully with regards to that other aim of the drift: emotional disorientation. A second possibility for a virtual dérive, Kvas suggests, lies in the use of smartphone apps to guide one’s drifting. The Dérive Urban Exploration app offers drifters a series of cards with navigational instructions (“follow something blue”, “find a cobbled road”), ! 64 ! apparently supplanting or supplementing Debord’s original instructions to simply let oneself flow in accordance with attractive and repellent urban ambiances. The Dérive app in that sense appears to defeat the point of original Situationist psychogeography, but of course the instructions lend themselves to easy détournement and can be followed not only in a literal sense, but also in cyber or other virtual capacities. More than a smartphone app but a similar technological enhancement of the psychogeographical praxis is proposed by Colin Ellard, (2015) who, in co-operation with the BMW/Guggenheim Lab, pioneered a methodology that might more aptly be called neurogeography: a rigorous effort to capture environmental affects and effects through state-of-the-art brain measurement technology. If we could standardize and quantify, in an empirically founded manner, ‘psychogeographic data’ – our micro physical and chemical responses to the built environment – this could yield, Ellard suggests, a snapshot of a place's affective influence on the average pedestrian, and lead to a set of general ‘psychogeographical’ guidelines for the design and construction of spaces. Of course, it has yet to be seen whether it is in fact possible to distill utilitarian policy from the chaotic swirl of contingent and informal conditions that continually mediate our spatial experience; and there are numerous philosophical objections to this approach to space as a stable, ‘neutral’ object of observation. Still, neurogeography seems to most closely approach psychogeography’s initial formulation as a scientific study of the laws of the environmental influence on its dwellers. ! 65 ! Psychogeography in Gamespace Perhaps the most promising medium for a virtual psychogeography is the video game. After all, permanent play was one of the core elements of the Situationist ethos; and in terms of space, games offer the theoretical possibility of the generation of an infinite number of worlds to explore, worlds with different laws from our own, new and disorienting sensory stimuli, different ways of interacting with one another and, perhaps, different politics. It is this reasoning that has led some theorists to suggest that the virtual worlds of Second Life (1999) and other games may be auspicious sites for psychogeographical activity. Second Life is one of the oldest massive multiplayer online games still somewhat widely played today, and it is quite unique in its open-ended nature: rather than being set in a traditional fantasy world where players are driven to complete quests and explore dungeons, SL’s setting is explicitly that of everyday life. This means, of course, a lot of banality: plenty of players appear perfectly content simply reenacting the usual consumerist routines of late capitalist existence with their new identities, at best seeking out in this virtual world the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll so deeply absent from ordinary petit-bourgeois life. But the game also offers opportunities to experience unique architectures and landscapes, as “[f]loating unsupported in midair, their contorted or symbolic structures defying laws of natural physics, the most ambitious cityscapes in Second Life can illustrate the utopianism of situationism’s [sic] ‘Unitary Urbanism…” (Elias 2010: 832-833) Examples of psychogeographic art in Second Life raised by Elias are the interactive landscapes of Adam Nash and the “Imagining Place” project by John Craig Freeman, the latter of which “defines its psychogeographical aims through a combination of Situationist ideas, Greek poetics, I-Ching philosophy, and Ulmer’s synthesis of Applied Grammatology to create a place-based virtual reality project that combines panoramic video, and three- dimensional virtual worlds to document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities.” (ibid, 834-836) These landscapes allow for forms of virtual drifting which in any case seems more convincingly ‘psychogeographical’ than drifts by algorithm or GPS technology. However, Second Life itself remains governed by a fundamentally capitalist natural law, where virtual money – purchased ! 66 ! with real money – is a prerequisite for many activities in the game. Collective, non-alienated play not subjected to surplus value extraction remains a pipe dream. Another possibility for virtual psychogeography – albeit closer in spirit to the nostalgic British tangents of psychogeography than the Situationist ones – may be located in so-called “walking simulators,” a term applied by Rosa Carbo-Mascarelli (2016: 1) to “games with an immersive use of exploration as a core mechanic utilised for environmental storytelling purposes.” Carbo-Mascarelli narrates her playthrough of three such games, suggesting that the ludic/aesthetic experience offered in them may qualify as a digitization of psychogeographic practice. But of course, the narratives in such games are always already written, leaving limited space for the player’s desire for interaction with others or artistic expression. Consequently, walking simulators may perhaps be grouped among other literary psychogeographies, but one would be hard-pressed to define the playing of them as pychogeographical praxis. Whether video games allow for psychogeographic play is at heart a more complex question than it might seem. For the Situationists, after all, play was explicitly uncompetitive, collective, and capable of eluding the rational domination of the everyday: “play, radically broken from a confined ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life.” The “creation of ludic ambiances” (Debord 1958b) would be a prerequisite for the construction of situations (or, alternatively, a Lefebvrian festival). Gaming today, meanwhile, is a multi-billion dollar business with a revenue more than twice the size of the film industry. And the rise of the video game by no means represents a victory of non-alienated play over Hollywood’s propaganda. “Only look what has become of the state of play,” writes McKenzie Wark (2007); “Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom of the player with endless rounds of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same.” Play has been recuperated: “the utopian dream of liberating play from the game…merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life…containing play forever within it.” (11) Sher Doruff (2006) further explores this argument in the specific context of virtual psychogeography. She builds on Bryan Massumi’s suggestion (2002) that our spatial perception is not limited to the conventional senses – sight, sound, touch – but that, in ! 67 ! addition, a sixth sense is at work: proprioception. This entails a subconscious awareness of the movements of the body relative to itself; it is the body calculating its movement in space with reference to its steps and the positions of its own parts. To put this a bit more concretely, proprioception is what allows people with sight impairment to move through familiar spaces with confidence – they may not see where they are, they may even lack an explicit cognitive map, and yet the body – through habituation – develops a sense for the space. We combine visual cues and proprioceptive habituation to orient ourselves in space. Doruff, then, suggests that a similar duality is at work in virtual space. However, the proprioceptive tendency is affectively modulated: rather than experiencing space directly, we experience the experience of the avatar in space. The virtual world gives us not only visual cues but also imposes on us a heightened emotional sensitivity, an intensity of feeling, a sense of becoming-avatar. We orient ourselves not only by sight but also by the imprints of affect that the virtual world leaves upon us. While this affectively modulated proprioception allows us to navigate – and enjoy navigating – the virtual world, however, it is precisely here that the Spectacle sinks its hooks into us and exploits our affect to mine surplus value. This experience simultaneously stimulates the player to purchases (the game itself, a subscription to keep playing, and/or additional in-game goodies) and turns the game into a treacherous refuge from the player’s isolated existence. In this reading, a ‘psychogeographic game’ can only denote a Spectacular recuperation of “play” that we grasp at for the illusion of escaping an everyday which the dominating logics of gamespace (and its predecessors) have rendered devoid of the real thing. We reiterate with Debord: true play – true psychogeography – must invade the whole of life. On the other hand, perhaps Wark is right, and it is “[o]nly by going further and further into gamespace might one come out the other side of it, to realize a topology beyond the limiting forms of the game.” (2007: 4) Just as Debord never condemned the medium of film but rather its manifestations under the Spectacular order, we may want to refrain from throwing out the baby with the bath water: gamespace could still be wrenched from the oppressive logics that dominate it today. ! 68 ! Afterword In conclusion, ‘gamespace’ might still yield to détournement, and virtual worlds could still become sites of collective dreaming; the accellerationist theory would hold that the logic of the Spectacle escalated to the extreme may in fact collapse into its opposite. This route, most closely aligned with Constant, would boil down to a tactical retreat forward into virtual realms, leaving the indefensible territories of the contemporary city exposed to the onslaught of ‘smart’ technology, rationalization, and surplus value extraction in favor of creating wholly new architectures and modes of experience in a qualitatively different category of space. To détourn a Situationist aphorism: the city is suffering - let it die. An alternative would be the romantic path: a ‘zombie’ psychogeography pursued within the decrepit malls and crumbling cities where there is no surplus left to exploit and where our little black mirrors lack reception; where we can wander quietly and dream, as the Situationists did in the very beginning of it all, of building the city and the world anew. In short, a return to what Marc Bonta and Phil Smith have called the ‘holey space’ – well-sheltered sites of opposition, based on intimate community, as opposed to broad political trajectories easily infiltrated and recuperated. My sense is that it is key not to repeat the mistakes of the Situationist International, whose supreme leader Debord often insisted on doctrinal purity at the cost of ideological diversity; a fixation that, in the end, formed an impediment to creative cross-pollination and transformed, towards the 1970s, his once vibrant movement full of revolutionary potential into a dangerously dogmatic nuclear core. To avoid repeating history as tragedy, psychogeography’s future should walk both paths at once: local activism and utopian dreaming; critique of the city’s sexist, racist, and ableist spaces and architectures as well as the design of seductive alternatives. We should also not forget that, in the end, psychogeography was always meant to have a sense of humor. But that sense of humor should never collapse into apolitical absurdity, into psychogeography once again becoming merely a mediocre game, which risks defusing any political potency that the concept may have. ! 69 ! And concerning that potency, I remain convinced that there is at least some. Even if they are not as revolutionary as the Situationists once hoped, I find the emerging applications of psychogeography in the realms of psychology and disability studies heartening; and groups like the Loiterers Resistance Movement in Manchester do significant and important work in raising awareness of the value of inclusive facilities and protecting their city from unfettered privatization. To walk, preferably together, finding joy in the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual influences of the city; to extend those delights to fellow humans historically proscribed from participation in them, and to defend these desires from interests who would harm or seek to monetize them; to dream, finally, of a fundamentally different way of living together, made possible by a colorful and humanistic spatial organization; these, in short, remain the aims of psychogeography today. 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