PsychogeopgrahyThe 1950s produced so many different explosions in art and letters that it is impossible to keep track of the different movements, schools, sub-schools, isms, and non-declarative smatterings of people clinging to a title or clinging to their lack of a title. War has always been the real motivation and momentum behind letters and art and it seems that after the biggest ones come the biggest movements; it is a nice symbiotic relationship wherein the people mutilate and harm one another and then reinterpret the remains of their world while envisioning some sort of future or another. It happens after the bloodiest, and it seems that the higher the body count the more theories, schools of thought, and over-the-counter-cultures we reap as a single stupid benefit of the bloodshed. Can you link the genius with the war-seed that sprouted him? Tolstoy. Proust. Goethe. Twain. Miller (either / or). Kierkegaard. Camus. Kafka. Nabokov. Even something as small as the tiny battle waged between tree-birds and their always thirsty counterparts, the water-birds, has given birth to a varied sampling of beauty.
There was a guy named Guy Debord (rhymes with Be not By) somewhere in Paris who, in the 1950s, threw a rope into the air and let it form a circle before descending to the ground. When it landed, there happened to be a few of his friends caught in the middle - other artists of the "modern" variety - and a group was formed. The arbitrary nature of this is important: he simply threw the rope into the air. It decided how to loop itself, and it alone decided where to land (and, sure, the wind and the dispersion of people on the ground did have something to do with it, but I digress.) How many other artists and men of letters were doing this at the time? Specifically speaking, Paris had somewhere in the neighborhood of 5.4 million people in 1950 and of those approximately 2% had labeled themselves, or been labeled by another, as an "artist" (of course this term is taken as loosely as it is applied.) That is a lot of artists and that means that a lot of groups of artists were created at the time. The Letterist International was one of the most arbitrary. When Debord threw his rope into the air he had no control over what shape it would take and exactly where it would land, encompassing whoever it happens to encompass: sound-poets, sham-painters, anti-film-filmmakers, alcoholics, thieves (the pettier the better, it seemed) and the rest of the shabby flowers that make up these sorts of unctuous bouquets. While there was debate over whether or not to include or excise the second E from their title (given to them by themselves, mind you) there was no mistaking the fact that these men, women and men-women were a shining light on the dark horizon of future arts. Many manifestos began to be written, which were then signed - members agreed: "the most urgent exercise of liberty is the destruction of idols." Like almost all art-groups, they made no attempt to define exactly which idols were in need of being destroyed (though they did single out Charlie Chaplin) it can be boiled down to a simple case of the "angsties," and, looking at the average age of the group's members (19-20) one gets a sneaking suspicion that this group was taking themselves a bit too seriously.
People of this age have a tendency to draw themselves together in order to cast themselves out of the world as "special" and thus demand their own spherical route of travel that is separate from that already prescribed by the earth's rotation. They see themselves as satellites, and why shouldn't they? They are younger, their will is stronger, their potential is far deeper and untapped, they have not yet been broken and bound by the responsibilities of adulthood, they are in the middle of experiencing the sliver of years allotted to us for fun, excitement, and the creation of the most artful of artifices (the construction of our self, or selves.) These Letterists joined one another in the same spirit. Within the group they are allowed the freedom to disconnect from individuality and this is a special bit of retreat for those that have felt the oppression of the outside world on the single person - as most artists have come to know. United by their arms, as much as by their ideals, the young art-group stands in stark contrast to those that they view around them as outsiders and declares: We are us! Which, symmetrically, also exclaims the obvious: You, you are just you.
Now that they have declared themselves as such, separate and special, they are left to their own worlds and constructions and, without aim, they disperse and begin expanding as most people that age tend to do. Expand they did - they grew and stretched so thin as to be transparent. They began demanding things of society (the same one they have just extricated themselves from with so much gusto) and eventually they planted themselves in a position against a principal (this is the most important part of being an art-group, opposition!) In steps "Psychogeography," in a nice ever-changing multi-colored and infinitely faceted suit.
Yes, Guy Debord can be thanked for a number of things - but his Psychogeography is the most deserving of our praise. To back up a year or so: Debord had already been heavily involved in the Marxist movement, which we know of today thanks to the ever-present Mark's Angle Reader (faithful and fateful companion to all good college students, old and young,) and more importantly the concept of Reification. When combining this thought with that of Psychogeography, an interesting form begins to take shape... but first a short summary of exactly what Reification means to Debord: he no doubt takes it as naked as he can - the literal German meaning "thing-ification" (verdinglachung/versachlichung) "objectification" and a twist of the pathetic fallacy to create a sort of web of vagueness and attach it to a nonvague thing. Reification is, in short, what happens when a person confuses an object with a feeling (not to say that some objects don't already have feelings...) or, more specifically, a confusion of contexts. I take up my book in my hands and cherish it as if it were my one true love. This is reification in the concrete (or simply a portrait of a deluded person.) It is bestowing the blessed living breath on an item without lungs, it is the gift of humanity given to the inhumane, or vice versa. The turning of an object into a subject, and subjects into objects. Even reification can be reified. All of this leads to ontological and epistomelogical problems inside the mind of a person, though even these problems might sound like the sweetest of songs depending on who is listening. The person who loves his book may honestly feel whatever love actually is on his own insides, but to his mother, sister, coworker he may be one of the saddest cases of loneliness ever imagined and contained in the skeletonned frame of "body/person".
No 19 or 20 year old has experienced an authentic swim in the lake of The World (as it is, with jobs and hardships and hobbies and capital, as Marx made it up) and surely no 19 or 20 year old artist has even less time in dealing with the mundane day to day routineliness of the office job. When Debord began to examine reification he was unaware that his feet were on glass and not ground.
How, then, did Debord apply his brand of Marxism on the world? Psychogeography! The beautiful blend of thought and land, dirt and feeling, walking and wishing. Their term, dérive, means "to drift" as a cloud drifts, or as the suds atop a beer drift, or a torn piece of paper to the wind, or any number of other weightless, momentumless travels by a tiny thing inside a very large thing. An attempted analysis of the totality of everyday life, through the passive movement through space (as the quicklypedia has it.) If we accept the assertion that every building (and thus any environment, in general) can be read as a book can be read - then Psychogeography, and the principles of dérive, state that one should never start with page one and read linearly on through to the end, following the standard succession of turning the pages from right to left and reading each line in the same fashion. For them, the book is the building and the only way to really inhabit it is to meander through it, the more passive the better: to floating from page to page, room to room, expanding first in this hallway and then magically appearing in the kitchen to examine the fine detailing of the cupboards, next an overview of the internal ducts used to heat and cool, and then a peek at the ending just because we can. The less directed and the more weightless the better.
One can go out on a dérive - it does not need to be 1950's Paris and one need not be an avant-garde post neo modernistic abstract expressionist. Anyone can go out and wander. The length of one's dérive should be the approximate distance between two spans of sleep (one day, or one day-ish) and could be done as a group if all can agree on a destination or alone. The factors that usually ruin a trip are embraced by the Psychogeographer along his dérive: he appreciates the rain and welcomes the storms, he praises every root and rock that stubs his toe, any obstacle that prevents him from movement is thanked personally with a smile, and the spacial scope of the proposed dérive may be as short as 2 steps or as long as the person can keep himself upright. There have, of course, been many breaks and exceptions to these rules - for example, the Static Dérive, performed anonymously, which involved sitting for an entire day in the Saint Lazare train station. While it would be assumed that the primary mode of transport is walking, and any reliance on mechanical device would be seen as taboo, it is not! By definition, vehicles must interact with their worlds, so to hop into a taxi to get 20 miles to the west could potentially lead to a more fruitful dérive than if one had simply resigned himself to walk the boring road instead. Even better would be for the taxi to break down, or for the driver to die at the wheel. Yes, the seriousness or lack of it depends entirely on the Psychogeographer - he or she may set out on their journey with the hopes of studying the environment or simply disorienting one's self (a classic variation is to precisely follow a map of London for walking around Paris, and vice versa.) By Debord's own definition: Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are very different to what we think of as journeys or strolls. The dérive is not a means to ‘gaze’ or ‘spectate’ at the re-invention and re-generation of cities and rural contexts. It is a means to make sense of experience ‘politically’.
Digressive burst: Debord is saved from being an anagram for the word Bored by one measly D! Damn.
Fictional flourish: Debord himself never really left the immediate area of Paris.
To make sense of experience, politically. That is an odd image created in the mind. Sniff a bit and it smells like reification. Experience, an intangible thing and totally embedded in a single, solitary little person. Politics - everyone else. To force the light of politics on this experience is very similar to forcing compassion on a stone. Psychogeography, too, could be a meta level of reification, a little peeled perhaps but still one of the many layers no less, especially given the methods used on the walks. Enforcing the London map on the city of Paris, or giving the same directions to two different places, or even just attaching any sort of psychological principal to a building (concrete, wood, steel, glass - not much emotion in its foundation, not much motive in its ceiling.)
This trails off. This will wander off. It will be a string and will be tossed into the air and that's the only action we will take. The string will shape itself and land when it will, that is all we can do. There is a short story buried in there.
