I wander thro’ each charter’d street – Research into Psychogeography MAFAzine Issue 3
drifting in the city by Mingyang Gao
The River Thames which snakes its way through London. Many people cross this wide strip of slug-grey water twice daily, to and back from work. In effect, this river splits up two aspects of people life. This could be defined as simply the effect your environment has on your mind, Or rather, that is one explanation of what is a rather nebulous though deeply fascinating concept, that has its roots in the Flâneurs – 19th century artists and writers such as Baudelaire who strolled around Paris observing and thinking – and carries on into the 21st century with the likes of British writers such as Ian Sinclair and Will Self.
Surreal cities
Professor of architectural and urban history at the university of California and other scholars find out more about this practice and how it’s possible to view the city from different perspectives.
Sadler says, “In novels and writings about Paris in the 1920s, Surrealists like André Breton and Louis Aragon wrote about the relationship between Paris as a city in which they were living and their internal emotions and mental states.”
They would drift around Paris aimlessly
Geography in the traditional sense is about the objective study of the environment. Psychogeographers, on the other hand, do not believe this is possible. They believe everything is subjective, and that the landscape is in part producing us.
Sadler says, “Following on from Freud, the Surrealists start to wonder if the city is also a projection of our own internal desires. We pretend the city is all-rational and that cities are about traffic circulating and getting your work done, getting things produced and buying and selling etc. but what if cities are also a projection of our own desires, what if, for example, it is all about sex?”
The Situationist International
And while this certainly gives us an amusing new perspective of the Eiffel Tower, a group to follow on from the Surrealists, known as the Situationist International, believed that something more sinister was going on – that a conspiracy by the state and capitalism was afoot through the construction of buildings.
Sadler says, “If you think about urban development in the mid-20th century, it could be argued that cities were becoming more boring. The Situationists thought that by building more sterile, vacuous and boring cities, we were in turn making our lives more sterile, vacuous and boring. They believed that it was a conspiracy led by capitalism and the state, in an attempt to make us more obedient and productive beings by depriving us of the stimulus that make us really human.”
Drifting
In the 1950s, the Situationists began to use psychogeography as a way of critiquing Paris by wandering around and reflecting on the changing cityscape. They called this form of wandering, dérive or drifts.
Sadler says, “They would drift around Paris aimlessly, just letting themselves be repelled and attracted by different buildings and areas and they started to calculate which parts of Paris were still good and conducive to being human and whole and which parts were designed to destroy us.”
He continues, “You need to imagine you’ve grown up in Paris and you love the Left Bank and Montmartre and you love alleyways and red light districts and instead you see Paris turning into an American looking city with skyscrapers and white collar workers. This was something they were rebelling against.”
Psychogeography and digital maps
It is interesting to consider what psychogeographers and Situationists would make of digital maps and the Internet more generally.
Sadler sees the exploration of the Web as a form of psychogegraphy in itself. He says, “Wikipedia is amazing for this. If you want, it will make a random page for you and you can follow the links and come up for air an hour later and it could be that you’ve changed your mind about everything! So, in this regard, Wikipedia could be seen as an extraordinary kind of psychogeography because you can come out a changed person and not only that, we don’t quite know who is writing it. Everybody is pitching in and people are arguing – if Wikipedia was a city, it would be a city built by many.”