Psychogeography Series

The topic of “psychogeography” has been raised in recent discussion of the April 6th "Beneath the Surface" post. As a geographer interested in narrative, exploration, invention, space, and place, I find that the concept of psychogeography seems both fascinating and quite normal as a category. When I hear other people use the term, I note that they are most always laughing as they say it. Whilst the situationist popularizers of the idea of psychogeography would no doubt appreciate the jollity and appreciation expressed in such laughing (the appreciative deconstruction of situationism is perhaps today most well known through “culturejamming” venues such as Adbusters), the recent psychogeography conversation on OnFiction has inspired me to begin another short exploratory series on psychology, fiction, and place.

The situationists who popularized psychogeography as a pastime were associated with a cluster of French intellectuals, identified most commonly around the figures of Guy Debord, author of the aphoristic classic Society of the Spectacle, and Henri LeFebvre, prolific author whose most salient work to psychogeography that’s been translated into English may be The Production of Space.

Part of what makes the situationists’ psychogeography so appropriate for the contemplation of psychology and fiction in the context of place, space, and setting is their emphasis on what we might think of as an inventive and activist phenomenology. Situationists encouraged people to notice the situations in which they found themselves, and to exert their agency in these situations, reinventing them – both critically and playfully. Psychogeography field trips are still regularly organized in many places, such as Toronto, and the purpose of these events is mainly to make a noticed, examined, and inventive situation out of the fabric of everyday life that would otherwise be recognized (or go unnoticed) as mundane. As LeFebvre explained in this fascinating interview by Kristin Ross (to which I will return), the goal of noticing and critiquing everyday life was an inventive "transformation of daily reality," or instigation of "the creation of new situations."

As I follow this line of thought on psychogeography in biweekly installments across the rest of the season, I would like to emphasize the way that this turning of attention to setting may parallel the attention to character that has been a recurring theme of OnFiction. If authors develop fictional characters by attending carefully to the inchoate characters who populate the environs of our imagination and who speak with our inner voice, is there a parallel process by which authors develop rich settings through the kinds of processes favored by the situationists, in their psychogeographic romps around the city?

Guy Debord. 1967/1994. The Society of the Spectacle. (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith) New York: Zone Books.

Henri LeFebvre. 1974/1991. The Production of Space. (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith) Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen. 1996. House Ball. Bethlehemkirchplatz, Berlin.

Kristin Ross and Henri LeFebvre. 1997. Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International; Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross. October 79, Winter.

Comment by Keith Oatley, 16 April
Thank you so much, Valentine ... this is wonderfully thought-prompting. Your idea that, in fiction, setting is not just where something happens, but a complement to character, is lovely. So, although, when I have been writing my travelogue pieces, I have had in mind your expertise as a geographer (which has made me wonder what you might think of my attempts to conjure up pieces of the geographical space around here), the idea that character and geography might be, all the time, in counterpoint with each other in fiction had not occurred to me. I think you are absolutely right.

Of course, in books on how to write fiction there is the idea of setting, but it is more-or-less a preliminary, so I think your idea puts its significance more properly. And, moreover, although people do remember pieces of geography from novels they have liked, the notion is not stressed in the same way as character. I suppose that one might think of three elements that can create a strong triangular structure for narrative fiction: character, setting, and incident. And really, perhaps, they are all of comparable significance.

Here in London there are reminders of writers, for instance with London's little blue plaques on the fronts of houses that say who lived in them and when. I am rather too much drawn to that kind of thing. I love, for instance, walking past John Keats's house, about 400 metres from where our flat is, and thinking of Keats there in 1819 ... I am struggling to write something to connect his nightingale in the trees in front of his house to the current trees and houses, but I have not been able to make anything gel properly so far. I love, too, the idea that George Orwell worked in a bookshop on South End Green. This shop (now a French bakery) is also about 400 metres away.

What about the confluence of character, geography, and incident, in Orwell's 1931 essay in which he describes attending a hanging during the time he was in Burma?

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he [the man about to be hanged] stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.

Here, I think, is a perfect conjunction: the man's character (with his disposition to push his captors slightly aside), the geography (the puddle), the action (avoiding the puddle): all visible but with the three together reaching towards something invisible (the mystery of life).

George Orwell (2004). "A hanging." In Why I write (pp. 95-101). London: Penguin (Essay first published 1931; one can read it by clicking here).

Psychogeography's Affordances

Psychogeography might be considered an action-oriented branch of phenomenology. In today's installment of my exploration of psychogeography as a domain of the relationship between psychology and fiction relating to setting, I reflect on the way that psychogeography's creative approach to places involves a radical receptivity to the affordances provided in environments.

A significant part of the point of psychogeography is thinking about and noticing the experience of place. This noticing is often then used to serve thinking about what has made the place -- a reading of the landscape that could help to reveal the power undergirding daily reality. In so revealing this power, psychogeographers such as the Situationists hoped to encourage inventive "transformation of daily reality," or to instigate the creation of new situations and new relationships with settings.

One common mechanism of the Situationist practice of place exploration known as the dérive involves disrupting usual wayfinding in a place by mutilating or re-inventing a map. The dissonance between the mapped space and experienced space helps to draw attention both to what is actually experienced in the place and also to the ways that experience of a place is mediated by the kinds of expectations mediated by a map. Perhaps even more traditional is the technique of simply wandering, or drifting, in which one might introduce randomness or disrupt habit by using an algorithm such as a coin toss to decide direction at choice points.

However much these mechanisms may be associated with a particular way of exploring places, they are really merely the training wheels of psychogeography: tools to break the habits of everyday automatic interactions with place and perceptions of place as real and given. Disrupting such habits leaves mental resources for more exploratory stances toward the environment, in which explorers tune in to the behaviors or emotions that the situation and setting most afford.

Associated frequently with the psychologist James Gibson, the idea of affordance is central to the tradition of phenomenology: in Gibson's vocabulary, affordances are all action possibilities perceived in an environment; in Heidegger's vocabulary, a hammer, for example, in its very design, affords a particular readiness-to-hand, or way to be used. The behaviors and emotions that particular settings afford are central to our experience of place, and to our consequent ways of imagining, behaving in, maintaining, and reproducing places -- both material and fictional, as I have argued in my effort to show the similarities between constructing characters and constructing settings.

The radical exploration of urban affordances of the Situationist dérive can be perceived in tension with phenomenological traditions of engagement with places that sought to create in the landscape character of a different sort -- often national, or white, related to homeland and security. Rhetoric inheres powerfully in setting, partly because it is so often perceived in a taken-for-granted way as a given. So while coin-toss or ripped up and re-taped together map guided rambles may seem silly from some perspectives, from others - and particularly, perhaps, from the sympathetic view of fiction writers who have considered the task of setting the scene - such disruptions of assumptions about place can be seen as powerful tools of invention.

James J. Gibson (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row.

Inventing Place

Authors of fiction may think of themselves as inventing places in their stories, but 'place,' as a concept, is something many people think of as given, not invented. Geographers and other theorists of place, however, think of place as a malleable medium, caught in a constant flux of desire and pragmatic action, and between the experiences and imagination of many different users.

Psychogeography turns specific attention to the experience of place, and people who practice psychogeography often work to disrupt the given nature of place experience. The dérive has been one of the most classic practices of psychogeography gatherings; associated with situationism, this form of place exploration has a wide following and some fascinating implications for thinking about fiction.

Literally a form of 'drifting' through space and place, Guy Debord described the dérive in the late 50s in his “Théorie de la dérive”:

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, 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.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

Individuals and groups embarking on this kind of exploration are encouraged to observe and respond to the possibilities and meanings that exist in the landscape -- indeed, noting one of the fundamental principles of landscape analysis, Debord cites Marx’s observation that “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” The politics of this approach to landscape are a central part of its lasting appeal and currency -- who can go where in the landscape - and how and why - are all telling exhibitions of our social fabric. Psychogeography attracts people largely because of this promise of exploration (and attendant exercise) of agency in relation to place involved in this politics.

The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draft the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambience, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Discovering this ability to engage places and to invent and re-invent settings has continued to attract people to psychogeographical writings and events. Although the way we invent places runs up against a myriad of immovable boundaries and forces beyond our power to change - or sometimes even understand, the engagement with place involved in this kind of exploration must have many of the same benefits that have been demonstrated in engagement with fictional characters and inventive future authoring. More on this in weeks to come.

Guy Debord “Théorie de la dérive.” Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958). A slightly different version was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives. This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Exploring the Character of Place

Before I set out to make my first Midwest-West transect (across Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado - and then back across Wyoming and South Dakota), I'd like to conclude my series of reflections on psychogeography -- just in time to prime some serious exploring of a dramatically new landscape. (As I write, I'm downloading appropriate listening materials: place-based fiction by Willa Cather and Edith Wharton and geographic texts on the West.)

Particularly as I prepare to spend so much time traversing space that is new to me, it seems apropos to return to a theme raised by Keith Oatley's question in reponse to my May 13 post about the affordances of places. Keith asked about Jay Appleton, who proposed that places are aesthetically appealing when they display such features as refuge and prospect. Although difficult to prove (and efforts to make evolutionary arguments about why we like prospects and refuges often head into dangerous and irritating waters), this idea is reflected in a myriad of ways in our culture, particularly in the composition of landscapes we preserve or designate as special. Semi-open landscapes, where we can look out from the refuge of forests or canyons onto the prospect of swales or meadows - or, better yet, water - far outnumber protected plains or grasslands where the prospect may be grand, but where there is no refuge from which to view it or with which to give variety or texture to the experience of the place.

I am skeptical of the evolutionary arguments. Although I may be better able to speak to this idea after my trip across the corn belt, I harbor suspicions that familiarity is a considerably more significant driver of landscape preferences than acknowledged -- and I also suspect that this familiarity is greatly enhanced and expanded by our literary experience. Particular landscapes are celebrated and valorized, and the high amenity landscape retreats represented by artists and writers eventually become the vacation spots and retirement destinations of much larger constituencies -- as seen in the American Southwest or in the ranchlands of the intermountain West, for example, landscapes which are perhaps also notable for their cultivation of more appreciation of open spaces.

As I consult Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop and Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow (and search for analogues for the Corn Belt and western midwest landscapes), I realize how underexposed to the poetics of open spaces I have been as an eastern urbanite. Realizing this, I am then faced with a dilemma that faces all literate travellers and explorers of space, torn between the desire to read about others' experiences and the desire to first read the landscape itself and to plumb my own experience of it, and then allow this to resonate with the experience of others. (Given the length of the trip, I'm sure I can accommodate both approaches; thinking of the increasingly ubiquitous recorded guides to museums and landscapes, I wonder how long will I last before I must have someone tell me about my experience?)

This desire to bring social experience to bear on the experience of space is central to the inquiry of psychogeography, as is considering explicitly this desire itself, and the way it shapes our experience of space and place. In my first post of this series, on April 15, I described Kristen Ross's well known interview with the prolific French intellectual Henri Lefebvre about the Situationist International -- the movement with which psychogeography is most associated. In the passage of the interview that I reproduce below, two features stand out for me as relevant to our inquiry in Lefebvre recounting of the social context of the development of the situationists' psychogeographic methods.

First: in the context of a group that was trying to pull the rug of familiar setting and space out from under the construct of bourgeois society to shake things up a little, to get people to notice, to pay attention, and to rethink, the unsettling they experience because of the displacement of their exploratory walking from the urban to the rural is striking. This points to the way that environments support us, and to the way that this support is accessible to us only to the degree that it may be read or interpreted.

Second: the methods they describe in effect highlight the experience of space -- like Virginia Woolf's writing, they wrest the unconscious bundling of association and meaning making into conscious attention. As I've noted before, these methods strike me as very similar to the way that authors describe their construction of character, and I suspect that they open doors for us to better understand the way that we imbue and extract meaning in our spatial surrounds.

H.L.: We worked together day and night at Navarrenx, we went to sleep at nine in the morning (that was how they lived, going to sleep in the morning and sleeping all day). We ate nothing. It was appalling. I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. We must have drunk a hundred bottles. In a few days. . . . and we were working while drinking. The text was almost a doctrinal resume of everything we were thinking, about situations, about transformations of life; it wasn't very long, just a few pages, handwritten. They took it away and typed it up, and afterwards thought they had a right to the ideas. These were ideas we tossed around on a little country walk I took them on. With a nice touch of perversity, I took them down a path that led nowhere, that got lost in the woods, fields, and so on. Michele Bernstein had a complete nervous breakdown, she didn't enjoy it at all. It's true, it wasn't urban, it was very deep in the country.

K.R.: A rural dérive. Let's talk a about the dérive in general. Do you think it brought anything new to spatial theory or to urban theory? In the way that it emphasized experimental games and practices, do you think it was more productive than a purely theoretical approach to the city?

H.L.: Yes. As I perceived it, the dérive was more of a practice than a theory. It revealed the growing fragmentation of the city. In the course of its history, the city was once a powerful organic unity; for some time, however, that unity was becoming undone, was fragmenting, and [the situationists] were recording examples of what we had all been talking about, like the place where the new Bastille Opera is going to be built. The Place de la Bastille is the end of historic Paris -- beyond that it's the Paris of the first industrialization of the nineteenth century. The Place des Vosges is still aristocratic Paris of the seventeenth century. When you get to the Bastille, another Paris begins, which is of the nineteenth century, but it's Paris of the bourgeoisie, of commercial, industrial expansion, at the same time that the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie takes hold of the Marais, the center of Paris -- it spreads out beyond the Bastille, the rue de la Roquette, the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, etc. So already the city is becoming fragmented. We had a vision of a city that was more and more fragmented without its organic unity being completely shattered. Afterward, of course, the peripheries and the suburbs highlighted the problem. But back then it wasn't yet obvious, and we thought that the practice of the derive revealed the idea of the fragmented city. But it was mostly done in Amsterdam. The experiment consisted of rendering different aspects or fragments of the city simultaneous, fragments that can only be seen successively, in the same way that there exist people who have never seen certain parts of the city.

K.R.: While the dérive took the form of a narrative.

H.L.: That's it; one goes along in any direction and recounts what one sees.

K.R.: But the recounting can't be done simultaneously.

H.L.: Yes, it can, if you have a walkie-talkie. The goal was to attain a certain simultaneity. That was the goal; it didn't always work.

K.R.: So, a kind of synchronic history.

H.L.: Yes, that's it, a synchronic history. That was the meaning of Unitary Urbanism: unify what has a certain unity, but a lost unity, a disappearing unity.

As I explore the corn and ranching landscape of the west Midwest, I will be fascinated to see what this exploration of the appearance of disappearing unity of North American experience of landscape reveals in the way of the character of place.

Willa Cather. 1927. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf.

Kristin Ross and Henri LeFebvre. 1997. Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International; Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross. October 79, Winter.

Wallace Stegner. 1955. Wolf Willow. New York: Viking.

Psychogeography as Seeing with Metaphors

As part of a sporadic effort to resist the move to wearing reading glasses (my last eye doctor – with a university health service, no less – suggested I could also just read less), I have in this past week taken up a series of eye exercises. The primary exercise involves donning prism glasses: each set distorts what I can see in a different direction, and the optometrist (this time a more reading-friendly one) emphasizes that it is important to feel the distortion, to notice whether the lenses make me seem taller in the room (with everything sloping away from me) or shorter (the floor, dizzingly, swoops up toward the wall). When the lenses make things bulge to the left or to the right, he has me run my hand up and down the doorjamb, and in each case, I am to feel the hill that has been created out of the floor and to walk carefully up and down it, being in that new and novel space.

As I quizzed the good doctor about the effects that this exercise was having on my vestibular and visual systems in its effort to retrain their habits, I do not think he expected that I would already have a framework to which I could liken this new discovery of space: “this is psychogeography!,” I exclaimed to his puzzlement, groping my way enthusiastically through what I had just realized were, in fact, wayfinding exercises that, like psychgeographical exercises like the derive, found their power precisely in their ability to disrupt assumed geometries and geographies, and to promote new learning in domains where old assumptions might generally inhibit such learning.

In this second-to-last post of my current Spring series on psychogeography (the June 8 post will return to the topic of affordances via 'prospects' and 'refuges'), I’d like to return to two previous posts to work my way forward to a consideration of the relationship between metaphor and space in the context of setting, psychology, and fiction. First, in response to my May 1 post on Inventing Place, Nat Case asked:

Is the goal of the dérive to shake loose our preconcieved sense of space, and discover the place itself, or to look back and see patterns of space construction from a newly alienated vantage-point? Are we seeking a deeper understanding of the subject space by clearing away mental debris, or to understand better how that debris is constructed in the first place?

Yes, both – and how eloquently put! In a somewhat roundabout but related way, Keith Oatley’s May 22 post on the Actor Problem has complicated my mulling over this question, and – through the prism lenses of my exercise glasses – has got me wondering about the value of mental ‘debris,’ the measurement of ‘deeper’ understanding, and the tradeoffs that happen in order to understanding something in a new or different way. Let me take some steps back to cover more gracefully the leap from space seen through the prism glasses of a disrupted lens on the spatial (the dérive) to the metaphors involved in the Actor Problem.

In his post, Keith describes Luria’s cognitive tests having to do with a syllogism about white bears. (“In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are the bears there?”)

He tested 15 people who had remained illiterate. Of these only four were able to answer this question. Those who could not answer it replied, for instance, that they could not say because they had never been to Novaya Zemlya. By contrast all 15 of those who had attended a literacy program could answer the question. They were able to escape the literal and immediate, to think in abstractions. Harris argues that Luria's result occurred because those who took the educational programs were inducted into the possibilities of imagining "what if?"

As someone who is perhaps over-delighted with abstract thought, I certainly appreciate the analytic purchase afforded by the possibility of imagining 'what if'. However, for the last week, I have found myself repeatedly returning to this syllogism, and wondering about what is involved in changing the way one thinks about 'what if' questions. If understanding about bears in places abstractly allows one to draw generalizations, what mental debris was preventing this analytical reasoning?

Although I will not go into detail here on his theories, Karl Polanyi is a central figure in my field, famous for his interpretation of The Great Transformation, which he effectively interprets as the disembedding of the economy from the social relations of everyday life. As the commodification of values make things generalized and more substitutable for each other, the complex web of social relations that at one point measured meaning and value are substituted by a system that while complex in its own way, undeniably simplifies the meaning of many exchanges -- and by many is considered to cheapen many experiences values, not least that of wage labor.

In this context -- an important one for understanding the experience of modernity that's linked to efforts to promote literacy, analytic reasoning, and progressive eye exercises, I cannot help thinking about what is traded for the ability to generalize bears. What sorts of metaphors of understanding are embedded in our preconcieved senses of space? When we seek the ability to 'to look back and see patterns of space construction from a newly alienated vantage-point,' or to seek 'a deeper understanding of the subject space by clearing away mental debris, or to understand better how that debris is constructed in the first place,' what does this cost us? And are there ways that understanding these trade offs might help us balance the values of a more analytical understanding with the values (that I still only dimly view, as if through prism glasses) involved in not being able to generalize -- with this 'pre-modern' or 'provincial' way of understanding so linked to place and experience?

Alexander Luria (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Karl Polanyi (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

xkcd

Tellingly, the word "emotion" never appears explicitly in the internet's current top comic strip, xkcd (A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language). "Fiction" appears rarely, as in the title of the analytical strip above: Fiction Rule of Thumb. Despite the unlikely focus for this publication on a text where "statistics" and "probability" are so much more common than emotion and fiction, I'd like to highlight xkcd's minimalist use of line and metaphor as remarkable illustrations of how little ink (if considerable skill) it takes to elicit significant emotion from readers.

Admittedly, Randall Munroe, xkcd's author, (and for full disclosure, I should admit that Munroe has the current distinction of being my youngest hero, and also that xkcd competes with OnFiction in my weekly reading -- not only for the comics, but also for the fantastic info graphics) has recently been drawing readers' sympathy with his poignant stick figure representations of medical worry (under the simultaneous ominous and innocuous heading of "probability"):

However, even when conveying less worrisome prospects, Munroe's stick figures are remarkably evocative -- and given the detailed analysis bestowed on most strips by Munroe's devoted and verbally fluent mathy fans, I hesitate to even make such a trollingly basic observation, but I suspect that many emotion and fiction readers may be likely to overlook the value of simple line illustrations.

Munroe's somewhat romantic math humor is complemented by remarkably perceptive analyses of everything from movie character interactions (exhaustively diagrammed),

academic pretentions to interdisciplinarity,

and the sheer random psychogeography of everyday life in the mediated contemporary world we inhabit (especially those line-drawing-attracted information workers who spend their time



online).