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USC Lecture 7 Psychogeography : the place of mind [SLIDE]

[SLIDE] Let us take Robert MacFarlanes advice from p.9 of the reading for todays session Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley (Harpenden: 2006)

[SLIDE] and place our glass on a map of, in this case, Manchester [SLIDE] draw our circle [SLIDE] and what do we see? **Gap for responses** Do we see a real place? Do we see a logical distinction between one part of the city and another? And as MacFarlane suggests can we follow our curve? What do we see? What is this Manchester? Where is it? What is it to you? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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p.9, Coverley, M., (2010) Psychogeography, Aylesbury : Harpenden (Pocket Essentials).

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How can we read this part of the city? [SLIDE] Better still, what happens if we draw our circle again [SLIDE] but this time on an out of date map of the same city? In this case 1801. What would happen if we tried to follow this map? What would our experience be? What would we be looking for? **Gap for responses** This disjointed and confused experience of space is not new one. Indeed as Coverley sets out the idea of this way of experiencing space can be traced in his view back to Daniel Defoe and Thomas de Quincey, amongst others. [SLIDE]

[SLIDE] de Quincey is here noted for his essay Confessions of an English OpiumEater (1821). In which, for him, London was transformed through the use of hard drugs. These adjusted his mind and this the city itself was adjusted. [SLIDE] Defoe famed for writing Robinson Crusoe, is noted by Coverley for another book his Journal of the Plague Year written in 1722 set in 1665-66 the year of Black Death. Written by the fictional diarist H.F.. Defoe as Coverley describes: [SLIDE]

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Coverley has here mentioned an important group I will come back to later, The Situationists. But first Id like to remind you of aspects of the first lecture in this unit. Dana Arnolds work that I talked about in Lecture1 here seem relevant. Especially her talk of the flneur.[SLIDE] The concept of the Flneur (masculine/viewer) and Flneuse (feminine/viewed) is complex one. It is a philosophical premise first introduced by Charles Baudelaire in relation to Parisian street life, but it is equally applicable here. The idea of the flneur is perhaps best defined in this context by Walter Benjamin in his famed Arcades project;
It is the gaze of the flneur, whose way of life conceals behind a beneficent mirage the anxiety of the future inhabitants of our metropolises. The flneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flneur into phantasmagoria. This phantasmagoria, in which the city appears now as a landscape, now as a room, seems later to have inspired the decor of department stores, which thus put the flnerie to work for profit. In any case, department stores are the last precincts of flnerie. (Walter Benjamin, Expos of 1939, Arcades, 26)2

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(June 2008) Tourism and Typology, [online] (url: http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/2008/06/), rd American Stranger blog, [accessed 3 October 2009].

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In fact Arnold suggests that the concept of the flneur originated in London; [DANDY/FLNEUR QUOTES SLIDE] ..the languid figure of the flneur/euse sought novelty and entertainment. But this practice of viewing yet being disengaged from the process of urban life had its roots in the dilettanti and dandies of early nineteenth-century London.3 This example of the flneur as the Dandy or Fop is perfectly suited to nineteenthcentury London. At the beginning of the nineteenth-century the dandy carried on the tradition of his eighteenth-century counterpart and he was without doubt a kind of flneur. The importance of the rituals of social dress code to the early nineteenth-century young man about town reveals how this manifestation of style represented the intricate system of social hierarchy.4 [DANDY PCKLER-MUSKAU QUOTE SLIDE] Prince Pckler-Muskau noted in a letter of 1827 where he reports on the remarks of his washerwoman who found herself in great demand by the fashionable lite: [she] is the only person who can make cravats of the right
stiffness, or fold the breasts of shirts with plaits of the right size. An lgant [dandy], then, requires per week twenty shirts; twenty-four pocket handkerchiefs; nine or ten pairs of summer trousers; thirty neck handkerchiefs (unless he wears black ones); a dozen waistcoats; and stockings a dandy cannot get on without dressing three or four times a day, the affair is tout simple, for he must appear: 1st. Breakfast toilette, a chintz dressing gown and Turkish slippers; 2nd. Morning riding dress a frock coat, boots and spurs; 3rd. Dinner dress dress coat and shoes; 4th. ball dress, with pumps, a word signifying shoes as thin as paper.5

So this fashionable flneur observes the city at a remove and watches others, particularly women (the flneuse), with a degree of detachment or even aloof superiority. In Baudelaires conception this watching is designed to enable a degree of understanding of what is essentially incomprehensible. For as Wittgenstein said: [WITTGENSTEIN SLIDE]
I am the limit of the world but I cannot draw a boundary around it, for to do that I would have to be able to step outside it, which I cannot do.6

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p23, Arnold, D., Re-presenting the metropolis: architecture, urban experience, and social life in London, 1800-1840, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 4 p97, ibid. 5 p97, Arnold, Op cit., 2000. 6 p47, Heaton, J. and Groves, J., Introducing Wittgenstein, Royston : Icon Books, 1995.

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This brings us to something of an impasse in the conception of the psychogeographic. The flneur and the languid dandy are to observe the city outside of themselves. Defoe and de Quincey reimagining the city through the medium of fiction, death, and drugs so this fixed place of the city, a solid tangible object of stone and concrete has become blurred lost in a smog [SLIDE : 1952 London smog] of ideas and reinterpretations. The city has become of place of the mind not the physical world. So can we in anyway re connect the city or the tangible world in general to this philosophical psychological realm we seem to have unearthed?

This section of these notes were authored by Jane Webb [SLIDE] Alternative Tradition - Phenomenology An alternative tradition that uses the body as means of reading our world is phenomenology. [SLIDE] ** Jean-Paul Sartre and group existentialism The backdrop for phenomenology is post-war Paris when there was a powerful emergence of existential philosophy. This was a response to the experience during the war in which a sense that all would be well was beginning to be questioned. The ideals, truth, beauty, God seemed to have disappeared. The existentialists proposed that they did not exist and that all that was left for the individual was themselves and themselves alone. The individual became very much isolated. [SLIDE] ** Henri Lefebvre Critique of Everyday Life, c. 1947 the hitlerian mystique In a similar way Henri Lefebvre also classified what had happened during the war as a symptom of the sense that people were so reliant on ideals. He called it the Hitlerian Mystique, a kind of unquestioning attitude. [SLIDE] ** Ideal of physical beauty in Classical art

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You can see this approach actively working in the contrast between the notion of the ideal, and the art from Paris from the period [SLIDE] ** Portraits, Antonin Artaud 1947 and Place, Composition and Three Figures and a Head, 1950 Alberto Giacometti [SLIDE] ** The Situationist International c. 1957 Inspired by Lefebvre, the Situationist International as a group in various ways attempted to play out this individualistic and rather bleak approach. Simply coming to terms with the end of hope or right and wrong. [SLIDE] ** Michael Mourre in front of Notre Dame God is dead speech on Easter Day 1950 This is part of a speech that one of the artists associated with the Situationist International delivered in 1950. What you will notice as well as the rather brave act is that he talks about tilling the earth anew with your proud hands. This is the approach that came as a response to the notion that all was lost use your body, do the ordinary and have interest in the ordinary. [SLIDE] ** Derive Literally translated into English as to drift. This is the method by which simply walking, getting lost, challenged the spatial authority of the city and was a subversive act. Ordinary actions replacing the authority of the ideal. If you think about it the city is a symbol of that ideal planning. [SLIDE] ** Merleau-Ponty in Paris, c. 1950s It is into this environment that you get Merleau-Ponty who brought a method that utilised the use of the body. This was phenomenology. Drawing on a sense of individual isolation, Merleau-Ponty suggested that it is an impossibility for us to see outside of our own physical perspective and that all we experienced had to acknowledge that it was in our bodies, in the world.

From the phenomenologists we therefore get a sense of the body as central to our experience of the environment, in our case the city. The Situationists appear to have inherited the dandy and flneurs tendency to view the city. But not from their aloof remove, but from an engaged physical stand point. But I would argue we are forced to come back to the flneur. Coverley again does not see The Situationists in quite as original a light as the Phenomenological argument would have it. [SLIDE] !
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From the phenomenologists we therefore get a sense of the body as central to our experience of the environment, in our case the city. [SLIDE] We are nonetheless stuck with Wittgensteins conception that we are no a removed impartial observer. That we exist in and of our environs therefore we have an impact on them, even by just observing. It was however back to London we need to come to look at the next state of this psychogeographic evolution, and with it we must abandon any sense of intellectual impartiality and deal with the underbelly of the urban realm. JG Ballard is the next subject of Coverleys attention [SLIDE]

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[SLIDE] JG Ballards Crash is notable here because of its notoriety A book of graphic sexual content based on the fictional account of people driven to sexual arousal by car-crashes. Which they actively seek out or cause. [SLIDE] I would argue however that Ballards Concrete Island written a year later is more affecting and effective book in which a young architect becomes stranded on a traffic island surrounded by tearing motorways and high embankments, with two people who live feral existence in the gaps between the modern world. Ballard has become so noted in psychogeographical and literary circles that the word Ballardian was coined, and appears in the Collins English Dictionary as: [SLIDE] BALLARDIAN: (adj) def. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballards novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments. Pictured is another fascinating book of Ballards, High-Rise from 1975 which is described as:

So as we move through this exploration the habitat of the psychogeographer seems to be that of destruction, the recording of the doomed and destroyed. This milieu has become central to modern critical conceptions of the psychogeographic ideal. The next generation of psychogeographers, of whom more later have inherited Ballardian qualities in their work, as Coverley says on p26: [SLIDE]

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[SLIDE] Of course redevelopment is not just Thatcherite (2012) and destruction is not new phenomenon. [SLIDE] Coverley again takes us back to the flneur as the first walker of the city to encounter the destruction that made his wanderings so much the more pertinent.

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The hostility of the urban environment to would be modern flneur or psychogeographer is perhaps best illustrated by a current grand projet worthy of the Dauphins of France. [SLIDE] London 2012 brings us destruction on an unprecedented scale. This is one image of the 2012 Games. [SLIDE] This documented by the Royal Geographical society is another. [SLIDE] The big Blue Fence that sprung up in a matter of weeks in Summer 2007, and is documented in a psychogeographic manner by the Guardian journalist Andy Beckett [url: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/sep/21/communities], is an example of the exclusion of the wanderer. The privatisation of public space, the destruction of the old and unruly. Like the great modernists before them the 2012 Olympic Committee will replan Stratford Marsh, Hackney Wick , Old Ford, Leyton and Temple Mills in their new image of a prosperous regenerated sport city. [SLIDE] The area appears thus in the latest London A-Z. To discuss this further I want to show you the following film. Featuring the aforementioned Iain Sinclair.

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SHOW EDGELANDS by Sally Mumby-Croft, vimeo [url:http://vimeo.com/5191789] 15mins


The world that thankfully Mumby-Croft documents has now gone. As Iain Sinclair said speaking in the file buried under tarmac. [SLIDE] This is now what will greets people as they emerge from Stratford Mainline Rail Station during the Olympics. The Westfield Stratford Shopping City. This route is the only way to get from the station to the stadium. The American shopping corporate monolith that is Westfield has privatised the Olympic way. [SLIDE] Here is the site as it looks from Google Earth today. Stratford International Rail Station at the top and The Westfield Stratford Shopping City in the middle. [SLIDE] [SLIDE] This is the Olympic site as it looks this year. And in relation to what was being said in Sally Mumby-Crofts film there is an apparent erasure of history taking place. In an attempt to find a counter image to this all GoogleImages would show me [SLIDE] was this. Hundreds and hundreds of photos of the regenerated lower Lea Valley. [SLIDE] It is only because I own this book that Im able to show you this image [SLIDE] of the Lower Lea valley circa. 2000 Because the book is of still, printed, fixed photographs it is a snapshot in time, an historical document in a way that Google Maps can never be. The impact of the digital age on or reading, and most importantly the documentation, recording and history of our urban spaces in profound and potentially shattering. The city of the past is accessible to us, to degree, through Defoe, De Quincy, observers and diary writers like Prince Pckler-Muskau and Samuel Pepys. For our age we have Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd for if it was left to Google our urban story would be obliterated every few months with the latest update of GoogleEarth.

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