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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Pyschogeography « Previous | |Next »
March 3, 2009

Ian Sinclair, the Engllish writer says that psychogeography:

For me, it's a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I'm just exploiting it because I think it's a canny way to write about London....I can't live in Hackney. ... Nothing working, completely shot council, the banality of gradual dysfunction, the sense of the landscape becoming more intimidating.

The reference is to layers ofthecity and the way it changes through development. An indication of what Sinclair is referring to can be gleaned from Friedrich Engels writes in On the Condition of the Working Class in England, where he says that 1840s Manchester:
‘is particularly built so that a person might live in it for years and go in and out daily, without coming into contact with a working people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or pleasure walks’.

Urban space was so designed that businessmen could enter and leave the city ‘without ever seeing that they are in the midst of grimy misery that lurks to the right and left’. In effect, in 1840s Manchester, work was
being hidden through the very shape of the city itself. In Manchester, the modern industrial city was being
shaped according to an incredible contradiction. The poverty, filth and cramped favella conditions, the base
of the new economy, were duly swept aside. The essential had become the undesirable, the undesirable
became the ignored.

Cities have secrets and histories that need to be discovered. Psychogeography--walking the city---is one way to do this. For the Situationists the aim is to combat the banality and conformity of everyday life; and psychogeography became a major element, in the form of the dérive. This was an aimless, intoxicated drift across the city which, they hoped, would make the familiar surprising and the mundane strange. The British version was about surreptitiously slinking along, fumbling for the underbelly. It was about the arcane and the hidden, rather than the bourgeoisie and the banlieu collaborating on overthrowing the state. Still, this act of walking in cities that are increasingly hostile to the pedestrian means that it inevitably becomes an act of subversion.

The danger of course is the resistance to new development become anti-development. The Manchester Area Pyschogeographic's website makes clear how they felt about about the new developments of the 1980s and 1990s:
"

The talk was all about loft apartments, gentrifying 19th-century warehouses, and so on. We preferred it in its sordid decrepitude. Perversely, because no one else was saying it, we launched the first MAP newsletter, sending copies anonymously to anyone we thought mattered, setting out our case: no to gentrification, no to museumification. We were saying, let the buildings fall down, if they must. We wanted to walk unregulated, unrepaired, atmospheric streets."

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:12 PM |