Who and what are the Situationists International?
The Situationist International formed as an underground group out of a meeting of three small artistic groups (the Letterist International, Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association) in a bar in Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy, in 1957. It was there that Guy Debord emerged as the dominant personality of the group, with the suggestion that it should be named ‘Situationist International.’
From 1957 to 1962, the group formulated a number of significant concepts (unitary urbanism, dérive, détournement, and décomposition). It attracted many prominent artists and theorists into its ranks, even though, as former members T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith observe, the Situationist International “never ‘recruited’ members”. [1] According to many accounts, the membership of the group never exceeded more than twenty. Nevertheless, the group managed during this period to attract members from Algeria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Sweden, and the US, [2] thus attaining international status. It is possible to attribute its ‘rotating’ membership to the group’s “policy of aiming for constant agreement on key matters,” [3] which often resulted in ad hominem attacks among the members and consequent expulsions from the group. Nevertheless, during this period the situationists were active in theoretical as well as artistic work, often capturing public attention with modes of action aiming to scandalize and provoke the public, as well as the orthodox Left.
From 1962 to 1966 the life of the group was characterized by splits and more internal disagreements. In 1962, a rival Second Situationist International was established. As Peter Wollen argues, the breakup “can be characterized as a split between ‘artists’ and ‘political theorists’ (or ‘revolutionaries’)”, based around Debord’s insistence “that art could not be recognized as a separate activity, with its own legitimate specificity, but must be dissolved into a unitary revolutionary practice.” [4] The split effectively put an end to the earlier artistic endeavors of the group.
It is not until 1967, however, that the group regained a public presence. That year two major texts outlining Situationist theory were published: Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. Furthermore, various creative actions committed by members of the group won the Situationist International media attention. Perhaps the greatest year for the group was 1968 when the uprisings that shook Paris were characterized by forms of creative resistance which “were far more in tune with the SI than with ‘Vietnam Committees’ and calls for university reform.” [5] As Peter Wollen notes, “their contribution to the revolutionary uprising was remembered mainly through the diffusion and spontaneous expression of situationist ideas and slogans, in graffiti and in posters… as well as in serried assaults on the routines of everyday life” [6]. The situationists were active participants in the events, acting as ‘mentors’ of revolution who promoted workers’ councils without attempting to gain any power in them. In 1969, the group published the last issue of its journal L’Internationale Situationniste and held its last conference in 1970 in Wolsfield and Trier, East Germany. More internal disagreements, expulsions and splits followed, with the group dissolving in 1972. Its total membership never rose above 70. - http://affinityproject.org/groups/situationist.html
Who is Guy Debord and what role did he play in psychogeography:
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including _Hurlements en faveur de Sade_ (1952). Inspired by the libertarian journal _Socialisme on Barbarie_, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists-http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Obituary/debord.html
who is Iain Sinclair and what makes him a Pschogeographer?
Iain Sinclair made a documentary and a book called Orbital, where he and friends walk around a motorway that rings London called the M25. Like Ballard, he is interested in no-man's land (like you get around motorways) and how humans and nature actually fill that space that isn't meant to be filled with anything.
"Listeners of Radio 4's Today programme recently voted London's M25 the worst of the "seven horrors of Britain" in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they'd done what the novelist, poet and "psychogeographer" Iain Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they'd have thought differently. For this was his unique project - to walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so, comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible landscape disappear.
Sinclair describes the journey - taken in the millennial year - in his new book London Orbital. Most people would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting? "Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly exhilarating," says Sinclair. "You didn't know what you were going to find. Getting up really early in this weird landscape. You might as well have been in some totally remote country."- i bleev that this hliglted section is what makes Iain Sinclaire a psychogeographer, as he went out to creat work in the urban envorment not knwing what he was going to find or photograph.
J G Ballard and his book 'Miracles of Life'
'Miracles of Life' opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of the events which would profoundly influence his work. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He explores his subsequent involvement in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, and the adjustments to life following the premature death of his wife. In prose displaying his characteristic precision and eye for detail, Ballard recounts the experiences which would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing an striking social analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. 'Miracles of Life' is an utterly captivating account of an extraordinary writer's extraordinary life.
Who is Will self?
Will Self: On ‘Psychogeography’ and the Places That Choose You
Travel Interviews: The novelist and journalist talks to Frank Bures about his new book, long-distance walking and our search for the places that embrace us
12.17.07 | 4:41 PM ET
Photo by Michael Wildsmith.In it, Self writes that people today are “decoupled from physically geography.” He observes that walking “blows back the years, especially in urban contexts. The solitary walker is, himself, an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveler.” He told the New York Times on his 26-mile walk from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan that, “People don’t know where they are anymore. In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”
The book is one of the most original travel tomes in years. Its essays, which originally appeared in the Independent, are illustrated by none other than Ralph Steadman. It hits bookstores at a time when many people seem to be craving a more immediate experience of the world and are ready to explore experimental travel. Frank Bures asked Self all about it.
World Hum: For the uninitiated, what exactly is psychogeography?
Will Self: The term derives from the French Situationists, a post-Marxian groupuscule in 1950s Paris. Their leader, Guy Debord, coined it. For him, what he fervently hoped was that “late capitalist” society was a kind of illusion, or spectacle, in which city dwellers were thrust hither and thither by commercial imperatives—work, consume, die—and so unable to experience the reality of their environment. His solution was the derive, or drift, really a resurrection of the time-honoured tradition of the Parisian flaneur, in which the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it. Since the Situationists—whose main derive was to pick up a few bottles of cheap red wine, get drunk on them, totter through Paris to the Ile de la Citee in the Seine and then sleep it off—psychogeography has mutated in many ways, but most of us who practice it—and it is a practice, not a field per se—take the view that by walking you can decouple yourself from the human geography that so defines contemporary urbanity.
How did you get interested in it?
My epiphany came in 1988, when one day I found myself standing in Central London with a day to kill. I realised—from out of the blue—that I had never seen the mouth of the Thames River that flows through London, even though I had been born in the city and lived there all my life. Not only that, I had never even seen a representation of it. It struck me, that if you were to encounter a peasant 30 miles from the mouth of the Amazon, and ask him what it was like at the river mouth, and he was to say that he had never seen it, you would think him a very benighted peasant. Yet that peasant was me. I immediately got in my car and drove to the mouth of the Thames. Needless to say it was nothing like I imagined. But as an indication of how strongly this human-defined geography still holds sway, I recently asked a large London audience at one of my readings how many of them had seen the Thames’s mouth, and only a handful raised their hands.
What got you started as a long distance walker?
My father was a big walker. My way of being with him was to walk. We did long walks—hikes, really—when I was a child. The impulse to walk went underground for a long while—walking doesn’t really mix well with drug addiction, unless you’re going to score—but then re-surfaced eight years ago when I cleaned up. Since then it’s been burgeoning and burgeoning.
You write that tourism is a search for a place that will embrace you. Is that partly what you’re doing with your walks?
No, not really. I’m an unrepentant Londoner, and the places that have chosen me (because I think it’s that way round: places choose you, rather than vice versa), have already done so. I think you only have room for two or three serious affairs of place in a lifetime, just as you only have emotional space for two or three serious love affairs.
Apart from your walk from JFK to New York, what have been your most memorable walks?
One that springs to mind is at the mouth of the Thames. On the north bank of the river there is a large, 10,000-acre island called Foulness, which has been a British army firing range since the First World War. It’s off limits except to those going on shore from boats. You can then walk across this eerie land that time has passed by and out on to the Thames estuarial mud, this on a Medieval causeway called the Broomway, because it’s made up of bundles of broom buried in the mud. I walked with a handful of companions over the mud for about six miles upriver, before tending back to the shore—an utterly bizarre, dislocatory and quite beautiful experience.
What separates a psychogeographic act from a stunt, or a gimmick? Is it a difference in intent, or in outcome?
I’m too old for gimmicks or stunts. The kind of psychogeography I practice really works—for me. It inspires my prose, it soothes my soul. It makes it possible for me to deal with the hideousness of the globalized man-machine matrix.
In such a hypermediated world, what room is there for an idea like psychogeography?
Like writing—which is low start-up, all you need is a pen and a piece of paper—psychogeography is bare-bones. You just get out there and experience. It doesn’t require the hypermediated world, it is more akin to a meditational practice.
Photo of Will Self by Michael Wildsmith."
http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-interviews/will_self_on_psychogeography_and_the_places_that_choose_you_20071217/
What is Flaneur
"The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity. In French Canada flâner is rarely used to describe strolling and often has a negative connotation as the term's most common usage refers to loitering.
Flâneur is not limited to someone committing the physical act of peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking", and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's essay on "why I walk" in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010).[1] Louis Menand in seeking to describe T.S. Eliot's relationship to English literary society and his role in the formation of modernism describes Eliot as a flaneur (The New Yorker,September 19, 2011, pp. 81–89?)"
"
The flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer described by nineteenth century journalist Victor Fournel before the advent of the hand-held camera:
This man is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd. ("Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris", What one sees on the streets of Paris)The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' "Richard Wentworth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur
Office workers are on the roof garden of their block thinking they are above the city, but they don't know that I'm watching them through a periscope that is mounted on the roof of a plumbing supplies centre round the side of King's Cross rail station. Swivel the periscope and you see Victorian rooftops in the afternoon sun, a Union flag flying. This view is framed in such a way that you don't see cars, or McDonald's, or any of the detritus of today's King's Cross - it might be London on the day Mafeking was relieved. Turn the periscope to the right and you are even more dislocated in time, as the Dracula's castle of St Pancras blots out the sky.
It sometimes seems that Artangel, the site-specific art-enabling outfit behind this installation, is mustering an army of artists to explore London's exotic corners: Whiteread's Bow, Sinclair's Spitalfields. Richard Wentworth's mapping of the King's Cross area is another excavation of the capital's psychogeography. So you come to this plumbing supplies warehouse not bored exactly, but with a slightly comfortable expectation of metropolitan magic realism.
But King's Cross resists cosiness. Wentworth insists it is "an area of outstanding unnatural beauty". It's got something, all right. That wooden tower like a maimed windmill makes you think for a second that you are in Montmartre. The space in front of the station has a seaside feel.
Wentworth offers tentative ways of knowing this place. There are ping-pong tables printed with fragments of the A-Z street map, video monitors showing The Ladykillers, and maps from different eras - frozen moments of London, recognisable yet alien configurations of the city. In the 18th century it was all fields around here. A Victorian map minutely discriminates between the unrespectable, semi-respectable and respectable, house by house.
Wentworth's project is in a tradition of modern art as urban exploration. It successfully distils what it is like to walk around London. The inconclusive arrangement of tables, TV monitors and periscope platform creates a pleasurable disorientation. When you look through the periscope, the rooftops, railways and canals don't resolve themselves into a pattern; London seems thrown together carelessly.
Among the maps is a comparison of the street plans of London, Paris and New York. Next to Haussmann's boulevards and Manhattan's grid, London looks like noodles spilled on the pavement. Which is just the sort of thing you are likely to tread in if you get too dreamy around King's Cross.
· Until November 17. Talks and walks start September 25. Details: 020-7713 1400.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/sep/19/artsfeatures1
It sometimes seems that Artangel, the site-specific art-enabling outfit behind this installation, is mustering an army of artists to explore London's exotic corners: Whiteread's Bow, Sinclair's Spitalfields. Richard Wentworth's mapping of the King's Cross area is another excavation of the capital's psychogeography. So you come to this plumbing supplies warehouse not bored exactly, but with a slightly comfortable expectation of metropolitan magic realism.
But King's Cross resists cosiness. Wentworth insists it is "an area of outstanding unnatural beauty". It's got something, all right. That wooden tower like a maimed windmill makes you think for a second that you are in Montmartre. The space in front of the station has a seaside feel.
Wentworth offers tentative ways of knowing this place. There are ping-pong tables printed with fragments of the A-Z street map, video monitors showing The Ladykillers, and maps from different eras - frozen moments of London, recognisable yet alien configurations of the city. In the 18th century it was all fields around here. A Victorian map minutely discriminates between the unrespectable, semi-respectable and respectable, house by house.
Wentworth's project is in a tradition of modern art as urban exploration. It successfully distils what it is like to walk around London. The inconclusive arrangement of tables, TV monitors and periscope platform creates a pleasurable disorientation. When you look through the periscope, the rooftops, railways and canals don't resolve themselves into a pattern; London seems thrown together carelessly.
Among the maps is a comparison of the street plans of London, Paris and New York. Next to Haussmann's boulevards and Manhattan's grid, London looks like noodles spilled on the pavement. Which is just the sort of thing you are likely to tread in if you get too dreamy around King's Cross.
· Until November 17. Talks and walks start September 25. Details: 020-7713 1400.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/sep/19/artsfeatures1
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