When I first approached the term "psychogeography", having no other reference than my classical and Greek language studies, I started by breaking down the word into its components
Ψυχή = soul
Γη = the planet we live on
Γραφία = writing
It is quite clear from its components that this word has to do with our soul's perception of the planet we live on.
The association between psyche and soul is interesting since the psyche is associated with rationality and reasoning, while the soul is associated with the vital spirit, but also with perception, sensation and emotion.
We could therefore say that psychogeography is linked to the emotional perception of the environment around us.
This conclusion seems to be confirmed by a sentence I read in the book that I will quote immediately after.
With this initial concept in mind, I started reading Merlin Coverley's “Psychogeography”.
This book is the first reading that was recommended by my Tutor.
In order to complete a research path on the subject of psychogeography, and thus create the basis of the subsequent Critical Review, I will use the guidelines of this book and integrate them with derivative research on other documentation.
To understand the concept of psychogeography well, I researched for definitions and statements. Many of these can be traced back to the 1950s and to what Guy Debord theorized.
In the second issue of Potlatch (information bulletin of the French section of the lettrist international) on June 29, 1954, Debord lays the foundations for defining psychogeography.
In the same issue, Debord introduces a so-called "Exercise in psychogeography", where he gives examples of psychogeographic classification of some well-known individuals.
".....Piranesi is psychogeographical in the stairway.
Claude Lorrain is psychogeographical in the juxtaposition of a palace neighborhood and the sea.
The postman Cheval is psychogeographical in architecture.
Arthur Cravan is psychogeographical in hurried drifting.
Jacques Vaché is psychogeographical in dress.
Louis II of Bavaria is psychogeographical in royalty.
Jack the Ripper is probably psychogeographical in love.
Saint-Just is a bit psychogeographical in politics. (Terror is disorienting.)
André Breton is naively psycho-geographical in encounters.
Madeleine Reineri is psycho-geographical in suicide
.........
Along with Pierre Mabille in gathering together marvels, Évariste Gaullois in mathematics, Edgar Allan Poe in landscape, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam in agony....."
accessed on 20/09/2022)
In a post, I also reflected on a practical interpretation by Macfarlane of "doing" psychogeography in 2005.
Debord’s oft-repeated ‘definition’
of psychogeography states: ‘....the study of the precise laws and specific
effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the
emotions and behaviour of individuals....’
(Debord, G. E., ‘Introduction to a
Critique of Urban Geography’ (Les Lèvres Nues #6, September 1955), in
Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. by Ken Knabb, Berkeley,
CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, 5-8, p. 5)
Psychogeography determines an attitude and behaviour towards the environment around us.
Historic legacy of the discipline
Merlin Coverley finds the first embryonic traces of psychogeographic behaviour well before Debord's conceptualization/rationalization in the 1950s.
The characters of books dating back to the early 1700s "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) and " Journal of the plague Year "(1722) by Daniel Defoe, move psychogeographically in the environment.
Coverley also cites authors from the 1800s, such as Robert Luis Stevenson with "The Strange Case of Dr Jeckill and Mr Hide" (1886), Thomas De Quincey with "Confessions of an English opium eater" (1821) and "Man of the Crowd" by Edgar Allan Poe (1840).
Apart from "Robinson Crusoe", all these works have in common an urban environment in which the plot unfolds: the city of London. For this reason, these authors have been associated with a literary current called "London Writing".
If two cities of the old continent can be associated with psychogeography and its conceptual components, they are London and Paris. Paris is also the environment where, since the time of Baudelaire, the so-called "flaneuring" and the figure who interprets it, the "flaneur", developed. A flaneur is a person who fully interprets psychogeographic behaviour in his disenchanted wandering through the urban environment.
The figure of the flaneur creates a special bond between London and Paris through authors such as Baudelaire (who, knowing English, translated the aforementioned book by De Quincey) and Walter Benjamin, who, in turn, translated and interpreted Baudelaire.
Psychogeography does not find its expression exclusively in the urban environment but also in the rural one. In 1925 Alfred Watkins wrote the book "The old straight track". Watkins introduces and develops the concept of "ley lines", which is an essential component, as well as the "theory of drift" of psychogeographic thinking.
In the early 1950s, the Letterist movement encoded the meaning and role of psychogeography.
Later movements such as the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) were born in 1957, together with other movements such as International Movement For An Imaginist Bauhaus and the Letterists themselves, represented by Guy Debord, founded, in Italy, the Situationist International.
Ideas that shape psychogeography
The Situationist International is a political/artistic movement that, under the leadership of Guy Debord (and through the frequent expulsion of people considered "too artistic"), takes on an increasingly political and less artistic connotation.
I believe that, following the conceptualization and codification of psychogeography within Situationism, the political contamination of psychogeography arises, which leads to the definition by Guy Debord of the "Theory of drift".
According to Debord, Drift is a playful-constructive behaviour that directly contrasts with classic notions of travel and strolling. It is considered by the situationists as a psychogeographic and political act which is set against the current system and bourgeois orthodoxies. As Ian Sinclair later wrote in 1975 with "Lud Heat", it is a "remapping" of urban planning that the situationist feels as an imposition and an enemy of the freedom to move, perceive and leave the predefined schemes.
As I wrote in a post, I don't feel involved in this political connotation of psychogeographic behaviour, which has the drift as its explicit expression.
As a photographer, I see psychogeography and drift as a tool to "trigger" me to wander in search of signs that I can perceive and process personally to arrive at an equally personal expression of mine through the photographic image.
It should be noted that, while psychogeography is closely linked to the birth and development of Situationism, it is Situationism itself that determines its decrease in importance: in the sixties, psychogeography has a marginal role in the formal acts of situationism. This demotion is explained by the totally different nature between situationism, which is essentially a political and philosophical movement, without practical implications, and psychogeography, which essentially starts from the key practical, act of wandering and making a drift.
My personal perception of psychogeography is that of a paradox, to which I cannot answer: if the practice of psychogeography is essentially based on the act of making a drift, and therefore privileging emotional perceptions, how can psychogeography be a scientific tool to measure such emotional perceptions?
The introduction of Cowerley's book ends with the citation by the author of other practices originating in psychogeography, which in some way have also usurped some meanings: mythogeography, schizocartography and cyclogeography, where the wanderer coincides with the cyclist.
This makes me reflect on my choice of location in which I have done and will do my drifts.
As I have already stated in "Drifting in Giudecca" this island is not open to cars or even bicycles. However, it is surrounded by water and crossed by narrow canals, and therefore I humbly propose that the Venice lagoon is the only place in the world where boatgeography could develop.
Psychogeography, beyond the philosophical and political connotations that support its content, remains mainly linked to the act of wandering, in all its forms, by all means, in any space frequented by the human being, be it urban or rural.
The act of wandering introduces us to an environment from which we receive visual, physical and emotional stimuli, which produce reactions in us.
Photography documents, or is itself, a reaction to the stimuli derived from psychogeographic exploration: it, like painting, writing or cinematography, can be one of the functional tools for the creation of psychogeographic artistic works.
‘Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood ‘information’. What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being’
(Flusser, V. , 2013. ‘Towards a philosophy of photography’, London: Reaktion Books)
