We live surrounded by maps of every sort you can imagine, digital and on paper. What Three Words reduces the world to three random words, Garmin and Strava can make you feel good about how far and fast you can run. Map My Run – well, maps your run. The Ordnance Survey is still going strong. There’s no need to get lost, ever again, because with just three words you know exactly where you are. Exactly. At the same time people are drawn to the idea of psychogeography and walking, and the idea of “walking” is credited with anything from curing many ills, physical and mental, to deciding whether or not to hold a general election. And, of course, you can sell it to someone.
The Lettrist International, later becoming the Situationist International (SI) were a group of French intellectuals, headed by Guy Debord, who thought a lot about walking, cities, mapping and having a lot of fun. They looked back to the flaneurs of the 1890s, to Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, and Homo Ludens, the seminal book about play by Johan Huizinga, and they developed the theories of Psychogeography and the dérive. The dérive is a walk with no real beginning and no real destination, but lets you wander aimlessly through your city (it is always urban) guided only by what attracts or repels you in your environment. They also came up with the idea of the Spectacle, the mass media that tells you to obey, conform, consume, via the world that is filled with images, on advertising hoardings, the television, magazines and now, well, everywhere you look.
Of course people love to make things more simple or more difficult or add things on, and modern day psychogeography is is a long way from the simplicity of Debord’s original thoughts. Debord rightly said that all protest is repackaged and sold back to us by the Spectacle or mass media, and psychogeography is well and truly being sold back to us. Some modern psychogeography practitioners would challenge this and say they are developing Debord’s rigid rules, and bringing more fun and interest to it. But whatever modern psychogeographers say, one of the fascinating things the Situationists wanted to do was to map their walk – or rather unmap it. Or maybe anti-map their walk.
The complete scanned 12 issues of the journal of the SI are now available to buy, and when you see them together in their entirety it is a revelation and, when looked at as a whole, they are full of maps. The most obvious feature of the journals that is missing from this scan, the gorgeous shiny foil in glorious colours (which were the result of many weeks of correspondence between Debord and the printers, trying to get the perfect result. It was worth every effort) places them outside of the expected from the start.
The maps inside show journeys, but reimagined. One of the first is below, which shows the journeys a student made whilst living in the 16th arrondisment of Paris over one year. How we make mostly the same journeys, again and again, but they all lead to home. It was positioned without comment in a rather humourous article which basically expelled one of the founders of the SI, Ralph Rumney, who had gone to Venice to make a psychogeographical report, but
“Rumney, struggling against innumerable difficulties, slowed down more and more by the territory he had attempted to cross, abandoned one line of research after the other, and in the end … came to a complete standstill.”
Rather like the student whose map this is, journeying between lectures, piano lessons and sundry other journeys.
Just before this in 1957, Guy Debord and fellow SI member Asger Jorn produced the Naked City map of Paris, and it’s the most famous psychogeographical map of all :
Debord adored Paris, just at that point in the 1950s when the post-war slum clearances were starting, just as his romantic memories of the city of his birth were being erased. (There is an excellent detailed discussion of the places in the map here.) So cutting up maps and making an emotional connection rather than a geographical reality, a map for yourself and only yourself, is a way of preserving your city, of preserving your memories. For various reasons I made my own version of this map recently, spending an evening cutting up photocopies of maps, arranging them, making Debord’s map my own. It was massive fun and I thoroughly recommend doing it.
The SI not only went on walking derives, they would use taxis or – rarely – a bicycle : Michèle Bernstein, Debord’s wife, recently wrote “most of the time I was pedalling, alone.” They also put psychogeography into real-life practise, Ralph Rumney writing “I once got lost in Cologne and couldn’t ask the way since I didn’t speak German. But using a map of London, I quickly found [the] restaurant.” The fourth SI conference was held at at “a secret address” that the delegates had to somehow find, and they once proposed an “extreme static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station.” Having taken part in the Liminal Residency retreat at Heathrow Airport, this suggestion fascinates and attracts me hugely, and it is something I fully look forward to doing in the near future.
The SI were also interested in the future of cities, and talked of different areas of use :
“The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life. Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc.”
This idea was taken up and planned in detail by Constant Nieuwenhuys, another member of the group, who made various plans for a Situationist city, where areas could be re-made, re-ordered and rearranged at will depending on the inhabitants’ needs and desires. The city was eventually given the name The New Babylon, but its original title was Dériveville.
One of the most beautiful maps in the journal isn’t one made by the SI at all, but is the Carte du Tendre, from 1653 by the novelist Madeline du Scudery, which takes us through a map of the emotions of love. Who hasn’t visited the Lake of Indifference or wanted to visit the village of Billet Doux?
Underlying this mapping of ideas is the idea that was central to the whole SI project, the idea of play, of having fun and letting that fun take you to places and ideas that you might never have found otherwise, and those ideas were often politically revolutionary. Nowadays Debord is often seen as a boring, rigid, stuffy intellectual who was a bit of a tyrant with his ideas and attitudes towards expelling his friends from the group, but if you look a bit more closely it is overwhelmingly a group that geared themselves to fun, creating playful situations to burst through the all encompassing Spectacle to show real life and its possibilities. They once put back a copy of a statue of the revolutionary dreamer Charles Fourier after the original had been removed by the authorities, made a film that was comprised of black and white screens – in its entirety – and published a book with covers made of sandpaper. Try putting that in your bookcase.
Debord’s wife, Michèle Bernstein, wrote two Situationist novels, All the King’s Horses and The Night. The first was a parody of a Francoise Sagan novel detailing the real-life love life of Michele and Guy and his girlfriend, the second re-told the same story but in the style of a nouveau roman novel. The Night is the story of a night-long dérive undertaken by Debord and his lover, which doesn’t exactly appear in the first novel. But you can map your way around the Latin Quarter by following its instructions.
Ultimately Debord developed an idea he had been mulling over for years, and produced “The Game of War”, a war game where you used Situationist tactics to gain power over your enemy and negotiate spectacular society. Highly influenced by The Art of War, (eg “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent”) the game’s aim is to develop your own personal tactics and wit.
Dotted throughout the journals are maps and diagrams, much more so than one would expect in a political journal:
These are just a very few of the diagrams and maps, and I ask myself why there are so many, and why they are of such obvious importance. I think the answer to this lies in the events of May 1968 when France was brought to a halt by the most serious political unrest since the Second World War. The events were heavily influenced by the Situationists, and as the days of May went by more and more graffiti appeared on the walls of the city: take your desires for reality; live without dead time; underneath the paving stones, the beach; run, comrade, the old world is behind you. Like another sort of map the slogans led you to another life, a life where, in the words of SI member Donald Nicholson Smith, “your dreams could come true.” A life that, if you understood the lessons and the experience of the labyrinth, you could find your way to the very centre of Dériveville.
This map is of the barricades protecting the Latin Quarter, during the most intense days of the demonstrations in May. The thick black lines show the barricades, and residents often left their cars unlocked at night with the keys on the driver’s seat, so the rioters could move them to make the barricades more easily.
But 1968 was a long time ago, and the SI disbanded in 1972, with Debord dying in 1994. The Situationists never wanted to be put in a museum, or hero worshipped or recuperated, but all of those things have happened. And today a definition of psychogeography exists that Debord would not have recognized. And of course there are psychogeography apps for your smartphone, the item that encapsulates everything Debord said about the Spectacle. Ben Schiller writes:
“More recently, the concept of the dérive has got new life as a series of apps. The modern-day Situationists are app designers looking to direct users in random and strange ways, so they can become better associated with their surroundings, whether by foot or by car…”
Ben Schiller, Fast Company.
Obviously. Why walk when you can drive, or think for yourself when someone else can? In all honesty I’d probably love this, but I’m certainly not admitting it to anyone. But because we aren’t in the Latin Quarter in 1968, or drunk with Debord in St Germain des Pres in 1957 or wandering around Florence with him in the 1970s after his Paris adventures had ceased, maybe these new inventions do provide a way for us to step outside our structured, rule-led lives and discover something new. Invent your own three words for where you are. Don’t bother mapping your run. Make your own map, whatever it looks like, heartbreak or revolution or just happiness. The pandemic has taught us, if nothing else, to expect the unexpected, and to have a walk every day – and just like the pandemic, psychogeography doesn’t always follow any rules, or a roadmap for that matter.
Christine Donovan is an Irish Traveller who writes psychogeographical novels. Her first novel, Jump Derry (2010) won the International Rubery Book Award, and her second novel is due out later this year. She is currently writing a book about the women involved in the Situationist International. Christine took part in the Liminal Residency at Heathrow Airport in 2018. She blogs at Mostly, I Just Walk Around.