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Psychogeography

Crispy said:
I like this youtube channel



Warm hearted and soothing, gently funny
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I've just recently started watching John Roger's videos and was at Hand Trough creek in the Cuckold's Haven nature reserve, which features in this video earlier, not much of an adventure as it's a ten-minute walk from home, but absolutely glorious if you look in the right direction. In the seventeenth century play Eastwood Hoe one of the characters manages to get shipwrecked a Cuckold's Haven. I wondered if it still existed when I read the play 30 years ago. Now I know it does.



Enter SECURITY, without his hat, in a nightcap, wet band, etc.
Sec. Heaven, I beseech thee, how have I offended thee! where am I cast ashore now, that I may go a righter way home by land? Let me see; Oh, I am scarce able to look about me. Where is there any sea-mark that I am acquainted withal?
Slit. Look up, father; are you acquainted with this mark?
Sec. What! landed at Cuckold's Haven? Hell and damnation! I will run

He falls down.
back and drown myself.
Slit. Poor man, how weak he is! the weak water has wash'd away his strength.
Sec. Landed at Cuckold's Haven! If it had not been to die twenty times alive, I should never have 'scap'd death! I will never arise more; I will grovel here and eat dirt till I be chok'd; I will make the gentle earth do that which the cruel water has denied me.
Slit. Alas, good father, be not so desperate! Rise man; if you will, I'll come presently and lead you home.
Sec. Home! shall I make any know my home that has known me thus abroad? How low shall I crouch away, that no eye may see me? I will creep on the earth while I live, and never look heaven in the face more.

John Roger's has now made well over a hundred of them. Good Marty, marty21, seems to be a fan too.


www.youtube.com

John Rogers

London-based film-maker and writer John Rogers, author of This Other London - adventures in the overlooked city http://bit.ly/1tQS301 My blog The Lost Byway ...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
 
This is still good:

By suspending the ‘common sense’ as we move from location to location in our daily life, we can rediscover the wilderness within the city. By exploring those areas we have no good reason to be in, we can discover the reasons we are constrained to certain areas.

But this layer of psychogeographical activity soon reveals other layers. Questions of gender, of race, of access for people with disabilities soon arise. Any specific locality does not have a unique character. It is not just that a woman may relate differently to a place than a man, but that a woman’s presence (or even the presence of a horde of women) can transform that place. Normality no longer functions as a global variable, it can only exist as the production of the functioning of a particular power at a particular place. The restructuring of capital has displaced the linear organisation of power with a cybernetic web of centres of excellence which survive a idyllic islands in a sea of chaos. Access to such locations is the product of wealth, and poverty is the exclusion from even the simplest forms of shelter, food and sociability.

Psychogeography is not a substitute for class struggle, but a tool of class struggle. When kids from council estates wander into posh housing areas they are immediately harassed by the police. They get accused of being burglars even before they had a chance to break into the first house. The police impose a rationality: they force us to explain why we are at a particular place. They only accept conventional explanations in terms of economic activity (even visiting relatives boils down to economics, as the family is precisely the conjunction of private life with the economic sphere). Psychogeography is always an uneconomic, even anti-economic, activity.
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tim said:
I've just recently started watching John Roger's videos and was at Hand Trough creek in the Cuckold's Haven nature reserve, which features in this video earlier, not much of an adventure as it's a ten-minute walk from home, but absolutely glorious if you look in the right direction. In the seventeenth century play Eastwood Hoe one of the characters manages to get shipwrecked a Cuckold's Haven. I wondered if it still existed when I read the play 30 years ago. Now I know it does.



Enter SECURITY, without his hat, in a nightcap, wet band, etc.
Sec. Heaven, I beseech thee, how have I offended thee! where am I cast ashore now, that I may go a righter way home by land? Let me see; Oh, I am scarce able to look about me. Where is there any sea-mark that I am acquainted withal?
Slit. Look up, father; are you acquainted with this mark?
Sec. What! landed at Cuckold's Haven? Hell and damnation! I will run

​
He falls down.

back and drown myself.
Slit. Poor man, how weak he is! the weak water has wash'd away his strength.
Sec. Landed at Cuckold's Haven! If it had not been to die twenty times alive, I should never have 'scap'd death! I will never arise more; I will grovel here and eat dirt till I be chok'd; I will make the gentle earth do that which the cruel water has denied me.
Slit. Alas, good father, be not so desperate! Rise man; if you will, I'll come presently and lead you home.
Sec. Home! shall I make any know my home that has known me thus abroad? How low shall I crouch away, that no eye may see me? I will creep on the earth while I live, and never look heaven in the face more.

John Roger's has now made well over a hundred of them. Good Marty, marty21, seems to be a fan too.


www.youtube.com

John Rogers

London-based film-maker and writer John Rogers, author of This Other London - adventures in the overlooked city http://bit.ly/1tQS301 My blog The Lost Byway ...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
Click to expand...
I am a fan , been binge watching him during lockdown, keep expecting to run into him on my walks around the various marshes.
 
butchersapron said:
Second-home psychogeography:

View attachment 218566

(Authentocrats - Joe Kennedy)
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I was at a talk in Cambridge a few years ago given by Nigel Pennick who discussed the lesser known history of Cambridge, topics included the battle of King St in '69 (anarchists v trots) to the penchant for local stone masons/builders back in the day of burying horse heads at certain sites. He showed his own collection of photographs that revealed a different side of what today is a pretty boring tourist hotspot. His photo of the workers co-op (that took up a huge building) next to the market right in the centre of town was impressive, in what is now one of the most divided places that I'm familiar with (town v gown). I noticed among the dozen or so people present, Robert MacFarlane making notes, like a vampire feeding.
 
sunnysidedown said:
I was at a talk in Cambridge a few years ago given by Nigel Pennick who discussed the lesser known history of Cambridge, topics included the battle of King St in '69 (anarchists v trots) to the penchant for local stone masons/builders back in the day of burying horse heads at certain sites. He showed his own collection of photographs that revealed a different side of what today is a pretty boring tourist hotspot. His photo of the workers co-op (that took up a huge building) next to the market right in the centre of town was impressive, in what is now one of the most divided places that I'm familiar with (town v gown). I noticed among the dozen or so people present, Robert MacFarlane making notes, like a vampire feeding.
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Ah, the lone enraptured male out of his preferred habitat.
 
Nick Papadimitriou's Scarp was a good read. He had a decent idea in his Middlesex County Council website too but he never got round to developing it properly which is a shame.
 
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Red Cat said:
Sorry to respond to an old post (so weird when that happens - do I even think the same as I did then?) but this did make me laugh.
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Well I think it even more now. :D

Since then I have found out more about Abdelhafid Khatib, an Algerian member of the SI (and one of its only non-white members). His psychogeography report on Les Halles in Paris had to be terminated because he kept getting hassled by racist cops.
 
Fozzie Bear said:
Well I think it even more now. :D

Since then I have found out more about Abdelhafid Khatib, an Algerian member of the SI (and one of its only non-white members). His psychogeography report on Les Halles in Paris had to be terminated because he kept getting hassled by racist cops.
Click to expand...
I think I've read something mentioning the same thing semi-recently - what was it that you read/heard?
 
Was reminded of this article semi-recently, this thread seems as good an opportunity to post it again as one of my favourite bits of could-be-called-psychogeog writing (and one that's definitely not men walking on their own):
mapmagazine.co.uk

TENANCY Part 7: Make it Safe

by No Matter
mapmagazine.co.uk mapmagazine.co.uk

Can the world become so safe that it becomes pure space?


This is an erotic fantasy that requires constant plain clothes policing. Alliance of banks, visionary in their transparent asset class. Smooth concrete hitting the moon’s curvature. Thin, non-dom ankles flashing blue upon any pinstriped February morn. No stopping, the signs reiterate at regular intervals. No trouble here. No seams. Security guards move in-out of the restive shadows felled by the sunlight’s muted discretion. No sign of poverty or coercion. We trace out the edges of this regulated zone, for where the private experience of the social world ends. A fresh sense of life’s ugly saturation. The boundary line of Spinningfields can be divined in fag-tips, in broken paving stones, in rubbish bags piled haphazardly upon the street. The Deliveroo drivers sit in idle exile, their empty mint green bags and their horizontal bikes also demarcate the boundary line, disbarred from waiting inside the privatised leisure zone. The zone demands. They are, without exception, male, mostly not white...


Walking through the zone in August 2020, we pass a handful of heavy-set male security guards, the kind that function as the sign of brute strength. This appeases our sense of nostalgia. Ex-soldiers. Ex-cops. Short on temper and big on flesh. Of crotch! The legs akimbo and firmly rooted, so that any other body must feel itself lithe and girlish. We prefer it, with the body, the shoulders, the crotch, the limits that such a topography presumes for me, and for my body. A lady. A relationship. Rather than this relentless nothing. The ecstatic blank buzz, slippery and exhausting. The colourless, odourless, inert XYZ. Here is a building that suggests nothing. Here is a pale, suited man, lip quivering with desire for not one thing. Pure choice is liquid abundance.


The guards wear body cameras to supplement the CCTV footage. The guards enforce the rules, clear away the undesirables. No homeless people, teenagers, loiterers in Spinningfields. All seats are monetised. The security guard’s dual function: the guard supplants each beggar and loiterer moved along, themselves occupying the lowest rung deemed desirable by necessity, paid, not paying. Guards sweep themselves into the positions of the ones they sweep away.
 
hitmouse said:
I think I've read something mentioning the same thing semi-recently - what was it that you read/heard?
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Well basically what I wrote is covered in the SI journal at the time I think.
libcom.org

Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles - Abdelhafid Khatib

From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958). Les Halles was Paris' central fresh food market.
libcom.org libcom.org

EDITORIAL NOTE: This study is incomplete on several fundamental points, principally those concerning the ambiant characteristics of certain barely defined zones. This is because our collaborator was subject to police harrassment in light of the fact that since September, North Africans have been banned from the streets after half past nine in the evening. And of course, the bulk of Abdelhafid Khatib's work concerned the Halles at night. After being arrested twice and spending two nights in a holding cell, he relinquished his efforts. Therefore the present — the political future, no less — may be abstracted due to considerations carried out on psychogeography itself.
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More recently a couple of articles have suggested he was airbrushed out of SI history:

salvage.zone

Salvaging Situationism: Race and Space - Salvage

In an article in Internationale Situationniste #2, Abdelhafid Khattib of the Algerian section of the organisation attempted the first in depth psychogeographical study of the area of Les Halles. The study was cut short due to a continuing curfew against Arabs on Paris streets. As a coda to...
salvage.zone salvage.zone

And that the SI could have done more to address the issues raised by all this:
conversations.e-flux.com

Situationism's failure to confront race and colonialism

In Salvage magazine, Andrea Gibbons writes about Abdelhafid Khatib of the Algerian section of the Situationist International, who was one of the few people of color involved in the group. Not coincidentally, Khatib’s written contributions to the SI canon—in particular, his work on race and...
conversations.e-flux.com conversations.e-flux.com
 
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