Filed under: psychogeography, semiotics, space and everyday life | Tags: Barthes, bikes, cycling, Debord, maps
Of late, I seem to have neglected this blog a little. Partly because I recently went here on my bike. Also, I’ve been working exclusively on my dissertation, and I’m wary of saturating this blog with posts about the iconography of May ‘68 (snore?), especially as we’re now in June and online attention to that period seems to be calming down. But I am determined that this blog won’t be going the way of my childhood karate lessons or brief dalliance with ornithology, and so, in a gesture of resurrection, this post will begin with a quote uncovered during my dissertation research, from Roland Barthes’ 1967 paper “Semiology and Urbanism”:
The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it.
Of course, this isn’t an unfamiliar proposal, but it places slightly different emphasis to the psychogeographical approach to urbanism with which it may seem indistinguishable. Barthes gives primacy to place: the city is there, concrete, and we traverse it as an already written text. The Situationists have it the other way around, in that we write the city ourselves, and the importance is how we internalise it. This is likewise Michel de Certeau’s angle that I’ve quoted previously.
The image above comes from Voices of Resistance from Occupied London, which is available online and as a very well produced little zine/journal. It reminds me of Guy Debord’s 1957 Psychogeographic Guide to Paris. As I was cycling through Holland, similar maps came into being in my own head, constructing mental arrangements of real places which made absolute sense to me at that moment but would invariably have been unrecognisable if charted and compared with the real topography of the places I was moving through. Specifically, I became interested in how the physical entrance that one makes into a city affects a more psychological transgression. Or, the relationship between physical experience and internal perception of new (urban) environments.
I noticed, for example, that the Dutch bike paths (which are brilliant, and this is one area where aping our Continental neighbours’ approach to urbanism would be of great benefit) often follow different routes into the cities than the major arterial roads. The bike paths regularly run alongside roads – separate, not in the glass-strewn gutter as they are here in Britain – and along pavements; but where roads all converge into hemorrhaged roundabouts, bike paths can pass under, over or around congested areas, and generally allow access into a city via routes that are more integrated with the urban environment than roads which are themselves boundaries and obstacles.
A slightly different example that I noticed when we returned to England was how London’s grandiose train stations act as portals that make a binary divide between being in the city or not. These terminals are like giant gaping mouths that swallow and spew people to and from the street. This arrival at the urban environment promts a different sensory experience to the more gradual entry by car or bike: you are suddenly there, in the midst of it all. At the train station, the city feels bigger, endless; less located and finite than having felt first hand its suburbs and physical make up. The bike can shatter the myth of the metropolis.
PS – I was thinking of making this a post about reconfigured maps, but it seems thats already quite well-trodden ground. Particularly interesting is this, Strange Maps, which demonstrates some of the effects of ideology on cartography. There’s also this oldish post from Fantastic Journal which looks at some reworked Tube maps, to which I commented a link to this map of DBB’s nascent sexuality. I like these collections of map tattoos, too, although they mostly err a bit close to Union Jack/Bulldog tattoos for me.
PPS – Later in that Barthes paper, he talks about how “the problem is to extract an expression like ‘language of the city’ from the purely metaphorical stage… the real scientific leap will be achieved when we can speak of the language of the city without metaphor”. Looking about on what I’ve just written above, its riddled with metaphor. I can’t decide whether Barthes is here offering a realisable methodology for urban thinking, or making a more vague conceptual projection as, y’know, those French philosophy guys are prone to doing.
more from greece and the conspiracy cells of fire:
On June 12 2008, we selected to strike the sponsors of the greek national squad (five targets in Athens and four in Thessaloniki).
Just as it was four years ago with the “success” of the national squad in euro, same thing now, a fair of incredible stupidity, during which thousands of clowns unite under the flag of national pride.
The tame crowds are more than willing to overlook the misery of their everyday life and turn for a few days into a mixture of phony smiles, and getting into goofy celebrations. The mass stupefaction media bombard us with thousands of advertises promoting a national sheep conscience alongside with mass consumption – the necessary parameter of every commodity fiesta. The role of multinational corporation sponsors is more than obvious, both in promoting their own merchandise as equally the national unity, creating a harmony of capitalist profiteering and implantation – revival of our hateful national identity. This is why we attacked you, we did it in the past, and we’ll be doing it in the future.
Your fiesta is full of bright lights and numerous smiles, national rag-flags, torpor spectacle and diffused nonsense. Our own celebrations are during the night, when the shiny lights give their place to the thick darkness of delinquency and become the gasoline for the fire, the movement, the destruction. Because national unity is for the frightened, we shall never compromise with any state and any nation. Our only country is the Revolution, Violent and Subversive in its steps, bound to annihilate your old world.
Generously sponsored by The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.
Filed under: space and everyday life | Tags: angry brigade, baader-meinhof, bombing, Conspiracy Cells of Fire, direct action, Greece, RAF
It seems Greece is currently host to what I like to think of as an anarchist group in the classical style. They’re ticking all the boxes right now: symbolic bombings; revolutionary rhetoric; a combination of poetry, analysis and direct action. The critique of the molotov cocktail. Below is their latest communique, which could be straight from the RAF or Angry Brigade vaults. Hopefully the CCF (even their acronym sounds right) won’t be following the example of their predecessors too far, though, and can distinguish between an anarchist tradition and appropriate forms of direct action, militancy and communication.
“Why we set your nights on fire
(more…)
Filed under: music, space and everyday life | Tags: Al Qaeda, Daily Mail, don't believe the hype, nuclear bomb, subhumans
Mickey Mouse is dead
Got kicked in the head
Cos people got too serious
They planned out what they said
They couldn’t take the fantasy
They tried to accept reality
Analyzed the laughs
Cos pleasure comes in halves
Subhumans – Mickey Mouse is Dead
Remember this? Well here’s a much more accurate depiction of future cities (mind you, I’ve been listening to the Subhumans a lot recently so the apocalypse is on my mind, its all those anarcho-punks talk about).
I think every blog and online news source has had something to say about this image, so I don’t want to linger on it, but – as far as I can tell – the story is this: it is reported that this picture has been used by Al Qaeda affiliated groups to promote attacks on the West and explore the possibility of a nuclear attack on Washington. It is later revealed that this is a still from a video game, has circulated before, and has simply been used in some amateur online video. The media, I hope, are shown up; “but still” – as the comments and discussions initiated by this episode go – “what if Al Qaeda were to bomb us? We should do something about this.”
The Telegraph tells us that, ” Al-Qa’eda’s propaganda arm Al Sahab releases over 80 ‘official’ videos every year, to keep the group in the public eye and generate support.” Sorry, Al-who? It seems to me that the right wing media is doing a pretty good job of keeping Al Qaeda in the public eye itself.
The lessons learnt? For one tendency: the Daily Mail and their ilk are lazy bullshit-peddlars with an absolute lack of any integrity. For another tendency: Al Qaeda and their ilk are cartoonish villians intent on utter destruction with an absolute lack of any humanity. For me: back to the Subhumans, and a suspicion that some institutions would actually be better off nuked.
