Walter Benjamin on The Flâneur

“Before Haussmann wide pavements were rare, and the narrow ones afforded little protection from vehicles. Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades.

Paris Arcade

“The arcades, a rather recent invention of industrial luxury,’ so says an illustrated guide to Paris of 1852, ‘are glass-covered, marble-panelled passageways through entire complexes of houses whose proprietors have combined for such speculations. Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature.’ It is in this world that the flâneur is at home; he provides ‘the favourite sojourn of the strollers and the smokers, the stamping ground of all sorts of little métiers’,’ with its chronicler and its philosopher. As for him-self, he obtains there the unfailing remedy for the kind of boredom that easily arises under the baleful eyes of a satiated reactionary regime. In the words of Guys as quoted by Baudelaire, ‘Anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead. I repeat: a blockhead, and a contemptible one.’ The arcades were a cross between a street and an intérieur. If one can speak of an artistic device of the physiologies, it is the proven device of the feuilleron, namely, to turn a boulevard into an intérieur. The street 4a becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. That life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations can thrive only among the grey cobblestones and against the grey background of despotism was the political secret on which the physiologies were based.”

From Charles Baudelaire by Walter Benjamin published by Verso which comprises of extracts from The Arcades Project

Quote from San Soleil by Chris Marker

There are so many striking poignant lines in Chris Marker’s masterful essay film, San Soleil, that I’ve resorted to reading a transcript found online. But this particular riff stuck out:

“I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”

then..

“I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.”

Roger Deakin on Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair has been writing about King’s Cross and St Pancras, and Aidan Dun. He returns yet again to Dun’s 1955* poem ‘Vale Royal‘ about Blake’s vision of St Pancras as a sacred place, a centre of energy, with St Pancras, the boy martyr, presiding over it, with Mary Wollstonecraft buried there, and Thomas Hardy’s ash tree rising, growing out of a rubble of gravestones like a stack of books in a bookshop. A tree rising out of the dead – Yggdrasil, the world tree, a great symbol of life in the face of the developers who have been under criticism for expunging this place ever since Dickens wrote his great passage on the coming of the railway to Camden in Dombey and Son.”

Roger Deakin ‘Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (pub 2009) – written some time 2000-2006

*Note: Vale Royal by Aidan Dun was published in 1995 not 1955.

A note on psychogeography and the dérive

I recently came across an essay on ‘Situationists and Architecture’ by Peter Wollen in The New Left Review from 2001. I thought it was worth sharing these passages on psychogeography  and the dérive as it’s a subject I’m often asked to explain or define, so scholarly sources are always very welcome.

 

psychogeography

from Memoires by Guy Debord & Asgar Jorn 1959

 

Guy Debord wrote the classic text on the ‘Theory of the Dérive’—usually translated as ‘drift’ or ‘drifting’—in December 1958, in the second number of Internationale Situationniste. He defines it as ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences’. Note, again, the taste for transience and spontaneity. Debord’s basic idea is that this project of wandering through the city should be determined not by any preconceived plan, but by the attractions or discouraging counter-attractions of the city itself. It requires a ‘letting go’ of ‘the usual motives for movement and action’—we might almost say, a letting go of everyday identity. Debord seems to have been inspired in part by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s study of Paris et l’agglomération parisienne, published in 1952; and particularly by its maps, which are frequently used as illustrations in the Situationist journal and in Debord’s own art works. He was especially struck by a map detailing all the movements made over a year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement: ‘her itinerary delineates a small triangle, with no deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Science, her residence and that of her piano teacher.’

Shocked by this rigid repetition of a fixed pattern of mobility, Debord conceived dérive as a way of creating completely new, unpredictable itineraries, dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses and reactions of the wanderer. The recourse to chance reminds us, unavoidably, of André Breton’s doctrine of ‘objective chance’ and above all of his great book, Nadja, which traces a series of just such aimless journeys through Paris, punctuated by a pattern of attraction and repulsion to certain buildings, or kinds of buildings, rather than others. Debord notes that this technique of dérive is, in a way, only necessary because his larger project of ‘psychogeography’ has not yet been sufficiently far developed. Psychogeography would make possible the creation of maps in which particular locations or regions had already been designated as favouring the arousal of one kind of affective or aesthetic response, so that a certain amount of pre-planning could take place. Meanwhile, chance was the best method. (This text, interestingly enough, was written just as John Cage was conducting his seminars on chance procedures at the School for Social Research in New York. Probably a coincidence.)

A dérive could take place over a few minutes or even a few days. Duration didn’t matter. Taxis could be used for rapid transport outside one’s usual environment. (One Situationist demand was for the abolition of private cars and their replacement by fleets of low-cost taxis.) As in Breton’s book, the dérive also implied the possibility of chance encounters, meetings with strangers. Debord even suggests that the subject of a dérive might be invited to visit a particular place at a particular time, with the expectation of meeting an unknown person, thus being forced to introduce themself to random passers-by in an effort to identify whether this was the person he or she was looking for. This was called the technique of the ‘possible rendezvous’. He also reveals a taste for straying in uncanny locations—‘slipping by night into houses due for demolition . . . wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc.’ Here we see the dérive as a kind of dream journey, even an invitation to break taboos—or, perhaps, simply to enjoy what we might think of, in the architectural register, as the Gothick picturesque.

…from the start, psychogeography was bound up with the creation of situations; and the concept of situations was expanded, in time, to cover not just the city, but the whole of society, the totality of possibilities open in an unalienated community.”

PETER WOLLEN, New Left Review 8, March-April 2001

Did you know this about London?

County Hall London L.C.C 1939

“Did you know that you can get one of the best-cooked meals in London at the Hotel and Restaurant Technical School at the Westminster Technical Institute?

Did you know that in Victoria Park in east London the L.C.C. runs the finest “Lido” in the country?

Did you know that at Avery Hill, Eltham, the L.C.C. has provided the largest Palm Houses and Greenhouses outside Kew?

Do you know that no one, however poor, need ever sleep out in London, that a bed is ready for any destitute man who applies at the L.C.C. Welfare Office?

The L.C.C. is not at all the sort of body to rest on it’s laurels.”

From – Fifty Years of the L.C.C. by S.P.B. Mais published in 1939