Psychogeographic Maps

The McDonough article analyzes situationist space reflected particularly through Debord’s piece The Naked City. McDonough deconstructs technical terms that are characterized in The Naked City and provides a discourse for enlightened interpretation of this disoriented and fragmented artistic guide of Paris. McDonough’s presents his main argument is presented in the following excerpt:
“The Naked City makes it clear, in its fragmenting of the conventional, descriptive representation of urban space, that the city is only experienced in time by a concrete, situated subject, as a passage from one “unity of atmosphere” to another, not as the object of a totalized perception” (64).
Here, McDonough seeks to win appreciation for situationist art by highlighting the assembly of context clues within the artwork that reference significant historic events and have been embedded into the psychogeographic value of the particular city.

The Naked City links various cut-out sites in Paris with uncoordinated arrows that create a map that is both lacks directionality and formality in analysis; McDonough informs us that this procedure is defined as “asyndeton”. In an effort to understand what the selective fragments on this “map” represent, during the period of post-Haussmannization, McDonough cites the artist’s own explanation, “[The fragments represent] the discovery of unities of atmosphere, of their main components and of spatial localization” (64). Then, McDonough argues that Debord’s The Naked City reaffirms Reclus’s concept of “social geography” which is defined by the fluidity of space as influenced by individual actions and social events.

Given that there is no formal method of interpretation for situationist art, I agree with McDonough when he claims that The Naked City “adamantly refuses the status of a regulative ideal, which is the goal of the cognitive map” (69). Despite the fact that this piece has no coherent representation of Paris, observers must recognize the level of relationship presented through the fragmented compilation of such sites, what Lefebvre termed “representational space”. However, I still fail to understand how the situating of a “dérive” is implemented into The Naked City. Who becomes such character, the artist or the observer? Furthermore, if the derive “attempts to suspend class allegiances for some time” how is it that the same artwork attempts to depict “the violence inherent in capitalism’s configuration” (69) as McDonough argues earlier in his article?