The Situationist (Re)thinking

Simon Sadler in “Rethinking the City” reminds the reader of McDonough’s article “Situationist Space” because of the context of Sadler’s discussion. A key difference, however, is Sadler’s clarity and precision in defining psychogeography. While much detail is given, “psychogeography” can be as broad as Debord’s definition – “that which changes our way of seeing the street is more important than that which changes our way of seeing painting” or as basic as “playful, cheap, and populist”.

The difficulty in literally rethinking the city comes in the fact that Situationist had to work off of Debord and Jorn’s journals which might have presented quite a lot of trouble recognizing how “psychogeography” was not a science thus a single truth or definition in theory could not be derived – “psychogeography was a reverie, a state of mind conjured up in Debord and Jorn’s Memoires, which left readers with the task of negotiating Jorn’s inky dribbles through Debord’s collage of text, maps, and illustration […] it represented a drift from the ideal and the rational to the extraordinary and revolutionary.”

Furthermore, as Sadler confesses, “psychogeography attempted to combine subjective and objective modes of study. On the one hand it recognized that the self cannot be divorced from the urban environment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city.”

Consequently, what I make of Sadler’s argument is one that by far is more definitive. Definitive in the sense that no longer is the reader left to contemplate whether this or that is “psychogeography”, we are told in the most clear terms what it is.

Question 1: How can we be sure what “psychogeography” is when there are so many interpretations?

Question 2: What type of map layout would be more useful, in terms of getting from point A to point B, a traditional map or one that is “psychogeographic”?