Dérive vs. Drifter

Concise and easy to follow, Sadler’s article deconstructs the term psychogeography to a substantive yet comprehendible definition for the reader. My immediate response is why didn’t we read this article before McDonough’s? Perhaps our critiques of McDonough would have been harsher and our understanding of situationist art more elusive than technical; nonetheless, there are subtle differences between the two articles which demand careful analysis.

Recalling from McDonough’s narrative last week, I noticed that he draws greater emphasis on the technicality of situationist art rather than engage the reader through a more informal but elementary description of the same much like Sadler achieves. McDonough place greater emphasis on terminology and their influence when portrayed in a situationist painting or installation whereas Sadler focuses on deriving interpretations to individual situationist works then simplifying these analyses for general study by the novice reader. Methods of style and diction are distinct in both articles; McDonough’s jargon-rich writing is directed more towards artistic scholars than Sadler’s, which I find glosses over the technical composition of situationist art and, instead, provides a more generic image of the same.

Yet, Sadler’s commentary is not entirely subordinate to McDonough’s in proficiency of analysis; rather, it is complimentary. Sadler presents a functional recapitulation of situationist art that outlines its general themes which McDonough’s article consolidates. Sadler’s article seeks to digest psychogeography as presented in the following, “the sublime could induce new flights of fancy…reshaped by the Enlightenment’s progeny, modernism. If we felt frustrated at the effort required to put them all together, we had missed the point” (76).

Throughout his article, Sadler stresses that, despite its overwhelming and oftentimes indistinct elemental structures, psychogeography should and can be appreciated without extensive knowledge in the field. He adopts the term “drifter” in order to situate a character behind the situationst work and attempt to foment objective and subjective interpretations by the speculator, and then underlines the interconnectedness between the two approaches to urban exploration. Sadler provides the following claim in order to encompass the purpose behind situationist maps, “[they] attempt to put the spectator at ease with the city of apparent disorder, exposing the strange logic that lies beneath its surface” (82).

Sadler uses the term “drifter” to represent the character in a situationist map while McDonough uses “derive”. What is the difference between the two terms and which is more used today?

Also, Sadler claims “ambiance” as a precursor for artists to envisage of psychogeography. How is ambiance different from emotional attachment or sensory appeal? And, what are its representations, if any?

Rethinking the City

Like McDonough’s article, Saddler talks about the situationists and psychogeographical analysis by examining similar artworks like Guy Debord’s The Naked City and “Map of the land of Feeling, 1656”. He talked about how situationism is not the pursuit of beauty in art, but a “constant play of contrasts, between confined and open spaces, darkness and illumination, circulation and isolation.” (72) Saddler used more examples of architecture, photography and drawings to illustrate his point as compared to McDonough’s more theoretical approach. He discussed more on the unities of ambiance rather than Debord’s derive.
Questions: “Unlimited access to all the prisons. The possibility of making them into tourist stopovers would foreground deviances that society has attempted to suppress…” Is Saddles making a point on tourism as McDonough did in his article?What is meant by the “three orders of facts”? What is an “undifferentiated state of the visible-readable realm”?

Rethinking the City

Comparing the two readings from Simon Sadler and Tom McDonough, I find more differences than there are similarities. Sadler’s vision about the situationist is much more broad than how McDonough viewed the situationist. In both articles, the author relied on analyzing The Naked City by Debord. Both articles touched on how space is seem by the situationist as an object that is something very involved in your social life. However, I think that Sadler’s chapter gave a clearer reasoning to why the situationist started to feel that way. Sadler wrote “psychogeography was playful, cheap, and populist, an artistic activity carried out in the everyday space of the street rather than in the conventional art spaces.” He explains the situationist as a group that is much less rigid and one-sided minded people as I got from the tone of the reading from McDonough. The concentrations between the two articles were also very different. Sadler’s chapter focuses more on talking about what the situationist meant or entailed when they were referring to psychogeography. McDonough wrote more like a situationist himself trying to convince readers about derive and trying to influence the reader’s view more the social environment.
Questions: what is meant when Sadler says that the situationist are responsive to the light changes in the fabric of Paris? What is the Corbusian vision he talks about at the beginning of the acticle?

Rethinking the City

Both of Sadler and McDonough talked about how society is being reflected in the pieces for situationists; however, Saddler focused more on the psychogeography effects, while McDonough focused on the situationist outlook of the urban environment by using The Naked City by Guy Dubor as the example. Sadler provides better background information of situationist by how the Parisians were affected by their environment spiritually and physically. Sadler names the people “drifters”, who drift away from the traditional view of the city, which developed a new way to interpret the city. I think McDonough's use of “derive” means the same thing. Sadler explains the meaning behind The Naked City, while McDonough just used it to reject the traditional geographic map. The Naked City is a very radical movement for Sadler. However, both of them do agree on the point that the Parisians are still very blurry. I think this article is easier to understand than McDonough's article. Part of it is because I believe McDonough used too much technical terms, maybe he was writing for scholars or people with similar background of situationist. Still, I don't really understand the true point of situationist. What can they really do to change the soceity? Also, if, according to Sadler, the drifters were supposed to be free, why would the Naked City have all the arrows pointing out the directions?

Rethinking the City

Sadler's article was way easier for me to understand, both because it is just generally more accessible in the way it was written, and because I have the benefit of tuesday's class discussion. It started off with an explanation of the situationist's goals and philosophy, and then went on to describe the drift before tackling the maps that are iconic of the group. When discussing The Naked City, Sadler talked about how the sections of Paris were cut apart with great care, and how this shows you that the streets were walked and considered. This made me see The Naked City as a more complex piece than McDonough's article which said that the portions of the city don't line up along the proper east-west axes, but didn't offer much of an explanation of why or what this could mean. Sadler on pg 248 gives examples of buildings that were included in the maps and how they are changed from their original purpose and how the
healthy state bodies" are absent from the maps.

Looking back at the end pages of McDonough's article I saw some of the same ideas in Sadler's piece regarding the discussion on the Derive or the drift. Namely, they both differentiated between situationists and surrealists, though Sadler did this in a way that made it understandable for me. They also used a lot of the same quotes from Debord himself to describe the act and essence of the drift. I think one reason Sadler's article was easier to read is that he gives more context for the quotes and explains them thouroughly afterwards, instead of relying on the reader to decipher the arcaic grammar and awkward wording that arises from translations.

One Question arose when Sadler brought up the idea of the male point of view, and that most of the drifters were white men who used the drift as a way to somehow conquer the city. He then also said that there were a few women and non-europeans who used the rift as a way to rebel against the rule of the white men in power. I found this very interesing that these two groups could have appearantly contradictory purposes yet use the same means. I guess it kind of works if you remember that the men were also rebeling against the imposed order of the time... okay maybe that wasn't a question just a point of thought.

Question 2: Appearantly, the word or act of the derive/drift has military/nautical connotaions? I didn't really understand this part of either of the articles, and it was mentioned in both.

Aside: I liked the allusion to Jackson Polluck in reference to an early railway network map on pg 234

Situationism

Simon Sadler's "Formulary for a New Urbanism:Rethinking the City" focused more on situationists and the way the viewed and created art while Tom McDonough's "Situationist Space" focused more on the Naked City while later mentioning one or two paragraphs on situationists. Sadler's piece was definitely more difficult to understand but it introduced situationism well through comparing and contrasting their thoughts and others such as surrealists and and the Architectural Review. While McDonough does briefly explain why situationists reject surrealists' ways of chance, Sadler goes into more detail about their drift and how they believed in balancing chance and planning. He also mentions that they were more attracted to the "troubled side of the picturesque-meditative, exotic, expressive" and their sense of unities of ambiance was expressed through the "constant play of contrasts". In McDonough's essay, he mainly compared situationist maps to traditional academic geography. He talked a lot about what psychogeographical maps represented, how they were created through social relationships, and these maps brought feeling and emotion to the viewer. Reading both these articles helps the overall understanding of the situationists approach to architecture and art.

Questions:

What does Sadler mean when he says that "the power of psychogeography" is both "fetishistic and militaristic"?

Is Sadler saying that sectors of the city has a different meaning for everyone therefore we can block the city into a perfect geographic map?

[reth]Inking the City

Simon Sadler’s “Formulary for a New Urbanism” provided, finally, a broader array of situationist images than Tom McDonough had in “Situationist Space.” Where McDonough focused almost exclusively on Guy Debord’s The Naked City, Sadler incorporated images from situationist publications like Potlach, paintings favored by Debord such as Claude Lorrain’s Seaport with Setting Sun, and a photographic records of a “drift” as well as others. The total effect is of a more inclusive description of situationism, encompassing the views of situationists other than just Debord. A more well rounded approach to a description of situationism provides three dimensionality to the movement. Apparently the movement included quite a few people – enough so that there were factions; the least orthodox of which were blasted. Some of these people, apparently, where also women and non-Europeans. McDonough had left me with the sense that the movement was much more insular.
McDonough’s article had painted a more severe portrait (or should I say “collage?”) of the situationists. Sadler’s focus widened and softened. They were drunkards? Junkies?? Lazy “turn on, tune in, drop out” vagrants?! My my!
Sadler included some situationist relatied images that were much more engaging than The Naked City, like “plotting of all trajectories effected in a year by a student inhabiting the 16th Arrondissement.” Unlike The Naked City, this provided sufficient impetus for personal reflection. Where do I go? Where don’t I go? Sadler’s situationists are more willing to engage me in a dialogue than are McDonough’s.

Question 1: Why is Debord so worried about the idea of chance, in the drift in particular?

Question 2: Why can’t drifters “let go?”