Exerpts from Rethinking the City, written by Simon Sadler
First appeared in The Situationist City, 1998
As its name implied, 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.
In his [Guy Debord] that “letting go” might collapse back into surrealist automatism, Debord overlooked the fact that drifters could not completely “let go” even if they wanted to. Psychogeography was formed and validated by a situationist group discourse and culture that couldn't be just blanked out at will. In fact Debord presented the situationist maps of Paris and the “theory of the dérive” precisely in order to ratify group activity, codifying all sorts of overblown psychogeographic techniques.
Rather than float above the city as some sort of omnipotent, instantaneous, disembodied, all-possessing eye, situationist cartography admitted that its overview of the city was reconstructed in the imagination, piecing together an experience of space that was actually terrestrial fragmented, subjective, temporal, and cultural.
Drift had to alert people to their imprisonment by routine.
Cutting freely across urban space, drifters would gain a revolutionary perception of the city.
