24.3.05
Language/Psychogeonamics and Where-To-Go-Next
Imagine some 20 people drifting around La Source, (a suburb of Orleans, combining a university and research laboratories in the north, rows of free-standing domestic dwellings in the south and, so we where told, the only proper 'ghetto' of Orleans in between: modest high-rises painted in light Mediterranean colours splattered between groups of trees, boys are playing football and the streets are more spacious than traffic demands, complementary to all this La Source is the sister town of Winnipeg, Manitobe, Canada), trying to name things, objects, scenes that stand apart from the drab surrounding it. Actively trying to find things of interest, especially in one of those neighbourhoods nobody ever speaks friendly about; doesn't that sound like a psychogeographical exercise? It was, it happened mid-October 2004, as part of the Archilab festival. Starting from the observation that the naming of places is one of the most natural way language comes into existence, this text will explore some lines of thought about concerning the function of language in artistic urban research. Recently, some things have become clear that previously were confused and muddled up in corrupting auxiliary motivations. This is a manifesto of sorts, pointing out where we are going next.
Not too long ago, rural landscape was divided in abstract categories of things and names only so far as the people themselves had felt the practical need to do so. This is why Wordsworth could write, by way of advertisement for his 'Poems on Naming Places': "By persons resident in the country, and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown name, where little Incidents must have occurred, or feelings been experienced...". The ability to communicate about places in names you have yourself found the language for, the name of it reflecting the reason why it is named as it is, creates a strong emotional relationship with these objects. The survey of the names a community has given through the ages, will tell you about their collective history, it will relive past hopes and miseries, it will evoke mental maps of which some area's will be nearly abandoned, while elsewhere lots of names are in close proximity. Wordsworth understood that the suppression of local names, in favour for gutless administrative ones, estranged people from the world they live in, especially because names tend to become inseparable from the object they are naming. We underline our ownership of a pet when adopting it, sometimes even in the case of babies, by renaming it. Yet nobody finds it odd that the places we occupy for years go without personalised names. It is as if we are half human/half scorpion, living in an bubble of mud, pretending not to be there, at any time anticipating some huge shoe coming from the sky to evict us.
You can't fake the psychogeonamics of naming places: you can't go in with a fistful of psychogeographers, approaching it as a name-dropping PsyOp and expect names to pop up by reflex. What this experiment proved is that giving names to places needs time and a real attachment to grow in. This is even more true when you try too hard and you find that the object to be named escapes you. Afterwards it became clear that instead of naming places, the attention had without consultation shifted towards describing, with varying length and eloquence, the gusto of a place. Gusto, William Hazlitt defined it as the "power or passion defining any object", encountered in the setting of a psychogeographical walk focused at urban systems at large, was only rarely found in isolated objects. The gusto of a city is defined by configurations of objects, in a pattern not in a landscape. "Orange Berry Tree; I stop in front of one of those trees or bushes. They are really full of orange berries and bring really flashy and nice colour touch in the town", one psychogeographer noted. "Square with anything but trees, in front of a forest of buildings", writes another. Both describe the gusto of a view in emblematic, nearly heraldic, terms, each element turning into a symbol that tells a story at a level different from the observation at hand. Wordsworth documented what struck him in blank verse, rambling stanzas and boldly rhyme, but nowadays artists use technology to share this with others and posterity.
The hills with no name, the lake with one name, and the rock with multiple names are captured as validated machine-readable data-models, images, video, worked over by algorithms and statistical analysis, translated into maps, diagrams, flowcharts and waypoints. But often the focus on these tools turn the place being researched into just another source of data. Psychogeography, like all urban research, needs to document, it needs to collect information, to be able to be more than just a habit of making people walk in strange ways. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. As we are a civilisation of snapshotteers, taking pictures is regarded by many as the holy grail of documentation, (with GPS coming in second). But landscapes and cities have qualities impossible to isolate in a series of pictures. Psychogeographical research should put the documentation of ambiguous, unacknowledged, psychic effects of place upon people before the documentation of the places that caused these effects. Pictures show the crime but not the motive. Abstraction by definition has no room for fear, bewilderment, crisis and all these mixed emotions you have to go through before a place really opens up itself. Naming places, committing a description to a place in the most sublimated form language can provide, is not an act but a process that takes years to become self-evident. If this time is not available, artistic research should at least put in some effort, by finding the language to talk about whatever is being researched, to reach between the bits, to touch upon the reality that escapes high-resolution vector-graphic mappea mundi.
When thinking about ways to record the psychogeographic appreciation of landscapes there always lurks that strange entry in Coleridge's notebook, made in 1805: "In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, ..., I seem rather to be seeking, as it where asking for, a symbolic language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new". Coleridge himself lost track of what he meant to say while writing this and accordingly we can only speculate on the syntax and grammar of this unspecified symbolic language that, for a short instance, flickered before his mind's eye. A language not made of words but of symbols, a symbol "a focal point for feelings which otherwise would have remained less articulate" (Gombrich), that would mirror the outward world: perhaps a language with you as the only one native speaker. Even though that would be a modern interpretation as Coleridge still believed in the universal meaning of symbols. If the naming of places forges a direct link between you and your surroundings, or (more bluntly) if the landscapes makes you as much as you make the landscape, the symbolic language of Coleridge would allow you to communicate this intangible relationship where ordinary language and images would fail. Would it be too far-fetched to think that this symbolic language would be written with hieroglyphs expressing categories of gusto?
To remind you of the gusto of he who went by the name of Coleridge: he was the best friend of Wordsworth, famous for his infinite recursion of asides and for this very reason unable to walk in a straight line (Hazlitt informs us), his major prose works are labyrinthine structures readable only in well-proportioned fragments while his best poems are unfinished, and intriguingly so. His command of language was near perfect and his daughter approvingly remarked that his essential quality was Coleridge: "could not bear to complete incompletely, which everybody else does". His talents were unmarketable because of this instinct that made him write about the world in a way similar to the cartographer producing a map bigger than the territory. Coleridge's own research followed the path carved out by science only so far as it helped him to get a grip on what was around him. Once science stopped doing that, Coleridge unfolded his wings of imagination and wandered of into endless but equally valid speculations in order to make statements about the same general truths, from an angle necessarily the opposite of scientific objectiveness. For Coleridge language should be vigilantly personal, and it should do justice to the infinite complexity of reality. It is doubtful that a scientist would ever achieve acclaim for a shattered body of unfinished work, but an artist can and s/he should use this power to bring to life what otherwise would be gone forever. The map is not the territory, let science produce the map and let art recreate a bit of the territory.
socialfiction.org
Not too long ago, rural landscape was divided in abstract categories of things and names only so far as the people themselves had felt the practical need to do so. This is why Wordsworth could write, by way of advertisement for his 'Poems on Naming Places': "By persons resident in the country, and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown name, where little Incidents must have occurred, or feelings been experienced...". The ability to communicate about places in names you have yourself found the language for, the name of it reflecting the reason why it is named as it is, creates a strong emotional relationship with these objects. The survey of the names a community has given through the ages, will tell you about their collective history, it will relive past hopes and miseries, it will evoke mental maps of which some area's will be nearly abandoned, while elsewhere lots of names are in close proximity. Wordsworth understood that the suppression of local names, in favour for gutless administrative ones, estranged people from the world they live in, especially because names tend to become inseparable from the object they are naming. We underline our ownership of a pet when adopting it, sometimes even in the case of babies, by renaming it. Yet nobody finds it odd that the places we occupy for years go without personalised names. It is as if we are half human/half scorpion, living in an bubble of mud, pretending not to be there, at any time anticipating some huge shoe coming from the sky to evict us.
You can't fake the psychogeonamics of naming places: you can't go in with a fistful of psychogeographers, approaching it as a name-dropping PsyOp and expect names to pop up by reflex. What this experiment proved is that giving names to places needs time and a real attachment to grow in. This is even more true when you try too hard and you find that the object to be named escapes you. Afterwards it became clear that instead of naming places, the attention had without consultation shifted towards describing, with varying length and eloquence, the gusto of a place. Gusto, William Hazlitt defined it as the "power or passion defining any object", encountered in the setting of a psychogeographical walk focused at urban systems at large, was only rarely found in isolated objects. The gusto of a city is defined by configurations of objects, in a pattern not in a landscape. "Orange Berry Tree; I stop in front of one of those trees or bushes. They are really full of orange berries and bring really flashy and nice colour touch in the town", one psychogeographer noted. "Square with anything but trees, in front of a forest of buildings", writes another. Both describe the gusto of a view in emblematic, nearly heraldic, terms, each element turning into a symbol that tells a story at a level different from the observation at hand. Wordsworth documented what struck him in blank verse, rambling stanzas and boldly rhyme, but nowadays artists use technology to share this with others and posterity.
The hills with no name, the lake with one name, and the rock with multiple names are captured as validated machine-readable data-models, images, video, worked over by algorithms and statistical analysis, translated into maps, diagrams, flowcharts and waypoints. But often the focus on these tools turn the place being researched into just another source of data. Psychogeography, like all urban research, needs to document, it needs to collect information, to be able to be more than just a habit of making people walk in strange ways. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. As we are a civilisation of snapshotteers, taking pictures is regarded by many as the holy grail of documentation, (with GPS coming in second). But landscapes and cities have qualities impossible to isolate in a series of pictures. Psychogeographical research should put the documentation of ambiguous, unacknowledged, psychic effects of place upon people before the documentation of the places that caused these effects. Pictures show the crime but not the motive. Abstraction by definition has no room for fear, bewilderment, crisis and all these mixed emotions you have to go through before a place really opens up itself. Naming places, committing a description to a place in the most sublimated form language can provide, is not an act but a process that takes years to become self-evident. If this time is not available, artistic research should at least put in some effort, by finding the language to talk about whatever is being researched, to reach between the bits, to touch upon the reality that escapes high-resolution vector-graphic mappea mundi.
When thinking about ways to record the psychogeographic appreciation of landscapes there always lurks that strange entry in Coleridge's notebook, made in 1805: "In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, ..., I seem rather to be seeking, as it where asking for, a symbolic language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new". Coleridge himself lost track of what he meant to say while writing this and accordingly we can only speculate on the syntax and grammar of this unspecified symbolic language that, for a short instance, flickered before his mind's eye. A language not made of words but of symbols, a symbol "a focal point for feelings which otherwise would have remained less articulate" (Gombrich), that would mirror the outward world: perhaps a language with you as the only one native speaker. Even though that would be a modern interpretation as Coleridge still believed in the universal meaning of symbols. If the naming of places forges a direct link between you and your surroundings, or (more bluntly) if the landscapes makes you as much as you make the landscape, the symbolic language of Coleridge would allow you to communicate this intangible relationship where ordinary language and images would fail. Would it be too far-fetched to think that this symbolic language would be written with hieroglyphs expressing categories of gusto?
To remind you of the gusto of he who went by the name of Coleridge: he was the best friend of Wordsworth, famous for his infinite recursion of asides and for this very reason unable to walk in a straight line (Hazlitt informs us), his major prose works are labyrinthine structures readable only in well-proportioned fragments while his best poems are unfinished, and intriguingly so. His command of language was near perfect and his daughter approvingly remarked that his essential quality was Coleridge: "could not bear to complete incompletely, which everybody else does". His talents were unmarketable because of this instinct that made him write about the world in a way similar to the cartographer producing a map bigger than the territory. Coleridge's own research followed the path carved out by science only so far as it helped him to get a grip on what was around him. Once science stopped doing that, Coleridge unfolded his wings of imagination and wandered of into endless but equally valid speculations in order to make statements about the same general truths, from an angle necessarily the opposite of scientific objectiveness. For Coleridge language should be vigilantly personal, and it should do justice to the infinite complexity of reality. It is doubtful that a scientist would ever achieve acclaim for a shattered body of unfinished work, but an artist can and s/he should use this power to bring to life what otherwise would be gone forever. The map is not the territory, let science produce the map and let art recreate a bit of the territory.
socialfiction.org
# posted by alvaro @ 2:26 a. m. 
