Psychogeography revisited: Hello, Paris! A date with Guy Debord in Copenhagen, circa 2018 or 'do I need the footnotes?'

 The dérive does not happen of its own volition, but accidently, brought about by circumstance. There was no intention to take the course called Psychogeography because the student preferred its sister title ‘Memory Maps.’ But Fridays were taken up with paying the mortgage and I needed a course to fill the up the timetable. Plus, the University seems so less radical than it must have in 1968, so much more established and afraid of controversy and challenge. The signs are uniform font, there is an air of carefully regulated hedonism and the campus itself is housed in a series of tower blocks that could easily be a dystopian nightmare from any literary milieu.

As for psychogeography itself, how many definitions can there be for a term that all claim to be the RIGHT one. The Situationist International movement has flitted across my academic radar before: 1997, writing a paper on the double standards in military policy held by the French regarding Vietnam and Algeria, I must have seen something, heard the phrase but was distracted by looking at the world through a Cold War lens. Hard not to, given the life of a US Army brat, even one who grew up listening to Radio Moscow whilst watching all that the Armed Forces Radio and Television Services (AFRTS) deemed appropriate (‘General Hospital’ and the abiding confusion of Luke and Laura’s love remain a favorite), or listening to the Armed Forces Network (AFN). The student long ago accepted that pretty much everything surrounding her is propaganda.

We pick our poisoned chalices, align ourselves with philosophies the best we can, and try to live what lives we’re given against the ones we make. 2 Without pieces of the puzzle, we fill in the gaps ourselves and sometimes our own imagination is the enemy that would have saved us if we could have fed it all the facts. I have spent the last weeks trying to get under the public skin of Guy Debord and it isn’t that ‘the use of propaganda to manipulate the behavior of any group is essential,’ as he keeps insisting in the Society of the Spectacle. The use of television and the further developments of technology -- smartphones, social media, the immediacy of fame and ‘news’ -- lives up to Debord’s fear in Society of the Spectacle and very few do it better than the US Government, complete with footage from the AFRTS and AFN. On down the line to the US Department of Veteran Affairs to even try to root through the causes of severe ear infections, the deliberately unacknowledged psychological trauma of being raped at the age of 8 in front of my brother, then another, by a soldier in my father’s unit. Combine that with access to birth records, medical records, death records, and inconsistencies in these records, how can we believe anything we’re instructed to?

It isn’t easy, not in the least because of my appalling French. Surely, there should be something in The Spectacle or The Sick Planet about self-limitation being part of a systematic failing. The term psychogeography is more defined by the urban drift than by getting back to nature. At odds with this definition, the course took account the geography of the Essex landscape, of the natural world or a worlds reclaimed by nature. But on this derive, go back to the beginning the original

source for the term, if you can find one. This particular horse’s mouth is Guy Debord’s 1956 essay Debord defines the dérive as ’a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.'  This is a class about thought and walking with the source, so the walk should be urban, the assignment is clear.

And what better walk can there be than where it all came together in the beginning that never quite was the beginning? Fin de Copenhagen, a collaborative project between Asger Jorn and Guy Debord is a pretty good place to start, as is the early correspondence of a social movement, especially one as emotionally charged as the Situationist International. The week before leaving for Copenhagen, my father asks mewhy I am going.

‘Well, I need a break and some perspective on the marriage front. And I have an assignment due. So, I thought, why not do both and write about something not about dead mommies and fire and get my brain out of a rut?’ He says something about needing my head examined, then asks who this Guy Debord is. I read him some tidbits from the Society of the Spectacle and from SI articles. I can feel his confusion and disdain through the phone. ‘Who does this guy think he is?’ ‘Well, he doesn’t think he is anyone anymore. He shot himself in 1994.’ ‘That shit is depressing. I’d have shot myself, too. Maybe he should have walkedmore and written less.’ I giggle to myself and make note for the secret blog my friends and I keep called ‘What Would Staff Sergeant Howse Say?’ and tell him I’ll send him a postcard.

‘I liked Copenhagen. But you best stay out of Christiana. I was there in the 70s.’ I snort. ‘True dat, daddy. True dat.’ I don’t tell him about the hipsters and the raids. It would only bring him down.

Later that night, I begin reading the founding correspondence of the Situationist movement. It is all outgoing Debord’s letters, no responses, which is frustrating. One striking attribute in the correspondence of the early SI movement is the sense of a collective but there is so much done by unseen hands that goes uncredited. I am almost immediately frustrated. We get it, Debord: you are the Secretary, the nag, the horse of instruction, working intently to abolish work. But there is somuch here that says every one involved in the movement pitched in right up to the point where Debord had enough of their getting it wrong. The Situationist is a new concept, a new idea, an ever moving, evolving point on the horizon, but as times marches, only Debord knows when it is wrongly represented and pulls no punches in excommunicating people from the Movement, which would being disbanded in 1972.

Before the culling began, those ready for the change that the Situationist movement seemed to have potential to bring pitched in to building the SI, regardless of gender. Asger Jorn’s financial success is subsidizing the movement, whilst he and Debord are exchanging concepts and ideas for exhibitions and installations.

Michele Bernstein is writing literary critiscism, novels and – though the claim that she also wrote horoscopes for horses may have been made in jest, it is Bernstein’s drive in getting Debord’s Society of the Spectacle published in 1967, followed by Rumney claim that it was Bernstein who ‘was the one in Cosio who picked everyone up on the fact that one does not say 'Situationism' but says 'Situationist' because when it becomes an 'ism' chances are that it will turn into an ideology, a sect.’  It seems ideal but exhausting.

In the first volume of compiled letters about the SI movement, there are no letters TO women, only mentions of them in postscripts. And throughout the writings of the SI itself – the contributors are mainly men, though the organization of the movement was driven by both. The great irony, is that it is the women who give us the lasting portrayals we have of Debord and the SI. Michele Berenstein’s books are said to contain kernels of original Debord and Alice Becker-Ho Debord is left managing Debord’s legacy. Even the biographical information is scarce, outside of the Hussey biography written in 2001. Hussey’s tone in the follow-on articles is that of a fangirl done wrong, even if he is treated shabbily by the Widows Debord or his own certainty that his biography is the best. My drift through Copenhagen is not pure because I am walking solitarily and engage only with strangers. The dialogues are internal: the student, the mother, the archivist, the struggling writer all vying for the attention of a dead philosopher against the backdrop of Copenhagen. The backdrop is light-handed, almost playful. Debord’s 2nd collaborative artwork Fin de Copenhagen, complete with self-destructive cover made of sandpaper is perfect for the extroverted introvert. 

The planning of this derive has happened in isolation I have tried to discuss what I’ve been reading these past weeks with my social circle, but the mums at the school gates gawp at me blankly and the time change makes talking with my kindred spirits a wall I don’t have the energy to scale. A glass of wine could easily turn into 10, during these talks and that is a dangerous slope, with Death still so close a companion and suicide—even of an intimate stranger--is a dangerous bedfellow. Out of the hotel adorned with dragonflies, I turn left. I am dressed practically: jeans, white button-down shirt, brogues. I have left my phone, credit cards, identity papers (with the exception of a drivers’ license, just in case I get run down by rogue cyclist or a bus). I walk with brisk efficiency to nowhere in particular. People stop and asked for directions 4 times in the space of 37 minutes. Each time my eyes show I am flustered, speaking no Danish beyond the basic pleasantries.

I pause occasionally and examines a shop window, at a billboard, into the windows of houses and flats. So much is the same! So much is different! Why are apothecaries so much more attractively presented on the continent than in England or the US? Everything neatly spaced, well-packaged and presented. The current window has a giant rouged mouth and if I looks very closely between the glass and the image, I can see a dead fly pressed into the paper. Detournement? No, just a fluke of nature.

The neighbourhood is on the rise (or decline, depending on your view). The hipsters really have moved in, according to the ‘newspaper’ that greats me at the eco hotel. There is man with a Starbucks cup, but I haven’t seen not seen a Starbucks. There is a 7-11. This is comforting: I could be in Australia or the Deep South. I can get a microwave burrito at the 3 in the morning! The Spectacle rears up, creating hegemony and brainwashing convenience. I resist the childhood comfort call of the slushy machine. Outside of a baby exhibition (This Pram Will Save your Life! Tommy Tippee, the world’s best diaper sanitizing system! Should YOU hire a wet nurse?) I pause. I feel sentimental towards my children, wonder what they are doing. I relish missing them. I go into the expo and procure a wool sleep suit for a growing toddler.

Debating whether to walk over to the outdoor market but I have to walk through a gaggle of men in various states of intoxication and undress. One is one the verge of falling over. I look over his shoulder to see the juxtaposition of the man with the bedraggled mullet leaning against an advert for lanolin cream for the breastfeeding mother. Everyone has one, I mutter, sauntering away from the former cattle auction site.

I think about a quote of Debord’s I came across in Panegyric and I wonder, was this what he had become like, but alone Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than the majority of people who write, but I have drunk more than the majority of people who rink. Although a hefty correspondent, writing over 30 letters a day for 40 years, Debord does not appear to have been able to sustain lasting relationships if there was not a complete meeting of the higher mind, outside of his relationships with women. By all accounts, he was primarily a hermit.

But all of the claims I make here are made with haste and with a pre-cap at 5,000. Though Michele Bernstein declined to have her letters published in the Correspondence: Founding of the Situationalist International, there is that united front protecting DeBord from speculative gazes that she and Alice Debord have formed. I wonder at the nature of estates and heredity for the moment, thinking about the role managing a dead person’s life becomes. It is sometimes a rebirth, sometimes a prison, and sometimes the first and last control a life-partner has over their loved one. I’ve seen it go really well, smoothly handled, families at peace with opening collections and dirty laundry up for researchers. And I have seen it go very, very wrong. I’m not saying that Debord isn’t a French National Treasure, I’m just saying that so much of value when it is the belongings of a dead person comes from someone else – in this case, the Beineke Library at Yale, wanting the same thing before you even knew you needed it. Of course, then there are the KingPapers, I think, munching on an apple as I walk past a bust of Kierkegaard. Emory spent thousands of hours, millions of dollars on working through Martin Luther King’s collection, with only a permanent loan agreement in place. Ultimately, the King Center in Atlanta had to partner with Stanford at the behest of the Estate, only to have the papers pulled and sent to Morehouse College in exchange for $32 million dollars.

 Alice Debord can’t be accused of cashing in on Debord’s legacy, but she does appear to police it with an ironically Cold War style efficiency. I look out over Tivoli Gardens and think of Chris Rock’s early stand-up. ‘Uh huh. Uh huh. I told you that bitch was crazy.’ Sometimes, those words are never truer than when we talk about dealing with the legacies of the dead. I turn, and look at the city behind me. Where in the hell am I? Eh, it is still light. I’ll figure it out. I find a bin for my apple core and jaywalk across the street, still trying to write a collections scope and content note in my head. THIS is how I know I am still an archivist; I reduce much of my dealing with human beings to scope and content notes.

 What is the breadth of your involvement in X? How many linear feet would these useless ‘Friends of Not a PTA discussion take?’

My mom-brain shifts into gear. ‘Guy? Guy, over here! Do you want a muffin? I baked ‘em fresh. I wanted to ask ya, what would YOU, Guy

Debord, make over the powerplays over the use of coinage at a summer fete verus wristbands or in making it – literally – a free for all, donations welcome but not mandatory. Guy, what do you think???’ I picture his face deadpan and revolted, but unwittingly intrigued. He’d probably start by said mama to referring to point 62 in the Spectacle 11 :

The false choices offered by spectacular abundance—choices based on the juxtaposition of

competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected

roles…develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent

allegiance to quantitative trivialities….Wherever abundant consumption is established, one

particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism

between youth and adults. But real adults—people who are masters of their own lives—are

in fact nowhere to be found.

The difficult thing in sussing out who DeBord actually was, is who was he? So much is unknown. The biographies are sketchy about his early years, outside of saying his daddy died from Tuberculosis, his mama was a beauty who was still young (20ish), when he died. She had 2 more kiddos, then married a man who would adopt the 2 illegitimate children (forcing the boy to change his name) but leave Debord out of the fold. We know Debord and his gran left Paris at the onslaught of war, moved around and settled in Nice, then Cannes with his mother’s ‘new’ family.

We know he preferred Musil to Proust. That he felt loss keenly, so keenly that the ‘Howl for Sade,’ is attributed to the lost children. Displacement abounds and rebirth at the twilight of Dadaism, standing next to Isidore Isou seems inevitable.

How did he make money, how did he live? Did he live or was he so paralyzed by the concepts he observed and given voice to that he drank to silence the demon voices of the Spectacle and they had gotten him anyway? Why haven’t I found a biography that give me this insight? Even the letters, without the give and take of correspondence, leave more questions. I think about the beautifully

written biography of Camus I read in high school and again in Uni.  I wonder about the mystery that surrounds some literary and philosophical champions, and about the need to know more. Is it a blend of stupidity and greed, brought on by being born of the Spectacle at its height? Is it because of a deeply ingrained sense of distrust and a moribund curiosity and need to dissect what I would believe in?

After trying to wrap my head around what psychogeography should be about, I don’t think I care. As Staff Sergeant Howse would say, ‘Stop worrying so much about why you’re walking, girl. Just go for a walk.’ I turn down a street and look at the linden trees blossoming. It is late afternoon, the light is glorious. Tomorrow, I’m gonna take Guy to dinner, I think. A lavish dinner. Maybe at Geist. Just the two of us, to say ‘Good night and Good Luck.’ I hope my liver can take the company.

*The liver survived intact.

**But really, would the footnotes be useful?