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Pill Pod 108 - Situationist Psychogeography (Exclusive) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-27 19:29:53
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2026-06
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Why were the concepts of Unitary Urbanism, Psychogeography, and Derive central to the Situationist International? Could we build better cities? There are a bunch of short readings you can look at for more hopes and dreams, and if you are very radical, you could even go for a walk! Looking forward to your comments on your cities, so please discuss!

1. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/formulary.html  

2. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/unitary.html

3. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/critique.html

4. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html

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ageOfBumFires

21:00 Japan actually does a really good job, whether intentional or not, of intermixing gardens/parks/temples with their mega cities, I.e. good job of not bulldozing them when they modernized. In two blocks you can time travel back then forward 1000 years. Japanese gardens are really fascinating, how they are essentially curated to represent a condensed version of an entire region, the entire country, etc. You get a tremendous sense of care and attention, they build little support structures for ancient trees so their limbs don't break. It's all very natural, perfectly in place, like the Zen story of a student who was told to sweep the walkway, and the master who, once it was swept, said it was not done, and proceeded to shake the pine branch so a few needles naturally laid across it. 25:00 re "central planning not leaving any space for experimentation." This is vacant lots and abandoned structures at least in my city. I do rogue vacant lot gardening/sculpting. I just collect seeds from my own garden then start them in a vacant lot and keep doing that over and over. I build little trails, plant trees, plant edibles for public consumption. People usually stop and ask me what I'm doing, usually thank me for caring for the otherwise neglected lots, comment on how much they love walking by the sunflowers. It's fun because its no strings attached, no plan, no end, no attachment, just play. Just some good old fashioned anarchism. Im not a fan of waiting to do something until it's possible to be totalized or collectivized or approved, you'll wait until you're dead. As the green screen Shia Lebeof or whatever his name is says "what are you waiting for, just do it!" I decided one day to just turn my tiny 400sq ft front "yard" into a quirky urban farm, I get compliments and questions all the time, and it seems like it opens up the possibility for my neighbors to do the same. I guess it makes them a little more comfortable to express their own version of an urban oasis, in their own spirit. Judgement free block, let those freak flags fly. Urban planning to me is the death of life. It is not democratic, you get what they give you. I was the chair of my neighborhoods nonprofit development council for a hot sec, and basically the city tells you to be thankful for what you get and what they plan for you, and if you complain, maybe you won't get anything. They host meeting to get community input, then proceed to ignore the input and do whatever they wanted to do. Our "Urban Redevelopment *Authority*" is the absolute worst. 44:00 re "surreal cities." Dubai? China also has a ton of these "themed" cities, although my impression of most of them are they they are/turned into ghost towns.

George Brown

I've been to Vegas 4 seperate times and the Strip is to my mind an interesting topic when talking about walkability. It's certainly not walkable in the same way a lot of European cities are. If you look at pictures and maps of Vegas you'll see that Victor is right that it's just The Strip surrounded by suburban hellscape, and the Strip itself is like an 8 lane (maybe more) fucking highway, so in that sense it's most definitely a car city, and not different from many American cities in that regard. However, being such a tourist attraction, the Strip itself is actually fairly pedestrian friendly. The sidewalk area is very large and accommodating and there are a bunch of footbridges that cross Las Vegas Boulevard so pedestrians don't have to worry about crossing 8 lanes of high speed traffic. A lot of the footbridges and sidewalk areas are themed with regards to the various casinos and hotels, and I think some of the footbridges even led directly into the casinos but that might have changed. There's also lots of attractions on the strip walkway itself, I distinctly remember there being a high speed roller-coaster that operated on the walkway itself, although I think that has been shut down. That being said, the hotels and casinos were still built on a major highway and as such they're incredibly spaced out; walking from one end of the Strip to the other is not a quick and easy task, it's much larger than people realize. However, there is a monorail and multiple free trams operated by the casinos to alleviate the distance issues. So it's actually a fairly walkable and accomodatable city, but it's not to be understood in the same way as a European city. You don't out of your house to a local bodega on the Strip to buy handmade baguettes, the walkability is entirely mediated by capital. You walk down the strip to be bombarded by gift shops and paid entertainment and the sheer spectacle of it all, and towards the rougher areas bombarded by folks selling trading cards of local strippers and escorts (yes this is a real thing, not hyperbole). It is not an organically intimate city, instead it is a very clearly automobile-centric planned suburbia that has since been painted over with pedestrian accommodations in the name of capitalist interests.

Steve B

We are producers (ala Barthes) as much as consumers and patrons.

Alex B

I recommend checking out Greg Girard's photos of Kowloon walled city. They'll seem eerily familiar being the aesthetic source of most cyberpunk and dystopian cityscapes. Permanent night. No sense of time. No maps, no records. No certainty of structural stability. The densest population on earth. Thick tangles of exposed cables and claustrophobic neon-lit corridors. Each door could reveal a makeshift dwelling, a 24 hour factory, something inbetween, or a forgotten church engulfed by the chaotic ever-shifting ghost cube.

Heather Harrington

The environment will affect how a person feels and thus acts. An environment that is conducive to a sense of community may lead to creative acts from individuals, but I believe that individuals can perform transgressive acts in the socially sanctioned dead public space (speaking of the design both in structures and movement) that disrupts. Everyone else is following the everyday choreography of the space, and thus carried away with the momentum of this socially sanctioned behavior, but a person with their movement, their body, can rupture the momentum of repetition. Anna Halprin (dancer, activist, choreographer) and her husband Lawrence Halprin (landscape architect) delved into this territory.  Along with some other good sources: British social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey, Erving Goffman's "micro-sociology" of human interaction (Goffman 1971; Giddens 1987), and "time geography" of the Lund school (Pred I977). The latter, in particular, considers "the choreography of everyday life" by establishing a notation which traces through time the paths utilized by individuals moving between places (Pearson and Thomas 1994).As far as Vegas; fake, the dream of more and more, crass, glutinous, surface. Yeah you can walk along the strip and go into these dens of hallowed-out excess, but to get around you do need a car. It is fascinating because it is like watching a trainwreck, a real hotbed of observations. Now what I found to be in many ways like nothing I had observed before (and I lived in NYC for 20 years) was the old part of Vegas, Fremont Street, here you can walk and experience what I thought had a feel of Mad Max, the outskirts of this area are definitely a wasteland full of lost souls.

Eli

We need a pill pod Urban Design/Architectural theory arc so bad

Myles Jeffers
>>100732032

Ian Borden wrote a great book called, Skateboarding, Space and the City, about how street skateboarders reinterpret the architecture of city spaces challenging their design and subverting the top down normative channels (no loitering, keep to the pathways) human bodies are supposed to take when traversing city spaces. So I definitely agree with the human potential to disrupt (punk can never die, the marxism is within us). However, also look up Stigmergy. It's an interesting concept about how environment dictates consciousness that goes some way to explaining why most people seem so lacklustre in their ability to imagine new ways of living. Though I think the internet is a great counter to that; in what other time could a lower middle class boy from a small English town gain revolutionary consciousness through philosophical texts and podcasts?

Brian Penkrot

I did my master's in Las Vegas, and I found nothing about the city to be walkable. When thinking of whatever the city center is, the strip probably comes to mind, but that is considered "new vegas." There's the "old vegas" with the fremont lights over the pedway and there is a "downtown" between the old and new which has offices and downtown-y things and you would never realize you were in a "downtown" compared to real other cities. The strip is not designed for walking, since the casinos don't want you leaving, and the distance between locations is deceptively large. (I suppose the pedway is technically walkable so long as you don't mind a little extra jingoism broadcast over you, blocking the sky). The rest of Vegas is quite separate from these areas and there is no overlap. Locals will go to the tourist areas if they work there or have guests in from out of town, but that is it. All the areas outside of the strip are strip malls and walled communities. There are few and far between public areas, since green is almost impossible to maintain. There is a shopping area just south of the strip called Town Square; one of those malls that absorbed living spaces and attempts to make a neighborhood out of it. There is even green space (astroturf). But community building is very hard the way the city is designed. I found some communities that took advantage of the natural spaces outside the city (biking, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, etc) but by and large found most people to be both lonely and hesitant to connect beyond surface interactions. It seemed everyone had a 2 or 5 year plan of when they could move to wherever else. Venturi Brown and Izenour's "Learning from Las Vegas" might be of interest. If the situationists hoped to use avant garde art to interrupt mass inertia, this approaches the shift in architecture that is meant to disrupt inertia, but only momentarily as a way of capturing capital.

Joey McAuley

Anthropolpgist James Scott's book Seeing Like a State talks a lot about how planned cities were built to be "legible" to outside entities like colonials, tax collectors and other officials, to the detriment of their livability. Things like grid patterns and permanent street names; the road to Toronto from Ottawa would at one time be called "the toronto road" and the same road would be called "the ottawa road" in Toronto and this was difficult to establish addresses for tax and census purposes. He compares iirc Sao Paolo and Brasilia, with the latter being a fully planned shithole that cant sustain a population and the former being a vibrant metropolis that was more spontaneously developed over time.

anacidcommie

Is Baudrillard really dismissing a huge chunk of sociology like that by saying that everyone who theorised about alienation in modernity, from Marx to Weber to Durkheim, Merton, the Chicago school, Frankfurt school etc are just projecting? I mean if so, that's objectively wrong and supremely arrogant.

Plastic Pills
>>101212023

To put it in context, Baudrillard knows the discipline better than you or I, and he has no qualms about making statements for effect rather than truth value... and yet..............yes, that is what he's saying, ch. 3 of Fatal Strategies. Most people most of the time are contented enough and when they aren't, their blame is cast onto another. To theorize and chalk up causes and effects to sociological explanations is to overdetermine the causal relationship in the final result. And for what it's worth, I see it. Alienation is a sort of pin-the-tail exercise for every social ill, and it always presupposes the theorist's position outside of the process.

The One True Tim

Not sure that is the message, but being distracted by an expectation of philosophic/existential politesse, i.e., "arrogance" has 0 value in assessing truth, function and universality. (In fact, I'd argue the opposite) The standard one may hold to others- in assessing their loyalty to the perception you insist is representative of more than the anachronistic commodified fluff it actually represents- is far more subjective and varied- and most importantly; NOT OWNED BY THE TERMINALLY ONLINE MINORITY- than you seem to be willing to entertain. Glad I worked my way through Marxism. It's a tension contagion that changes nothing, but a chance at meaningful collectivization. (No less a life of freedom) Class-consciousness is an outdated lie. The patterns, history and theory that underpin my thesis are not. Take this chance, again; to evolve. I will not harass u here anymore. This is a safe and stellar space that I would rather use to move forward then to hold others still w/i their desperate frustration. But, my argument is meant to enlighten. Just work through the ego, my friend; and meet me on the other side. <3

anacidcommie
>>101212023

And yet, depression and anxiety rates are exploding, with depression poised to be the leading cause of the disease burden globally, according to the WHO, by 2030. So something is going on which is objectively worsening people's general mental health across the globe, and in the context of improving medical care and technology (in the first world, at least) I'm yet to see a better explanation of this than alienation. Aside from the fact that alienation for Marx is also an objective phenomenon: you are objectively alienated from the means of production because you objectively have no ownership over it, or say, nature, because we objectively do treat nature as nothing more than a material resource to convert into capital. This isn't subjective, and not related to how much control you feel you have over the course of your life, and no amount of semiotic nihilism is going to change that. Alienation (in these senses, at least) is as real as the earth or sky that touch and see you back. TBH, as this series goes on, I'm beginning to understand why Marxists like Jameson have such a problem with postmodernism. If you speak to people who aren't in academia, conversations about being frustrated at work, not getting paid enough, financial worry for the future, ecological worry about climate change etc. are all commonplace, and most people talk about these things in either depressed or resigned tones. And Marxism still more than adequately explains all this, despite the flaws in certain aspects of it eg. its teleology. But this is my problem with Baudrillard's total abandonment of Marxism: it feels like a very privileged, very typically academic stance to take, to dismiss the same capitalist relations that Marx described to be fictions, or to not (or no longer) have major effects on human subjectivity. Baudrillard can argue that talking about production and surplus value require language and so are nothing more than yet more signs all he likes: people without tenure still have to literally get up in the morning, go to work, and get paid a lot less than they're producing, for the most part. And yes, the consumer produces as well and all that, but the fast food you order needs real labour to be produced, as does it being delivered to your door, and these people are still being paid a tiny fraction of that product's exchange value. So until all this is no longer the case, Marxism is still very much a foundation that can't just be flippantly dismissed because it didn't take 20th century image proliferation or its humanistic assumptions into account.