Metropolitan Strategies,Psychogeographic Investigations

Lost in the City We Find Ourselves

The notion of psychogeography (as well as many other ideas of the Situationists) appears frequently within political and artistic discussions. Indeed, they circulate to the point of cliché, in the process becoming almost completely emptied of content. There has even been interest in the use of psychogeography as a research method for business research (Knowles, 2009) where it is used to develop an expanded perspective on how organizations are experienced. The derive is reduced to a leisurely stroll, perhaps accompanied by some secondary musings about the nature of the spectacle, a theoretically informed mode of shopping (Vains, 2008) a dash of literary activity, with some local history thrown in for good measure (Baker, 2003). This process is of course a hollowing out of the concept. Psychogeography for the Situationists was primarily not an aesthetic activity but more than anything a strategic approach to understanding the forces shaping the city and from those finding points of intervention within it. At times, it verged on a nearly military framework, working to gain an intuitive understanding of the territory and its layering of images, affects, and circuits of capitalist valorization (Shukaitis, 2013).

Today, we find ourselves in a condition of ever intensified spectacular sociability: all of life put to work in webs of biopolitical production, overwhelming communicative and media flows, and the reshaping of the metropolis through culture-led gentrification. More than ever, well-developed psychogeographic investigations are needed to comprehend the shaping of the metropolis and the possibilities this offers for political action. But this is not a task for the carefree wanderings of the flaneur, but perhaps better-suited for what Ian Sinclair (1997) has described as the superseding figure of the stalker, the one who knows where he is going but not why or how.

Against this emptied-out conception of psychogeography, we pose the idea that there are two, if not more, key strategies that it contains. The first would be to enact a process of de-familiarization from the routines and relationships to everyday life. Georg Simmel (1950) suggested well over one hundred years ago that the intensity of experience found in the metropolis tended to stimulate a kind of blasé attitude from its inhabitants, one developed to protect oneself from overstimulation. This is because confronted with the vast complexity and speed of everyday interactions, to engage full with all of them would require all of one’s mental resources and energies, if not more than they are capable of. A great deal of social routines and interactions are based around finding ways to deal with and work through this otherwise overwhelming complexity. In many ways, the arguments Simmel made a century ago could easily be argued to be just as relevant in the conditions of contemporary spectacular capitalism (Gilman-Opalsky, 2011), and even more so with the intensification of communication and media flows.

Psychogeography, in particular through the practice of drifting, or the dérive, is a method of breaking from this formulaic interaction with the everyday. It is an attempt to bring to conscious attention all the dynamics and patterns of attraction and repulsion with the environment that remained submerged by routine relationships to the everyday. The dérive becomes a way that getting lost, of opening up how one is affected by the world, brings to the fore all the richness (and horror) of the everyday that is typically not paid attention to. In some ways, psychogeography could be understood to be an extension of how the Surrealists drew from psychoanalytic ideas in their exploration of the unconscious, creativity, and desire. As Andy Merrifield (2005) comments on the practice,

As they shifted in and out of public spaces, they were intent on accumulating rich qualitative data, grist to their “psychogeographical” mill, documenting odors and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies: ruined façades, foggy vistas of narrow, sepia-soaked streets, nettle-ridden paving stones, empty alleyways at 3 a.m., menace and mayhem, separation and continuity (p. 31).

The difference with psychogeography is that the terrain in question is not an individual mind, but rather the substrate of subconscious elements dispersed through the territory of the metropolis. In this way, it is inherently much more a social practice (Jakobsen and Rasmussen, 2011).

This “getting lost to find the world again” is the aspect of psychogeography, which is more readily grasped in the continued reception and circulation of Situationist ideas and practices. But what tends to get lost in this reception is the second and more directly strategic aspect of psychogeography, which is the emphasis on what new political possibilities these practices open up and make possible. For the Situationist International (SI), psychogeography was not simply valuable in itself as some sort of phenomenological investigation, or even as a sociological research method. Rather, its focus was to understand the ways in which the continued accumulation of capital was shaping the nature of the city, and thus affecting their relationship with the environment and the structuring of the everyday. And from this understanding of changes in value production and accumulation, the rendering of surplus for capital accumulation, it was thought to then be possible to find new ways to interrupt this ordering of the everyday and its avenues of exploitation. The dérive and psychogeography are thus forms of reconnaissance, gathering information of the territory in which the tactics of everyday resistance are to unfold.

Ken Wark (2011) develops an interesting strategic appreciation of psychogeography, arguing that it sought to pose a form of lived time that does not accept the binary division work and leisure. This division between work and nonwork time is accepted by labor and capital, where it is in the interest of capital to extend and intensify the workday and in the interest of labor to shorten it (or at least extract higher wages). It is often this shared focus on productivity that functions as a point of mediation between apparently conflicting interests, one in which the apparent representatives of working class struggles end up taking on a more of an accommodating function to the needs of capital (Seidman, 1990). As Wark (2011, p. 25) suggests that the Letterists, and the SI, started from a different conception of time, one “resolutely based on non-work.” This can be seen in what Debord considered his first major work, the painting of the slogan “Never work!” on a Parisian wall, a theme that was carried on through the activities of the SI. Here we can see a close, resonant connection with themes developed by the Italian autonomists, who likewise argued not just for reduction of working hours or higher wages but also for the abolition of work altogether.

For Wark (2011), thus, the derive becomes “the practice of lived time, time not divided and accorded a function in advance, a time inhabited neither by workers nor consumers” (p. 25). But here we can also see what prospect the SI posed for capital despite themselves, in the ways this collapse of work and nonwork, of play and labor, forms the basis of new patterns of work and capital accumulation. In some ways, all the creative industries hype around new media could itself be understood as a perverse form of the SI’s dream to completely collapse together art, play, labor, and everyday life. The key aspect missing from this, though, is the abolition of capitalism: To collapse work and leisure without an abolition of capitalism, without a complete transformation of everyday life, is to reinscribe the problems of alienated labor at a deeper level of subjectiviation. As Andy Merrifield (2005) argues, “work-as-fun justifies non-stop toil, dreaming of riches and stock options, of hot dot.com start-ups, where hippie 20-some-hings play Frisbee while they put in eighteen-hour days” (p. 140).

This is not to cast blame on the SI by any means, for it is clear on many levels that they were aware of this dynamic even if not the particular forms it would take. Rather, it is to suggest that the SI’s methods were formed in relationship to a particular moment of capitalist development. Thus, it is necessary to see how they could be adapted to the changing situations of the present. The use of psychogeography to open and de-familiarize the world, and from there to develop new political tools, remains a useful and productive approach—as long as it understood that doing could (and likely should) reach different conclusions and understanding precisely because of the shift in the political terrain, the nature of capitalism, and so forth. A desire to collapse work and play into a new version of the everyday doesn’t mean the same thing where that has already occurred but as a method to intensify and extend the workday. Nonetheless, the practices that the SI proposed for investigating the everyday, their derives, and psychogeography retain their values as ways to approach these transformed conditions, albeit in a different way. A renewed form of psychogeographic practice could benefit greatly from drawing on the autonomist class composition analysis.

Open Composition and Autonomous Inquiries

In the Situationist approach to psychogeography, there is a two-way movement of opening up a terrain of struggle to sketch a new map of political subjectification but one that does so without foreclosing possible directions for future mutations in that form of politics. When the SI began their investigations into the changing psychogeographic nature of the city, they could not have figured in advance what kind of political practices would emerge from these investigations. If pressed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when they were most heavily using these techniques to make a prediction about what directions a radical political movement would take it, it is very unlikely (nearly impossible) that they would have imagined in advance the events of May 1968 and the alliance between the students’ and workers’ movements. Very likely, given their intellectual and political background, they would have been much more focused on an expansion and radicalization of the existing labor movement, and on the role that forms of artistic (and antiartistic) practice could have in this expansion, rather than considering student politics as a possible detonator or catalyst of a larger social explosion. But the benefit of the approach used is that it remained open to possibilities that could not have been foreseen in advance, and even managed to prepare tools for political actors that could have not been anticipated. The eruption of spring 1968 saw the practice of occupations come to constitute a political territory in itself, from which other modes of being in the city, forms of life, and desire emerged.

This dual sense of finding spaces for a new politics, but keeping them open to the unforeseen can be compared with the autonomist notions of technical and political class composition. Roughly speaking, technical composition is the forms of skills, knowledge, and abilities found within a given labor process. Political composition is the subjective experiences and possibilities for political transformation held by the working class at a given point. Clearly, there is a close relationship between these two, but it is not the one where either side can be understood in a reductive way to the other. The autonomists understood very clearly that the working class is always more than its particular position in the overall labor process (Carlsson, 2008); it is constantly overflowing and exceeding its enforced position with more desires, potentials, and directions than could ever be contained within that class relationship—whether this be for escape, security, or revolution.

In practice, what the autonomist notion and analysis of class did was to open up and expand the notion of class itself. While more traditional party-based forms of Marxism remained fixated on the industrial working class (such as the French and Italian communist parties), or basically factory workers, as the anticipated political subject, autonomists expanded their focus and understanding. While this initially began by trying to work from and with the eruption of wildcat factory strikes, these struggles subsequently and quickly spilled beyond the factory gates into the fabric of the city itself, as well as the university. There were intense struggles of the student movement, over health care and housing; the feminist movement put forth a very strong challenge to the notion of what counted as work by raising the question of gendered labor and social reproduction. While it might be tempting to understand all these “new social movements” as being something quite different from the labor movement, at least in the traditional sense, at its best the autonomists understood these movements not as something distinct or opposed to working class movements but as an extension of them. This is due in large part to the key concept of the social factory, where capital has developed to a point where it attempts to extend its control all throughout the social fabric. A consequence of this argument is that struggles occurring outside the factory gates still occur within the larger process of the factory-ization of society and are thus still part of contesting the production of surplus value.

A class composition analysis thus asks questions about the expanded forms of social labor existing within the social factory. What are the labors that keep the social factory operating? What forms of value are created within this expanded mode of accumulation? What territories exist within it, and how are they shaped by their position within the circuits of accumulation? The autonomist method to investigating these questions took the form of a workers’ inquiry. Originally conceived of by Marx as a way to investigate factory conditions in the late 19th century, this was adapted and configured to the needs of the Italian situation. This was an approach that drew heavily from sociology and industrial relations to explore the changing nature of work conditions. A key aspect involves starting from the realization that oftentimes the needs, desires, and conditions of workers are not actually known—and cannot be presumed in advance. This is especially the case for a situation such as Italy in the 1950s to 1970s, which was undergoing profound and dramatic economic and social transformations.

The purpose of a workers’ inquiry, however, was not strictly a sociological one. Its goal was not to map out and understand new configurations of class and power in a disinterested manner. Rather, it was to work from within the forms of discontent that presented themselves, and to find ways to intensify their antagonisms, and to formulate new politics based on them. The language used to describe this process was often quite abrasive, where someone like Mario Tronti would argue for a formulation of a partisan inquiry into conditions, a purely one-sided investigation founded on class hatred. This was far from the supposedly objective and politically neutral form of social science the autonomists often drew from in addition to Marxist thought and politics.

In some ways, they are much the same questions the Situationists investigated through their practices. In both cases, what we see are approaches that are opening up to new forms of political practice outside the boundaries of traditional leftist politics, outside the activities of the union and the political party. Situationists and the autonomists are seeking to understand the changing terrain of politics and capital accumulation, and from that understanding to tease out possibilities for new political subjects. There are numerous ways that one could tease out how both approaches understand their situation using different but roughly comparable concepts. For instance, the autonomist concept of the social factory (as well as the idea of real subsumption) is in many ways roughly comparable with the Situationists’ concept of the spectacle, insofar as it expresses a new mode of capitalist accumulation where all of society is mediated through the production of imagery as surplus value. Psychogeographic practice can be understood as an investigation into the changing conditions of the city, which was also much the goal and focus of class composition analysis in its approach to investigating the condition of labor in the social factory. Both traditions focused on investigating conditions within a social terrain, the changing conditions of capital accumulation, and what new strategies for contestation could be found within these conditions. A further consideration of how these approaches might be jointly used would be valuable for finding new tools for sabotage within the metropolitan factory.

Sabotage Within the Metropolitan Factory

In recent autonomist writings, there has been a greater focus on the city understood as a kind of productive space in itself, or a kind of metropolitan factory (Negri, 2006; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Pasquinelli, 2008; Plan B Bureau, 2009). Likewise, there has been a focus put on the city as a space of struggle within radical political thought more generally, which can be seen in ideas such as claiming a “right to the city,” which emerges directly from the writing of Henri Lefebvre (Harvey, 2012). For the autonomist tradition, and those picking up and adapting its conceptual framework, the approach to the changing nature of the city is more particular; it brings together the changing conditions of dispersed forms of labor with the changing nature of political practice and social movement formations. This can be seen most clearly in the writings of Hardt and Negri (2009), who argue that the modern metropolis is to multitude what the factory was to the working class: a primary site for the production of the working class, its internal encounters and organization, and for the expression of antagonism and rebellion. As opposed to these bounding of the productive space within the factory walls, Hardt and Negri (2009) suggest that the “contemporary productive activities of the multitude, however, overflow the factory walls to permeate the entire metropolis, and in the process the qualities and potential of those activities are transformed fundamentally” (p. 250). These productive activities are not just forms of labor as traditionally understood but also the varied instances of affective and immaterial labor, artistic and creative practices, and all the dispersed flows of labor that exceed the boundaries of any particular capitalist organization but are becoming all the more essential to the reproduction of capital. Even within traditional management and organization analysis, this poses a problem of capitalist discipline in that firms are forced to rely on the free self-organized activities of workers whose labor they do not directly control but rely on.

In marketing practice and management, this problem is addressed through the framework of the “co-creation” of value, where it is understood that the active participation of consumers and their circuits of feedback and creation are directly productive of value. But the difficulty here is that “the interactive and interdependent nature of value co-creation processes challenges traditional management practices . . . Value co-creation requires an ability to engage ‘the extended enterprise’ by managing across and within customer and supplier value creation processes” (Payne, Storbacka, & Frow, 2008, p. 93). Here, we can also see a perverse echo of some SI themes, where the emphasis of active participation (as opposed to the notion of spectatorship or passivity) is embraced but not as a tool for liberating or bringing about new forms of political composition and subjectivity but rather organizing a free labor force for the purposes of marketing and branding. This vast reservoir of free labor (Terranova, 2004) is all the more valuable in how it is often not even recognized as work, how it is pleasurable and embraced by people even while being rendered into vast sums of revenue through social media and digital marketing (Zwick, Bonsu, & Darmody, 2008). It was the new economy’s new “hidden abode” labor, one that has spread out beyond the circuits of the high tech and cultural economy (Bohm & Land, 2012).

It is this conjunction and changed value production that bringing together psychogeography and class composition analysis in a more concerted way can help to address. The Situationists investigated ways that the accumulation of capital transformed the environments on multiple levels, from the physical shaping of space to the mental and emotional environments. When capital has extended its circuits of valorization through the city in much more pronounced ways, for instance by orienting around creative industries and city policies, the shaping of the city is embedded directly within the changing circuits of capital accumulation. One downside of the SI’s approach was that its totalizing analysis left little room for appreciating more subtle differences in transformation of capital accumulation. Once the spectacularization of the everyday life and the city had been declared, it left little room for appreciating the changing nature of the spectacular forms sociability was taking. In this sense, the practices of the derive and psychogeography, which are much more connected with the earlier phases of the SI’s activities, provide a better framework for analyzing the shifting configurations of everyday life than the more brazen and charismatic analyses that they are well-known for.

The purpose of bringing together autonomist class composition analysis and psychogeography would be to develop an approach for drifting through and understanding the new territories of value accumulation in the city configured as a factory space. What are the possibilities for political recomposition within these circuits? If capital is drawing from an expanded terrain of value production that relies on immense amounts of free labor, what possibilities are there for disrupting accumulation within these spaces? And perhaps even more importantly (even if somewhat dispiritingly), what are the processes and dynamics that are blocking moments of political recomposition? While there has been a great deal of discussion about the inherent radicality and social cooperation found within some forms of immaterial labor, it often seems that these have not led to the kind of political outcomes or collectivity emerging from them that one might have expected. The basin of immaterial labor, far from bursting forth with new communist militants, rather seem to be inhabited by people who might seem to be characterized by high degree of possessive individualism, more concerned about the nature of their practice, and with the very real questions of surviving within the challenging conditions of the city itself, more so then with questions of collective conditions of struggles. Perhaps it might be that their position within circuits of labor and reproduction tends to block, or preclude forms of collectivity from emerging, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009) has suggested. However, if this is the case, then what is needed is a closer investigation of the dynamics through which these blockages occur to sabotage the process.

There are a number of projects that are developing an approach along the lines of what has been suggested so far. This is not to suggest that they are ideal moments by any means, but rather developed practices that go in useful directions. One could look the activities of Precarias a la Deriva (PAD), who are a Madrid-based feminist collective formed in 2002 in response to the call for a general strike. For women working in part-time and precarious work, the proposal of going on strike did not make sense. What would it mean to go on a strike in those conditions? How could they do so without undercutting their own conditions of survival? How would it be possible to go on strikes over conditions of care work? PAD (2006), thus, carried about drifts within the circuits of gendered labor and social reproduction they were enmeshed in. In this sense, the derive became not a tool for investigating the overall metropolis, but rather particular circuits and spaces within the city, and how they were being transformed: a tool for mapping out one’s own working conditions, networks of support, and relations. And, most importantly, searching for what kind of politics, what kind of agency, or active refusals is possible from within these positions.

The Countercartographies Collective (or 3Cs) is a project based in North Carolina that has drawn from the history of mapping and autonomist politics to analyze the changing shape of academic labor (Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias, 2007). Similar to PAD’s formation in response to a labor politics that did not seem adequate to the conditions of the present, 3Cs formed to investigate what kind of labor politics might be possible within the space of Edufactory (Edufactory Collective, 2009). What flows of labor, resources, and collective intelligence existing within the university space? More recently, they carried out a mapping of these flows in relation to Queen Mary University in London, particularly focusing on questions of labor and migration. This project included developing a board game that could be used as a pedagogic-political tool (Countermapping, 2012). How might the different forms of labor and social life within the university, from adjuncts to janitors, students to tenured professors, relate to each other in a manner that could create common grounds of understanding and political action?

The practices of walking and drifting have been taken up in a much different way by The Walking Archives, an Argentinean project of art history coordinated by Eduardo Molinari (2012), a mapping that traces the continuing legacy of colonial power and domination. In particular, with their project The Soy Children, the goal became to map out unseen social and economic relationships that were having immense impact on the environment. For instance, the ways in which the biotech economy, particularly through the production of genetically modified soy crops, could be shown to have immense impacts on culture and politics in Argentina far beyond agriculture. Molinari suggests that the biotechnological approach of genetic recombination has directly filtered through into transforming modes of cultural production and politics, creating new circuits for the operations of political and economic power: “Today’s neoliberalism needs a transgenic culture” (p. 5). The Walking Archives then draws from psychogeographic practices such as the derive, combined with archival investigations and curating of artistic events, and traces out these networks of power and influence and makes them visible (Mayo, 2012; Molinari, 2011).

In the United Kingdom, the Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB; 2012)/Carrot Workers Collective have been organizing for several years on issues of precarity within cultural and creative work, particularly focusing on the questions of unpaid cultural labor in the forms of internships. This has taken multiple forms, from working with graduating art students warning them about the conditions they might likely face when entering the creative industries, which led to the production of a counter internship guide, to the coordination of a people’s tribunal on the question of precarious labor. While there has been much more focus on the question of unpaid labor, within the cultural industries and more broadly (Gill & Pratt, 2008; Ross, 2009; Standing, 2011), the activities of PWB are distinct in that they are not formed around a legalistic claiming of rights. Rather, PWB attempts to create spaces for political recomposition of open subjectification through the conditions of shared precarity, rather than through attempting nostalgically to reclaim the position of some lost golden past for creative workers that was ensured through state protection.

What is clear from these brief examples is that the forms that political recomposition would take within the metropolitan factory are significantly different from those used within industrial struggles previously. Organizing around arts and cultural labor, in circuits of immaterial work, would necessitate a different approach—in the same way the call for a general strike might not be the best tactic for precarious workers. The conditions of creative labor within the metropolis are oftentimes extremely individualizing and isolating, where freelance workers find themselves moving from café to café, project to project, with no common space that they encounter others facing the similar conditions. The purpose of bringing together psychographic drifts with class composition analysis is not to propose in advance any particular tactics for countering these conditions—rather, it is to suggest that not enough is known about the particularities and compositions of these situations—and that any radical politics worthy of the name must begin from working within and against them

Conclusion

In one of the few exhibitions staged by the Situationists, Guy Debord wrote over the painting of fellow SI member Pinot Gallizio, “abolition du travail aliene” (abolition of alienated labor). Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (2011) argues that this could serve as a bit of mantra for the SI, that the creativity “the artist was endowed with in bourgeois society had to be set free and generalized” (p. 98). In this sense, it was not all that paradoxical that the SI celebrated and despised the role of the artist. It was not so much that they were opposed to the existence of creative practice, play, or imagination at all—for this is exactly what they wanted to expand all throughout everyday life in revolutionary directions. But this is precisely their objection to the restricted role of creativity within the figure of the artist (although the same could be said of the restrictive role of the creative class or cultural industries). For the SI, art had to be realized throughout the everyday and not just within the separate realm of the art world.

In the conditions of neoliberal post-Fordist capitalism fueled by creativity, play, and desire, art has indeed moved beyond the separate realm of the art world. Unfortunately, the effects of this artistic sublation have been somewhat less then liberatory. In these conditions, it no longer makes sense to make recourse to play and creativity in the same way, assuming that liberating them will drastically transform everyday life. In reality, it is precisely a continued attachment to such claims that may bind people even tighter to their own domination. The task of finding new methods for contesting neoliberal capitalism starts not from continually recycling the ideas of previous revolutionary movements without adapting them to the current conditions. Rather, it starts from understanding how the demands of previous movements have shifted the patterns of life and labor—and by drifting through this metropolitan factory and its circuits of valorization, finds new ways to sabotage these very circuits.