Particulations

How to (de)Construct a Place Setting in Three Easy Steps

2012-02-12T03:55:00.000-08:00

1 - Define a place setting.

What is a ‘place setting’: the setting of a place, to set a place? The opposite of ‘to set’: un-set…unsettle. A place for whom/what? A set placing. A place for a subject. A setting of a scene. To set the scene for the subject of the place.

1 place /plays/ n 1a physical environment; a space 1b physical surroundings; atmosphere 2a an indefinite region or expanse; an area…4 a particular part of a surface or body; a spot…5b an important or valued position…7a a proper or designated niche…8a an available seat…8c PLACE SETTING

2 place vt 1 to distribute in an orderly manner; arrange 2a to put in, direct to, or assign to a particular place…2c to put in a particular state 3 to appoint to a position…5a to assign to a position in a series or category; rank 7 to put, lay…

setting /’seting/ n 1 the manner, position, or direction in which something (e.g. a dial) is set 3a the background, surroundings…5 PLACE SETTING

2 - Ascertain the limits of the place setting.

“How is it possible to determine, in such a situation, what truly belongs to the inside and what does not?" (Derrida 1987: 138).
The place setting exists as a singularity in space and time: on the spatial plane it exists on a surface without clearly delineated edges, and temporally it is unclear at which point the place setting becomes itself, or when it is no longer that of which it is known in regards to assembly/disassembly.

Somebody puts together the place setting. It could be the diner, it could be the cook, it could be the silver service waitress/waiter . . . it could be you. A number of possible people construct it. The placemat, cutlery, glasses, plates are laid out by following certain cultural conventions. The dining paraphernalia is placed on a surface, a table. Some of the items may rest on the placemat, if there is one, and some will not, for instance the glasses do not, although they too can sometimes sit on their own object, a coaster.

Where is the edge of the place setting? If you were to draw around the limits of the place setting you would quite probably draw around almost every single separate item that makes it up.

The margins are unclear. It appears that the outside of the place setting is also contained within the inside of it, in the fluid space between the items. The outside pours into the inside. What belongs to the place setting and what does not? Does the tablecloth belong to the place setting: the tablecloth could be removed and the place setting could still be considered to exist. What of the table? What could be utilised in the place of a table that would still enable a place setting to be called such: a kitchen counter, a TV dinner tray, a wooden packing crate. How many individual items that make up the place setting need to be removed for it to not be a place setting? Everything but a knife and fork . . . maybe . . .

How significant is the setting of the place setting: could one assemble a place setting on the pavement of a busy street, or in an art gallery? The context of the place setting might mean that a diner could not be present at scene of the place setting. If it were physically impossible (or dangerous) for a diner to be in attendance, is it still a place setting: could a place setting be set on an airport runway and it still considered to be a place setting. It would certainly be recognisable as one, but how much does the context effect the place setting, inasmuch as it is part of the dining event. On a spectrum of contexts it is difficult to ascertain an absolutely clear point at which a place setting would not be considered to be such.

The place setting, in terms of its existence, comes into and goes out of being surreptitiously. At some point in its manifestation it becomes what is recognised as a ‘place setting’, but its materialisation is gradual and rather furtive. It is carefully assembled piece by piece, comes to rest for a period of time, then is gradually dismantled by the diner and/or an-other: disarranging the original construction. If the place setting was only considered to be a place setting at its most complete (prior to the diner’s arrival, prior to their unpicking of it), its disassembly could be seen as a destructive act. The diner destroys the place setting, like one might destroy a work of art. This could be considered an act of violence.

Considering the place setting to be a ‘place setting’ only when it is whole and complete, allows for it to be described as such even in the absence of a diner. If the place setting is set, but the diner never arrives, the place setting is still a place setting, even if its origins are not so sure. However, at some point, the items making up the place setting will all be removed.

If the place setting is seen as something more nebulous, uncertain in terms of when it begins and ends in time, the diner’s re-arranging of the items that form it, and the removal of those items during the dining process, could also be included in what is recognised as the place setting. But, we still have the issue of a beginning and end, though. Does the place setting begin when the placemat is laid or, maybe, when the first piece of cutlery is set down. Does it end when the final item is removed?

The place setting is a fragile thing.

3 - Ensure the place setting is ready for the diners’ arrival.

The place setting awaits a subject. The place setting is calling a subject. The diner is hailed by the place setting, “interpellated” in the Althusserian sense, whether the place setting has their name on it or not, as it might at a formal dinner when written on a card. The place setting has a subject in mind, whether it is a named subject or a generalised other. The type of dinner will dictate, to a large degree, certain characteristics in the diner: it may dictate their class, wealth or social status; their associations with other diners (relative, friend, business associate); their membership of a certain group. All these qualities define the event, the place setting, and the subject. Therefore the place setting holds certain notions about the subject before they arrive at the dining table.

At a formal dinner the place setting exists for the sole purpose of a subject to be sat at it, and for that subject to utilise it within a given framework. It is an object requiring a subject to fulfil its purpose. The place setting anticipates an always already subject. In this sense the subject comes before the place setting, they exist before the place is set, as a knowable, expected attendee of the dinner. But, does the subject exist as a diner before the place setting is set? If the place setting is a one-time-only event, it is possible the subject only exists as a diner at the point they sit down at the table. If this is the case, then the place setting comes before the dining subject.

It appears that the tendrils of the place setting spread temporally in both directions. It forms a nexus which connect a past and future subject in the singularity of an event. This event, operating around the hub of the place setting, is also contingent in the changing of the subject. The subject will have been altered by the event and will not be the same subject that sat at the place setting at the beginning of dinner. Conversations might have taken place, dialogue exchanged, the subject’s psyche could be transformed, however minutely.

The place setting, as an assembly, is also part of the greater assembly which is the dining event. This could be considered to be like the Deleuzo-Guattarian “assemblage” which comes together and then disassembles. If it were considered in these terms, we could not separate the subject from the event, the subject does not attend the event they are part of the event. The place setting and the diner would be intrinsically linked, because they make up the processual dining experience.

The place setting retains the history of the event. Before the final items are removed, what remains of the place setting contains a trace of the event that has just taken place. The place setting is a recording device for the event as it is for the particular individual subject as diner. How the place setting is left at the point the diner leaves the table is an audit trail for the actions of the subject during their dinner party. If the recording could be played back the subject’s steps could be retraced. The used place setting, at the moment the diner leaves and prior to the point it is finally removed by the attending staff, alludes to an absence. The dining subject leaves their signature (their autobiography), in the rumpled silk placemat, in the not-quite-finished glass of vintage port, in the highly-polished unused silver dessert spoon. Disorder replaces order. But this disorder is telling. It speaks of a past, of an attendance.

Each individual diner will leave their history behind on the table: an archive of the event left behind in their wake. The dining subject has left their mark. Their absence leaves a sign of a past presence. ‘Elvis has left the building’ but he still exists in the discarded crumpled gig programme and trampled cigarette butts of the deserted dance hall.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago 1974-79, the Brooklyn Museum

References:
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).

Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies

2012-02-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies Journal

Using Psychogeography to Discover the Hidden Consequences of Social Reproduction

2012-02-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

In the opening to her essay on the regeneration project at Grand Central Station in New York during the 1990s, Cindi Katz states: "The hidden city is itself an outcome and a representation of what might be understood as 'postmodern geographical praxis', but so too is the project of its unhiding." (2001: 93) Commenting on the complexity of heteretopic spaces, and their implicit heterogeneity, she discusses the partitioning of space through "domination and privilege". (2001: 94) This is done by looking at particular neighbourhoods, the relationship 'the other' has with specific spaces, and the process of hiding (in public policy) and unhiding (in this case a deconstructive form of revealing produced by her own critique). Katz states: "it is clear that the spatial forms associated with increasingly globalized capitalist production are indeed masterful at hiding the consequences and contradictions of the associated social relations associated with it." ( 2001: 96) Comparisons can be made between postmodern geographical praxis and psychogeography in the way that "Psychogeography comprehen[ds] buildings through their use, their history, and their collective and associative generation of meaning and mood". (Sadler 2001: 160)

Katz explains how the process of privatizing space is at the heart of the neoliberalist project such that this raises important issues in relation to place and meaning. This is also remarked upon by Michel Foucault. When commenting on the "human site" he says that it is a function of our times that a certain type of knowledge is required when examining space, such that "knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end." (2001: 238) This becomes pertinent when applied to the process of capital accumulation inasmuch as when the "given end" is the project of acquiring space, then a knowledge of how processes such as "circulation" and "marking" operate become useful in altering the appearance of spaces such that they manifest in a new way, occluding their socio-historical origins. Guy Debord also remarks on aesthetics and urban semiotics in a similar way to both Katz and Foucault. He states: "What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic." (1998: 50) He explains that "Today [...] the tendency to replace the real with the artificial is ubiquitous [...] Everything will be more beautiful than before, for the tourists' cameras." (1998: 51) In Katz's case study, removing the signs of homelessness was one of the priorities of the Grand Central Partnership. Postmodern geographical praxis is what is employed to reveal these types of heterotopic inconsistencies.

Links:

The North/South Divide: Spaces of Illusion and Compensation in Leeds
Cindi Katz
Grand Central Terminal

References:
Debord, Guy. 1998. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London and New York: Verso).
Foucault, Michel. 2001. 'Of Other Spaces', The Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Nicholas Mirzooeff (London and New York: Routledge). pp. 237-244.
Katz, Cindi. 2001. ''Hiding the Target: Social Reproduction in the Privatized Urban Environment'', Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis, ed. by Claudio Minca (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). pp. 93-110.
Sadler, Simon. 2001. The Situationist City (Cambridge: The MIT Press).

The North/South Divide: Heterotopias of Illusion and Compensation in Leeds

2012-02-02T03:26:00.000-08:00

Last week I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for an upcoming BBC Radio 4 programme on the North/South divide. So, on Thursday 26th of February the radio producer Mary Ward-Lowery and the insomniac writer-psychogeographer Ian Marchant came 'ooop norfff' to walk and talk with me in Leeds.

After researching Danny Dorling's work in this area, where the above map comes from, I decided to take them on a walk that looks at the north/south enclaves within these areas. For instance, a north/south divide actually within the north. I chose the border of Holbeck Urban Village and Holbeck 'proper'.

While I didn't take any photos on the walk, it is an area I have spent much time in before, so all the photos in this blog are of Holbeck in Leeds. The first photo below is from the, now, 'trendy' urban village, emerging as a post-yuppy space with modern flats for 'young professionals' and new-media companies. The other image is taken in the 'old' Holbeck itself, the streets where the people live while the redbrick terraces are being pulled down around them.

On the walk I decided to compare these adjacent areas with the similar, but much larger project at the Isle of Dogs in London, Canary Wharf. This area in Leeds does include Granary Wharf, so it's not that much of a stretch. London has its One Canada Square and we have our Bridgewater Place.

While I have lots to say about these postmodern urban village projects and how they effect the local community, what I would like to do is comment on this situation from the perspective of Michel Foucault and Cindi Katz. I won't include my deconstructive comments on borders and space that were part of the interview, as I think they could be included in the radio show, but will add to the border dichotomy by including some work I have done on space in the last week since the radio interview.

As Katz explains, this appears in the form of a "visible monumentality [that] is built on rendering invisible those who are on the losing end of the great and growing divide between rich and poor". (2001: 103) Foucault touches upon these binary states as they relate to heterotopias. He discusses how, in a deconstructive way, the act of creating a space forms partitions that define both sides of these boundaries: for example, defining an illusory space will reaffirm a real space, and, he continues: "Or [...] creat[ing] a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled." (2001: 243) Foucault describes these two types of spaces as heterotopias of "illusion" (the former) and "compensation" (the latter). (ibid.) Which become particularly relevant in regards to the regeneration project in Holbeck.

Katz uses terms such as "reordering", "regulation" and "sanitation" when discussing the rhetoric attached to these projects. (2001: 102) She explains that this compensatory function has the effect of organising space and the lived experience, such that it fits into a specific agenda. (ibid.) The colonially occupied space of Holbeck is becoming a heterotopia of compensation, in the process of being marked by its new occupiers.

Links:
Spitfires on the Line
The North South Divide - Where is the Line?

References:
Foucault, Michel. 2001. 'Of Other Spaces', The Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Nicholas Mirzooeff (London and New York: Routledge). pp. 237-244.
Katz, Cindi. 2001. ''Hiding the Target: Social Reproduction in the Privatized Urban Environment'', Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis, ed. by Claudio Minca (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). pp. 93-110.

The Psychogeography of Other Spaces: St George's Field

2012-01-28T07:56:00.000-08:00

Michel Foucault offers the space and concept of a cemetery as an example of a heterotopia; he explains that it is such because over time the function of the cemetery has changed to reflect the prevailing culture. (2001: 241) At one time being the centre of the city, reflecting a more religious community spirit, in the Victorian times which brought with them not only a more atheistic attitude but also a greater awareness of disease, they were moved to the suburbs. (ibid.) St George's Field (the cemetery at the University of Leeds) as it is discussed on this blogspot, confirms Foucault's second principle of the heterotopia, a historical place that has a determined position within culture, which can then be superseded by another function at a later time (ibid.): in this case, the change of use from graveyard to garden.

What is interesting about St George's Field, is that it not only holds true of the basic principles of what classifies a heterotopic space, it also has further qualities that a 'regular' cemetery might not. These further qualities have come about because of its condition of reuse set out in the 1960s. For example, as Foucault states in his third principle: "The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places, several sites that are in themselves incompatible." (ibid.) Is it possible for the cemetery to also be a garden? Can it comfortably be a sanctified place of rest for the dead and also a park-like area, open to all and contained within the boundaries and administrative structure of a university campus? I pose these questions, not because I intend to answer them, but so as to highlight the tensions inherent in the place. These very tensions being what creates a heterotopia in the first place. Foucault describes these simultaneous places as being "foreign to one another" (ibid.) and while the example of the cemetery as a heterotopia is apparent enough, he also provides the garden as an example of a heterotopia, because in antiquity gardens were originally created to represent a small version of the world. (2001: 238) To complicate the space of St George's Field further, the chapel is also a storage place for the university library and even has a library code assigned to it as a storage facility: STCHA. Foucault also classifies libraries as heterotopias, because they represent the modernist concept of "accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose [...] the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages". (2001: 242) Maybe this is even more so for St George's Field: since the chapel is already a preserved building, it is even more stable as a place than our high street public libraries, that have been under threat in the past few years.

Foucault uses the mirror to explain the relationship with utopias (sites without places) and heterotopias. He describes the mirror as a type of utopia, by his own definition "a placeless place". (2001: 239) The mirror projects us into a place where we are not. However, the mirror is also a heterotopia in the sense that it does exist as a real object in space, enabling us to "discover [our] absence from the place where [we are]", since we can see we are located elsewhere. (ibid.) This has the effect whereby the gaze as it is located in the ground of the reflection, can be traced back towards us as the viewer, via the glass, and back into ourselves through our eyes, where we become restructured. (ibid.) As Foucault states, this has the effect of making the location of the subject conjured in the act of looking at the glass both "absolutely real" and "absolutely unreal". (ibid.) For a heterotopia such as a cemetery, this mirroring effect might also be evoked by the surface of the ground and the gravestones locating 'loved ones'.

The mirroring effect that Foucault mentions, as they relate to a relationship between heterotopias and utopias, is very pertinent to the cemetery, especially in relation to the visitor of a grave. Firstly, because cemeteries, as they were developed in the nineteenth century, were a utopian concept. It was considered that everyone, rich or poor, had a right to a place of burial. Sylvia Barnard explains how the 'guinea graves' (paupers graves) operated in Leeds in Victorian times. These graves contained many bodies, all listed on a single gravestone located above them. The poor would pay approximately a pound to bury their family member, and were assured of a 'proper' burial with their relative listed, in the form of minimal information, on the gravestone. Barnard describes the practice as a "brilliant and humanitarian concept" (2009: 54) Secondly, one can view the surface of cemetery land as a kind of mirror. A visitor to the burial plot of a family member actually gazes at the headstone and the surface of the grave, but, in a sense, they are also looking past the surface to the body below. This produces a recognition inherent in kinship, where one sees oneself in other family members. So the visitor also sees themselves, especially in family plots where a space is also kept available for a spouse who is still alive. Even though married couples are not biologically related, this mirroring could still be considered to occur in the sense that the unit created in marriage produces a projection whereby the other half of the unit reaffirms oneself. So the husband or wife visiting the grave of their partner, sees a reflection of themselves echoing back from the surface in a shadow-like form, a reflection "that enables me to see myself there where I am absent". (Foucault 2001: 240)

Please note: The images shown here, despite looking old, were taken in 2010 with a lomography camera, a Diana F+.

Links:
St George's Field, Fallow Again: A Schizocartography
Dying to Find It: Where is the University Cemetery?

References:
Barnard, Sylvia M. 2009. To Prove I'm Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victorian City (Stroud: The History Press).
Foucault, Michel. 2001. 'Of Other Spaces', The Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Nicholas Mirzooeff (London and New York: Routledge). pp. 237-244.

St George's Field, Fallow Again: A Schizocartography

2012-01-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

Links:
An Island of Heterotopia
Dying to Find It: Where is the university cemetery?

Graffiti: The Artform of the Proletariat?

2012-01-21T07:19:00.000-08:00

This is the alleyway that takes you from St Michaels Lane to North Lane in Headingley, Leeds. It is a cut-through at the back of the cricket/rugby grounds. As well as there being a family of foxes nearby, who seem to be around day and night, the walls are full of graffiti throughout most of the length of the path. These are the boldest and most colourful of the selection there:

This is one of the more subtle ones.

Here's an extract from a graffiti blog called Bombing Science. The article is entitled 'Graffiti Theory: Graffiti and Marxism':

Illegal. Feared. Rejected by societal norms and described like cancers to communities, a destructive virus that consumes and devours decent proper values until suddenly there’s a crack house next door OR perhaps just another victim of Marx’s social alienation. Let’s be straight, America really has no problem with graffiti—as long as they can make a buck off it. The style has been mimicked and milked in almost every market, from designer t-shirts to XBOX games and countless hip-hop album covers. Yet despite all this corporate love, the act of getting up, putting the paint on the walls is still punishable by jail time and large amounts of debt.

Graffiti is the art form of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie can’t sell off the walls of their factories so whatever the workers write on them is finally there’s to keep. It’s an art that cannot be exploited by those who own the means of production, because graffiti exploits them first. The proletariat artist is using the property of the bourgeoisie as a canvas—essentially redistributing the use of property to the people. In that sense graffiti writing becomes the last truly free artistic vehicle; it cannot be taxed and doesn’t have to be taught. Anyone can participate, regardless of class, race, religious preference or sexual orientation. Graffiti doesn’t even require consumption of any materials if the artist doesn’t wish to purchase them. According to old school ethics, paint should be stolen from supply stores as an act of liberation from bourgeoisie’s financial death-traps—but really, all you need is a rock and a hard surface to scratch on to make your mark.

Click here for a recent Yorkshire Evening Post article on Synical, a local 'graffiti vandal', as the police have described him: 'Leeds graffiti vandal's war on blank look'

Dying to find it: Where is the university cemetery?

2012-01-14T09:15:00.000-08:00

St George's Field at the University of Leeds

At the University of Leeds there is an area located at the north edge of the campus known as St George's Field. This 'field' - referred to as a 'garden' on the signs located at its entrances - can be seen on the campus maps provided by the university under the label 'St Georges Field'. As you can see from my reappropriated map below, this space takes up a large percentage of the surface area of the campus:

Until the 1960s St George's Field was a cemetery. Previously known as Woodhouse Cemetery and also Leeds General Cemetery, prior to it first becoming a cemetery in 1833 it was known as 'St Georges Field'. In 1969, when its function as a working cemetery was officially terminated, it reverted back to the name 'St Georges Field'. All the university maps refer to this space as St George's Field and there is very little historical information about it on the university website. If one types the word 'cemetery' into the university search engine, the first four items do include reference to the cemetery but take you to the university library archive, listing data on St George's Field. Most of the other links refer to "Cemetery Road" (the road that runs adjacent to St George's Field) and "Cemetery Lodge" (a part of the gatehouse of the original cemetery that still remains and exists as office and studio space for the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies). However, if one types 'St George's Field' into the university search engine a number of links appear from various departments at the university, for instance the Estates Office, and Access and Community Engagement. Also included are links that take you to information on some events that have been held there in the past few years, and to information on Pablo Fanque (the first black circus owner in Britain, who died in 1871 and is buried there along with his wife).

St George's Field is surrounded on all sides by walls and/or metal railings. At some places the wall is quite high on the outside, but because parts of the cemetery terrain are higher than the surrounding land, the walls can appear lower from the inside in some places. On the most northern side the area is bordered by the Henry Price Halls of Residence which sits, in a cantilever-effect, on the original wall of the cemetery and overlooks this field. The halls themselves are on the uppermost edge of the campus, facing Clarendon Road and, across from there, Woodhouse Moor (locally known as Hyde Park, although Hyde Park is actually the nearby neighbourhood in Leeds). The east-most side of the field is bordered primarily by engineering department buildings, but also a road, which includes a pedestrian path for only part of its length. While this is where the cemetery gatehouse is located, and there is a blue plaque outside stating that it was a cemetery, there are no signposts to the field in this area or anywhere on campus, only small signs like those located at all the entrances to the garden. The west edge of the field is bordered by a number of departments including Geography and also the School of Design. Behind these buildings can be found a small entrance into the field which is serviced by some steps. The southern edge of the cemetery is well hidden by a number of buildings including part of Chemistry. However, if one is curious enough to look, another entrance can be found to the field here via a metal staircase behind these buildings.

Once in St George's Field the area is presented to you as a well-kept, landscaped park-like space. In the centre is the original chapel, now, apparently, storage space for the library. A main path leads to the chapel, from the gatehouse and from the back of the School of Geography. Much of this path is made from paupers' gravestones which list a number of people located in one burial plot (these paupers' gravestones are just about viewable in the first image in the blog). The chapel is in the middle of the space. The rest of the field is mostly a grass surface, with copse-like areas of trees and shrubs which have gravestones (but not paupers gravestones) located in them. There are also a number of old, large trees which are indexed with a metal number tag. The area is not completely flat even though some photographs suggest that it is.

From an aesthetic perspective, the space is extremely pleasing to look at and quite peaceful despite not being far from the main road leading north-west out of Leeds. It looks more like a well-maintained municipal park than a cemetery. Since I already knew of the cemetery before I first saw it, I cannot say how it would feel to come across it by accident. However, I should imagine it would be a delightful surprise and maybe even produce a slightly uncanny reaction, because, in a sense, it is out of place and out of time, yet it is familiar due to its similarity to other parks one might have come across elsewhere in Britain. What is interesting, in this regard, is that despite it appearing to be temporally and spatially out of context, it was there long before the university, so one could argue that it is really the university which is 'out of place'. St George's Field could even be considered to be a little haven within the sea of learning and teaching and, in fact, on their website the Equality Service Department at the University of Leeds recommend it as a place for "quiet contemplation".

As well as the gravestones which are located in pockets, there are a few large monument-type memorials (the above image is of a memorial to Leeds firemen). Upon closer examination there are a number of small memorials dotted about the area which appear in the form of small wooden plaques close to the ground, where gravestones appear to be either absent or never existed in the first place. There is also another path which eventually joins the main path. Part of this path is slightly hidden by shrubbery, but actually leads through more gravestones. The far end of this path leads through the wall on the north edge, to another entrance/exit. There is also a large, stone, free-standing, arch located near the Henry Price building (see below) and a similar one nearby, which is situated in the original wall and has now been filled in.

The area is open to both university staff, students and the public, nevertheless most of the time it is very much empty of people, even in good weather. However, it is a short-cut, so it is used by those who know about it to head south across campus. Also, at times you can see people walking around looking at the gravestones, and on occasions one can come across other 'events' occurring there.

So, my question is: why is the cemetery 'hidden'?

Links:
A Trip to St George's Field on a Not So Hotsy Totsy Sunny Day
An Island of Heterotopia
St Georges Field, University of Leeds

A Trip to St Georges Field on a Not So Hotsy Totsy Sunny Day

2012-01-08T05:53:00.000-08:00

Many Saturdays over this winter have I attempted to get some sun on the scene that is St George's Field - the cemetery at the University of Leeds - in order to get some good photos to accompany my thesis. And again this Saturday it was a dreary Northern sky overlooking the campus. However, I did manage to get all the photos I had planned to get except one, a nice clear image of the sculpture of James Schofield's helmet on the firemen's memorial near the gatehouse of the cemetery. The photo below was taken on a previous trip.*

Schofield died in the Dark Arches Fire of 1892. The Dark Arches are located near the rail station in Leeds. Apparently there were 100,000 mourners at his funeral.

One of the tasks I'd set myself was to photo all the entrance/exists to the cemetery, however I won't be including all of them in this blog, but rather some of the other phenomenon I came across: those things I wasn't expecting to encounter, like this rack of old paint, waiting to be chucked out along with much other rubbish. This entrance to the cemetery is located near the Maintenance building and behind the Old Mining Building. You would only find this entrance from the outside direction if you were snooping (as is my wont), because it is really well hidden.

At one point I spotted lots of magpies under this tree. When I got there I found they had been eating the apples that were strewn over the floor beneath. Most of the apples were rotten, but many looked fine and must have survived in the cold weather.

I came across this memorial for the first time. Apologies for the poor image, but it says:
"I don't care to belong to a club
that accepts people
like me as members"
Groucho Marks
Charlie Velu 1986-2010

I've never come across the memorial before. I can't seem to find any information on the university website or even on google. I guess, because of his age, he had been a student at the university.

The memorial that I am mostly interested in is this one, which I have previously written about. The twin sister of Pauline Mavis White, Christine Bairstow, has been in correspondence with the university over the moving of her sister's gravestone. Even as recently as 2008 there are articles in the Yorkshire Evening Post: Leeds pensioner begs university to mark sister's grave

I have visited this memorial a good few times over the past couple of years. Today I managed to get a good photo, which included some recently left red roses. So someone, probably her sister, still tends the memorial.

My trip to the cemetery was psychogeographically interesting as it almost always is. I've included this final photo because despite earlier saying it wasn't sunny, I note some beams of sunlight filtering through the top of my image.

*If anyone has a good crisp image of the helmet and would be happy to share it with me, that would be great. Thanks.

Links:
An Island of Heterotopia
St Georges Field, University of Leeds
For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy by Ian Dury

Sleeping Northern-based Psychogeographer Invents New Unit of Time

2012-01-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

Lady Macbeth by Johann Heinrich Füssli.

The Leeds psychogeographer, Tina Richardson, has invented a new unit of time for psychogeographers, while sleeping! This unit of time lasts anything between 10 mins and 1 hour, but is significant because the quantity of time is uncertain to the psychogeographer due to the psycho-aesthetic state they are currently experiencing (what the psychogeographer Iain Sinclair would describe as 'reverie').

This unit of time is called a 'purse' and is rather like a pocket of time. The term refers to both the personal carrying device that contains items for the owner (these items are clearly subjective and reflect the individual owner of the purse), but also to the work of the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced 'purse'). Peirce's system contains 1) a sign 2) an object, and 3) an interpretant. The purse refers to the interpretant such that it is a subjective response to an object/sign that causes a specific state of consciousness for that particular person. For the psychogeographer these objects appear in the form of urban décor that have specific signs attached to them and are responded to by that individual (signs that could be compared to the Barthesian 'myth' e.g. connotative signs or second level semiology).

Ms. Richardson, who runs Leeds Psychogeography Group and guest lectures in schizocartography, said: "I hope that the 'purse' becomes a useful term for psychogeographers because it enables a form of recognition, and hence indexing, to take place that will encourage discussion on these very states that are what psychogeographers both experience and value in their own work." She added: "Also, I am designing an actual psychogeographers purse for wealthy wannabee psychogeographers who like the idea of urban walking but can't be bothered to do the actual walking itself. These designer purses will appear in the form of miniature distressed-looking rucksacks and will include a tiny chest-strap that will enable you to attach it to the designer dog of your choice."

"When you don't see it. It is still there."

2011-12-31T06:08:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Ken Knabb's edited volume Situationist International Anthology and came across a paragraph that reminded me of something Iain Sinclair discussed in a series in The Guardian in 2009, called 'Hidden Britain'. Sinclair explains how it is only at the point of near extinction that some buildings become visible to us for the first time: “When you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance.” I think this is philosophically interesting from the perspective of a kind of reverse subjective causality. This is what the Ivan Chtcheglov says in 'Formulary for a New Urbanism (1953)':

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backwards in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel.

Please note: I have included one of Claude Lorrain's paintings, above, because the preceding paragraph mentions him in the context of creating 'situations', and also because of the SI's interest in 'ruins'.

Links:
Situationist International Online
Situationist International Anti Public Relations Notice

Situationist International Anti-Public Relations Notice

2011-12-21T03:47:00.000-08:00

I just found this excellent SI notice in Ken Kabb's edited volume Situationist International Anthology. I have also included, below, an interesting quote from Raoul Vaneigem from 'Basic Banalities (Part 2)', where he is discussing the spectacle in, what turns out to be, very Baudriallardian terms:

Time itself is deprived of a centre. In this concentration-camp world, victims and torturers wear the same mask and only torture is real . . . The tortuers condemn all hierarchical power, however organised or dissimulated they may be.

Links:
The Burlesque of Psychoanalysis
The Situation at the University
Guide Psychogeographique de University of Leeds

The Carrstone Affect

2011-12-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

Hunstanton's Historic Buildings

During the wintery months, any visitor not wishing to brave the blustery beaches of Hunstanton with it's freezing winds, might like to take a walk around some of the town's notable historical buildings. This blog highlights some of those known in the town, three of which display Civic Society coloured plaques. For those of you not familiar with the area, please note the honey-coloured bricks that many of the buildings are made of. It is a sandstone known locally as Carrstone.

Valentine Court

According to Jim Whelam, writing in the Hunstanton Newsletter:

The establishment of a convalescent home at Hunstanton was first suggested in 1869 in Ely Cathedral, so that sick and poor people from Ely could recover their health with the assistance of sea air . . . The Prince and Princess of Wales agreed to officially open the home on Easter Monday, 14th April 1879. As soon as the date was known, all the villages between Sandringham and Hunstanton began making preparations on a grand scale to honour the visit. During the Easter weekend the weather was foul with keen east winds, rain and snow. The day of the visit commenced with a dull leaden sky, no apparent sign of an improvement, and not even the numerous decorations could make Hunstanton look anything less than miserable. However by noon the clouds lifted and the sun shone, crowds gathered, the railway brought in 3,000 visitors and thousands of others entered by road.

Now a block of flats, the building appears on google searches mostly under property sales. Jim Whelam's account in the local newsletter is really interesting and can be read here:
The Royal Opening of Hunstanton Convalescent Home

Old Police Station

This old police station is great. It just looks like a 'regular' terraced house. However from 1875 to 1954 it was Hunstanton's police station. I wonder if the three cells were in the basement. One can only assume that crime was a relatively minor issue in Britain until the mid 50s, as the current police station, on the main road, is pretty big in comparison.

Children's Recovery Home

Health, for the Victorians was a major concern, some would say even an obsession, and the seaside was a perfect place for convalescing. This, once, children's recovery home is now the council offices for the town. Now that our children are not dying of diphtheria, tuberculosis and typhus these old Victorian buildings are put to other uses. I don't have the mortality figures handy for Hunstanton, but in Leeds in 1867 most people who died were 4 years old and under, and in one book I have - To prove I'm Not Forgot - Living and Dying in a Victorian City by Sylvia M. Barnard - the under one's were classed separately, because their chances of living beyond one year old was so slim.

The Old Vicarage

This is the old vicarage and is located in Northgate, at the town end of the street. Again, it is now apartments and it is difficult to find information on it online other than that on estate agents sites. However, I have included another photo of the building (below). This type of architectural detail is very popular in Hunstanton, and manifests in various forms on a number of buildings.

Often this kind of inlay appears in a square shape, which produces a tiling effect. I really like it and I wonder if it is a common style from that period that was produced mostly in this area, or whether it is more generic.

My little psychogeographico-historical trip around Hunstanton was interesting. The more time I spend in the town looking at the architecture and soaking up the ambience, the more I get in touch with its aesthetic, which feels like it is very particular to the area.

For information on my other work on Hunstanton please go to: Reading the Arcades/Reading the Promenades and look for the links for Hunstanton

Links:
Hunstanton Civic Society

Emotionally Mapping the Campus

2011-12-10T06:01:00.000-08:00

University of Leeds Cartography Workshop

This week, as a change from teaching cultural theory to first year BA students, I decided to run a cartography workshop to support last week's lecture on space and the city. I set the task of making an emotional map of the campus. These are the three that were awarded first (Amy Dawson - above) and joint second prizes (Bob Palmer and Katerina Lee - below).

Links:
University of Leeds
Emotion Maps - Christian Nold

In people all over the world...we find ourselves.

2011-12-08T08:26:00.000-08:00

I picked up this lovely little second-hand pamphlet online called The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself while looking for Situationist journals. It was printed in 2003 in the US and the introduction states that the essay therein was originally published in The Spectacle in 1975.

There is one paragraph that gives an excellent example for helping explain Marxist abstraction, alienation or even the Debordian spectacle. Here it is:

Suppose that you want a cup of coffee from the vending machine at work. First, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantation and in the refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have the workers who made the different parts of the vending machine and the ones who assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, and work for the electricity utility which supplies power to the machine. Then all the workers who transported the coffee, cups and machine. Then the clerks, typists, and communication workers who coordinated the production of all things necessary for the others ones to survive. That gives you a direct material relationship to several million people, in fact, to the immense majority of the world's population. They produce your life, and you help produce theirs. In this light, all artificial group identities and special group interests fade into insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of your life that at present is locked up in the frustrated creativity of these millions of workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production, strangled by lack of control over their own productivity, warped by the insane rationale of capital-accumulation which pits one against all and makes life a mad scramble for economic survival. Here we begin to discover a real social identity - in people all over the world who are fighting to win control over their own lives, we find ourselves.

Links:
AK Press and Distribution

There's Summat Going on at Leeds

2011-12-03T08:33:00.000-08:00

Click here for film

I made the above film while helping out at Gerry Turvey's Walk+Talk workshop at the Leeds Summat Gathering on Saturday November 26th 2011. It is shot on the University of Leeds campus. The old building that is featured is now a private Halls of Residence but used to be a priory. The university owned it for a period of time.

Links:
Gerry Turvey
The Priory of St Wilfred

J30 N30 ?30 Go!

2011-11-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

November 30th 2011 - Public Sector Strike

Well, I've just got back from the public sector strike which took us from outside Old Mining Building, at the University of Leeds, to Woodhouse Moor (see above picture) and then into Leeds city centre. The title of my blog (for those of you old enough to remember) is taken from the Bow Wow Wow single C30 C60 C90 Go! (1980), which doesn't appear to be very revolutionary on a superficial viewing, but in the song the protagonist does challenge a copper for threatening to arrest her for taping a single! My title alludes to the June 30th 2011 strike and today's, obviously, plus any upcoming ones, which I'm sure there will be!

This is where we started our protest, outside our school at the university, on Woodhouse Lane (The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies). This is Daniel looking very determined and sporting a couple of signs saying 'strike' in different languages.

Here is one of the revolutionary dogs we met during the protest. She was wearing a bandanna and a union badge. Her owner was part of the Socialist Revolutionary Organisation who were carrying the following banner.

Above is our union's banner, the UCU (The University and College Union). But mostly our group carried handmade banners, made by the PhD students/Teaching Assistant's in the school, in an attempt to add a creative flavour to our input to the protest.

There was also face-painting carried out by Sybil, and Gail provided a performance element to the proceedings by reading out notes of support from lecturers who were unable to attend.

I particularly like the following posters which were outside one of the university entrances.

According to the lunchtime news, there were more of us than anticipated. So, it took us a while to get into the city centre. Once we got there there was not enough room for us all to gather outside the Leeds City Gallery and we flooded onto the road and consequently blocked part of the Headrow.

Today's strike was extremely heartening in terms of support, not just from those attending but also from those passing by in their cars, vans and trucks. There was a great communal spirit and plenty of fervour to take us to the next step. Watch out Cameron!

To close my blog I'd like to add a few Situationist slogans that were used in the 1960s and are still relevant today:

No replastering, the structure is rotten!

We'll ask nothing; we'll take, occupy!

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation!

Reform my ass!

Links:
Public Sector Strikes - The Situation at the University
J30: The City is on Strike

The Anti-University

2011-11-26T08:56:00.000-08:00

While looking up the situationist Alexander Trocchi online, I came across the above super poster on Peter Watts blog I noticed the anti-psychiatry franchise are on the list (Berke, Cooper and Laing), along with some radical writers and artists of the time. What a great poster it is, not especially for its artistic aesthetic, but because it represents a moment-in-time which is connected to a place - a truly historical document which pinpoints people in space, while attributing them to a specific revolutionary action.

As Peter Watts states on his blog: "The London Anti-University was formed after participants at 1967′s Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse decided they wanted to continue to explore some of the themes and conversations that had started there (sample debates: The Future of Capitalism; Black Power; Imperialism and Revolution in America)." I love the titles of these classes. They are pretty much standard university modules in Cultural Studies nowadays, even if the titles then were much more polemic than the contemporary ones. Today we like to seduce our students with 'Postcolonial Theory' and 'Capital and Critique', in order that they don't get too scared and sign up for something more innocuous - and less revolutionary - instead.

The London Anti-University seemed like a great idea (check out the excellent film on Peter's blog at the above link). I especially like the hotch-potch of donated chairs for the students.

Links:
Notes on institutions, anti-institutions and self-institutions
Revolutionary educational practice

The Student Movement / Moving the Students

2011-11-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

The recently published The Assault on Universities (edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freedman) contains a very up-to-the minute essay, by John Rees, on the current situation as it pertains to students and education cuts. Here I shall include a couple of paragraphs from the essay with some anecdotal commentary of my own.

The student movement of 2010 was the largest for a generation. It transformed the political atmosphere around the Tory-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s cuts programme and popularised the 'rejectionist' argument that the deficit could be paid for by taxing the rich, the corporations, and the banks or by cutting Trident and the war budget for Afghanistan. It undermined the legitimacy of the government by exposing a larger democratic deficit: the election of 2010 had revealed an electorate that voted centre left, but the government they got was a monetarist and right wing. (page 118)

Having been, prior to this moment, someone who was questioning the general lack of engagement in political life that appeared to be happening in some of the young people in society, I was very impressed by the student protests of 2010/11. As a mature undergraduate student, and now a teaching assistant at university, I have been exposed to many young people since 2005. While I don't want to make generalisations, nor conjure up stereotypes, I was a bit puzzled by the lack of fervour in relation to current issues in some students prior to this point. And, while I would not use the term 'apathy' in the way it was being used, I didn't really understand why the young of today were different than 'we' were in the 1970s.

By the time I was fifteen years old we had been on strike twice at my school (in regards to school policy). I had also had my own one-woman revolution. We striked 'at the drop of a hat'. It was our default position. If we were unhappy about something we were going to have our say. Which is interesting, as this was a period when children had even less of a voice than they do today.

While doing my BA in Cultural Studies (2005-08) we read Mary Wollstonecroft's On the Vindication of the Rights of Women. At the time our teaching assistant asked us if we thought that women had now reached equality in society. As a 45 year old who can remember a time when there was not a law for equal pay in regards to gender, since I thought the answer was pretty much overdetermined I decided that I would not answer it and would allow someone else to offer their opinion. No-one answered the question or even made a comment until I allowed my exasperation to be expressed. After the seminar I was left feeling confused: their parents were the same age as me, had they not communicated these issues to their daughters? Was there a certain level of wealth in particular groups in society that created a buffer of comfort and therefore there was no reason to question political life? Or, was something much more disturbingly hegemonic going on?

I didn't, and don't, still have a simple answer to this. However, the recent student protests have been inspiring and I hope that students and public sector workers can come together over current government cuts, and that students will realise that education cutbacks are actually situated in a larger context of capitalist ideology, the repercussions of which don't only just effect them.

This is what John Rees says about strikes and protests in relation to students and workers supporting each other:

The students can...cause a social crisis into which workers...are drawn. But for this to happen the student struggle itself, the occupations and demonstrations, need to be sustained and spread. The trade unionists in the education unions will find it easier to become involved in the struggle if this is the case, and this can be a bridge to other workers becoming involved. Occupations are key to this because they make the campuses ungovernable for the university authorities and present the staff with the question of taking sides in a way that demonstrations alone do not. (page 122).

Links:
Public Sector Strike Flyer
The Students are Revolting
University and College Union

Public Sector Strike - The Situation at the University

2011-11-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

My university and school are currently preparing for next week's Public Sector Strike (Wednesday 30th November 2011). The Guardian newspaper says that Britain's three largest trade unions are backing the strike.

I have created a Situationist stylie flyer (see above). Please feel free to download, distribute and print. It is in jpg format and A5 size, so two fit neatly onto a landscape A4. Or you can enlarge it to A4 size for a poster. The stats on there are 'generic' and apply to both students and lecturers.

Links:
University and College Union
The Students are Revolting

The Students are Revolting

2011-11-19T06:06:00.000-08:00

This week I came across the Situationist International inspired document On the Poverty of Student Life created by the students of Strasbourg University in 1966. It opens thus: "It is pretty safe to say that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the policeman and the priest." I also found a really interesting recently reworked version of this document from 2006 It comes in a handy pdf format and was reproduced and distributed at the eindexamen exhibition of the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

The recent student protest in London (9 November 2011), in regards to tuition fees, spawned placards that stated "Scrap Tuition Fees" and "Free Education". And, according to the Guardian newspaper, chants included "David Cameron – fuck off back to Eton". While reports say there were 4,000 police on the streets, the protest 'passed off peacefully'.

Paris in May 1968 showed a different picture, when the students came out in support of the workers. The students and the authorities had been in conflict for months leading up to this event. Slogans said "The more you consume, the less you live. Commodities are the opium of the people." and were accompanied by Situationist graffiti.

The above is an iconic image from May 4 1970. This student, from Kent State University, was shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard along with three others. Consequently this became known as the May 4 Massacre. While this protest was over the US invasion of Cambodia, the strikes that followed involved a nationwide closure of universities and colleges.

I wasn't sure when the next upcoming student protest was in the UK, so I typed 'next student protest' into google. I found a student website where students were asking the same question. One answered: "Not sure... I hope the police know in advance so they can be ready with their water cannon and student-eating dogs." Someone else had also voted for this remark. However, I think it is the 29th January 2012 in London.

The next public sector strike is Wednesday 30th November when university lecturers will also be striking.

Links:
Students at the Heart of the System by Anna Chism
Guardian Blog - Student Tuition Fees
Situationist-inspired animated strike map

Students at the Heart of the System

2011-11-17T03:42:00.000-08:00

UK Higher Education Government Strategy

by Anna Chism

I'd like to comment on the use of the word 'heart' in the UK government higher education strategy in light of the recent student protests (November 9th, London)

In June 2011 the Higher Education White Paper was released. How the coalition can pinch Browne's soundbite from his 2010 report and use it as the title to this document is beyond me! Only somebody who has no access to the media, or lives in another solar system, could possibly think that the government are putting students at the 'heart' of the education system. The only thing at the heart of the education system, as far as the current government is concerned, is £££££££s!

This frankly disturbing use of the word 'heart' is also used again in the conclusion of the government document Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy The conclusion is subtitled: 'The heart of a knowledge economy and a civilised society'. The word 'heart' also appears in another part of the document, in this context: "How we will further strengthen the role of universities at the heart of our communities and shared intellectual life, and as one of the key ways in which we engage with the wider world." (italics author's own) This is clearly intentional and must be some kind of ameliorating tactic to lessen the blow of all the education cuts - which don't only extend to students but also lecturers in the form of redundancies, cuts in pensions and in greater workloads.

This is what the verb 'heart' means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
a.trans. To give heart to, put heart into (a person, etc.); to inspire with confidence, embolden, encourage, inspirit, animate; = hearten v. 1. arch.
While I appreciate that the government are using the term 'heart' to represent 'centre', they are, however, not using the word 'centre' but the word 'heart', with all the connotations attached to that. Hello government! Using the word heart does not inspire future students with 'confidence', nor does it 'encourage' or 'embolden' them. You are expecting them to be in debt for decades to come, with little prospects of getting a job or EVER buying a house. This has got nothing to do with 'heart' nor has it got anything to do with putting them at the centre OF ANYTHING! The only thing it puts them at the centre of is the capitalist economy, while at the same time marginalising those who cannot afford to go to uni, which is 'technically' the opposite of the centre, I would say!

Students are out on the streets protesting again, as they were in 2010. And, applications for places are already down for next year. How many future young people are going to be effected by this before the government rethinks its 'selling out' of higher education. I predict even more disenfranchised young people, and I don't mean of the demographic of those on the streets over the summer of 2011, but a new group of disenfranchised middle-class young people, in-line with the May 1968 Paris students.

So, coalition, put that in your pipe and smoke it to your hearts content!

Links:
Bureaucracy in the Corporatised University
The Semiotic System of Capitalism
Input/Output at the University of Excellence
The Scene of Teaching

Bureaucracy in the Corporatised University

2011-11-09T08:31:00.000-08:00

I would like to look at the activity and ethos of the corporatised university as it pertains to bureaucracy by first providing a definition of the corporatised university by Henry Steck:

the corporatized university is defined as an institution that is characterized by processes, decisional criteria, expectation, organizational culture, and operating practices that are taken from, and have their origins in, the modern business corporation. It is characterized by the entry of the university into marketplace relationships and by the use of market strategies in university decision making. (1985: 74)

Bill Readings explains that it is excellence in its manifest bureaucratic forms - for example, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) formed in 2007 - which is the driving force behind harnessing the university function of the past and in postmodernity placing it under the forces of the market (1999: 38): "Like the stock exchange, the University is a point of capital's self-knowledge, of capital's ability not just to manage risk or diversity but to extract a surplus value from the management." (1999: 40)

The decentralised movement of capital from its original position in the nation-state into what in postmodernity appears in the form of globalised flows, also recapitulates the process for the postmodern individual: what once was the centred humanist subject oriented in their singular culture, now becomes one with a capital-oriented consciousness, a worldview that is legislated to the level of a norm. Jean-François Lyotard explains that this is done through "formulat[ing] prescriptions" which appear in the form of utterances that legitimate particular statements. (2004: 31) This means that it is difficult for those who operate in the institution to not take up these narratives and continue to promulgate them. Readings explains that in capitalist society we are no longer citizen-subjects but "operatives" that take part by adopting a "corporate identity". (1999: 48) Felix Guattari says that we all have a number of different subjectivities available to us, depending on our relationships with other individuals, groups and specific social processes. However, he sees capitalist subjectivity as being the most extensive.

Mark Fisher makes direct reference to university bureaucracy, including providing an extensive list of documents a module leader has to complete for each module they oversee. (2009: 41) Fisher says that the constant checking, monitoring and production of figures does not provide "a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output". (2009: 42) We no longer have a system focused on knowledge (learning and teaching), instead we have a system that concentrates on measuring performance and output, and disseminating that data: “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performativity.” (Lyotard 2004: 11) It is essential for the functioning of the bureaucratic university that this system is open, even if its process of self-defining (for example, in using terms like 'excellence') is internal and closed. The university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, in the form of representable data. What this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as representable data, the output of the excellence process. These signs present the university in the guise of what Guy Debord would describe as "commodity as spectacle". Debord explains that the spectacle is "where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence." (2005: 36) This is problematic for the university because it means it can become removed from its original idealised functions - the pursuit of knowledge, high quality academic research, education for all - meaning that others might also see it in purely economic terms too (anyone who works in the university knows that some students see their degree only in the form of exchange value: a degree for a job)

Bureaucracy, as a measure of excellence in the corporatised university, as Fisher describes, "floats freely, independent of any external authority" (2009: 50). It produces a style of surveillance culture for academics that is rather like an invisible postmodern semblance of the time and motion study that constantly hovers over them in the form of a bureaucratic superego.

Links:
Input/Output at the University of Excellence
Schizoanalysing the University Campus
Austerity and the University of Excellence

Bibliography:
Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red).
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2004. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).
Steck, Henry. 'Corporatization of the University: Seeking Conceptual Clarity', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 85 (2003), 66-83.

A Walk Around St Chads Church

2011-11-06T09:12:00.000-08:00

To take advantage of today's sun, following the scuppering of yesterday's planned outing due to the bad weather, I decided to take a walk around the ground of St Chads Church in Far Headingley, Leeds. I really liked the gold fish gate to the entrance of the church itself.

There were two information boards telling you about the wildlife in the graveyards. Interestingly, they share a similar nature demographic as the graveyard down the road at St Michaels. It seems that the redwings visit both graveyards in the winter, on their trip down from Scandinavia. Early this year I watched a number of redwings spend a good few days in St Michaels graveyard, before heading down south.

This is my favourite image of the day. The light catching some of the leaves makes them look really bright green in places. Also, you can see the red holly berries piercing through the green on the top right of the image (click on the photo and zoom in to take full advantage of the colour).

Above is the Garden of Rest which has a message at the entrance saying it is a place for contemplation. Much of the graveyard is slowly deteriorating, as you can see in the image below. This is quite similar to St Michaels. I am assuming there isn't enough money to maintain them nowadays. The fronts of both graveyards looks fine, i.e. the part that faces the street and entrance. However, venture further in and you can see that they require a lot of work and care. Nevertheless, I find the higgledy-piggledy gravestones and creeping undergrowth much more interesting than a well manicured cemetery.

I found this strange switch panel out at the back of the church, near the boiler room (well, it was near some cellar entrance where a sound of humming machinery was emanating). I think it must have belonged to an organ. While you can't tell from the image, it did have buttons which had the word 'pedal' and 'soft', etc, printed next to them.

I like this stone detail on the church (see below). It says anno dom and a date which I can't work out. I don't think it's the date of its consecration though (1868), as I typed that into a Roman numeral converter (how fab that we can can do that online) and it definitely wasn't that date.

I had a really nice stroll around the church. You get the sense that you are soaking up the social history of the lives of all the people interred there. Also, they are peaceful, relatively secluded places where one can - just by taking a few steps away from a busy high street - get away from the buzz of traffic and contemplate the fragility of life.

I only saw magpies and wood pigeon's though - pretty much everyday cemetery birds in Headingley. I didn't get very good shots of the whole of the church, due to the position of the sun in the sky, shading caused by trees, etc. However, I did get a nice picture of the spire against a lovely crisp, blue autumn sky (no photoshopping done here!).

Bonfire Night on Woodhouse Moor - 4th November 2011

2011-11-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Above is a photo of the bonfire, still under construction, at 2.30 today (4th Nov) in Hyde Park, Leeds.

This is what the University of Leeds Student Union says:

"Bonfire and firework display will be taking place on Woodhouse Moor from 6.30pm. The Terrace and Old Bar are wellie friendly so pop in and enjoy the sausage and ale festival in the Old Bar or have a few post fireworks drinks in the Terrace.

Date: Friday 04 November 2011
Time: 6:30pm - midnight
Location: Woodhouse Moor"

Have fun students, and other locals! Also, I do hope the nutkins, and all the other Hyde Park critters are not too scared!

Existential Affects as a Catalyst for Personal Transformation

2011-11-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

In ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Brian Massumi describes affect as “intensity owned and recognised” (2006: 221). Because it is different from emotion, and because it best describes the sensations felt in the event of a personal transformation, I shall adopt this term for what I understand to be the sensation experienced prior to existential change.

Massumi explains that language operates on two levels which resonate with each other: these are “suspense” and “expectation” (1996: 220). Every expression culminates in an event enacted upon by suspense and expectation, in always differing proportions (ibid.). We see parallels with Gilles Deleuze’s description of the resonance between the signifier and the signified in The Logic of Sense, and Massumi acknowledges Deleuze in his essay. For Massumi, affect is this two-sidedness (2006: 228). And, I maintain, it is in these oscillating moments that the individual has the opportunity for a greater awareness, a self-mastery attained from self-reflection brought about through some kind of conflicting state.

Félix Guattari, in his essay ‘Ritornellos and Existential Affects’, discusses affect within the framework of the aesthetic. He explains how expressions of an aesthetic nature can become catalysts for the individual. Guattari believes, in special circumstances, that this can induce “aesthetic ecstasy, a mystical effusion” (1996: 165). In Chaosmosis he uses the phrase “poetic-existential catalysis” (1995: 19) to explain a trigger operating within a particular enunciative domain. This can be considered as a “molecular rupture, an imperceptible bifurcation capable of overthrowing the framework of dominant redundancies, […] the classical order.” (1995: 19-20).

Massumi alludes to Deleuze’s folded subject when talking about self-reflection: “Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two removes.” (2006: 225). And, if the subject is always folded, then it seems that the individual always has this capacity available to them, whether they choose to utilise it in any profound way or not. But, maybe the individual needs to be reminded of this ability, shaken from their self-forgetting, by receiving a kind of shock, a jolt, which will take them out of their familiar everyday frame of reference. The individual can be so caught up with the daily routine of just surviving on a subsistence level or instead tangled up in playing whatever game society deems appropriate for them, that active self-reflection is a luxury. We can see this elucidated in Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, with self-actualization (B-cognition) offered as a potential only after all basic needs are met.

Bibliography:
Deleuze, Gilles. 2004a. The Logic of Sense. Trans. by Mark Lester (London and New York: Continuum).
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
Guattari, Pierre-Felix. 1996. The Guattari Reader. Ed. by Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers).
Massumi, Brian. 1996. ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. by Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell) pp. 217-239.

Schrödinger’s Box or the Purloined Letter

2011-11-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

letterbox flaps
document falls
doormat cradles
letter lifted
envelope torn
words read
person cries
letter stored
box confined

With mischief-making on his mind
he finds the box hidden behind
the dolls thrown in so carelessly
all broken…twisted. Secretly
he fumbles in the quiet house
to carry out his mission of revenge
of which his sister’s punishment will end
the hurt he feels.

Upon returning from church Flo brushes Sunday off her hat and places it back in the box.
The green-felted brim smiles up at her, alluding to future outings.
Replacing the lid she notices the fragment of a stamp lying in the corner of the box and goes downstairs to make some tea.

To the Ordinary Man - Michel de Certeau

2011-10-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

I'd like to post this beautiful and poetic forward (I believe it is not really a forward but a for-forward, if that is a real term in bibliographical parlance) by Michel de Certeau from the beginning of his book The Practice of Everyday Life.

The reasons I like it are multifarious: it is inspiring and hopeful (even utopian). It contains the history of the 'man in the crowd' and the metropolitan personality. Also, it heralds the onset of the multitude and introduces the postmodern subject that exists in a textural space. But, I guess, more importantly, it offers up the city to us as an "anonymous subject" in its own right - the city that proffers us a particular appearance that is desirous of political administration, of the streamlining of processes and systems, of geographic zoning and capital accumulation. An appearance that disguises the hidden consequences of social reproduction. One that tells a different tale of the city, if only we can spend the time to reveal it behind the spectacle. One that is open to interpretation.

To the ordinary man.

To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. In invoking here at the outset of my narratives the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity, I inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. What are we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of history to license us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate to him the writing that one formerly offered in praise of the gods or the inspiring muses?

This anonymous hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. He does not expect representations. He squats now at the center of our scientific stages. The floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names
and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. The increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic
details—parts taken for the whole. Slowly the representatives that formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.

Maps of Competence - Félix Guattari

2011-10-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

Extract from The Machinic Unconscious (1979) by Félix Guattari:

Maps themselves are like laboratories where experimentations on tracings are set in interactions. Thus, here the map is opposed to the structure; it can open itself in all its dimensions; it can also be ripped apart; it can be adapted to all kinds of assemblies. A pragmatic map can be started by an isolated individual or a group, it can be painted on a wall, it can be conceived as a work of art, it can be conducted as a political action or as a mediation. For a type of performance, a particular assemblage of enunciation, or a redundant tracing being given, what is important is determining whether or not it modifies the unconscious map of a local pragmatic competence. (page 172)

Links:
Axis of Exploration and Failure (schizocartography)
Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies
On Massumi's Logic of Relation

40647? Qué?

2011-10-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

I took this image on the University of Leeds campus this morning while on a psychogeographical trip around St Georges Field cemetery. I then went into the union to get a coffee and picked up the Leeds Student newspaper and found this short article:

On returning home I checked it out on the University of Leeds website, but they are clearly keeping tight-lipped. However, there is much speculation on twitter with #40647 now having its very own hashtag. This is what the University of Leeds official twitter account says in response to all the conjecture: "Lots of you are asking what the 40647 numbers on campus mean. All will be revealed soon..."

Links:
University of Leeds on Twitter

The University of Leeds and its City - Part 3

2011-10-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

Town and Gown, Trade and Industry

This is what the Pro-Chancellor Hubert Stanley Houldsworth said about the university's relationship with its city in The University of Leeds Review: Jubilee Edition (1954):

There must [...] be a strong extra-mural department to take the torch of learning into towns and hamlets around the University; and within the University precincts there must be opportunity for both members and non-members of the University to join together in the cultural pleasures, of music, poetry, and literature, in the appreciation of painting and other works of art, in lectures on general matters, or even in some of the more specialised lectures which, of necessity, must be an attraction to a smaller section. The University must be a focus of learning and cultural life to the whole community. (1954: 47)

We can see Houldsworth's vision for an outreach programme that forges a cultural and educational relationship with the city that bore it. However, this relationship was not just one-sided: the Redbrick universities were meant to be an expression of civic pride and a symbol of national identity to the local citizens. In his article on 'Town and Gown', Houldsworth provides a list of chancellors that preceded him and their achievements that impacted the region. He concludes his text with the motto: "'Town and Gown' in unison is our endeavour. At Leeds, 'Town' helps 'Gown', and 'Gown' helps 'Town'. The contributions of each to the other must continue to grow, to the advantage of each, and, we trust, to the advantage of the world." (1954: 52)

A. N. Shimmin's chapter on Town and Gown (The University of Leeds: The First Half Century) is replete with gifts from notable local businessmen - for example, Edward Baines and Frank Parkinson - whose legacy we are reminded of in the form of existing university buildings that were built in their honour or indeed with their money, as was the case with the Parkinson Building.

Michael Sanderson provides much detail on the University of Leeds and local business in his book The University and British Industry 1850-1970. He discusses the success of the university's early days of specialising in areas of study which enabled them to create alliances with industry, such as industrial chemistry; coal, gas and fuel, tinctorial chemistry for textiles, and textiles and material. (1972: 85-86) Most of Shimmin's discussion on industry appears under his chapter 'The Faculty of Technology'. Broken down into sections on agriculture, mining, textile industries, colour chemistry and dyeing, engineering and leather (which all make up individual departments within the faculty), it becomes apparent how significant for the university this faculty was at the time of his text. These departments still existed in 1954, however today the faculty no longer remains, with those departments that still do exist being made parts of other faculties.

David Jones opens his chapter 'Founders and Benefactors' with the remark: "The civic universities were built upon charity." (1984: 164) While I think this is an overly simplistic statement, it is clear that without endowments from outside the institution that these universities would have not been able to develop and grow. Indeed, were it not for the Clothworkers' generous endowment when Leeds was working towards its university charter, it would not have been granted in 1904. Bruce Truscot's remark that the university's responsibility to industry should be secondary to its pedagogic one does not reflect the blurred boundaries between these two areas, as is clear when it comes to the subjects taught historically at the university of Leeds. If the Redbrick university wished to provide a good education to the local bourgeois, enabling them to become successful businessmen, then educating the sons of local middle-class merchants is both an obligation to local industry and also an educational undertaking. The historical relationship the university has had with trade and industry appears in the legacy of the subjects taught. While in modernity this relationship grew out of a direct response to an economic need which meant the university reacted to the demands of a certain type of knowledge requirement, in postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, meaning that attempting to demarcate industry and institution as separate entities is a far more complex move. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business. This means that it has to be run like one and therefore take up the procedures and practices of commerce.

Reference:
Houldsworth, Hubert, Stanley. 'Town and Gown', The University of Leeds Review: Jubilee Edition (1954), 44-52.
Jones, David R. 1984. The Origins of Civic Universities: Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International).
Sanderson, Michael. 1972. The University and British Industry 1850-1970 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul).
Shimmin, A.N. 1954. The University of Leeds: The First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

The University of Leeds and its City - Part 1
The University of Leeds and its City - Part 2

The University of Leeds and its City - Part 2

2011-10-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Birth of a University

It was in the local newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, of 1826 that plans for a university in Leeds first appeared. Its formation was also considered to be a reaction to the Paris Exhibition of 1867, when local businessmen became fearful of foreign competition. (Jones 1984: 91; Sanderson 1972: 66; Taylor 1975: 3) However, it would not be until 1904 that the University of Leeds got its Charter as an independent university. The origins of the university lie in the philanthropic orientation of a number of the founders, including John Marshall, a local MP and pioneer in the area of textiles (flax). In the 19th century, Marshall, inspired by the education system in London, recommended a range of cultural and educational subjects that would be offered to boys in Leeds, enabling them to remain at home and reduce the cost of travel and accommodation. This dream of Marshall's eventually manifest itself in the form of the Yorkshire College in 1874 (this was not a college in the usual sense, but a secondary school with similar aims to that of higher education). As A. J. Taylor explains, the Yorkshire College was part of a "second generation" of colleges that came about as a challenge to the privileges enjoyed by those who could afford Oxford and Cambridge. (1975: 1) It is also important to note that while the forming of the Yorkshire College was a reaction against an exclusive higher education for just the upper classes, the college was providing education for the middle-classes only, in the form of an education for the sons of local merchants in the area of science and the arts. These colleges were a response to the need for an improved technological education to support local industry: in the case of Leeds this was primarily textiles, clothworking and mining.

The early part of 19th century Victorian England saw a raised awareness of class consciousness, with the working classes seeing the apparent polarised positions of themselves and the middle-classes as not just being one of a disparity in wealth but also in literacy. In 1870 the Education Act was formed to provide elementary education for children in Britain, and schools were set up in areas where there had previously been none. But it was not till 1880 that another act was put in place to make education for children compulsory for those aged up to ten years. A number of acts followed, covering older and disabled children.

During this same period the medical school grew out of Leeds General Infirmary (formed in 1767). The Medical School was founded in 1831; its formation stemmed, in part, from the Apothecaries Act of 1815, which meant surgeons needed formal qualifications. Doctors taught in their spare time, often in the evenings at the end of their day working in the infirmary. The Yorkshire College and the Medical School did not amalgamate until 1883-84. Over the next few decades expansion was supported by funding, for example from the Clothworker's Company who maintained a textile department at the college. (Shimmin 1954: 3-13) In 1887 the college in Leeds became part of the Victoria University, which had already existed jointly as Manchester and Liverpool colleges. This meant that finally it received university status and could now endow degrees. But it was not until 1904, following a generous gift of £70,000 from the Clothworker's Company, that full university status was secured. (Shimmin 1954: 28)

While the university had to drop some courses in 1904 in order to be competitive and hone its resources, a post-war run on courses before the 1921-23 slump, followed by economic problems in Japan that benefited the British textile industry, meant that the university expanded rapidly leading up to World War II. (Shimmin 1954: 30-39) This expansion was not only in the case of students and staff, but also in regards to geographical growth. Nevertheless, many of the plans for the post-war development of the university were scuppered by World War II. For example, the Parkinson Building (an art deco, neo-classical building that was designed as the entrance hall to the Brotherton Library) was designed in the 1930s but was not completed till 1951 due to a suspension in building during the war.

References:
Jones, David R. 1984. The Origins of Civic Universities: Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International).
Sanderson, Michael. 1972. The University and British Industry 1850-1970 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul).
Shimmin, A.N. 1954. The University of Leeds: The First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Taylor, A.J. 1975. 'County College and Civic University: An Introductory Essay', Studies in the History of a University, ed. by P.H.J.H. Gosden and A.J. Taylor (Leeds: E.J. Arnold). pp. 1-41.

The University of Leeds and its City - Part 1
The University of Leeds and its City - Part 3

The University of Leeds and its City - Part 1

2011-10-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

A Proper Place for a University

All great universities have found their being in centres of trade and commerce: the geographical circumstances which have favoured the exchange of goods have been equally hospitable to education and liberal culture. The Universities Oxford and Cambridge established themselves among communities of traders, whose fairs and markets gave itinerant teachers their best chance of finding an audience and making a permanent settlement. . . . In a great commercial capital, the natural reservoir of the industrial energy of a wide area, our University finds its proper place. (Hamilton Thompson cited in Shimmin 1954: xiii)

A. N. Shimmin's book, The University of Leeds: The First Half-Century (1954), written in the university's jubilee year, provides an in-depth history of this period. The other historical analysis solely dedicated to the university is P. H. J. H. Gosden and A. J. Taylor's 1975 edited text Studies in the History of a University, which celebrates the period of 1874 to 1974. My three-part historical summary of the University of Leeds will be taking the perspective of its relationship to the city in which it grew.

The three centuries leading up to the Leeds Charter of incorporation in 1626 saw Leeds being forced to deal with not only a number of crises in the form of multiple infections from the bubonic plague to floods and drought, but also a burgeoning wool industry and the birth of a formalised education system that responded to local needs. What Charles I Charter meant for Leeds, along with its incorporation as a town under the control of a local council, was that it was able to control the quality of the cloth produced there and also in the surrounding area. Dishonourable manufactures could be marginalised due to the new regulations. However, the Charter did not bring with it a Member of Parliament status, nor was the council democratically elected. Following the town's incorporation, later developments included a properly designed reservoir-fed water supply in 1694, and an improved road system to enable the transportation of raw materials and cloth to and from the town.

The history of Leeds tells a story of economic, political and social advancement not dissimilar to many other economic hubs that sprung up in England and whose history can be traced back to pre-Roman times. In the 'Industrial North' its significance as a prominent civic centre and profitable economic region becomes even more apparent in the period that followed. Its civic attitude to education, coupled with the continual need for an improved technology required to maintain the status of the region, lent it to becoming a town fit for a university.

Reference:
Shimmin, A.N. 1954. The University of Leeds: The First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

The University of Leeds and its City - Part 2
The University of Leeds and its City - Part 3

'The Burlesque of Psychoanalysis': Walking, Psychogeography and Schizocartography

2011-09-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on an analyst's couch"

...so say Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their introduction to Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. McKenzie Wark makes reference to this quote in his new text The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011).

McKenzie says of Deleuze and Guattari:

By the time they wrote this, much of what had been critical thought had laid its weary head on that analyst’s couch - depressed, anxious, irritable, neurotic. Obsessed with old wounds. Unable to forget. Unable to get up. At its melancholy end.

Deleuze and Guattari's exemplary walkers were literary characters, but it turns out that Chtcheglov [also known as Giles Ivain and a member of both the Lettrist International and the Situationist International] was that schizophrenic out for a walk, and he already had a theory of his own nomadism. Years before Deleuze and Guattari, he already saw the dérive as a kind of analysis. "The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one." Unlike psychoanalysis, it did not sever language from the continuum of practices in which it is embedded. "The dérive (with its flows of acts, its gestures, its promenades, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language" Chtcheglov writes. The Lettrist International refuse the separation of urban space from urban culture, each assigned to their own specialists. They refuse the separation of the external, social space of the city from the internal, private space of subjectivity. The subjective belongs to the city and can be analyzed experimentally, much as the city is subjective and can be reconstructed to expand our desires. (page 26)

My own psychogeographical practices bridge these spaces: the urban, the psychic, the social, etc. Schizocartography attempts to address the way dominant structures reroute subjective desires while at the same time producing an outlet where heterogeneous voices are encouraged to emerge form the postmodern terrain.

I have developed schizocartography from Félix Guattari's term "schizoanalytic cartography". Schizocartography enables alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in space and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. This is my definition of 'schizocartography':

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that questions dominant power structures and at the same time enables subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

While the term “schizoanalysis” is derived from “schizophrenia” (as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari), it does not promote mental illness; rather, “schizo” is used as a way of offering up the possibility of multiple voices, and alternative world-views, amongst other factors. Please see a sample of my other work relating to schizocartography:

A film can be viewed here: Hello! from Hunstanton

An online article is available in this journal: Using Schizocartography as a Method of Critiquing the University of Excellence

The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 2

2011-09-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

Below is the paragraph that follows on from my previous post, from Fèlix Guattari's Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972) on the systems and processes of capitalism.

All [capitalisms] 'mystery' comes from the way it manages to articulate, within one and the same general system of enrolment and equivalence, entities which at first sight would seem radically different; of material and economic goods, of individual and collective human activities, and of technical, industrial and scientific processes. And the key to this mystery lies in the fact that it does not content itself with standardizing, comparing, ordering, informatizing these multiple domains but, with the opportunity offered by these diverse operations, it extracts from each of them one and the same mechanical surplus-value or value of mechanical exploitation. It is its capacity to re-order through a single system of semiotization the most diverse mechanical values which gives capitalism its hold, not only over material machines of the economic sphere (artisanal, manufacturing, industrial, etc.) but equally over non-material machines working in the heart of human activities (productive-unproductive, public-private, real-imaginary, etc.). (page 275)

Click here for The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 1

The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 1

2011-09-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

Below is an interesting extract from Fèlix Guattari's Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972) on the systems and processes of capitalism:

What capitalizes capital is semiotic power. But not just any power - because in that case there would be no way of demarcating the earlier forms of exploitation - a semiotically de-territorialized power. Capitalism confers on certain social sub-systems a capacity for the selective control of society and production by means of a system of collective semiotization. What specifies it historically is that it only tries to control the different components which come together to maintain its processual character. Capitalism does not seek to exercise despotic power over all the wheels of society. It is even crucial to its survival that it manage to arrange marginal freedoms, relative spaces for creativity. What is of primary importance to it is the mastery of the semiotic wheels which are essential for the key productive arrangements and especially those which are involved in changing machine processes (the adjustments of machine power). Doubtless it is obliged by the force of history to interest itself in all domains of the social - public order, education, religion, the arts, etc. But, originally, this is not its problem; it is first of all continuously a mode of evaluation and technical means of control of power arrangements and their corresponding formulations. (page 275)

Click here for The Semiotic System of Capitalism (Fèlix Guattari) - Part 2

Schizoanalysing the University Campus: Three Little Films

2011-09-15T03:48:00.000-07:00

Below are three psychogeographical films about the University of Leeds. They form part of a growing schizocartography of the campus.

Axis of Exploration and Failure in the Search for a Situationist 'Great Strike'

Click here for film

This animated map is appropriated from the Situationist map by Guy Debord called Axis of Exploration and Failure in the Search for a Situationist "Great Passage" (1957). My map is based on the recent education-related strikes in Leeds, in particular at the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University in the last year. My own image takes sections from various University of Leeds maps, it includes a photo I took of the J30 strike in June.

The Situation at the University

Click here for film

"Our central purpose is the construction of situations, i.e. the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformations into a higher passionate nature. We must develop an intervention, directed by the complicated factors of two great components in perpetual interaction: the material setting of life and the behaviours that it incites and that overturn it." Guy Debord (Situationist International) 1957

The Sound of the Sixties

Click here for film

This 3 minute film is an acoustic psychogeographical response to the area called the precinct at the University of Leeds represented by the architecture of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. The film features two of the most impressive of the buildings designed by the architects: the Worsley Building and the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre (now a Grade II listed building). It alludes to a moment-in-time architecturally, with the popular cultural reference of the title - The Sound of the Sixties, a radio and TV series playing pop music form that era - and the 1964 track by the R&B British pop band Manfred Mann. The song title 5-4-3-2-1 provides a countdown to the walk, which was actually 8 individual edited films, appearing in the sequence they were recorded.

So as to avoid being distracted by the campus scenery only the feet were shot, they being the instrument used to tap out the sound on the surface of the topography of the precinct. I considered just supplying the sound without the visuals of the walking feet, but I decided that the trace left by the feet becomes a form of cartography which has a number of functions that to me, as a psychogeographer, are important, and which also support the tenets of schizocartography.

Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 2

2011-09-10T02:36:00.000-07:00

Discarded Phenomena at the University of Leeds.
Image CC Tina Richardson

We are not outside the university, we occupy it every day and this is the place from which any considerations for a future university will be made. However, we need to be cognisant of the problems that occur through living in a historical university: a past that refuses to completely disappear, that manifests itself in a contradictory and haunting co-presence, and that needs to be considered, first and foremost, as a place that is occupied by the people of the present. Any new way of living in the university will require an understanding of the complexity of space that the posthistoric university has inherited. We need to explore the university in an attempt to acknowledge its past, a search that may require a form of revealing to occur in order for us to understand what the university of today, and tomorrow, might mean.

What I would like to propose is a critique of today's university that helps to reveal a material life that can easily be forgotten when dealing with the abstracted notions and alienating practices associated with technological systems and knowledge generating processes. The university is a physical body existing in geographical space, occupied by people who traverse its roads, paths and corridors. To fully understand the university of today, and be able to respond to a new university, it needs to be excavated both archivally and topographically.

If we are to believe Félix Guattari, then we need to seek out modes that are counter to the dominant consciousness that appears in the form of power. All dominant powers require a particular worldview to take place in order for the status quo to be maintained. The university presents a particular outward face. This face is a consciously structured one that supports its specific messages. The university does not say everything about itself, in the same way that a business doesn't, because it would not be 'good practice'. The process of representation is a mediated one in which the university attempts to foster a like-minded view in the recipients of its representational medium, whether it be the university website, or how the campus looks.

In order that governing bodies can carry out policy, consent is the optimal reaction rather than opposition. Alternative voices are not encouraged, revolutionary ones need to be crushed or at the very least assuaged through hegemonic means; or, post event, they can be ignored entirely by being written out of history. However, these other voices and histories are still part of the body that makes up the institution as it appears today, even if they might be sidelined, for strategic reasons or otherwise. If the university is not conscious of its past, if it does not acknowledge its shadow qualities, it would be difficult for it to think of itself as a place of community, of consensus or belonging. In order to confront its unconscious the university needs to come to terms with its past-and-present relationships, especially those that stir up a sense of dissonance in the pit of the institutional stomach.

I would like to suggest that this can be done by looking for the hidden university, the one that is behind the veil of the manufactured image. It is the one that appears in the darkest part of the university: in its archives and in its lost or forgotten places. It can be found through a bottom-up method of psychogeographical exploration and archival research which will reveal a more complete university, one that can be traced in the palimpsest layers that form its spatial manifestation, and in its archival attempts at a de-prioritisation of certain data.

While we need to accept that the past still haunts the corridors of the institution, it needs to be acknowledged in its spectral manifestation. Neither should it be seen as something nostalgic, a time when ideas about the university were pure, honourable and righteous. The university always represents a mirror of society. While having the ruined signs of the ghost of university past all around us, the complexity of postmodern space - with its abyssal protocols and procedures - demands a renegotiation of that space. And I think Bill Readings expresses this most eloquently when he compares the university to an Italian city. So I will leave you with his quote:

Dwelling in the ruins of the University thus means giving a serious attention to the present complexity of space, undertaking an endless work of détournement of the spaces willed to us by a history whose temporality we no longer inhabit. Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-signifying campanile induce. (1999: 127)

Related link: Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 1

Bibliography
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

Austerity & the University of Excellence Part 1

2011-09-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

The Parkinson Steps at the University of Leeds.
Image CC Tina Richardson

During modernity the university's relationship with commerce grew out of a direct response to an economic need, whereby the university reacted to demands for a certain type of knowledge requirement. In postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, this means that attempting to demarcate industry and institution as separate entities is far more complex. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business: it has to take up the procedures and practices of commerce.

What this means for the university is that in its corporate incarnation it is essential that it becomes part of the globalised marketplace and in that move adopts the modes of operating that capitalism endorses. It needs to involve itself in the transfer of capital within society both at home and abroad. The university does this in a number of ways, from its relationship with industry in its vocational courses, to research that directly benefits business and technology.

However, even as far back as 1990 academics were writing about the negative aspects of applying a commercial formula to every aspect of education. In her essay ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline' Cynthia Hardy says:

The tough choices advocated in business literature are likely to escalate the political conflict that surrounds declining resources, not resolve it. Draconian measures - terminations and program closures - can send shock waves through the university community. The more marketable individuals will leave to find less hostile surroundings; potential recruits will resort to political infighting, as they try to protect their departments. (1990: 317)

I provide this illustration not because I think academics do not know this already, but because I wish to emphasise that this current period of austerity is situated within the greater issue of how organisations operate under neoliberalism. And, not just organisations, but individuals also. We no longer look to the nation-state for our sense of cultural identity, nor the modernist university, but to the High Street. We are first and foremost consumers.

This is how Mark Fisher puts it: "Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems." And Félix Guattari would agree. He believes that while we have many subjectivities available to us, the prevailing consciousness is a capitalist one. He says that capitalism works in such a way as to prevent anything that is antithetical to its project from taking hold. The signs that capitalism creates discourage any singular processes of individuation and attempt to reroute subjective desires back into capitalist production: this is anti-production, and here Guattari situates it in the context of education:

It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training, research, etc. The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process. (1984: 34)

So what are we to do if this is less to do with the current crisis and more to do with 'the postmodern condition': the restructuring of education under neo-liberlism and the prevalence of a capitalist consciousness?

I think the clues are in the ruins of the university. Not only in those left by Bill Readings in his posthumously published book The University in Ruins but also in the material of the university which we inhabit today, the physical and abstract space of the university behind the spectacle.

Because the university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, what this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as representable data, the output of the excellence process. These signs present the university in the guise of what Guy Debord would describe as "commodity as spectacle". Debord explains that the spectacle is "where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence." This is problematic for the university because it means it is removed from its original idealised functions - the pursuit of knowledge, high quality academic research, education for all, etc. Readings believes that the university as a concept no longer has any content: "The University of Excellence is the simulacrum of the idea of a university". And while this might sound negative, or even hopeless, herein also lies the possibility for it to be remade under a different concept; as Readings says "the wider social role of the university is now up for grabs".

In a time where grand narratives no longer hold sway, where culture and ideology is decentralised and where the once autonomous subject can even be argued to be posthuman, we need a different model of consciousness to help us negotiate the postmodern terrain and those institutions that are manifest in them. This is well-noted by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism when he calls for a new cognitive map:

It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its environment [...] can itself stand as the symbol and analogon1 of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (2009: 44)

This is echoed by Fisher when he states: "To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity'" (2009: 34)

So, if we are to believe that a predictable future is unavailable to us in this simulacra-like university that is inseparable from these global networks, how do we find the university of tomorrow?

Related link: Austerity and the University of Excellence Part 2

Bibliography:
Debord, Guy. 2005. The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red).
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
Hardy, Cynthia. ''Hard' Decisions and 'Tough' Choices: The Business Approach to University Decline', Higher Education, 20, 3 (1990), 301-321.
Jameson, Frederic. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

The English Summer Riots: Signification and Group Behaviour

2011-08-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Paris May 1968 Riots

The following text is from Fèlix Guattari's Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972) and I think it serves well as an analysis of the August riots in England:

The gang of young men that forms spontaneously in a section of town does not recruit members or charge a subscription; it is a matter of recognition and internal organization. Organizing such a collective depends not only on the words that are said, but on the formation of images underlying the constitution of any group, and these seem to me something fundamental - the support upon which all their other aims and objects rest. I do not think one can fully grasp the acts, attitudes or inner life of any group without grasping the thematics and functions of its 'acting out' of phantasies.

You cannot relate the sum of a group's phantasy phenomena to any system of deductions working only with motivations made fully explicit at the rational level. . . . There is, to start with, a kind of solidification, a setting into a mass; this is us, and other people are different, and usually not worth bothering with - there is no communication possible. There is a territorialization of phantasy, an imagining of the groups as a body, that absorbs subjectivity into itself. From this there flow all the phenomena of misunderstanding, racism, regionalism, nationalism and other archaisms that have utterly defeated the understanding of social theorists. (pages 35-36)

Please click below to see related link:
Paul Gilroy speaking on the August 2011 riots

Axis of Exploration and Failure in the Search for a Situationist "Great Strike"

2011-08-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

The above map is appropriated from the Situationist map by Guy Debord called Axis of Exploration and Failure in the Search for a Situationist "Great Passage" (1957). My map is based on the recent education-related strikes in Leeds, in particular at the University of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University in the last year. My own image takes sections from various University of Leeds maps, it includes a photo I took of the J30 strike in June, and I'll leave you to work out what the top image is . . .

Here is how Tom McDonough describes Debord's map in The Situationists and the City:

...a novel sort of map, or perhaps we might better say a work that stands halfway between the realms of art and cartography...This was one of a series called 'psychogeographic' maps he made of Paris at that moment, maps intended to chart "the specific effects of the geographic milieu, consciously planned or not, acting on the affective comportment of individuals." It in fact records one particular expedition...undertaken three years earlier by Debord and Chtcheglov (seen in their photograph at the top left) across their favored neighborhoods on the Left Bank, pictured in four collaged aerial photographs linked by arrows signalling various possible routes of entry and egress from one 'ambiance' to another. At the bottom right we find a poetic emblem of this voyage, a reproduction of Claude Lorrain's Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula of 1641...The three elements together - along with the work's title, which characteristically unites a rather dry, technical description with the fanciful reference to the 'great' (that is, northwest) passage sought by explorers from Christopher Columbus forward in their quest for a more direct route to the east - produce an idiosyncratic plan of the city, one that privileges psychology as much as topography.

Please note: Unfortunately I cannot find a link to the original map of Debord's, although it is reproduced in McDonough's text, which is actually the first time I came across it.

Here is an animated version of the map: Axis of Exploration

Please click below to see my other Situationist-based maps:
Guide Psychogeographique de University of Leeds
A Psychogeographical Guide to Hunstanton Promenade

University as City

2011-08-03T02:55:00.000-07:00

In his article originally appearing in the Architectural Review in January 1974 but also reproduced in the Henry Moore Institute publication The New Monumentality (2009), Lance Wright refers to how the campus development at the University of Leeds in the 1960s was oriented around "university-as-ideal-city". (2009: 33) The development, led by the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon (CPB), was considered at the time to be both an attempt to create a kind of university-as-city in its own right, but also to integrate the university itself into the city of which it belonged. Even more so today, campus universities are relatively self-contained inasmuch as they house all the facilities and amenities required for students not to just study but also to live and socialise: supermarkets, eateries, cash-machines, bars and clubs, and a variety of shops from travel agents to opticians. Because the ideology behind the massive sixties development plan for the campus orients it within a city-based model, it serves us to consider some of the relevant texts that take a postmodern aesthetic and subjective perspective on the city as an object of study.

David Pinder's Visions of the City (2005) takes a primarily Situationist look at the city and discusses détournement, the dérive and their cartography in depth. Preferring the Situationists' approach to the Surrealists' he states: "The dérive placed more emphasis on a conscious analytic subject, investigating and contesting terrain." (2005: 3) Pinder believes that the maps produced by Debord, and the performative acts behind them, go towards altering conceptions of the city and the lived experience therein. (2005: 159)

Jonathan Raban also discusses the individual's response to living in the city in Soft City (1974). He begins by explaining that the city, your own city, has a language that speaks to you and that your recognise: "the language you've always known, the language from which being you, being me, are inseparable." (1998: 3) Raban's poetic prose on the city - describing a flexible space that can be bent to our will - views the city as malleable, encouraging fluid identities in its citizens. In not seeing the city as being full of 'evils' that can create an alienating effect, Raban prefers to show us aspects that we can use and mold for our individual purposes:

For at moments like this, the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. (ibid.)

Raban's text echoes elements of Roland Barthes comments on the city: "The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it." (2004: 168)

Another interesting and relevant aspect of Raban's text looks at ideas around the concept of reason that have historically been attached to texts on the city, in particular because of the dichotomies around urban/rural and refined/uncivilised. (1998: 153) In postmodernity this idea of reason could be transferred to a view on the rationalist approach attached to capitalism, especially the rhetoric in circulation concerning it. Not just the idea that countries that are capital-generating are considered to be more civilised than those that are not, but, also, the expressions that are promulgated, dismissing any alternative model of living than the consumerist one.

Texts on the city also lend themselves to being used for analysing campus space because the posthistoric university has many qualities that are comparable to city living. The university puts consumers and products into circulation, enabling an analysis from the perspective of networks and flows. Space is designed, from a rational standpoint, to control the flows of people, machines and materials in a way that encourages the efficient running of university space while also supporting the ideology behind it. This means that the campus can be analysed from the perspective of how capital might use and acquire that space, for example, through capital accumulation. Also, the university, like the city, has an appearance in the form of which it appears, its referent. The university, in manifest form, is a representation, supported by a particular discourse, which means it can be deconstructed linguistically.

Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland. 2004. 'Semiology and Urbanism', Rethinking Architecture, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge). pp. 166-172.
Pinder, David. 2005. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twnetieth-Century Urbanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd).
Raban, Jonathan. 1998. Soft City (London: The Harvill Press).
Wright, Lance. 2009. ‘University of Leeds: Criticism’, The New Monumentality (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute) pp. 32-34.

The Psychogeography Franchise

2011-07-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

The British psychogeographer and writer Iain Sinclair is known for highlighting the problems of psychogeography, at one time calling it "psychotic" geography and describing it as a type of "franchise". (Fortean Times 2002) Historically it has often been considered to be the pursuit of middle-aged men, fortunate enough to have the luxury of time and money, who wander through urban space formulating a commentary on it, as was the case with the flaneur. However, in contemporary times, and perhaps in part because it has become a method and practice for art, there are many more women who partake in it and could perhaps classify themselves as psychogeographers. Probably the most high profile female psychogeographer in recent history is the Situationist Michèle Bernstein.

British psychogeography, in particular, has been criticised for being nostalgic, with Sinclair being cited as one of the main proponents of an approach where "loss and redemption are explored and negotiated". (Bonnett 2009: 54) Alistair Bonnett's recent article 'The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography' explores these notions alongside a consideration that this strand often sits next to a radical activist lineage of psychogeography in Britain.

For the purposes of my own project I mostly use the definition of psychogeography as it is set out by the Situationists. Psychogeography is: “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” (Situationist International 1996: 69) However, I think it is pertinent to note that another form of psychogeography was given the same name by Howard F. Stein. In his book Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (1987) Stein does not see psychogeography as a nebulous or cryptic response to space at all, but something that is ever-present in the individual. Approaching it from a psychoanalytical angle, Stein sees psychogeography as referring to "people's shared psychological representation or 'map' of the natural and social world". (1987: 3) In his edited text with William G. Niederland Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography (1989) it is described thus:

Psychogeography is the study of how issues, experiences, and processes that result from growing up in a male or female body [...] become symbolized and played out in the wider social and natural worlds, which serve as 'screens' for these inner dramas. (1989: xvii)

Psychogeography for Stein and Niederland takes a Freudian look at space, in considering the inner life of the individual and, therefore, their gender. This form of psychogeographic study aims to look at what connects someone to place and how geography makes a person who they are. It is possible that this form of psychogeography pre-dates that of the Situationists, as the introduction to Maps from the Mind states that Niederland developed it in the 1950s when looking at river symbolism. (1989: xxix) Joel Greenberg uses Niederland's definition of psychogeography in his oedipally named essay 'Psychogeography: A Freudian Look at the Search for Mother Earth...or, How I loved My Mother, Hated My Father and Discovered America' (1978) which looks at exploration and cartography. Greenberg looks at "the unconscious libidinal components linked to geographical pursuits", why the ego projects imagery onto the outside world and how geography appears in representative form. (1978: 90) This type of psychogeography is not the direction I take. I include it here to show the 'grey areas' in the different types of psychogeography. Also because the work of Niederland and Stein has authority in its own field in academia, and to not acknowledge it would be to provide an incomplete picture of what psychogeography is considered to be.

Merlin Coverley talks about how psychogeography resists definitions, and while this could be considered its downfall, it could also be part of its enduring nature: it can be picked up like a flexible tool and re-shaped to suit the individual practitioner. The downside of it is that practically anyone on a causal stroll through town could describe themselves as a psychogeographer, and while this is not really a problem for many individuals involved in this field, it is another criticism levelled at it. In order for psychogeography not to be an elitist pursuit, I prefer to be generous in the use of the term. However, one urban walk does not a psychogeographer make and I would also attach the premise that the walk needs to have certain qualities for it to be of a psychogeographic nature, for example, it needs to be an intentional act that elicits an aesthetic response of some sort in its critique of that space. Coverley describes it as "cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city's inhabitants" (2006: 12) and I think this would be a good way of describing what many contemporary psychogeographers do, including the Situationists (it is also true of the psychogeography I carry out, on my own and with Leeds Psychogeography Group). It would be at least partly correct to say psychogeographers "seek to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the every day" (Coverley 2006: 13); however, this sentiment is problematic, as it implies that there is a truth underlying postmodern space that can be revealed, and this is not the case; there is no single truth present under the surface, nevertheless, the act itself does allow one to reveal social histories which might otherwise remain hidden.

Not only are there different definitions of psychogeography, some of which have been discussed, but there are alternative names for different forms of psychogeography, and some of the differences are quite subtle. Papadimitriou calls his own type of urban walking "deep topography":

What is deep topography? It's not a programme. It's an acknowledgement of the magnitude of response to landscape. Something that I don't see in most accounts that I read of landscape. I find there's two ways that descriptions of landscape go. One of them puts the person who is experiencing at the centre; and it always seems a little narcissistic to me: 'I respond to this', 'I spotted that'. It's more about them than about the landscape. And the other way it goes, it tends to be greened or touristed, one of the two. So there's either an attempt to place the landscape within the framework of mainstream green philosophy, or else it goes the other way, which is it just becomes touristic: 'The field are really nice in April'. That sort of thing. (Papadimitriou 2009)

The London Perambulator is predominantly about Papadimitriou and his deep topography. There is also a well known form of walking known as mythogeography, subscribed to by a number of artists, writers and academics who are part of a fluid collective. On the Mythogeography website there is a page which differentiates mythogeography from psychogeography. It says:

In the UK the concept of psychogeography was detached from activist meaning and reconfigured as a literary practice in the work of writers like Iain Sinclair and also gathered some occult trappings during this time from Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and others.
Mythogeography describes a way of thinking about and visiting places where multiple meanings have been squeezed into a single and restricted meaning (for example, heritage, tourist or leisure sites tend to be presented as just that, when they may also have been homes, jam factories, battlegrounds, lovers' lanes, farms, cemeteries and madhouses). Mythogeography emphasises the multiple nature of places and suggests multiple ways of celebrating, expressing and weaving those places and their multiple meanings.
Mythogeography is influenced by, and draws on, psychogeography – seeking to reconnect with some of its original political edge as well as with its more recent additions. (Mythogeography 2011)

This definition of mythogeography attempts to return to the more activist form of psychogeography proposed by the Situationists, while at the same time allowing for multiple meanings to reveal themselves through those spaces.

Psychogeophysics analyses the effects of geography and place on the individual. Walking is one of the means for carrying out this semi-scientific-based research. Mostly examining the city from an ecological perspective, it uses measuring and mapping devices when creating 'situations'.

Because of the historic problems attached to the term psychogeography, and in order to differentiate my own style of psychogeography from the many other existing forms, I have formulated my own term: schizocartography.

I have developed schizocartography from Félix Guattari's terms “schizoanalysis” and "schizoanalytic cartography". While the term “schizoanalysis” is derived from “schizophrenia” (as discussed in depth in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia collaborative series of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), it does not promote mental illness; rather, “schizo” is used as a way of offering up the possibility of multiple voices, and alternative world-views, amongst other factors. Schizocartography enables alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in space and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. This is my definition of 'schizocartography':

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that both questions dominant power structures while at the same time enabling subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

Bibliography:

Bonnett, Alistair. 'The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography', Theory, Culture and Society, 26, 1 (2009), 45-70.
Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials).
Greenberg, Joel. 'Psychogeography: A Freudian Look at the Search for Mother Earth...or, How I loved My Mother, Hated My Father and Discovered America', Science News, 113, 6 (1978), 90-91.
Mythogeography, 'Not Psychogeography', Mythogeography, (2011), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Sinclair, Iain, 'City Brain: A Meeting With the Pioneer Psychogeographer', Fortean Times, (2002), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Situationist International. 1996. Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City, ed. by Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona).
Stein, Howard F. 1987. Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press).
Stein, Howard F. and William G. Niederland. 1989. 'Editors' Introduction', Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography, ed. by Howard F. Stein and William G. Niederland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press) pp. xvii-xxix.

Ghostly Figures That Look Suspiciously Like Ray Davies

2011-07-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

The Psychogeographer in the Urban Landscape

In a series of articles in the Guardian in 2009 called 'Secret Britain' the British psychogeographer Iain Sinclair explains the effect/affect of stumbling across 'hidden' places in the urban terrain:

These sites, come upon by accident, prick our imagination, provoke reverie. Questing for one story, we blunder into another: we must train ourselves to expect the unexpected. The thing hidden behind a high wall is still part of our true 'legacy', but buildings and sites sometimes have to wait to achieve a haunting dereliction, to be come legitimate targets for vulgar curiosity. That's how the Secret Britain guide philosophy works: when you don't see it, it is still there. And when you do, it is on the point of disappearance. (2009: 5).

And it is these sites that most contemporary psychogeographers write about and show in their films. The writing often takes the form of a personal account which is interspersed with historical or literary references - a subjective response to a particular place that "provoke[s] reverie" (or other psychic responses), combined with an interest in pursuing a particular historical direction engendered by that affective reaction. These accounts are what give the best 'flavour' of what psychogeography is, much more than any theoretical analysis or discussion can. So, I shall include a few paragraphs from some writers and will also comment on some psychogeographic films.

One of the chapters in Will Self's Psychogeography recounts a walk around the nuclear plant known as Sizewell, in the UK:

Sizewell again. This patch of Suffolk coastline, psychically irradiated by the untold ergs of electricity generated by the two nuclear power stations, exerts a strange hold on me. I far prefer it to the environs of Southwold, further up the coast, which have become overwritten by scribes as various as P.D. James and W.G. Sebald. I lived inland of here for a couple of years in the mid-1990s but was forced to evacuate when the wife of the one local acquaintance I'd made invited me to 'drop by' her gift shop in Saxmunden. I was on the phone to the self-drive van hire company that very evening. (2007: 141)

Self is known for his caustic wit and it is this type of subjective response to place that seems to be permitted in textual representations of psychogeographic walks. Below is the transcription from part of one of the films that Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers made together about one of Papadimitriou's walks. Papadimitriou's geographic concentration is the English county that used to be called Middlesex. What was left of the county Middlesex (after the forming of the county council system in the 1800s) was taken up by Greater London and other counties before World War II. However, it is still considered a geographic area, so it remains so in that sense. Papadimitriou investigates the urban detail at its fundamental microbe-like level, almost down to the very molecules that make up the urban décor, as you will see when we look at him examining a concrete post. This film is called Deep Topography with Nick Papadimitriou. At about 53 seconds into the film we see Papadimitriou standing facing the camera with his right hand on a concrete post. There are a couple of trees to Papadimitriou's right, a road behind him; at the far side of the road we can see a building and a car. We are in Golders Green in North London. The concrete post reaches approximately the level of Papadimitriou's chest. From its appearance it looks like it is made from a mix of concrete which also contains shingle. The post is old, part of it is worn away, we can see its inner metal skeleton has been exposed. Rogers says: “Tell me about this post Nick”. This is Papadimitriou's reply:

I don't know anything about this post, but I like it and I think that, you know, I'm basically a religious writer and if I were to invent a religion this would be the type of object that people would kneel to. I think it's a kind of storage vat of regional memories, and they are contained inside it like a sort of, [pause] they radiate out slowly. Sometimes when I am in certain frames of mind, particularly on very hot days around the North Circular, I can feel time radiating off of pre-moulded concrete lintels and I've kind of developed a way of accessing them. And, I think what these things store are conglomerate images, eras passing, people's hairstyles, ghostly figures that look suspiciously like Ray Davies [pause] or his brother Dave Davies. I love this, this machining. It's fantastic isn't it?

Papadimitriou's connection with this concrete post, whilst highly imaginative and also cultural, philosophical and existential, is also extremely tactile. Papadimitriou sees the post as, somehow, storing “conglomerate images” and he explains how it has seen the change of fashion (hairstyles) and popular music (the Davies brothers from the band The Kinks), and that this history has become stored in the very matter of the concrete.

This subjective response to space will become a large part of the psychogeographic walks used in my own project and will tie in to the theory of Félix Guattari that looks at the subjective processes that can become a challenge to dominant modes of power - his Molecular Revolution texts in particular. Below is another example of Papadimitriou's which demonstrates how an individual can respond to a space in a different way to the 'intended' one. At a showing of The London Perambulator at the Curzon in Soho, London, the literature made available to the audience includes a note from Papadimitriou:

I imagine sometimes that I am on a powerful and yet undiscovered hallucinogen, one that dissolves the ego-boundaries so effectively that subject and object fuse, so that, were I to ingest this substance while visiting Watford, I would in some way pass into and become the town centre. It would be a transtemporal, multiplex, experience; a monad amidst conflagrations of men and women; young girls' eyes at Chicken Hut; your story, one among many as you surged through the Studham for work at your tattoo parlour. (2010)

In Lights Out for the Territory (1997) Sinclair traces a number of routes across London, showing us its darker side and at the same time historically connecting people and place. The extract below provides an example of how individuals - in this case a published writer and psychogeographer - who do not fit the model of a certain 'type' in the capital, can become persona non grata:

And so it was, on the fine and pleasant afternoon of Saturday 8th April, 1995, that I found myself trying to walk in through the front entrance of the Barbican Arts Complex and being treated like a bogside bomb-carrier. The sensation is not uncommon in the new City. It's how they want you to feel, uncomfortable: the stranger in town. They want you to carry a card, with a photograph and a number, that defines you as some sort of non-person lowlife. (2003: 99)

The Barbican Exhibition Hall is located in the heart of the finance district in London and during the 1990s British security was becoming very constricted because of the IRA bombings in the capital at that time. This is a common side-effect of being a psychogeographer, being treated suspiciously because a definitive label cannot be attached to you. In The Fringe of London: Being Some Ventures and Adventures in Topography (1925) Gordon S. Maxwell, a walker and writer, includes his experiences of how he is received by others when they ask what he does 'for a living'. On meeting a "commercial traveller" in an inn, the travelling salesman assumed that he was of the same profession, yet wondered where he kept his samples. Maxwell explained that his samples were too large to carry with him because he was a topographer. The other, commenting on the art of cutting trees into the shapes of animals, confused it with topiary. (1925: 27-28)

Prohibitive signs that appear in the environment are a form of urban phenomenon that can be intriguing to psychogeographers. In his essay on walking around Bromley-by-Bow in London, Dougald Hine explains how the signs that forbid action are the ones that predominate: "Spaces are defined by the games we can't play, the activities which won't be tolerated." (2011) He then remarks: "Where are the suggestive signs, I wonder - the signs which invite you to try something you might not otherwise have thought of? [...] Even the sign at Prospect Park which reads 'Play Here' feels like a command, rather than an invitation. (ibid.)

Psychogeographers have to decide what boundaries they are prepared to cross, legal or physical, in order to find their 'story'. Maxwell states: "The true rambler must never be afraid of committing the crime of trespass; fair words are a better help than fast legs." (1925: 22) However, this was 1925, when society was far simpler in structure and crimes, such as trespass, may have not even been reported. Maxwell goes on to say:

On the whole, people are courteous, when they know your errand is harmless [...] I have known an Ordnance Survey map works wonders if prominently displayed. You are sometimes then mistaken for a Government surveyor by a farm labourer - a mistake which is often useful. (ibid.)

This innocent comment is starkly contrasted to Sinclair's experience outside the Barbican. Nowadays a map in the hands of someone whose appearance might be deemed suspicious, could be the sign of a potential 'terrorist' threat. Maurice Beresford's text on the University of Leeds Walks Round Red Brick (1980) also includes similar experiences to that of Sinclair and Maxwell, and interestingly, since his walks took place in the 1970s, could be situated somewhere in between the other two, both historically and culturally. Beresford explains how one day when discovered hiding in the shrubbery of a private garden by a research fellow, his explanation for being there was dismissed by the other. The fellow exclaimed: "You're no professor, you're a thief!" (1980: 104)

Bibliography:
Beresford, Maurice. 1980. Walks Round Red Brick (Leeds: University of Leeds Press).
Hine, Dougald, 'Dériving Scarcity', Dougald Hine, (2011), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Gordon S., Maxwell. 1925. The Fringe of London: Being Some Ventures and Adventures in Topography (London: Cecil Palmer).
Self, Will. 2007. Psychogeography (London: Bloomsbury).
Sinclair, Iain. 2003. Lights Out for the Territory (London: Penguin).
Sinclair, Iain. 'A world you never knew existed', 'Secret Britain', The Guardian, April 2009, pp. 4-6.

Knitting a New Holbeck

2011-07-10T08:50:00.000-07:00

On Saturday July 9th 2011 Simon Bradley and myself went for a walk around Holbeck. The first thing I photographed was this lovely little guerilla knitting sculpture, which I nearly missed. I like it because it's quite subtle and also I wonder what the long term effects of water running over it will be. Will it calcify like those teddies that people hang up in caves for visiting tourists.

Holbeck is now part of a regeneration scheme in the Leeds area. Below is one of the lovely old Victorian buildings that still remains in the area, the old library. Simon and I think it is probably an office now. Thankfully from the outside you wouldn't know it was. Even the old sign remains above the door: Ex Libris:

The above image was stencilled on the pavement of the bridge that you can see in the photo of the library. And the following reliefs were on the wall near Ingram Road Primary School. The date is 1904.

This lovely tree stump sculpture is on the grounds of a nearby church, which I think is now a community centre for Holbeck. It has an Arts and Crafts Movement feel about it, but I'm sure it is new. Below is the underpass nearby. As underpasses go, I've seen much worse. And, note, no graffiti - unusual:

Giant Ghost Sheep Eats Unsuspecting Tourists in Norfolk Coastal Town

2011-07-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

I took this superimposed image with my Lomo Diana F+ on a recent trip to Hunstanton in Norfolk. The giant sheep statue stands outside a cafe in St Edmunds Terrace. The results exceeded my expectation as it is difficult to get the exposure right on both images.

For my 'proper' work on the schizocartography of Hunstanton, please click here: Reading the Arcades/Reading the Promenades

The Situation at the University

2011-07-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

Click here for film: The Situation at the University

"Our central purpose is the construction of situations, i.e. the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformations into a higher passionate nature. We must develop an intervention, directed by the complicated factors of two great components in perpetual interaction: the material setting of life and the behaviours that it incites and that overturn it." Guy Debord (Situationist International) 1957

Note: The walk was run by Gerry Turvey, with assistance by myself: two walks took place, each one led by one of us. This map reflects the walk led by Tina. It was a random exercise in urban exploration (developed from an idea by the German choreographer Thomas Lehman). It required a small group of people, a willingness to have fun, and a sense of imagination: a series of timed walks, followed by short interventions of fantasy from participants. Most of the participants were from Leeds Psychogeography Group and/or the University of Leeds.

Related Links:
The Semiotic University (a map of the same walk)
The Overdeterimation of the Space of the University (theoretical analysis of urban space at the university)
The Sound of the Sixties (psychogeographical film, inlcuding brutalist architecture)

J30: The City is on Strike

2011-07-01T02:41:00.000-07:00

"The invocation of the idea that 'there is no alternative', and the recommendation to 'work smarter, not harder' shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post-Fordism." Mark Fisher

This was the scene outside The Leeds Metropolitan University yesterday. This woman, below, representing the UCU (University and College Union), was happy for me to take a photo of her and her placard:

This is a paragraph from the PCS literature that was handed out:

Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union, along with our counterparts in education unions, have made the difficult decision to take industrial action as it is the only way of standing up to the government's unprecedented attacks on public sector workers.

Below is one of the leaflets I was given by protesters:

Related Links:
The Scene of Teaching
J30 Strike Organisation
Public and Commercial Services Union
University and College Union

Bibliography:
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).

The Semiotic University

2011-06-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

"The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it." Roland Barthes

The above schizocartographic map is a collage of a walk that took place on the University of Leeds campus on the evening of 23rd June 2011. The walk was run by Gerry Turvey, with assistance by myself: two walks took place, each one led by one of us. This map reflects the walk led by Tina.

It was a random exercise in urban exploration (developed from an idea by the German choreographer Thomas Lehman). It required a small group of people, a willingness to have fun, and a sense of imagination: a series of timed walks, followed by short interventions of fantasy from participants. Most of the participants were from Leeds Psychogeography Group and/or the university.

Want to know what schizocartography is?
Click here: What is Schizocartography?

Related Links:
Gerry Turvey
Andy Turner's blog of the walk
The Collage University

Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland. 2004. 'Semiology and Urbanism', Rethinking Architecture, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge). pp. 166-172.

The Collage University

2011-06-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

“Collage is simultaneously innocent and devious.” Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter

The above image is a collage of a walk that took place on the University of Leeds campus on the evening of 23rd June 2011. The walk was run by Gerry Turvey, assisted by myself: two walks took place, each one led by one of us. This image reflects the walk led by Gerry.

It was a random exercise in urban exploration (developed from an idea by the German choreographer Thomas Lehman), requiring a small group of people, a willingness to have fun, and a sense of imagination: a series of timed walks, followed by short interventions of fantasy from participants. Most of the participants were from Leeds Psychogeography Group and/or the university.

Related Links:
Gerry Turvey
Andy Turner's blog of the walk
The Semiotic University
The Collage Seaside

Bibliography:
Row, Colin and Fred Koetter. 1987. Collage City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press).

Hello! from Hunstanton

2011-06-23T01:34:00.000-07:00

Film: Hello! from Hunstanton

The above film was shot with a Microsoft sensecam and the camera visible in the film is a Lomo Diana F+

Input/Output at the University of Excellence

2011-06-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to the BA Show at the School of Design at the University of Leeds. This poster by Daniel Bird - a final year student about to go into the world and get a job along with his peers - caught my eye for a number of reasons, not least because of the frightening amount of debt students are expected to incur.

However, what I particularly liked about it is that it is a brilliant example of the performative aspect in which the university now operates (input/output), but from the other side. I am referring to the work of Bill Readings in The University in Ruins and also Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Nevertheless, I think Mark Fisher says it very succinctly in Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? He makes direct reference to university bureaucracy, including providing an extensive list of documents a module leader has to complete for each module they oversee. (2009: 41) Fisher says that the constant checking, monitoring and production of figures does not provide "a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output" (2009: 42).

We no longer have a system focused on knowledge (learning and teaching), instead we have a system that concentrates on measuring performance and output, and disseminating that data: “The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output – in other words, performativity.” (Lyotard 2004: 11) It is essential for the functioning of the bureaucratic university that this system is open, even if its process of self-defining (for example, in using terms like 'excellence') is internal and closed. The university needs to reduplicate itself internally, and also express that reduplication externally, in the form of representable data. What this means for the university is a spectacle-like appearance in the form of signs that appear as this representable data, the output of the excellence process.

Daniel's brilliant poster lists the quantifiable data in the form of the 'cost' to himself of his degree. The university of excellence, in theory, should be happy with this particular representation of data. However, I doubt that we will see anything like this appearing on the University of Leeds website as a way to attract future students.

Bibliography:
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books).
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 2004. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

(de)Constructing the University of Leeds

2011-06-15T00:41:00.000-07:00

I caught this image by chance while outside the Student Union at the University of Leeds last week. I wish I could say I managed to choreograph the construction workers into this position for the purpose of the aesthetics of my photo, but they were already situated thus because they were passing metal poles up to each other.

I did, however, ask them if I could take a photo and they all stopped and 'posed' momentarily. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the man on the ground in the shot at all, and also chopped the man at the top's head off. The image reminds me of the ITV ident Snakes and Ladders

Happy Accidents #2 - University of Leeds

2011-06-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

These Lomography images were taken in May on the University of Leeds campus. These are my two favourite images of the day taken with my Diana F+. Although it isn't clear what's going on in the above one, it is a superimposed image of the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre and a campus signpost and the buildings behind it. I think it produces a slightly uncanny effect whereby you can't work out what buildings belong to what image. Also, the signpost is in such a place where it looks like the beige building on the right is abutted to the grey concrete building in the background.

This image is also superimposed. It is of the Clothworkers' Centenary Concert Hall (what used to be the Presbyterian Church) and a lovely tree nearby that was in bloom with yellow blossom. The effect is of golden light emanating from the church door, which is interesting from a religious perspective, even though it wasn't my intention.

Related Links:
Lomography
Presbyterian Church on Leodis
Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre - Listed Building

St George's Field, University of Leeds

2011-06-06T04:23:00.000-07:00

Here are some recent images I took of St George's Field, what was Leeds General Cemetery, on the University of Leeds campus. The above one was taken with a sensecam. And the following two, black and white, were taken with my Diana F+.

The above image is the best one that I took with this film. One of the reasons I like it is because it looks like an old photograph, but was actually taken in May 2011. Why I like the image below is because the young man is challenging the traditional use of space by using the base of the Henry Price Halls of Residence - made from the original cemetery wall - as an object to traverse.

The Sound of the Sixties - Brutalist Architecture

2011-06-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

Film: The Sound of the Sixties

During the major planning drive by the University of Leeds that took place after World War II, architects were employed to draw up plans to expand and develop the campus. Many architectural plans were made, alongside two large bound proposals prepared by the architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who are most famous for their concrete brutalist architecture in places like the Barbican - the grade II listed complex of housing, education, office and exhibition space located in the City of London, completed in 1976. Much of the text of the reports that Chamberlin, Powell and Bon submitted to the university is oriented towards a section of the campus referred to as “the precinct”. The precinct area includes plans for a number of very large buildings and vast car parking zones. Part of the conclusion of the 1963 report by the architects says the following:

No effort has been spared in Leeds on the part of the City Authorities, the Hospital Board and the Council of the University to make the planned expansion possible despite the extreme difficulties inherent in the comprehensive re-planning and redevelopment of the old City sites which have hitherto rested in many ownerships and were laid out between a network of streets obsolete for any present purposes.

The innovative architectural designs of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon were not only aspirational for the University of Leeds, but also British universities in general. The university led the way in rethinking the nature of university architecture, and in employing a younger generation of designers to build it. While the University of Leeds was not the first to embark on a rebuilding effort during this period, they were the first to deal with the campus in a holistic way.

This 3 minute film is an acoustic psychogeographical response to the area called the precinct and features two of the most impressive of the buildings designed by the architects: the Worsley Building and the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre (now a Grade II listed building).

The film alludes to a moment-in-time architecturally, with the popular cultural reference of the title - The Sound of the Sixties, a radio and TV series playing pop music form that era - and the 1964 track by the R&B British pop band Manfred Mann. The song title 5-4-3-2-1 provides a countdown to the walk, which was actually 8 individual edited films, appearing in the sequence they were recorded.

So as to avoid being distracted by the campus scenery only the feet were shot, they being the instrument used to tap out the sound on the surface of the topography of the precinct. I considered just supplying the sound without the visuals of the walking feet, but I decided that the trace left by the feet becomes a form of cartography which has a number of functions that to me, as a psychogeographer, are important, and which also support the tenets of schizocartography (my own particular form of psychogeography):

1. they make a claim to that space, even thought it is a momentary one
2. they attach an identity, however nebulous, to the walker
3. by revealing the feet and the surface of the terrain, focus is directed towards part of the production process behind the sound-making, the mise en scene of the film

Chamberlin, Powell and Bon were considered not to be very vocal architects, and there is little information on them and even less by them, other than their architectural work. So, in a way I consider this film to be in part a homage and in part a challenge to the space of the precinct in the sense that it might be perceived as a spectacle. I shall conclude by quoting Penelope Curtis from the Henry Moore Institute's publication The New Monumentality.

How should we interpret the work of such silent architects? In the words they chose to use in the meticulously prepared reports for the Court of the City of London or for the Court of the University of Leeds? In the words of others? There were reviews enough in the 50s and 60s on their newly published projects and realised schemes, even if there has been almost nothing published since. Or should we interpret their work through the language of the forms themselves?

I hope, however unconventional it might be, that perhaps I have given sound, if not voice, to the work of Chamberlin Powell and Bon at the University of Leeds, while simultaneously staying faithful to my own project of challenging anti-production through the process of schizocartography.

Relevant links:
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon on e-architect
The Barbican
University of Leeds listed buildings

There Are No Longer Bears in the Bear Pit - Phew!

2011-05-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

Today I went for a walk to photograph what is known as the Bear Pit on Cardigan Road, Headingley, Leeds. It was part of the Leeds Zoological and Botanical Gardens built in 1840, at the peak of the Victorian curiosity in all things 'other'. Apparently, the zoo didn't do too well and was closed down. The Bear Pit was restored in 1966.

There used to be a plaque on the big boulder in the middle archway, but it seems to be missing.

The Bear Pit itself is actually located behind the façade shown in the above two photos (take a look at the flickr images below under 'links of interest' to see the actual pit). The bears could be viewed from the top of the little circular staircases, which were located in the turrets (you can see the turret and stairs in the following two images). There is a 'rumour' that there is a tunnel that leads from here into the town centre.

Below is some text from the Yorkshire Evening Post, dated October 7th 2010, entitled 'The Seven Lost Wonders of Leeds':

Many people will have passed the castellated frontage on Cardigan Road, Headingley but few perhaps realise that in its heyday it was a zoo, called Leeds Zoological and Botanical Society.
Opened on July 4, 1840, it was home to swans, eagle hawks, owls, monkeys, raccoons and other animals. There were also botanical gardens, a lake and a bear pit, with a bear which was made to climb a pole time and time again, whilst being pelted with buns by the public.
The zoo was not a financial success and courted controversy after keepers regularly put live rooks into the birds of prey cage, only for them to be killed cruelly and torn apart as the public looked on.
The site was bought in 1848 by entrepreneur Thomas Clapham, who made it a success but sold the land for development in 1858.
Leeds Civic Trust bought the sole remaining feature, the Bear Pit in 1966 and part of the wall, which was described by one newspaper as "a whimsical Victorian feature in the style of a castle" and which still stands today.

Links of interest:
The Bear Pit on Leodis (photo archive)
VR Leeds (panorama of Bear Pit)
Flickr (excellent photos of the Bear Pit)

The Overdetermination of the Space of the University

2011-05-16T03:13:00.000-07:00

An event or a thing at a point in space cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at that point. It depends on everything else going on around it [...] A wide variety of disparate influences swirling over space in the past, present and future concentrate and congeal at a certain point [...] to define the nature of that point. (Harvey 2006: 124)

Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. (Foucault 1991: 252)

Whichever mode of space we are discussing (abstract, virtual, concrete - might be one form of categorisation) it is difficult to separate it from other forms in the same way that it is impossible to talk about space without also discussing those processes involved in them. One factor that is concurrent in those different spaces is us, and our experience of those spaces is influenced by a multiple of factors. Since modernity space has been transformed in relation to the lived experience. In his 1903 essay 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' Georg Simmel presents us with a representation of the individual's internal life in response to the modern city. He discusses the acceleration of pace and the collapse of space-time resulting in the “intensification of nervous stimulation” (2004: 132). Postmodernity brought with it an even more complex response to space, as discussed by cultural theorists such as Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), where he calls for a new cognitive map to help the individual negotiate the postmodern terrain. The spaces we occupy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are so complex that new words have been invented to enable us to even discuss them, such as: hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard and others), non-place (Marc Augé), heterotopias (Michel Foucault), to name but a few. Therefore, space is not only overdetermined because of the many different groups of individuals who operate in these spaces and, hence, have a different aesthetic of them, but also because of the multiple ways of analysing space.

Theoretical approaches to space occur in many fields of academia, even if we just choose to analyse concrete space as it appears in the urban environment. Urban space can be critiqued from multifarious fields such as sociology, geography, cultural theory architecture, urban planning and even psychology, and within those fields there are many different approaches. The term 'urban space' will be defined differently depending on the particular field of analysis. For example, in his text aptly named Urban Space the urban designer and architect Rob Krier describes it thus: "If we wish to clarify the concept of urban space without imposing aesthetic criteria, we are compelled to designate all types of space between buildings in towns and cities and other localities as urban space." (1979: 15) Two important factors become apparent from this definition, the first is this: because Krier is bracketing the aesthetic, this demonstrates how significant it is to any discussion of urban space. Secondly: it is difficult to talk about urban space without also talking about the city (or the town, or even suburbia).

Henri Lefebvre's socio-philosophical synthesis of real and mental space in his book The Production of Space (1974) presents us with one of the most significant texts on space. It is rare to read a subsequent work about space without it referring to Lefebvre's text. The Production of Space has influenced David Harvey, Edward Soja and Manuel Castells; Castells book The Urban Question (1977) being a criticism of Lefebvre's Marxist-Humanist approach. Lefebvre categorises his formulation for analysing space by using the following terms: "Spatial practice" (the space that society utilises for the purposes of both work and leisure, and the praxis involved in these relationships), "Representations of space" (how space is defined and represented by the various dominant agents in society) and "Representational space" (a response to how space is lived through the various signs that represent it, this includes dominant images of space but also the possibility for other more inventive representations) (1991: 38-39). In his homage to Raymond Williams, the Marxist geography David Harvey offers us another approach to looking at space. In his essay 'Space as a Keyword', Harvey breaks down space into absolute, relative and relational. He explains that absolute space "is the space of Newton and Descartes and it is usually represented as a pre-existing and immovable grid amenable to standardized measurement and open to calculation" (2006: 121). Relative space allows for "multiple geometries" and can be approached in a multitude of ways depending on who and what are being investigated, the Einsteinian conceptualisation (Harvey 2006: 121-122). And relational space, which Harvey attributes to Leibniz, states that "there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them" (2006: 123). Both of these frameworks allow for methods of categorising space that highlight a space that can appear at once dominant or rigid, but also subjective or fluid, allowing room for negotiation or even appropriation.

In their essay 'Postmodern Urbanism' (1998) Michael Dear and Steven Flusty cover the discourses attached to the two most influential schools of urbanism in the US: The Chicago School, which appeared in the 1920s and 30s, and the Los Angeles School which emerged in the 1980s. They explain that the model of the city adopted by the Chicago School is one of concentrism with a view of the city that is organised around a central hub (1998: 65). The Los Angeles school, with its postmodern approach to the city (its main case study being Los Angeles itself), sees a break with the traditional concept of the city described above. It prefers to view the city as "fragmented parcels [...] within the collective world city" (ibid.). Dear and Flusty provide an interesting list of adjectives associated with Flusty's own work on city space, such as: "stealthy", "slippery", "crusty", "prickly" and "jittery" (1998: 57), demonstrating a complex aesthetic response to the space we occupy in present times.

While Krier's definition of urban space intentionally excludes the aesthetic and subjective, when discussing urban space in my thesis I shall be concentrating on these aspects. This individualised response would lend itself to the relative approach mentioned by Harvey: it depends on who or where you are as to how that space (time) appears. However, the mode of space I intend to be challenging is the one that 'appears' as absolute and unquestionable, the one that Debord would put down to the project of the capitalism, the spectacle. Nevertheless, because the appearance of space-time has internal to it various processes, which indeed cannot be separated from it, then the relational view takes those processes into account: "external influences get internalized in specific processes or things through time". (Harvey 2006: 124) At the university these processes can be spatially observed, not only in the more obvious physical movement of staff and students covering the campus terrain, but they are also actualised in both the actions taken up by the various actors at the university (for example, in taking up a practice of completing an administrative process) and in the concrete form of the buildings, or other campus phenomena, that support these processes. Therefore, Harvey's formulation of space, with its geographical critique of capital accumulation provides a useful springboard into a critique of postmodern space and "relational aesthetics". This term can be attributed to Nicolas Bourriaud, based on his text Relational Aesthetics (1998). It refers to a response to art (predominantly from the 1990s) which not only emphasises the social nature of the lived experience, but that also draws the viewer into the work as participator. One of his definitions is: “art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. (2002: 14) The conceptual artists that interest Bourriaud are concerned with changing the more traditional position of the gallery visitor as 'beholder' to one of an interactive process. Very often the works Bourriaud discusses do not even take place in a gallery setting but in everyday social space. In his book, Bourriaud also uses the theory of Guattari to discuss relational public art.

Above I have provided two different ways of examining space from two different (although not inseparable) fields of theory. My own theoretical analysis will include theory from both postmodern geography/urbanism and also the work Harvey has done in regard to how capital contributes to formulating our landscape. It is also the case that the processual and relational factors that influence space (and that are influenced by space in return) can be related to the work Guattari has done in the area of "molecular revolution". Guattari explains that it is possible for individuals to not be reliant on "the spatio-temporal specifications of the social phantasy". (1984: 97) In other words, the representations of the university - which also includes how it appears in space - while they may be encouraging a certain semiotic (in the case of the examination under way here, a capitalist-oriented one), can also enable a different aesthetic paradigm through differing connections and alternative existential territories. Guattari explains that this occurs when moments are no longer ideologically cloaked but become a "nucleus for processual relay"(1995: 105-106). Changing one's position, either physically or mentally, might encourage a shift away from the dominant aesthetic, to what Guattari would describe as "access to a-signifying nuclei of subjectivation” (1995: 68).

Foucault's own analysis of space, which is apparent in much of his work, including The Order of Things (1966) and Discipline and Punish (1975) - becomes inseparable from other factors in his interview with Paul Rabinow 'Space, Knowledge, and Power'. As discussed in Discipline and Punish, fields of surveillance are spatially manifest: operations and procedures applied to the body-politic take place in material structures that appear in the concrete form of the institution, whether it is a prison, a mental institution or a university. The authority attached to these procedures (and hence these structures) come in the form of statements that become naturalised upon being repeated by not only those designated to do so, but also they become legitimised by being taken up into larger groups. In ‘Truth and Power’ Foucault explains how the individual is under the influence of various propagated discourses that exist in the environment under the aegis of ‘truth’. He states: “‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.” (1980: 133). These very statements, exist in their moment of utterance, defined by their enunciative domain and materialised by their particular formalised mode of power. Statements are supported in the structures of particular institutions through the practices that reaffirm them and in the discourse transmitted by them, they are also delineated in the images that represent them.

Bibliography:
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics, trans. by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Le presses du réel).
Dear, Michael and Steven Flusty. 'Postmodern Urbanism', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88, 1 (1998), 50-72.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon, trans. by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press).
Foucault, Michel. 1991. 'Space, Knowledge, and Power', The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin). pp. 239-256.
Foucault, Michel. 2001. 'Of Other Spaces', The Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Nicholas Mirzooeff (London and New York: Routledge). pp. 237-244.
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).
----- 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London and New York: Verso).
Krier, Rob. 1979. Urban Space (London: Academy Editions).
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).
Simmel, Georg. 2004. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, Art in Theory – 1900-2000, ed. by Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing) pp. 132-136.

Happy Accidents #1 - St Michael's Church, Headingley, Leeds

2011-05-10T09:31:00.000-07:00

These two lomography images were taken in April in St Michael and All Angels' Church graveyard in Headingley. This was the first time I used my new Diana F+ camera. These are my two favourite images, or 'happy accidents' as they are described in the literature that comes with the camera.

Related Links:
Lomography Website
St Michael's Church

Derrida Queen Mother

2011-05-08T12:11:00.001-07:00

This jigsaw-cum-sculpture is part of the phenomena of our office in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. I'm not sure who placed the cut out of Jacques Derrida's face over the Queen Mother but it's a work of genius. Following a google search on the terms: derrida, queen mother, I was surprised at how many times the two names come up in scholarly works, including: Ashley Thompson's 'Post-cosmopolitical Theories: Sexual Difference, Vernacularisation and Art after Angkor' (2011) and Gyatri Spivak's 'Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle' (1984).

Related sites:
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
An excerpt from Derrida the movie
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother

Five Dead Women and Many Live Animals

2011-05-01T06:53:00.001-07:00

The above map is based on the view from my window. It is an aesthetic response to the graveyard of which my flat borders. While it is a very quiet place, and not visited by people very often, because I live next to it I get to see the 'comings and goings' of not only the animals, of which there are many, but also the people. While the animals are totally open in their actions - the squirrels scratching themselves, the blue tits cleaning their beaks, the robins 'beating up' the hedge sparrows - some of the human visitors behave a bit 'cagey', like they think they are not supposed to be there.

The 'Action Zone' is the area around my window. It is named thus because this is where I feed the animals and hence it is a draw to all the birds and squirrels. The animals seem to think it is a tuck shop. Unfortunately they do not realise there is only food in the 'Special View' section, so sometimes they come in in order to see what other delicacies might be inside, much to their disapointment...

A Visit to the Freud Museum - Part 1: Childhood Rituals and Auburnophobia

2011-04-10T01:28:00.000-07:00

I was very fortunate to be visiting the Freud Museum this week at the point an art installation was being erected actually over the surface of Freud's house by the artist Alice Anderson. Alice, who has lots of beautiful red hair, unlike my small paltry amount, uses red hair in her work. The current exhibition, Childhood Rituals, includes the work that is currently appearing at the Freud Museum. In the following picture you can see Alice's team on the roof draping and fixing the hair.

Being a redhead myself, and also a cultural theorist, I struggle with the ginger prejudice which is so prevalent today and has definitely got worse since I was a child. I think it was probably David Bowie that saved my teenage-hood from any potential bullying because of my hair. As a small child, older people seemed to love my hair saying things like "It is a sign of beauty", and one of my father's friends actually called me "Red". I remember seeing a straw poll on the campus of a university where they asked ten male students if they would go out with a redhead. Nine of them said that under no conditions would they, the tenth said he would sleep with one but wouldn't call her the next day - and these are supposed to be 'educated' people! Interestingly enough, and also in a somewhat contradiction to these figures, I can remember hearing about Edinburgh University doing a redhead gene study a while ago, in order to find the evolutionary benefit for those who have it. It turned out that one of its benefits was in attracting a mate. However, this appears to work for ancient Scots only as, going by the media portrayal of red hair, the pull has turned from attract to repel.

Below are some really good close-up shots of Alice's installation where the hair reaches the ground and is anchored in various places:

Alice Anderson's exhibition is on from April 15th to June 5th 2011.

Related sites:
The Ginger Phenomenon
Flaming Heck
Sarak Spanton

Have You Ever Been to Seahenge? or a Tenuous Homage to Spinal Tap

2011-03-23T10:46:00.001-07:00

In Boston Square, Hunstanton, Norfolk, is a sensory park commissioned by Norfolk County Council and designed by Jeremey Stacey Architects. In the park is what looks like a homage to Seahenge which is a prehistoric structure that was found off the coast of Holme-next-the-Sea: a timber circle from the Bronze Age. It was discovered in 1998 and now resides in Lynn Museum. Here is a video I took in the sensory park, and it is my homage to the Stonehenge scene in This is Spinal Tap (1984), directed by Rob Reiner:

Boston Square Sensory Park

Below is the script from This is Spinal Tap, where it refers to Stonehenge (one of the funniest scenes in the film), including a link to the relevant section in the film:

Ian: Are you telling me that this is it? This is scenery? Have you ever been to Stonehenge?
Artist: No, I haven't been to Stonehenge.
Ian: The triptychs are...the triptychs are twenty feet high. You can stand four men up them!
Artist: Ian, I was...I was...I was supposed to build it eighteen inches high.
Ian: This is insane. This isn't a piece of scenery.
Artist: Look, look. Look, this is what I was asked to build. Eighteen inches. Right here, it specified eighteen inches. I was given this napkin, I mean...
Ian: Forget this! Fuck the napkin!!!

SPINAL TAP performs Stonehenge
(click here for film clip This is Spinal Tap )

HOTEL room after gig

David: I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been...that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf...

Related Links
Seahenge
Stonehenge
This is Spinal Tap

Leeds Girls' High School - 'Development Opportunity'

2011-03-19T03:39:00.000-07:00

A sign has finally gone up for the sale of the Elinor Lupton Centre building of the old Leeds Girls' High School in Headingley Lane. I spotted in when walking back from university so decided to have a wander around the building and take some snaps.

As you can see it is made in the same Portland Stone as the University of Leeds, popular for construction in this area in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a jurassic limestone and, interestingly, has tiny fossils in it if you looked closely.

According to this person who posted a photo on flickr, it is a grade 2 listed building and was purchased by the school in 1986 for £230,000:
Elinor Lupton Centre

I love this building and pass it every day on the way to and from university. I remember when I first came to Leeds (2005) it was still in use and drama performances were advertised on the board outside, in the same place as the 'for sale' board now appears. It would be lovely to see the building cared for again: some sand-blasting and graffiti removal.

The building is much bigger than it looks in my image. The Geograph link below shows a good image of the building and reflects its size much better.

There was a locked fence at the back and I managed to take this photo of this old sign through the railings:

Also, this detail I photogrpahed demonstrates the Greco-Roman influence in Art-Deco architecture of this period.

Related Links:

Leeds High School on Wikipedia
Elinor Lupton Centre on Geograph

Walking to the Beach

2011-03-06T02:35:00.000-08:00

Video: Walking to the Beach

Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses respects, etc., the trajectories it "speaks". All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the weather. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail. (De Certeau 2006: 99)

Reading the Arcades/Reading the Promenades
This mini-blog is part of the above project. All my seaside schizocartography posts are available here:
Reading the Arcades/Reading the Promenades
Or click here to link to my previous blog on the Norfolk seaside resort of Hunstanton: The Seaside in Winter

Bibliography
De Certeau, Michel. 2006. 'Walking in the City', The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press) pp. 91-110

For the Benefit of Mr Kite

2011-02-24T03:55:00.001-08:00

Photo: Simon Warner

A Dedication

I went to a workshop at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery on Saturday February 19th. We made landscapes on a dinner plate, following a walk around the cemetery of St Georges Field at the University of Leeds. The above is my contribution and I would like to dedicate it to Pablo Fanque, and Christine Bairstow and her twin sister.

Christine Bairstow wrote to the Yorkshire Evening Post in 2008 to protest about the fact she cannot locate her twin sister who died in 1946. The gravestones were separated from the bodies in the ground during the landscaping of the space in the 1960s. Pablo Fanque, the first black circus owner in Britain, is buried in the cemetery along with his wife. The Beatles sang about Pablo Fanque on their Sergeant Peppers album in the song Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite (he is apparently also mentioned in a Cockney Rebel song - interesting).

Photo: CC Phill Harding

The above image shows the cemetery as it appears in 'real' space, as opposed to artistic/ideological/political space, which my plate represents. Below is a timeline of the cemetery that I put together from a number of sources, which are included in the bibliography below.

Cemetery Timeline

1833
Formation of Leeds General Cemetery Company (purchased the site for £11,000) (BBC 2006).

1835
On July 23rd the new cemetery was officially opened by architect John Clark (BBC 2006).

1922
Suggested acquisition of cemetery (Beresford 1975:144).

1930s
Graveyard nearly full, some graves neglected (Beresford 1975:144).

1947
University bursor re-opens question of cemetery acquisition (Beresford 1975:172).

Date unsure (1958-1963)
Cemetery closed and landscaped and original name was reverted: St George's Field (Beresford 1975:172).

1965
Local opposition to University of Leeds Bill, re: cemetery development (Beresford 1975:145).

1969
St Georges Field completed (Leodis 2010).

1984
Founding date of friends of the cemetery group (Dunk and Rugg 1994:80).

2006
On 24th April Dr Julie Rugg, of the Cemetery Research Group, unveiled the new blue plaque at the gatehouse. (Leeds Civic Trust 2006)

Bibliography

Dunk, Julie and Julie Rugg. 1994. The Management of Old Cemetery Land: Now and the Future (London: Shaw and Sons).

Beresford, M. W. 1975. ''Red brick and Portland Stone: A Building History', Studies in the History of a University 1987-1974, ed. by P.H.J.H Gosden and A.J. Taylor (Leeds: E.J. Arnold). pp. 133-180.

BBC, ‘Leeds’, Life and Death in Leeds, (2006), [accessed 30 March 2010]

Leeds Civic Trust, ‘Annual Report 2005/06’, Heritage and Conservation – Blue Plaques 1, (2006), [accessed 30 March 2010]

Leodis, ‘Woodhouse Cemetery’, (2010), [accessed 30 March 2010]

Related Links

St George's Field (BBC)
Simon Warner (artist)
Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery
University of Leeds

The Site of Deconstruction

2011-02-22T00:35:00.000-08:00

Here is an image I took on a mischievous psychogeographical trip around my school last night: The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

Walking the Board: University of Leeds Monopoly

2011-02-15T02:36:00.000-08:00

This is Hyde and Ford playing University of Leeds monopoly over the Christmas period. Apparently the original game goes back to around 1903. It has lots of the campus buildings - Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre, The Great Hall - with many of the traditional monopoly features. I had hoped the counters would relate to the university, e.g. a book, a mortar board, a pint glass, but they are the traditional ones. The profits go to the alumni fund.

Relates websites:
Monopoly on Wikipedia
University of Leeds Monopoly

Girl about campus// (a Boy about campus// rejoinder)

2011-01-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

After spending the exam period working on her thesis and preparing for the first week of teaching in her solitary studio-flat, Girl about campus thought that all the stress was over. However, this week her world was shocked. First the well-deserved demise of Andy Gray and his sexist chum Richard Keys hits the news, then, just as Girl about campus was celebrating the sackings she read a column in the Leeds Student...

Relates websites:
Leeds Student
University of Leeds

At UCLA You See LA

2010-12-15T09:34:00.001-08:00

I went to the University of California, Los Angeles on the weekend of December 4th and 5th to the Spaces and Flows conference Being a psychogeographer, I was very excited to be able to walk in a totally new kind of urban space. This was my first visit to an American University and to the US. This is my blog on UCLA:

Mapping UCLA

Just having logged into the university site, I find that a high level article is discussing how recent research is using GIS to map geographic areas where fastfood is located, and comparing this to public health.

Putting Public Health Concerns on the Map

I also found this great map in the Daily Bruin (the UCLA newspaper), while I was there. It comes under the heading Crimewatch and maps the crime in a one week period on campus. These are my favourite crimes:

"On Nov. 27, a man yelling at security officers was escorted from the Doris Stein Eye Research Center."

I'm not exactly sure why I like this one, and why it makes me laugh. I think it's the specificity of the place name and the possibility that the chap may simply have been poked in the eye by a researcher.

"On Nov. 22, marijuana was confiscated from behind Canyon Point."

Well it is a university campus after all. What more can I say. If there wasn't any marijuana (or, by the way, illegal alcohol - it is a dry campus), I would be concerned.

University Architecture

The campus at UCLA is pristine, elegant and I would even say beautiful. Most of the buildings are of the style in my above photo, and like the ones below:

However, the campus does not seem to have a lot of 'character' probably because the architecture is not diverse enough to enable that. There were some modernist buildings as well, but most buildings were similar to the style of the ones above, built with the pale salmony-pink brick. It tended to give the campus a homogeneous look - which I guess some will find attractive and some not.

Urban Décor

This section of my blog looks at the usual psychogeographic urban phenomena that I tend to observe, and I will include a series of photos with short comments.

The university staff (maintenance, etc) seemed to have access to these buggies to enable them to move effectively around the space. I even saw a student with a suitcase on the back of one at one point:

These lovely little signs appeared on the pavement outside the sports stadium. I assume they guide the supporters to their terraces. The university mascot is a bear (Bruin the Bear, actually its called Joe). However, I would like to challenge that and propose that the lovely mango-tummied squirrels replace the bear. The Fox Squirrels are all over the campus. See my future blog for more images on the UCLA squirrels.

These signs were outside the Ackerman Union. They even remained overnight. Although they were located only in one specific area, I got the feeling that they would not be allowed on the University of Leeds campus, unless it was for a specific one-off event.

I was handed this document outside the union.

The following three images are of various types of pipes, although I don't know what the first one is. The last two were on the periphery of the campus. I really like the blue and red pipes next to each other.

I also found this 'No Dumping' notice on one of the roads surrounding the campus. I like these signs that are made of concrete and situated on roads and pavements. They are less dominating and aggressive than vertical signs. I've never seen any like this in the UK.

This is the UCLA Guest House, where I was staying, and below that is an interesting church that was very near the campus.

Aesthetic Observations

What I found particularly interesting is that on one level at least, UCLA reflects the way that LA operates spatially. There does not seem to be a centre to the UCLA campus. There was not even a central administration building that I could find where I could get information about the campus. I asked people but no-one seemed to know. Also, there is no main entrance, like for instance, there is at the University of Leeds (the Parkinson Building and its famous steps). There was only a number of insignificant entrances which were oriented around LA's favourite object: the car. Here is one:

The entrances were not designed for the person entering on foot, as they all lead to car parks. Nor were they designed as symbols of the university that may represent a brand, as indeed the Parkinson Tower does for the University of Leeds: University Tower

Note the tiny tower symbol on the logo:
University of Leeds

UCLA, like many campus universities is a mini city. But it is not a mini city in the conventional sense, it is much more like the Westin Bonaventure in its postmodern disorientation. The university buildings and those in the surrounding area, bleed into each other and do not appear clearly on relative sides of the distinctive boundaries like they do on the map provided online: UCLA campus map

I have walked around the periphery of the University of Leeds campus, and there is a much more clearly delineated line where the campus ends and begins: The Forgotten Solo Dérive

Letters from UCLA

I wanted to sign-off with a really juicy and appropriate quote from someone like Baudrillard, or maybe find an entertaining youtube video about campus life. Most of what I found on youtube were really gushy films that I just couldn't subject anyone to; some were university marketing department created ones. Anyway, I don't even think this one is ironic. I thought it was at first, but then, reading the responses, I doubt it. But it is worth looking at as it is the most creative and interesting of the ones I found:

UCLA University of California, Los Angeles, Westwood

This is Tina Richardson, situated in a studio flat in Headingley, signing-off...

Relates websites:
Wikipedia on UCLA
UCLA Bruins

The Good Adventure: A Psychogeography of the Westin Bonaventure

2010-12-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

A Miniature City

Before I went to LA this month, my only impression of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA was based on the text of Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). In his critique of postmodern architecture he uses the hotel as an example:

"...the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd." (2009: 40).

What a perfect place to do some urban walking!

Westin Bonavanture

The Entryway is Always the Seam That Links the Building

"In this sense, then, ideally the minicity of Portman's Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute." (2009: 40).

As I was walking to the Bonaventure I entered it at street level. When approaching the hotel it was difficult to get a good shot of it, as it's surrounded by flyovers and, as you can see from my first photo, trees. The point I entered was on South Figueroa Street. You don't really feel like you are entering a hotel as such, because really it isn't just a hotel. The section of the building you enter from there is not even shown in the image on Wikipedia. The top section - the shiny glass tubes - is floor 6 upwards. Floors 1-5 feel like they are underground, although they are not. They are the concrete base, which appears under the ground of what you see in the image. The top of this section forms its own outside floor, where the swimming pool is located. Here is the swimming pool, and below the image I took of the building from that level:

It is Our Pleasure to Welcome You as a Guest

This is how the little booklet of the hotel opens. It lists the facilities, services and eateries that belong to the hotel, including a revolving cocktail bar on floor 35 (the lift wouldn't take me there at the early time I went, though). But alongside the hotel services are many others provided by retailers that are not part of the hotel - because it is also a shopping centre. I even found a actual brewery right near the swimming pool.

The building is so complex that there are two massive illuminated displays that provide information on what is to be found in this giant minicity:

There are signposts, that look like street ones. They are colour-coded (if it is not apparent from the image, this one is yellow):

This is the floor plan, which shows a horizontal slice through the building.

The People Movers

Apparently this is how Portman described his elevators: "people movers". The four glass tubes that surround the central tubes, all have their own lifts. Each tube is not only colour-coded but also shape-coded. For example, the one below is green and square. This sign appears outside the relevant lift:

"...it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper..." (2009: 42).

There are staircases, which are very apparent in the concrete base section. I'm not sure what they appear like above this level though. Below is a photo from under one of the staircases:

Since people don't tend to take stairs, and are not even encouraged to walk in LA in general, I was a little concerned that my behaviour may draw attention. But, I think because this place is not purely a hotel, anyone could potentially be there for a number of reasons, i.e. you don't have to be a hotel guest or hotel staff to be in the building.

Dynamic Paths and Narrative Paradigms

"...recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis...to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfil and to complete with our own bodies and movements." (2009: 42).

The Westin Bonaventure is only the second building of which I have done an internal urban psychogeographic walk. The first one was the Union Church in Hunstanton: A Journey Around My Church However, this hotel lends itself perfectly to the psychogeographer because of the complexity of its space and the multiplicity of its signs; and, here, I mean literal signs. How fortunate I was to find that part of the building was under construction and, as with outside urban space, had all the relevant notices on display. Although the grey 'branded' ones were a little more stylish and more polite than the ones provided by the British Highways Department:

Here is a rather unfriendly sign I took near Kirkstall Electricity Substation in Leeds, UK. Please click here for the relevant blog: Kirkstall Valley Subdub or The Prozac Walk

Locating the Human Body

"So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space - postmodern hyperspace - has finally succeeded on transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position in a mappable external world." (2004: 44).

Most of us (in Cultural Studies, Postmodern Philosophy, Sociology, etc) are aware of Jameson's famous plea for the need for a cognitive map to help the postmodern subject navigate the urban (and psychic) domain. However, some of us relish in the profusion of reflexive signs (Baudrillard), the Spectacle (Debord) and our decentred place in a society that no longer has a cultural identity for us to pick up and put on, rather like a hat (Lyotard). Urban space may be confusing, it may be overcoded, it may even be psychologically distressing. Nevertheless, it is historically rich and culturally abundant, and maybe the best we can do is appreciate its complexity by attempting to spatially navigate it. By situating our physical bodies in these spaces, the osmotic effect makes them become benign and familiar. We no longer see urban space as something 'out there', but become connected to it in the most basic of ways: through the physical act of ambulation.

Relates websites:John C. Portman (architect)
Westin Bonaventure, LA (official site)

Bibliography:Jameson, Frederic. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).

An Englishwoman in LA

2010-12-09T07:57:00.001-08:00

I'm just back from a conference in LA (at UCLA) called Spaces and Flows where I gave a paper on schizocartography. I managed to get over there a couple of days before the conference in order to check out LA and do some urban walking. The following blogs will be covering a psychogeography of LA and will be appearing here on particulations over the next couple of weeks:

1 - An Englishwoman in LA (this blog)
2 - The Good Adventure: A Psychogeography of the Westin Bonaventure
3 - At UCLA You See LA (urban walking on UCLA campus)

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like But You Can Never Leave

These photos are views from my hotel in Downtown LA (Little Tokyo). The first one is from my hotel window (early morning), the second one is at street level.

The Hotel Miyako was really well situated for 'cultural' Downtown LA. I could walk to a number of galleries and museums and, more especially, the Westin Bonaventure which I really wanted to see thanks to Frederic Jameson:

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Walk/Don't Walk

I was slightly disappointed not to see the Walk/Don't Walk signs that I associate with the States. Maybe they only exists in some states, or maybe they are a thing of the past:

Walk/Don't Walk

Instead they had a red hand and a white walking man. The red hand counts down after a while to tell you how many seconds you have left to cross. It took me a few crossings to work out what the protocol was - and the roads are big, so you don't want to get stuck halfway. It seems that even when the white walking man appears, that cars can turn into the road providing you are not on the crossing. I must admit, I was confused and slightly anxious when crossing at first, as it was early in the day and not many pedestrians were around to mimic. But eventually I worked it out by seeing what others did, and reading the instructions on the side of the road. By the end of my trip I was getting quite cocky and even running across when the red hand was counting down.

Stop/Go

Urban Décor

Here is a sample of some of the urban décor that I came across.

I think I may start taking pictures of fire hydrants from around the world - we don't have them in the UK, or rather they are under man-hole covers. I got a nice image of a red one in Marrakesh when I was there in September. I took the above one in LA. They appear on the corner of every street.

Here is a heavily graffiti-ed rubbish bin (dumpster?). It's not artistic at all, but I was interested in the layers of graffiti that have appeared over time.

I had to take a photo of the signage for the bail bond agent as we don't have them in the UK. I went into the office to ask if I could take the photo. The manager was fine and appreciated that, being from the UK, they are of interest to foreigners.

This is how wikipedia describes Bail Bondsmen:
"A bail bond agent, or bondsman, is any person or corporation which will act as a surety and pledge money or property as bail for the appearance of a criminal defendant in court. Although banks, insurance companies and other similar institutions are usually the sureties on other types of contracts (for example, to bond a contractor who is under a contractual obligation to pay for the completion of a construction project) such entities are reluctant to put their depositors' or policyholders' funds at the kind of risk involved in posting a bail bond. Bail bond agents, on the other hand, are usually in the business to cater to criminal defendants, often securing their customers' release in just a few hours."

The above two images were taken quite close to each other in the region of Los Angeles St and Temple Street. I can't remember the exact location. I went into the mall. When I first spotted it on the map I was hoping for a really grand American mall like the ones you see in films. Sadly, it was more like an Arndale Centre (see my previous post on Headingley Arndale Centre: The Headingley Arndale Centre: Today and yesterday). Actually, it wasn't even really like an Arndale Centre, that would have been a compliment. It was one of those like the ones we get in the UK on the edge of towns. They are scruffy and concrete and look like they emerged in the 1970s. There's one in Norwich called Anglia Square which the Los Angeles Mall reminded me of: Anglia Square.

I liked the public art that looked like a space ship. It was massive and was really colourful in the sun. I don't have the name so can't look up any information on it. It looks like it might be Central American influenced. There were many homeless people in the area around the sculpture, on the surrounding benches. I saw lots of homeless people in Downtown LA and didn't even get as far as Skid Row. However, they do seem to have more 'stuff' than the UK homeless, which they moved around in shopping trolleys or by other means, sometimes piled over six feet high.

The Museum of Contemporary Art

MOCA is well worth a visit if you are in the area. There are works from Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Jackson Pollock in the permanent collection. The following images are from outside the gallery:

El Pueblo Historic Park

One afternoon I went to El Pueblo Historic Park which was about a 15 minute walk from my hotel. These are the images I took in that area. The mural photo came out really well. The park itself was a strange place, really rather like a non-place. It was quite fragmented. I couldn't work out who it was designed for. The Christmas tree looked strange to someone from the freezing north of the UK: seeing it in the sun surrounded by palm trees was very disorientating.

Be Yourself No Matter What They Say

I could have easily spent a week in Downtown LA, walking around the district. While I have not done a typical psychogeographic blog of the area (i.e. ignoring the obvious and taking photos of mostly signs and other urban phenomena), I hope that I have provided a somewhat alternative view to the conventional tourist approach. There were plenty of interesting buildings that I thought about photographing, for instance the Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Also, I didn't want to do a conventional psychogeographical urban walk and ignore objects that interested me. So, I guess, this blog is somewhere in between the two: neither anarchic, nor customary. I suppose it does reflect the title: An Englishwoman in LA. Perhaps this is my Crispesque subaltern response to Los Angeles. Because of this, and also because I may have short-changed those hardcore psychogeographers out there, I will close this blog by including the lyrics from the Stranglers song Dead Los Angeles. That way, no one can accuse me of totally selling out ; )

The Plastic Peaches There
On Concrete Beaches There
You See The Leeches There
You See The Leeches There
They're Soft Marshmallow There
It's Oh So Shallow There
In Dead Los Angeles
In Dead Los Angeles
The Dredged Up Mastodon
Has Got His Glasses On
He's Never Seen The Shit
From The La Brea Pit

The Lunar Base Camp There
With Burning Midnight Lamp
They Call It Frisbeeland
It's Just A Disneyland
Android Americans
Live In The Ruins There
In Dead Los Angeles
In Dead Los Angeles
The Dredged Up Mastodon
Has Got His Glasses On
He's Never Seen The Shit
From The La Brea Pit (repeat x 6)

They Get The Tremors There
Been Give Babylon
Plenty Of Companies
Such Lonely Company
I Hear A Symphony
Of Lonely Tympanis
In Dead Los Angeles
In Dead Los Angeles
The Dredged Up Mastodon
Has Got His Glasses On
He's Never Seen The Shit
From The La Brea Pit

Relates websites:
The Stranglers, The Raven Album
Spaces and Flows
An Englishman in New York by Sting
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)

The Seaside in Winter

2010-11-29T02:40:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has visited the seaside in the winter knows what a different place it is compared to the height of summer. One of the things that is most noticeable, are the local people who live there all year round. In the summer, when these seaside towns are brimming with visitors, it is easy to forget that the space we occupy as tourists, is actually the home of many of the people who we do not even notice when moving around the resort. Many old people retire to the seaside. Hunstanton in Norfolk, is one of these coastal towns. Quite a few of the elderly who live there have buggies. Below is a photo of three buggies outside the Union Church, where they have a coffee morning, and bring-and-buy on a Wednesday:

In order to get a sense of winter-time at the seaside, I decided to take a buggy out in the town while on one of my visits. And, so as to give you a flavour of the seaside in winter, I took the buggy onto the prom and videoed my journey.

Related seaside blog: Reading the Arcades/Reading the Promenades

The Scene of Teaching

2010-11-25T02:11:00.000-08:00

This was the "Scene of Teaching" at the University of Leeds on Wednesday November 24th 2010:

I shot this video outside the Parkinson Steps. I think the students were coming up from the other institutions south of Leeds uni - Leeds Metropolitan University and also the other colleges on the edge of the city - to tie up with the University of Leeds students.

When I entered the Ziff building I overheard a security guard saying a building had been occupied. While we were in there, a lock-down started and after finishing our coffee we had to leave via the fire exit which was manned by campus security.

The "Scene of Teaching" reference above is from a chapter on Bill Readings 1996 book The University in Ruins. This is part of the opening of the chapter:

The replacement of culture by the discourse of excellence is the University's response to 1968. In the face of student critiques of the contradiction between the University's claim to be a guardian of culture and its growing commitment to bureaucracy, the University has progressively abandoned its cultural claim. Forced to describe itself as either a bureaucratic-administrative or an idealistic institution, it chose the former. And consequently there is no way back to 1968: a repetition of the radical postures of the late 1960s is not adequate to resist the discourse of excellence. This is because the discourse of excellence can incorporate campus radicalism as proof of the excellence of campus life or of student commitment...

Well, I hope Readings is wrong, but I feel he's probably right. Capitalisms skill in re-routing desires back into the main system has historically been the sign of its success.

Relates websites:
The University of Leeds
May 1968
The University in Ruins