What is the SCRIB Project?

The SCRIB Project is about the aesthetics of space from the perspective of the pedestrian in the cityscape. SCRIB promotes access to privately owned public spaces (POPS) and supports and advises organisations who are open to collaborations with various ‘actors’ and stakeholders. We help developers read the city and account for the multitude of objects and networks that make up the urban landscape.

SCRIB is concerned with upholding the relational aesthetics of place and the heterogeneity that is inscribed in a specific geographical area. We help connect people to places by involving them through meaning-making and material interaction.

This project is in its very early stages. Please refer back to this blog for further information. Thank you.

Walking Inside Out – Conclusion Extract 3

It’s Psychogeography’s Turn

Attempting to define something as ‘new’ that has not appeared out of a distinct break from the past is beset with problems. In academic theory the tendency is to use the word ‘turn’ (linguistic turn, spatial turn and so on). I would prefer to describe the current movement in psychogeography as more like a gentle bend in the road. I see the motifs under discussion here as representing leanings rather than seeing them as a clearly defined set of criteria about what something is and what something is not. This is not a radical break. There are qualities of contemporary urban walking that are Situationist, in the same way that there are similarities with the 1990s resurgence of psychogeography. An epoch of any kind does not end one day and the next day begin with a whole new set of different or opposing themes, as can be seen when discussing modernity ‘versus’ postmodernity within the framework of cultural epochs. They bleed into each other, but they also contain distinctions that respond to their cultural (politico-social) moment in time.

It could be argued that not enough time has lapsed to look at how and why today’s psychogeography is different from that of the 1990s. A lack of critical distance might mean it is not possible to state what today’s urban walking is in concrete terms. Labelling it in any way could be foolhardy. However, starting a dialogue about the changes that are taking place is important in a book about contemporary psychogeography. I also appreciate that attempts to define it may be considered to go against what psychogeography represents (labelling, constricting, limiting). Nevertheless, many of my own discussions in recent years with those in and out of the field, and those I have read in journal articles or online blogs, demonstrate that there is a general consensus that a revival is taking place. If this is the case, we need to consider what form this psychogeography might take and why. Not least because we should think about how it can be used productively in a changing historical, political and cultural milieu.

Please click here for more extracts: Resurgence and the Virtual and What is British Psychogeography?

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

Walking Inside Out – Conclusion Extract 2

The Matter of Psychogeography

Conclusion Extract 1: Resurgence and the Virtual

The current interest in rewriting and remapping urban space has taken hold at a time when communicating with each other has never been easier (aided by the internet and social networking). This has coincided with a geo-political moment when people are aware they have a stake in a city that is diminishing before their eyes. The differing groups and alternative strategies that come under the umbrella of psychogeography today, more than at any other time, are making available psychogeographical tools to fellow urbanites in order to help them express their subjective response to living/working in and moving about the city. Psychogeography related events and projects - even if they are not necessarily overtly activist or even described as psychogeography - enable a re/connection with a material space that is always potentially under threat of being renegotiated into private/prohibited space.

This connection to the concrete space of our towns and cities reflects a desire to offer a material/archaeological critique which excavates signs contained in the terrain that might be contrary to the dominant discourse (something that could be placed under the rubric of schizocartography). It often involves an exploration of the social history of a space that may exist below the surface and might not be obvious on a cursory viewing. The study of material culture helps reveal social boundaries - and the very ‘matter’ under critique by psychogeographers is urban space itself.

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

Walking Inside Out – Introduction Extract 2

What Doth a Psychogeographer Make?

To provide an aphorism of what psychogeographers do and why they walk assumes they are a generic group, which is not the case. It is as difficult as trying to provide a pithy sentence to describe what a writer or artist does and why they do it. Nevertheless, there are some universal qualities that are representative of many psychogeographers and that may help explain their intention. For instance, they attempt to connect with the terrain in a way that is other to that of a casual stroll, bringing a focus to the walk that takes it beyond both a ‘Sunday walk’ in the country (where the landscape almost appears to be placed their in order to be admired) and that of the Saturday shopping expedition in the local high street. It is neither of these. Nor is it about getting from A to B - it is absolutely about the process itself, however clichéd that may sound. The walker connects with the terrain in a way that sets her/himself up as a critic of the space under observation, but at the same time they unite with it through the sensorial acknowledgement of its omnipresence. The space becomes momentarily transformed through this relationship. The psychogeographer recognises that they are part of this process and it is their presence that enables this recognition to occur.

The form and purpose behind the critique of the topology/topography will be very dependent on the individual walker. It might involve making mental connections with the space through a song or piece of literature or it may involve a philosophical/theoretical analysis of particular objects under scrutiny. It could also be an overtly political process which applies an assessment of the power structures in play in a given situation or even a physical act of challenging those very structures directly in the moment. This could be thought of as a kind of traversing, whereby the walker sees this as a negotiation of the space which questions established routes and draws attention to the possibility of approaching the territory in a different way.

Please click here for other extracts: Introduction 1

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order

Mindful Walking and the Postmodern Urbanscape – Part 2

Please click here for part 1

Encouraging forms of mindful walking that respond directly to individuals’ affective reaction to space encourages a more positive engagement with that space. I do not mean ‘positive’ as opposed to ‘negative’ - it is fine for someone to dislike an aspect of their town or city - but positive in regard to a wish to explore it, to understand how it came to be the way it is and to think about the feelings they have which might arise in regard to it. This type of walking can be seen as a form of enactment which “might serve to both challenge and confirm prevalent forms of spatial ordering, dependent on the possible intersections of experience, power and ways of seeing and doing that inhabit the individual at any given moment” (Hancock and Spicer 2011). Mindful walking can help to create counter-narratives to the dominant discourse on particular spaces, becoming what Edward Soja would describe as a “thirdspace”.

I do not want to be prescriptive in how mindful walking should be enacted. I also would not necessarily employ, in any wholesale kind of way, the Situationist form of psychogeography to every scenario. The strategies employed for particular groups would emerge from the groups themselves through the help of facilitation: literally from the ground up. In this way the desire of the group (the “subject-group” as it would be for Félix Guattari) would promote a “semiotic poly-centrism” that supports “equal acceptance to all desire whether it makes sense or not, by not seeking to make subjectivation fit in with the dominant significations and social laws” (Guattari 1984). It would be in this way that citizens can speak to their city. As the sentence quoted by Roland Barthes in part 1 continues: “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” (1967).

I introduce this concept of mindful walking in these two blogs as a way of opening up discussion on further exploring the urban imaginary through the act of walking…

Mindful Walking and the Postmodern Urbanscape – Part 1

Physical agglomerations in the form of buildings, roads, paths, street décor and all the spaces in between, make up our urban landscape. While our towns and cities have gradually developed over time, one of the side-effects of urban planning is that of the homogenisation of the landscape such that it appears to have been that was ‘forever’. Take your regular walk to work as an example: have you noticed how you see new hoardings appear, then later the building work begins behind the hoarding, then upon completion the hoardings are removed and the new building appears in its fullness? In a very short space of time you will have forgotten what was previously in its place. The space will become ‘stable’ again.

Nevertheless, behind these structures sit power-relations in the form of authoritarian schemas: political decisions, competing agencies, organisational collaborations, policy-making and so forth. The schemas which represent the manifestation of structures that appear in urban space have a discourse which supports the ideology behind them: from the gestation of the development plan itself, through to the materialised object. The final project - be it a shopping centre, public housing complex or a new road system - is built on this discourse and becomes a representation of it. As Roland Barthes states in his text ‘Semiology and Urbanism’: “The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language” (1967).

However, the formations, processes and narratives that support the urbanscape often have a preference for producing a particular subjectivity in their pedestrian citizens, one of worker-consumer. Postmodern space is neoliberal in its moorings and along with this a habitus is defined which encourages specific behaviours, gestures and actions from us. As discussed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, power is spatially manifest: operations and procedures applied to the body-politic take place in material structures that appear in concrete form. The authority attached to procedures are oriented in space and come in the guise of statements that become naturalised upon being repeated by not only those designated to do so, but also they become legitimised by being mediated through popular narratives and discourse. Moreover, while the heterogeneity of postmodern space should, theoretically, contain the possibility of a multiplicity of potential subjectivities, subjectivities that do not conform to a neoliberal ideology are discouraged, or at least not encouraged. This means that individual desires that are outwith the project of capital tend to get co-opted by capital, rather than being allowed to run free.

For the pedestrian (for example, the worker or shopper), their individual desires tend to become either rerouted or suppressed by the urban landscape, to the extent that little internal thought arises, to any level of full consciousness, around how the urban space came to be the way it is. Nevertheless, these desires still exist because of the aesthetics of space and the affective response that results, even if it is not consciously acknowledged. This means that to be able to really ‘see’ the city individuals need to be encouraged to move about it in a new way. One could say that they need to be educated to respond to it somatically and aesthetically.

Please click here for part 2

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 2): Sigmund Freud

In part 1 of the blog I discussed Michel De Certeau's definition of the terms 'space' and 'place' from The Practice of Everyday Life, one of the main differences between the two being that place prohibits the superimposition of particular phenomenon, while space is able to cope with the contradictions of multiple and differing actors/actions, systems, agendas, etc.

Here I shall be providing an interesting spatial reference by Freud from Civilization and its Discontents which is offered as a kind of thought experiment for his readers in order to help explain how the ego operates on a developing sense of self in the individual. Freud explains that our initial sense of self - as a baby - is of an oceanic nature. It is connected to the vastness of the world, with no clearly defined subject/object boundaries. As we develop, the ego separates off from the outside world and becomes removed from this 'oneness'. However, Freud says, there is still a trace of this oceanic moment in our memory, as with those subsequent developmental phases that we seem to also forget on a conscious level (e.g. the Oedipal stages). This eloquent analogy by Freud, below, demonstrates that nothing is ever totally lost in internal space - the mind. But from the perspective of place and space, as it is for De Certeau, it offers up an example of external space, replete with its ambiguities, oppositions and negations - and how that space might be, if it weren't for place:

"Now let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome in not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent. For Rome this would mean that on the Palatine hill the imperial palaces and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus still rose to their original height, that the castle of San Angelo still bore on its battlements the fine statues that adorned it until the Gothic siege. Moreover, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus wuld once more stand on the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli, withought there being any need to dismantle the latter structure, and indeed the temple would be seen not only in its later form, which is assumed during the imperial age, but also in its earliest, when it still had Etruscan elements and was decorated with terracotta antefixes. And where the Coliseo now stands we could admire the vanished Domus Aurea of Nero; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the present Pantheon, bequeathed by Hadrian, but the original structure of M. Agrippa; indeed, occupying the same ground would be the church of Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it is built. And the observer would perhaps need only to shift his gaze or his position in order to see the one or the other.

It is clearly pointless to spin out this fantasy any further: the result would be unimaginable, indeed absurd. If we wish to represent a historical sequence in spatial terms, we can do so only by juxtaposition in space, for the same space cannot accommodate two different things. Our attempt to do otherwise seems like an idle game; its sole justification is to show how far we are from being able to illustrate the peculiarities of mental life by visual means."

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 1): Michel De Certeau

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 1): Michel De Certeau

The definitions of space and place are multifarious and vary not only between fields of theory (cultural geography, urban sociology, etc) but also between individual theorists within the same field. Below I have provided the example set out by Michel De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. It may seem complex upon first reading it, but when you start to think about applying examples to what De Certeau describes, it becomes easier to understand. Part 2 of this blog will provide an interesting cultural example (architectural and psychoanalytical) of how the world might be if space and place were collapsed into each other.

"A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct locations, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relations to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependant upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper'.

In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs."

Space/Place, Culture and Time (Part 2): Sigmund Freud

Lefebvre, Rationality and Zoning. Part 2: Space is the most general of tools

Part 1 of this blog covered the zoning used by urban planners to rationalise space, and the cultural effects produced by that in relation to 'difference'. I also made reference to the naturalising function of this on space itself and how Louis Althusser's ideological state apparatuses theory can be applied to our individual subjectification process in this regard. Here's that blog:

Lefebvre, Rationality and Zoning. Part 2: The analytical activity that discerns differences

This blog looks at what Henri Lefebvre means by "abstract space" and then includes a paragraph of his from The Production of Space that relates to the rationality and zoning theme of these two blogs, while demonstrating its actual effects on space (urban and otherwise).

While'abstract' appears to be quite an innocuous and bland word - while at the same time having many theoretical interpretations, not least Marxian ones, which bring with it a whole load of deconstructionist baggage - for Lefebvre it has a very specific and far from insipid meaning when he applies it to one of his forms of space.

Thetypes of space Lefebvre uses are: social, absolute, abstract, contradictory, differential, etc. They can co-exist. This blog is only concerned with abstract space. I find the best way to understand abstract space is by applying some of the tenets of neoliberlism (capitalism, etc) directly to space. Therefore, if you have a general understanding of capitalism in postmodernity in regards to how it functions - e.g. homogeneity, abstraction (in the Marxian sense), the co-existence of dichotomies such as absence/presence (in other words dualities) and, say, a focus on the visual (or, if you will, the spectacle) - then you will get it. Add a bit of Baudrillard's critique of the sign in Simulacra and Simulation and you've pretty much got it nailed.

So,for Lefebvre, abstract space is perfectly able to cope with contradictions in regards to representation. It is also duplicitous - well, in fact, it is duplicitous because of this. As Lefebvre states: "it is both a result and a container". One of the cleverest tricks it employs, as discussed in the last blog, is the fudging of the apparent temporal direction in regards to cause and effect. Some of the binary oppositions it happily co-presents with absolutely no negation at all are: positive/negative, empty/full, constraining/stimulating, distance/limit, local/global, benevolent/malevolent, etc, the list is endless...

So,now you understand a bit more what abstract space is for Lefevbre, this is the paragraph I promised. Here he explains the result of abstract spaces raison d'etre:

"...absraction's modus operandi is devastation, destruction (even if such destruction may sometimes herald creation). Signs have something lethal about them - not by virtue of 'latent' or so-called unconscious forces, but, on the contrary, by virtue of the forced introduction of abstraction into nature. The violence involved does not stem from some force intervening aside from rationality, outside or beyond it. Rather, it manifests itself from the moment any action introduces the rational into the real, from the outside, by means of tools which strike, slice and cut - and keep doing so until the purpose of their aggression is achieved. For space is instrumental - indeed it is the most general of tools." (page 289)


The following two blogs relating to the cutting up of space may also be of interest:

Cutting up Space Part 1: L = S - [l + c + i = e + p]
Looks at a formula used in how land value is calculated in the marketplace.

Cutting up Space Part 2: The Laws of Form
Introduces G Spencer Brown's calculus of indications in relation to demarcating space.

Bibliography:
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).

Lefebvre, Rationality and Zoning. Part 1: The analytical activity that discerns differences

Tallahassee Land Use, USA

CC Wikimedia Commons

There's much written about the zoning used by local councils to manage and control space, which I'm not particularly going to go into here. But, being an urban aesthete I am intrigued by the control of space and the effects of that rationale on the individual. I'm also interested in how this is considered from a philosophical perspective. Here are some comments that Henri Lefebvre has made in The Production of Space on zoning. I'm going to provide a section of Lefebvre's text in full, then situate that within his discussion on "abstract space" in Part 2of this blog.

"Zoning...which is responsible - precisely - for fragmentation, break-up and separation under the umbrella of a bureaucratically decreed unity, is conflated with the rational capacity to discriminate. The assignment of functions, and the way functions are actually distributed 'on the ground', becomes indistinguishable from the kind of analytical activity that discerns differences. What is being covered up here is moral and political order: the specific power that organizes these conditions, with its specific socio-economic allegiance, seems to flow directly from the Logos - that is, from a 'consensual' embrace of the rational." (page 317)

One of the key things Lefebvre mentions here is the 'covering up' and being a psychogeographer, this is what I'm particularly interested in: what's behind the spectacle. The political decisions and administrative procedures that make space appear the way it does behind the representations, the signs, that end up manifesting themselves in space in a seemingly innocuous way, to such an extent that they appear 'natural'. Louis Althusser talks about this naturalising function in his Ideological State Apparatuses essay (which is one of my favourite texts and I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in how the individual is functionally situated as a citizen in society). Althusser explains that it is the raison d'etre of the various state apparatuses of which we partake/belong/sign-up to, that they "interpellate" us in such a way that we do not realise that we are being fixed, identified and recognised as such. But, what is crucial to Althusser, is that we don't realise this is happening to us. Althusser's clever example is of a policeman who hails someone in the street, but we turn around because we think he's hailed us (we recognise ourself in the call 'hey you there'), and in that bodily turn, and that recognition, we become interpellated by the system, by the apparatus. We take up our place as a citizen subject, this is 'natural'. In fact, and Althusser leaves this fantastic bombshell till later in the text, this happen before we are even born! (I won't explain this to you here, go read the text, it's well worth it).

Anyway, I only slightly, digress. This 'covering up' and 'naturalising' of space works in a similar way to that which I've explained by Althusser's interpellation. We situate ourselves in urban space as subjects by following its paths, accepting its rules and bylaws, and behaving like 'good' citizens. We don't question the ideological processes that take place behind it most of the time. And, even if we do on occasions complain about a 'monstrous' piece of architecture we might not like, or that new supermarket on the edge of town, on an everyday basis we are interpellated by the urban decor that controls our behaviour and that we obsequiously obey.

Moreover - and more importantly to Lefebvre here - the bureaucratic processes that hide under the veil of urban space, work in a reflexive way such that they both conceal and create the differences that are formed through the rationalising formulations actually used in, for example, zoning. We (society) creates differences, then comments on those differences like they came about all on their own. Historically they have appeared - spatially - in anything from workhouses to ghettos, with the actual forming of the differences being concealed under the 'natural order of things'.

Related posts:

Space as a Locus of Production
Louis Althusser, Ideology and the Practices of the Institution
The Power of Representation

Bibliography:

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).

Space as a Locus of Production

Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space has some interesting hypothetical arguments that he presents as debates on issues arising in his text. One of my favourite ones is a conversation between a supposed interlocutor, who has taken a rather reductionist approach to Lefebvre's concept on the production of space, and a supporter of it. It's worth reading in its completeness, so I've included it all here:

'I am not convinced by your arguments. You talk of "producing space". What an absolutely unintelligible phrase! Even to speak of a concept in this connection would be to grant you far too much. No, there are only two possibilities here. Either space is part of nature or it is a concept. If it is part of nature, human - or "social" - activity marks it, invests it and modifies its geographical and ecological characteristics; the role of knowledge, on this reading, would be limited to the description of these changes. If space is a concept, it is as such already a part of knowledge and of mental activity, as in mathematics for example, and the job of scientific thought is to explore, elaborate upon and develop it. In neither case is there such a thing as the production of space.'

'Just a moment. The separations you are taking for granted between nature and knowledge and nature and culture are simply not valid. They are no more valid than the widely accepted "mind-matter" split. These distinctions are simply no improvement on their equally unacceptable opposite - namely, confusion. The fact is that technological activity and the scientific approach are not satisfied with simply modifying nature. They seek to master it, and in the process they tend to destroy it; and, before destroying it, they misinterpret it. This process began with the invention of tools.'

'So now you are going back to the Stone Age! Isn't that a little early?'

'Not at all. The beginning was the first premeditated act of murder; the first tool and the first weapon - both of which went hand in hand with the advent of language.'

'What you seem to be saying is that humankind emerges from nature. It can thus only understand nature from without - and it only gets to understand it by destroying it.'

'Well if one accepts the generalization "humankind" for the sake of the argument, then, yes, humankind is born in nature, emerges from nature and then turns against naature with the unfortunates results that we are now witnessing.'

'Would you say that this ravaging of nature is attributable to capitalism?'

'To a large degree, yes. But I would add the rider that capitalism and the bourgeoisie have a broad back. It is easy to attribute a multitude of misdeeds to then without addressing the question of how they themselves cam into being.'

'Surely the answer is to be found in mankind itself, in human nature?'

'No. In the nature of the Western man perhaps.'

'You man to say that you would blame the whole history of the West, its rationalism, its Logos, its very language?'

'It is the West that is responsible for the transgression of nature. It would certainly be interesting to know how and why this has come about, but those questions are strictly secondary. The simple fact is that the West has broken the bounds. "O felix culpa!" a theologian might say. And, indeed, the West is thus responsible for what Hegel calls the power of the negative, for violence, terror and permanent aggression directed against life. It has generalized and globalized violence - and forged the global level itself through that violence. Space as locus of production, as itself product and production, is both the weapon and the sign of this struggle. If it is to be carried through to the end - there is in any case no way of turning back - this gigantic task now calls for the immediate production or creation of something other than nature: a second, different or new nature, so to speak. This means the production of space, urban space, both as product and as work, in the sense in which art created works. If this project fails, the failure will be total, and the consequences of that are impossible to foresee.' (page 108-110)

Links:

Henri Lefebvre on NotBored.org

The Perturbed Psychogeographer

Bibliography:

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).

The Perturbed Psychogeographer: Contemplating Olympic Space, the Shard and Architectural Phalluses in General

The oversubscribed Olympic space in London has got me thinking lately. In the run-up everyone who was anyone was talking about what the East End meant to them (Paloma Faith, Dizzee Rascal, et al). Then in addition all the 'psychogeographers' were also providing their responses, albeit rather less publicly or media-led. I pondered on what I would do if I was a London-based psychogeographer. Would I just refuse to talk/write/blog about it? Would I get out of London and write about somewhere else instead, by way of protest? Or, would I try to do something really unconventional? (if that is at all possible within an already unorthodox domain).

Coincidentally I came across a paragraph by Henri Lefevbre this week in The Production of Space where he mentions this oversubscribing, or over-inscribing, as he calls it. He says:

"Both natural and urban spaces are...'over-inscribed': everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory. Rather than signs, what one encounters here are directions - multifarious and overlapping instructions. If there is indeed text, inscription or writing to be found here, it is in a context of conventions, intentions and order (in the sense of social order versus disorder). That space signifies is incontestable. But what it signifies is dos and don'ts - and this brings us back to power. (page 142)"

Needless to say, these manifestations of power are what many psychogeographers are interested in in the urban sphere, but this paragraph above also reminds us of how those who are moving in, around and out of the Olympic area (or London in general) will be responding directly to the urban décor placed there to control their behaviour. What the Situationists described as "fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones."

In this sense - as symbols and phenomenon of seemingly latent power - Freud may be useful for explaining how the signs in the urban environment operate on us unconsciously. His term 'overdetermination' is often used in dream analysis. It demonstrates that many different elements appearing in the manifest dream can be traced back to a smaller number of latent elements. For instance - and to be both obvious and facetious - the broken stick on the pavement, the knife in the drawer and the clipped off end of the cigar, are all manifestations of the fear of castration that might appear in this hypothetical dream.

So on that note I'll leave you with a great big phallus - London's newest, which I photographed last autumn while it was still under constructions, The Shard. It is a perfect example of the superego in operation in public space. In my slightly-more-than-amateur analysis it represents: erection (in both the architectural and male sense), power and domination over those below (see De Certeau's opening to 'Walking in the City') and 'the voice of the father' (if you don't try and seduce your mother, or kill me, you can have all this too)!

Links:
The Overdetermination of the Space of the University

Bibliography:
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell).

The Scopophilic Psychogeographer and The Other-as-Exhibition

© Simon Bradley

This is me looking into a window of a small shop in Holbeck, Leeds. It is an area that I am particularly interested in because it is on the edge of one of those Urban Village projects which is a short distance away at the South side of Leeds railway station: Holbeck Urban Village. This photo was taken in, what I call, 'Holbeck Proper'. It is an area that is a large square of terraces that you can see here:

These terraces are gradually being pulled down by the council, although this has come to a temporary halt because they have run out of money (a local solicitor informed me). If you walk around this area, you can see the gaps left where some of the terraces were standing not long ago.

Holbeck Proper is an area of Leeds that is part of the urban regeneration programme. It is not a very well-off area and properties are selling at around £60,000 at the moment. I am not sure what the council are offering - money-wise - to those who they want to move in order to redevelop the area. I also heard that at some point the postcode will be changed to LS1 so as to include it in the Central Leeds region. The repercussions of this move are far-reaching in relation to property values and for those who will be priced out of the market in an area that is currently considered to be mostly working-class (unlike Holbeck Urban Village).

I find this a really intriguing area for many reasons. But I also have a problem with my own interest in the area. I like it, aesthetically, because it is a concentrated area of lovely back-to-back redbricks, which have a long and fascinating history in relation to urban planning. It is also interesting in regards to the demographic, with areas of white working-class and also first, second and third, generation Asian locals. I did find an online article in a US paper recently that mentioned some tensions between the youths of these two groups in the context of a discussion on two 'rival' groups in New York.

My problem is not new in the field of ethnography (not that that is my field) or in any field where one is observing another group where there may be issues relating to power in regards to representation in socio-political life. It has a long history in relation to the postcolonial other, so there is much written about it, especially in cultural theory. My own concern is with regards to my own practice, that of psychogeography. Much of the time this isn't a problem, as I am usually the one who is challenging the boundaries of power. This is mostly manifest in the classic security-guard-phenomena whereby they often seem to be ignorant of a law whereby providing you are standing on public property, you can take a photo. For my own experiences on this, see the following two blogs:

Kirkstall Valley Subdub or the Prozac Walk

The Forgotten Solo Dérive

What troubles me is that while psychogeography is a psychological response to urban space that takes in all the senses, being a psychogeographer can be a very scopophilic pursuit (the love of looking). And while this isn't an issue in regards to power most of the time, in certain situations it does feel like it is. I don't mean that I am a scientist observing another culture in an anthropological sense, but that I am in someone else's space, observing it, photographing it, and commenting upon it. And there are more than ethics involved in this process of observing "ethnoscapes"(Arjun Appadurai).

Links:

Knitting a New Holbeck

Cutting up Space, Part 2: The Laws of Form

G. Spencer Brown's fabulous book on the calculus of indications, The Laws of Form, begins thus:

The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an inside from an outside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance.

Who would not want to continue reading this book after that enticingly fabulous introduction? Especially someone like myself who is interested in both language and urban space (specifically psychogeography and poststructuralist theory).

While the above paragraph sounds very philosophical, the book is nevertheless a mathematics-based book also, which includes Boolean algebra, the algebra of logic. This mostly appears in the form of symbols and simple formula, most of which is beyond me. However, I do understand the philosophical material, al lot of which is redolent of non-dual eastern philosophical discussion - and indeed G. Spencer Brown was a student of R. D. Laing (many of the terms Brown uses are translatable into psychoanalysis: for example, condensation and compensation). The concepts can also be applied to theories of self and other, of which Laing has written.

The book was described in its day as a mathematics of consciousness and became useful as a springboard into the theory of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela) and in second-order observation.

The basic symbol of the theory is the cross: the 'mark' or cross'.

It is a mark that forms a boundary, separating one space from another by creating a distinction. An inside and an outside, or a 'this' and everything else that isn't 'this, if you will. It also assumes an observer of the differentiation. Various actions can then be taken that involve crossing the boundary - once or twice, crossing then returning, etc. - and the result of carrying out these transactions. This mark, the cross, when it exists creates a marked state. When it does not it is an unmarked state, or the void, or nothingness (hence it's relationship to non-dual Eastern religion).

Already you may be able to see the potential relationship with deconstruction and its interest in the binary oppositions inherent in language. Not as much as you might expect has been written about the relationship between the two, although Niklas Luhman has done so, since he is a proponent of second-order observation theory too. There is also some parergonal logic in the Brown text. As discusses by Jacques Derrida in The Truth in Painting (in very simple terms, where the framing of the artwork creates both a division but also a bridge, this concept also being applied to theory itself).

My potential interest in the book in relationship to its uses in psychogeography are around the ideas of inclusion/exclusion, directions of observation, urban planning and zoning, crossing boundaries, self and 'the other', etc. I'd be interested in any mathematical psychogeographers who might have some more thoughts about it.

I'll sign off with this brilliant passage from the notes at the end of the book:

[In order for the universe to have the function of seeing itself] evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which can be seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct form itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false too, itself. In this condition it will always partly elude itself.

NB: I have a beautiful second edition copy of the book. I had wanted a copy for a long time so treated myself to one for completing my Masters. It has a great 1970s-esque cover, shown below:

Please click here for Part 1 of this blog: Cutting up Space, Part 1: L = S - [l + c + i = e + p]