Research outline
This isn’t a full article, just an outline for a future research project; I apologize for the incompleteness of the research so far.
Check it out: I’ve been staying in hostels, traveling. I’ve been practicing dérive, being a flâneur. In my travels through the built-up environments of the twentieth century, I’ve developed a sensitivity to the psychogéographie of the spaces; they reflect and mold the consciousness of their inhabitants. This leads me to wonder: how should spaces be designed and established? how should their building and development respond to and integrate the psycho-spiritual lives of the beings (not just humans) inhabiting them?
Let’s begin with Baudelaire, whom I’ve spoken about previously. In particular, let’s discuss the flâneur, the wanderer or meanderer. The flâneur, in the context of his essay “La peintre de la vie moderne” where Baudelaire develops the concept, is the “impassioned observer” who moves through the crowd, feeding from it; the flâneur resonates with the moving mass of humanity, and delights in their beauty everywhere it is to be found. In short, they are the kind who walks, looking at the city as they go through it (compare to Fran Lebowitz).
Walter Benjamin, in his essay “Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle,” points out that
La génie de Baudelaire, qui trouve sa nourriture dans la mélancholie, est un génie allégorique. Pour la première fois chez Baudelaire, Paris devient objet de poësie lyrique. Cette poësie locale est à l’encontre de toute poësie de terroir. Le regard que le génie allégorique plonge dans la ville trahit bien plutôt le sentiment d’une profonde aliénation. C’est là le regard d’un flâneur, dont le genre de vie dissimule derrière un mirage bienfaisant la détresse des habitants futurs de nos metropoles. Le flâneur cherche un refuge dans la foule. La foule est le voile à travers lequel la ville familière se meut pour le flâneur en fantasmagorie. Cette fantasmagorie, où elle apparaît tantôt comme un paysage, tantôt comme une chambre, semble avoir inspiré par la suite le décor des grands magasins, qui mettent ainsi le flânerie même au service de leur chiffre d’affaires. Quoi qu’il en soit les grands magasins sont les derniers parages de la flânerie.
Benjamin wrote this passage directly in French, and this is how I’d translate it today:
Beaudelaire’s genius, which feeds off melancholy, is a genius of allegory. In Baudelaire’s work, Paris becomes the object of lyric poetry for the first time. This local poetry is opposed to all country-side poetry. The gaze of the allegorical genius, plunged into the city, betrays first and foremost a profound sense of alienation. This is the gaze of a flâneur, whose life-style conceals behind a cheery mirage the distress of our metropolis’ future inhabitants. The flâneur seeks a refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into a phantasmagoria. This phanstasmagoria, where the city appears now as a country side, now as a room, seems to have inspired the decor of the large stores, who thereby use the flâneur themselves for their own profits. Whatever the cause, the great stores are the last haunts of the flâneur.
In other words, the free drift of the flâneur through the city streets and the gaze that they cast thereupon have been recuperated by the capitalists as the aesthetic content of a new kind of store, thereby capturing the new fantasy of an urban landscape produced by the flâneur. The final development of the city is the shopping mall, whose origin Benjamin prefigures in his discussion of Fourier’s passages and Grandville’s universal expositions earlier in the same essay. The flâneur’s (perhaps delirious) vision of the crowd in motion and of the poetry of city blocks becomes a new way to sell merchandise: the flâneur’s thrist for the new and different becomes precisely the means by which merchants are able to push ever more products on the consumers.
Benjamin’s pessimistic reading (this essay was written in 1939) of the flâneur’s recuperation by the forces of capital is not the only possible result of unguided expoloration through the city: Guy Debord and his colleagues in the Internationale lettriste developed, in the mid-1950s, a method they called dérive, meaning “drift”: Debord’s essay on the “Théorie de la dérive” defines dérive “comme une technique du passage hâtif à travers des ambiances variées” or (in my translation) “as a technique of passing quickly through varied environments.” They describe the process thus:
Une ou plusieurs personnes se livrant à la dérive renoncent pour une durée plus ou moins longue, aux raisons de se déplacer et d’agir qu’elles se connaissent généralement, aux relations, aux travaux et aux loisirs qui leur sont propres, pour se laisser aller aux sollicitations du terrian et des rencontres qui y correspondent.
One or multiple people hand themselves over to the drift by renouncing for a longer or shorter time, for reasons of movement and action that they usually know, their relationships, work, and leisure, in order to let themselves go with the desires and encounters of the terrain.
When you’re on a dérive, as made evident from “Deux comptes rendus de dérive,” from the same author, you let yourself drift through the city according to its inherent flow. In short, you just walk around, or maybe take a taxi or the metro, and go where ever you feel the city pulling you, telling you to go. You hand yourself over to the chance and happenstance encounters that spring up, and allow yourself to float (having abandonned all that weighs you down) through the invisible flows and currents of the urban space in it in “un comportement ludique-constructif, ce qui l’oppose en tous points aux notions classiques de voyage et de promenade,” “a playful-constructive manner, one that is opposed in all ways to classical notions of travel and walking.”
In this way, you explore the psychogéographie of the city: “il exist un relief psychogéographique des villes, avec des courants constants, des points fixes et des tourbillions qui rendent l’accès ou la sortie de certaines zones fort malaisés.” “Cities have a psychogeographic topography, with constant currents, fixed points, and whirlpools that make it very difficult to access or leave certain zones.” The city has a certain invisible rhythm and movement. Uncovering these fields and their impacts on the humans who inhabit them is the role of psychogeography, using the technique of dérive.
They are closely linked: in his “Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine,” Debord describes psychogeography as “l’étude des lois exactes et des effets précis du millieu géographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus” or “the study of the exact laws and precise effects of the geographic setting, consiciously arranged or not, that act directly on individuals’ affective behavior.” Psychogeography seeks to uncover how, exactly, the spaces we inhabit affect and determine what we do, how we feel, and what we are.
One must, then, mention the work of architects such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Le Corbusier, and Paolo Soleri, who sought to redesign our urban spaces according to new techniques. Indeed, Benjamin explicitly mentions the relationship between interior design under the reign of Louis-Philippe and urban design by Haussmann in his essay cited above: the spaces we inhabit are reflections of who we are, and in turn create us. But this threatens to lead into a study of the history of urban design, potentially as far back as cities have existed, and so I’ll stop here; anyhow, there’s much more research to be done.
At this point we return to my traveling: I have been drifting around Europe, following the psychogeographic currents. Both in each individual place and across the continent, I’ve been drifting. I’ve been melting into and observing the crowd whirling before me, and noticing the details of the placed I’m in.
The hostels have each had their own personality: in some way, it seems to correlate with the design, but the social structure of the emplyees has a large role. And sometimes there’s just an inexplicable feeling about the place that makes it nice or unpleasant. Somehow, it’s easier to strike up a conversation with a stranger in certain rooms and more difficult in others. I guess it has something to do with the design.
