Digger psycholudology reclaims the street

The San Franscisco Diggers (earlier, more in the future) were the anti-hippie radicals working inside Haight-Ashbury. 'Manhood in the Age of Aquarius' is an excellent on-line resource by Tim Hodgdon on the history of the Diggers and in this book we find the following explanation for an event that combines motives from the future Reclaim the Street movement with play tactics from psychogeo inspired street art. 

The Diggers' first happening, on 31 October 1966, attempted to reclaim the street as free territory.

They announced the event in thousands of handbills distributed in advance. The key to deciphering the cryptic text was a direct quotation from McLuhan: "an informed public is its own worst enemy." As "public enemies," the Diggers intended to inform the public by offering it a new frame of reference: in the left-hand column of the handbill they rendered a likeness of a picture frame, "the Digger Square," through which the public could watch a "reality" quite different from that framed by a television screen—a medium that, contrary to Abraham Lincoln's aphorism, "FOOLS ALL OF THE PUBLIC ALL OF THE TIME." Thus, "The Public is Any Fool On The Street," and every fool knew that "PUBLIC STREETS CONVEY MACHINES—ONLY A FOOL WALKS IN TRAFFIC."

But the Diggers saw the state regulation of pedestrians as designed to maximize the flow of traffic for the benefit of commercial interests. To raise consciousness of how deeply those interests restricted individual freedom of movement for the benefit of the few, the Diggers invited the public to play "THE INTERSECTION GAME," which "Any number of fools can play." They drew a diagram, roughly the same size as the Digger Square, of various ways to cross an intersection on foot, and placed it in the right-hand column. They urged people to "BRING A SQUARE"—perhaps a frame, or perhaps a person—"TO DIG THE INTERSECTION GAME" at 5:30 PM, at the intersection of Haight and Masonic Streets.

On the appointed Monday evening, the Diggers set up their yellow, wooden Free Frame of Reference at the corner of Haight and Masonic. With two puppets borrowed from the Mime Troupe (each standing about eight feet high, and requiring the coordinated efforts of two skilled operators located inside), they warmed up a crowd of about five hundred with a skit, "Any Fool on the Street," in which the puppets passed repeatedly through the Frame while carrying on an absurd, boisterous argument about which side constituted the "inside." With the assembled throng now primed for participation, the Diggers proceeded to the next stage of their plan. They invited the assembled crowd to stroll the crosswalks, in disregard of traffic law, creating as many geometrical figures as possible. Traffic came to a standstill.

#trickquestion

Manuel Castells was being interviewed for a recent Dutch documentary on the crisis, you can watch it here. I saw a bit of in the break of the Robin Hood film I was watching and I thought Yeah! this is how it is.

This idea that this is not a crisis, but a trick, do you agree with that?  

Absolutely. On the trick part. It is a crisis, in economic terms, but the crisis in fact has been used to improve the power and the profits of the financial groups which are in fact the leading elite in our society. All major banks and financial institutions in the last year have reported extraordinary profits. But now the governments are in a fiscal crisis, the governments need the money, and the banks say: “Well, in order to be stable and not to go back into our trouble, we cannot lend it to you. And in fact, the only way we are going to lend something to someone if you start cutting wages, firing workers, curtailing social rights and eliminating the collective power of the unions.” In that sense, the trick part of this statement seems to be empirically supported. Because profits are hugely up, some of the Spanish banks have reported largest profits in history, in 2010. And at the same time, the condition has been created for an assault on the welfare state, social rights, labour union power, and in fact on all the institutions that were constructing people’s lives in terms of their basic needs. So I don't think it’s necessarily conspiracy of the capitalist class and organisation but ultimately it is being used in those terms. So in the perception of people this is obviously a trick.

Skatebored urban activism

Ian Borden, UK theorist, architectural historian and skateboarder, visited The Hague on the 9th of June to lecture about skateboarding as an urban space production system. My review for Archined in Dutch is here. In my teens I used to skate a lot and the central idea of his work has always seemed completely reasonable to me: the idea that skateboarders through their special needs find novel ways to use and interpret the city. Using previews on Google Books I read some bits and pieces of Borden's writing and I didn't like what I read. 

"....the "ollie", the impact-adhesion-ascension procedure by which the skater unweights the front of the skateboard to make it pop-up seemingly unaided in the air."

talking of the skateboarder's senses "they are a sensory and spatialized version of the Althusserian concept of ideology as the imaginary representation of the subject's relationship to his or her real conditions of existence"

"...from the early 1980's, the focus of skateboarding has shifted, becoming more urban in character, directly confronting not only architecture but also the economic logic of capitalist abstract space."

"Skateboarders target the targets and times of the urban degree zero, reinscribing themselves onto everyday functional spaces and objects."

An 'imaginary representation' is that the same as an imaginary imagination? I also have my doubts about skateboarding as confrontational to any capitalist economic logic. When we met new skaters the first conversation was always about decks and wheels, mine always substandard from a lack of money. How I wished to have rich parents.

I did enjoy the lecture however: skating is a fun subject and Borden spoke like a human rather than some neo-Marxist oracle in overdrive. Iain Sinclair spoke earlier in the same lecture series and together they constituted a perfect pair of representatives for 21th century urban activism. An activism that acts through non-committal and silence. Borden spoke of the skateboarder's resistance to the city as one of 'wilful ignorance'. As cities are being developed by shady coalitions of corrupt building firms and money merchants, unchallenged by the public and out of bounds of political control, international monetary gangs are creating their urban skyscraping legacies. The skateboarder and the drifter challenge their hegemony by ignoring them, by refusing to acknowledge the star-architect and his backers. The city is not made by city planners but by people and the free interaction between people. I see the point but I wonder if something with more confrontational substance and visibility is needed. If only the Iains would make the frontpage of the Guardian: eminent writers attempted a citizens arrest of Rem Koolhaas.