Notes on Tati's Play Time

Yesterday I gave my interpretation of Tati’s 1967 film Play Time. I made a complete fool of myself and I should have prepared myself better instead of watching the snooker at the Crucible (that 147!) but here are the notes that I prepared but didn’t use.    

Notes on Tati’s Play Time

When I was invited to say something on the psychogeographical elements in Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Play Time my first reaction was: Who? Now I have seen the film I can understand why evoking psychogeography in relation to Tati’s film might be a good idea.

The origin and legacy of psychogeography is intimately connected to the restructuring of Paris. You could say that it inspired three generations of dissent; first there was Baudelaire and his portrayal of the flaneur, then came the Surrealists with their search for the unconsciousness of Paris, best captured by Louis Aragon in his book on the Paris Peasant and next came the Situationists who took their analysis of how the rationalization of Paris was not just a rationalization of the street plan but of society and daily life itself to a revolutionary conclusion. The work of Haussmann was long finished when Tati came to make his film and already a new breed of architects were preparing themselves to redesign Paris once more and this time do it right. The radiant City of Le Corbusier is the icon of modernist Paris that never was: 18 gigantic tower blocks for which a considerable part of Paris south of the Seine would have to be razed. Psychogeography in that sense was dead simple neighbourhood activism. It is unlikely that Tati ever read Le Corbusier directly but his proposals were part of the intellectual atmosphere and Tati (re)created a modernist town that feels right.

Tati: ‘In the first half of Playtime, I direct the people to follow the architect’s guidelines. Everybody is filmed as if moving in straight lines and feeling prisoners of their surroundings. Modern architecture would like typists to sit straight, would like everyone to take themselves very seriously. In the first part of the film, the architecture plays a leading role but gradually, warmth, contact and friendship as well as the individual I defend, take over this international setting and then neon advertisements make their entrance and the world starts to swirl and it all ends up in a merry-go-round. There are no more straight angles at the end of the film’. (quoted from http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/jacques-tati-and-architecture/)

When Tati got to design the city that is the back drop of Play Time he took his ideas of architecture as a monstrous inhuman art and what you get is a city that is has become one gigantic undifferentiated hallway in which the hospital, the workplace, the hotel, the airport are indistinguishable from another. Tati presents the life lived in such a city where nature has been conquered, design reigns supreme as a bad dream and where people have been stripped of their wildness, their senses, forced to ambulate from one place to the next searching for the cheap fix of inane novelties. In the city of Tati wandering is either made impossible (the tourist follow a carefully planned path) or a bureaucratic trick to keep you from reaching your goal, ala Kafka. Halfway the film Tati’s starts to introduce elements of resistance and the people are set free. Just as the docile domestic cow sometimes has something of the primeval wild bovine inside it. 

           

Strangely in his equation of fully planned, rational environment with the devaluation of humans to drones he almost verbatim follows Le Corbusier and his dream that a well planned city would create well behaved human beings. The psychogeographic drift (Ian Sinclair included) swallows that formula by assuming that drifting, the break-up of a functional activity into a semi-random play is revolutionarily. The city as a watch that runs as smoothly as design allows. Tati buys the ideology of control-through-design but mocks the ideologue. I would argue that this position both overestimates architecture and underestimates people. Strangely enough this idea is still with us but in the opposite way. The idea of the mallable society may have vanished but the precedence of public space over behaviour resurfaces in the broken window theory that gave the impetus for the Zero Tolerance policing that you sometimes hear about here too. So: we no longer believe that design can make us, but an absence of it can break us.

   

There is a scene in the film where we suddenly stumble on a great open space filled with a ordered series of free standing cubicles. In each cubicle sits one person. It is hard to gauge how the film must have appeared to the viewers in 67 but this is clearly a comic moment: haha look at what those architect fools have thought off, this will never pass in real life. No labourers will ever allow themselves to work caged in a box without any contact with a fellow human. Working like rats in perfect isolation. Of course the cubicles are here but they are not very popular with employers because who knows what your employees are doing down there, hidden away from view…. Probably they are working on their blog.

 

  

The great albatros wanders

From google scholar one can lean a lot about the wander-pattern of the great albatross. No wonder shooting them is such a bad idea.

The first history of Occupy Wall Street reviewed

The occupation of Zuccotti Park began in mid September and by December at least three books had been published about it. If that is not showing the way it captured the imagination of a great number of people what will? 

"Occupying Wall Street” tells the inside story of the occupation from the original Addbusters call to the eviction in November and a little beyond that. A large group of writers contributed material but the book speaks with one assembled voice. This means that while the book mostly reads well is it is written without style or literary embellishment. It sears through the history of OWS with the finesse of a transportbike at rush time. This is a sympathetic but detached account meant to be the first history of the movement. It attempts to represent the various and sometimes conflicting viewpoints and positions of the people involved as objective as possible by including a lot of interviews. As it documents the occupation from its humble, unsure beginnings to an unexpected mass movement it captures the key media moments like the 700 arrests on Brooklyn bridge as well as the evolving organizational structure of councils, working groups and caucuses. This turns this book into a how-to-occupy manual of sorts.

The chapter that discusses what it was like to actually live on Zuccotti does a good job explaining how the mass of occupation stratified into in smaller, often non-communicating groups with a rough division between the smart side and the down and out side. It takes you through the birthing pains of the formation of a city within a city with astonishing detail with all the social tension but also with all the bustle and excitement. The book shows what a bit of good will and energy can do: OWS did manage to provide good on-site services from daily mails, to book lending, to laundering and medical and legal assistance.

In the long run the use of this book will probably fade as better books telling the story of OWS come out but for now I will rate this book for the fact that it provides a huge amount of information that I had never encountered before. Great stuff.

PS: The Economist called this book self-congratulatory and boosterish but that can easily be explained because this book lacks the cynicism that the editors of the Economist mistake for integrity.

Walking in Siberia, forage psychogeography with the old world Eskimo

"MAPPING EVENKI LAND: THE STUDY OF MOBILITY PATTERNS IN EASTERN SIBERIA" starts with a number of maps showing Evenki land use but the paper gets even more interesting when it posits that each culture walks different before discussing the specific walking knowledge of the Evenki. This is forage psychogeography at it's finest.  

On Evenki mapping:

Evenki wander between situations or events that provoke and intensify the circuits of companionship and experiences of autonomy, rather than geographical points. With this in mind, describing Evenki land with an ordinary map imposed with spots and symbols on the continuous space or landscape becomes a real challenge. But if we inverse the main premise of map making in accordance with the logic of Evenki social organization we construct a depiction of Evenki land which will also grasp important traits of the Evenki mind. The task is easier than it seems, because the streams of Evenki paths covering their land are analogous to the changes (experiences of autonomy) from one companionship to another. Mapping Evenki land with an Evenki social organization could help us to find other such analogies between places and social interactions.

Following and watching an old Evenki man:

Only after we repeatedly watched the video recording that we made quite casually with Orochon walking in front of us through the taiga during one of our trips together, did we begin to notice some features of the particular Evenki way of walking. Orochon went through an animal pathway as if he was moving in a tube with thorny bushes as walls. He was carrying a stick on which he leaned. He took this stick in his right arm, but changed hands when some branches of the bush prevented him from going further. Then he took his stick in his left hand, and used his right hand to break the branches. The sound of this cracking was rather rhythmical and synchronised with his footsteps, which we could not hear as they were rather light. There were two images that we caught after watching this tape. One is that he was marking the path with these half broken branches he left behind. We supposed that these marks will be useful in winter, when the snow will cover the path, and only such marks above the snow surface will show where the narrow path is. Orochon himself told us that it is very important to clear pathways, because this is the basis for future hunting luck. He only commented that animals also preferred to use clear pathways, and if there were any such available then there would be plenty of prey. The other point was the importance of keeping balance. Orochon was moving through the taiga in the same way as if he was floating on a boat with a stick that helped not only in pushing forwards but also in keeping his balance. When Orochon was crashing through the branches he was also balancing himself, as his leap was counterbalanced by the inertia of branches. At these moments he had four points of support as if he had not two but four legs.
... We should not forget that Orochon was already 70 years old, but his movements had not lost any of this lightness.

Evenki go looking around for fun:

Evenki people learn from their earliest years not to be frightened and to be interested in and not exclude the new possibilities of hazardous situations – for the Evenki exploring new territories is a pleasant experience. The Evenki will prefer to go and have a look just for fun, even when there is absolutely no need to go anywhere. Looking for new places is a wonderful opportunity for experiencing companionship, and as a result it is a widely accepted thing to go somewhere with the intention just to look around. In company or alone, a trip to an unknown territory is also a fine experience of manakan (which signifies ‘independence’ and ‘solitude’ in the Evenki language), because even when together with somebody else, you perceive the place in your own unique way and take your own path. Once we participated in a ritual, in which the Evenki visited secret places in the forest. There was no obvious organization of movement from one secret place to another. Everybody was walking separately and they finally united in one place, the way hunters meet with their dogs at some moments, only to separate again without a shout or an order being given. The Evenki made their routes ever more difficult and complex. By walking in circles and making different loops they walked with the intention of looking around, thus raising their chances to come across somebody or something. The way the Evenki navigate explicitly shows their social organization, in which individuals each float freely, but are nevertheless eager for encounters and contacts with each other, uniting for a brief moment and then splitting up again to continue their individual free movement.

The emotions experienced are determined by the absence or existence of a concrete purpose for the trip. We have not only once witnessed how excited and happy the Evenki were when they were travelling without a specific purpose and also with risks (i.e. to new places) that could challenge the initial purpose. A broken wheel immediately transforms the situation during a trip, because you have to change your aims and figure out new ones, for example you need to go to your neighbours to borrow a new wheel and nobody really knows what will emerge from the new situation. Breakdowns, river crossings, drunken encounters and other occurrences, all of these incidents liberate you from the hegemony of the initial purpose, you receive the right to spontaneously change your route and combine different tasks and possible resolutions. All these conditions fill the situation with excitement and joy. In contrast to the predetermined purpose, for example the need to come back from the village to the camp to perform your household duties, this spoils the pleasure of the road and prevents total involvement in the travelling itself. Whenever possible the Evenki try to avoid moving under such conditions. For example, they find new reasons to stay in the village, even if they have no real place there and no money to spend. If they finally start on their way, the first coincidental encounter with someone will stop their movement and they will come back to the village accompanying the people they met. If there is no chance to escape from a trip with a predetermined aim, the Evenki look gloomy and keep silent, as if the existence of this concrete purpose prevents them from feeling free and getting pleasure from the trip.

Fungi Forage trail in Mexican highlands

 

"A new method for tracking pathways of humans searching for wild, edible fungi" discusses the best way to use GPS to track mushroom foraging behaviour of the Nahua in Mexico. The paper contains a trail of one forager, notice the change in altitude in a 5-hour trek.  

Searching behavior is a fundamental activity performed by organisms in order to increase their probability to survive, grow and reproduce by finding food, refuges or mates. Humans are no exception. Every day we can readily observe how we, consciously or unconsciously, search for and find a great variety of items, an ability that surely has its origins in our evolutionary past, including as hunter-gatherers.

Eskimo songlines / Eskimo highways

"The Trail as Home: Inuit and Their Pan-Arctic Network of Routes" by Claudio Aporta is a dense article connecting Canadian Inuit land use and oral knowledge in recent and historic times with personal observation that give some stunning insights into the Eskimo way of life and the human talent for humanizing a harsh terrain. A related article by the same author is here and here.

We were traveling the route that days before Abraham Tagunak had mapped for us. Tagunak, a well-known elder and traveler from Naujaat, had followed that same route for the first time when he was a little boy several decades ago. It was the same trail that members of the Fifth Thule expedition used in the 1920s. It had also been used by Captain Hall’s Inuit guides in the 1860s. In fact, it seems certain that this trail and the place names around it were known to Iligliuk, the Inuit woman who acted as a guide for Captains Parry and Lyon in the 1820s. What is remarkable about this is that trails in the Arctic are not permanent features of the landscape. On the contrary, they disappear when the sled tracks get covered after a blizzard, and as the snow and ice melt at the end of each spring. The spatial itinerary, however, remains in people’s memory and materializes again when the next trailbreaker makes the trip.

to Inuit, the Arctic was in fact a network of trails, connecting communities to their distant neighbours, and to fishing lakes and hunting grounds in between. Based on the data collected during that trip and after mapping over sixty trails in several communities of the territory of Nunavut, I argue here that this network extends across most of the Canadian Arctic, most likely including areas that were not the focus of this research. Since Inuit did not use maps to travel or to represent geographic information, this enormous corpus of data has been shared and transmitted orally and through the experience of travel since time immemorial. Although new trails or new segments of trails are sometimes created to accommodate new travel needs and transportation technologies, while a few others are abandoned, most of these trails are so old that they are part of Inuit’s distant history, perhaps beyond oral memory and certainly beyond the limits of written documentation.

The implications of this premise are several: (1) it rejects the idea of the Arctic as a barren place, or an empty land inhabited by geographically remote and isolated communities (still present in the popular imagination); (2) it implies that Inuit have made systematic use of the Arctic environment as a whole; (3) it suggests that trails are, and have been, significant channels of communication and exchange across the Arctic; (4) it presumes that some  types of oral history and knowledge can be accurately transmitted through generations, and (5) it proposes that an important part of Inuit cultural identities is better understood in terms of moving as a way of living.

On place names:

The importance of place names in Inuit culture has been pointed out by several authors. I have elsewhere shown the connection between trails and place names. The mapping of place names makes this connection evident to the point that often the existence of trails can be guessed just by knowing where the named places are. In other words, the spatial layout of the names suggests the existence of a particular itinerary. Figure (above) indicates the presence of a trail across the northern tip of Baffin Island. Through the use of these names, a narrator can describe a trail, identifying creeks, lakes, hills, portages, stone cairns, and landing spots. The oral description of the trail (or the narrative of the journey) will help a listener picture how the horizon will look from the trail, and what kind of features a traveler should expect.

The trail as home:

During his travels in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, Knud Rasmussen documented a ritual just before a newborn child undertook her first journey. After describing the ritual and the prayer, Rasmussen noted that “this was the child’s first journey, and the little girl ... had to be introduced to life by means of [a] magic formula”. Being introduced to the first journey was, in a way, being introduced to life, as if both living and moving were part of the same journey. The trail was a place where life unfolded. Life on the trail involved the learning from an early age of an immense amount of geographic and environmental information, as the individuals experienced the land through actual or figurative travel. Through that process, a sense of community was also developed. The oral and experiential knowledge learned on the trails is, in fact, intertwined with information on and understanding of topographic features, environmental dynamics, and ecology of the familiar region. As Inuit travel to less familiar or more distant regions, this knowledge needs to be acquired from neighboring communities, which suggests a system of tenure in which knowledge equals survival (social and physical). It is through accessing this corpus of knowledge that Inuit travelers from distant communities would be able to find the good trails and the resources necessary to live in other regions.

Yanomami forage trails / ethnocartography of reticular space

"Ethnogeography and Resource use among the Yanomami" looks at the hunting and forage trails used by a Brazilian Yanomami village. It argues that space to the Yanomami is organized reticular and not concentric and zonal. Reticular? I've looked it up for you, it means: "1) Resembling a net in form; netlike. 2) Marked by complexity; intricate." I'm not entirely sure what the observations that the Yanomami use different systems of pathways adds to the table of forage psychogeography. Maybe it is a way of showing that paths connects places without laying claim to the space it traverses?

The spatial patterns of the Yanomami’s use of forest natural resources have traditionally been described or represented by anthropologists as concentric zones of exploitation (gardening, hunting, and gathering) outlined by approximate contours. Three types of concentric zones are usually distinguished: one close to the collective house, which includes the gardens, one for daily hunting, gathering, and harvesting, and, finally, one for long-distance collective hunting expeditions (hwenimu) and wild fruit gathering (waimi huu, yanomoa˜i-). This anthropological “zonal model,” which lacks any indigenous cultural recognition, projects onto Yanomami productive activities an ethnocentric conception of successive “rings” of decreasing degrees of resource exploitation similar to the classic agricultural model proposed
by J. H. von Thunen.

The methodology we adopted, allowing a fine-grained record of the Yanomami’s exploitation of natural resources, enabled us to produce a very different spatial model, this time structured by the collective knowledge and use of a web of identified forest paths (principal and secondary) tying together notable sites labeled by toponyms (hunting and gathering camps, former habitation and garden sites, groves of fruit trees, geographic features, and so on). In Yanomami cultural cartography, this complex network of paths and places is, moreover, closely interwoven with the intricate branching of the hydrographic network (made up of named rivers and streams), which constitutes another primary spatial reference.

From this new perspective, the Yanomami ethnogeographic organization of space appears to be reticular—structured by a crisscrossing network of sites (points) and routes (lines)—rather than zonal. By taking into account this emic structuring of space based on networks, as opposed to the conventional etic perspective in anthropology and geography, we aim to contribute toward a spatial model of tropical-forest resource use through data that are both quantitatively more precise and qualitatively more compatible with Yanomami social practices and cultural concepts.

Outrunning a bull Kalahari style

"Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers" is a paper that deals with the outrunning of game, an ancient practise today only known to be used by Kalahari hunters. The paper does a great job describing the problems of persistence hunting, goes on to detail the environmental knowledge involved in a hunt before again moving on explain how all this is related to human energy consumption patterns. All that and more in nine pages. 

An average speed of 6.3 km/hr may not seem very fast, but the challenge to the hunter is not so much the speed as the difficult conditions that need to be overcome, including extreme heat, soft sand, and sometimes thick bush. The hunter may be slowed down when he loses the trail. The most difficult task for the tiring hunter is keeping on the right track when the animal joins the rest of the herd again, since its tracks must be distinguished from those of the other animals. When the animal is still running strongly, this can be very difficult, but when it starts to show signs of tiring it becomes easier to distinguish its tracks. Another difficulty is that the animal may circle back onto its own tracks and the hunter must decide which set of tracks to follow. The hunter does not always run on the tracks but often leaves the trail in order to pick it up ahead, and a number of times the hunter lost time following the wrong trail and then going back to find the right one. The trail may also be lost when herds of other antelope species cross the tracks. Losing the tracks was the main reason the hunters gave up in unsuccessful attempts. [The f]igure  plots the route of Karoha running down a kudu bull in October 2001, showing the kudu crossing back over its own tracks a number of times and joining other groups of kudu bulls.

...

When running down a herd of kudu, trackers say that they look to either side of the trail to see if one of the animals has broken away from the rest of the herd and then follow that animal. The weakest animal usually breaks away from the herd to hide in the bush when it starts to tire, while the others continue to flee. Since a predator will probably follow the scent of the herd, the stronger animals have a better chance of outrunning it, while the weaker animal has a chance to escape unnoticed.

Occupy changes everything, the second Occupy book does not

'This changes everything' is the second book on Occupy. It's slim and flimsy like a print-on-demand and comes from the offices of Yes Magazine. There are three sections, one deals directly with the organization and motives of Occupy Wall Street, the other two sections deal with what has to change in the US and how this could be done. For geographic reasons I have little use for the last two section while two articles in the first section also appear in the first book on Occupy. There are a few additional interesting pieces here but overall I feel that the editors of this book are ideologically far removed from OWS. While they go to great lengths to defend the consensus model of OWS you can't help but think that it's an appreciation based more on the success of OWS to capture attention than on any real sympathy for the model itself. There is just too much talk on the need for new leaders and to much emphasis on power. While the first book doesn't bother to address the way OWS changed the political agenda and gave a 'voice to the voiceless', the editors of this book can't stop salivating over this sudden mass eruption of anger and indignation. If only all those people would unite under their banner! Or at least got a subscription!! The ultimate aim of this book is to drain some of the energy of Occupy into their own fold and that makes this a dishonest book with a small number of good pieces.

Foraging in 1939

The foreword to the 1939 'Edible wild plants' describes its author Perry Medsger Oliver, a biologist, as a magnificent guide and a true woodsman. One who quotes Thoreau! Oliver's own foreword confirms the origin of US contemporary foraging as coming from a fascination with the untapped resources of knowledge about nature that are part of the cultural heritage of the native American (although, Oliver believes, only to the intelligent ones); see quote below. There are some interesting differences between this guide book and contemporary ones: there is no mention of poisonous plants; there are no warnings against over-harvesting of plants or the accidental taking of protected plants. There is much space devoted to cultural uses and histories and very little space to the details of preparation (no recipes in the modern sense) because it knows that readers know what to do with a plant and you don't need to tell them to boil the water first. It is from this that you know that this is a book from a time when the handling of a vegetable was a daily chore not a lifestyle option to be bought alongside the new Jamie Oliver book. Did you know that in 1939 dandelions were grown semi-domesticated in New Jersey and sold on New York markets?

MORE than thirty years ago, I was with Dr. Harvey M. Hall when he made his botanical survey of San Jacinto Mountain, California. An intelligent Indian joined us for a few days and acted as guide. He was much interested in the plants used by the American Indians, especially those used for food. After I came East, for several years we exchanged specimens and seeds. I sent the Indian nuts of nearly all the edible nut-bearing species in northeastern United States, also acorns, seeds of edible berries, and those of other wild fruits. These he planted along canyons and in moist situations where he thought they might grow.

From that time on I have collected data on edible plants from books, published reports, papers, from the experiences of people, and wherever information on the subject could be obtained. When possible, I observed the trees or plants first hand, often experimenting or testing out their edible qualities.

Learn about edible plants with Sturtevant's

'Sturtevant's edible plants' is Victorian ethnocookery listmania in hyperdrive. It is a collection of notes on what plants and what part of plants are eaten where and how. You can take almost any plant, look it up and learn how the Greeks or the Indians used it. The information was collected by US Botanist Sturtevant in the late 19th century but only edited for publication after his death in 1919. It is an outdated collection of lore but a fascinating place filled with all sorts of exotic factoids of interest to contemporary foragers. It is out of print but you can find copies of the Dover reprint, however this book that makes more sense as a searchable PDF. 

The Ikea of riot control

Open Street Map does a better job than Google maps.

The Situationists critique of urbanism was inspired by the redesign of their city. Paris recreated by city planning to make it easier for the police to control it; this in the light of France's long history of revolutions and uprising. San Francisco Digger Emmett Grogan gives an riot-control-through-architecture example for New York: Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side of New York. This park has a long history of political dissent and rioting (even OWS was planned here) and its architecture has been adapted to meet any infringes protesters there might want to make on public order.

Tompkins Square Park had been the setting of many riots earlier in the city, and after they took place, several city departments and agencies got together and redesigned the park, stringing it with so much cast-iron fencing that gave the place the look of of a labyrinth and made it virtually impossible for any crowd to move anywhere en masse. The four-foot-high iron railings were placed randomly throughout the park, successfully dividing it up into small sections, and at the same time, separating into easy-to-handle groups any large mob that might gather. Also, in case of trouble, there were handball and basketball courts in the north-east section of the park enclosed and encircled by thirty-foot-high chainlike fences - that could quickly be converted into a makeshift jail or temporarily holding facility for prisoners apprehended during a mass arrest. 

I would love to know more about this...

Wonderfull scenes from Occupied America

My own ever expanding drivel on Occupy attempts to document its rise and development from the afar and inactive position of a stay-home psychogeographic enthusiast. Occupy is the most exciting development in anarchist inspired protest and civil disobedience in my lifetime and I feel the need to bear witness (as Ezra Pound would say), to record the excitement and interpret the various positions as if each camp represents a game of chess, each player earning points for human progress.

Occupy Wall Street took Zuccotti park on 17 September 2011, by December 2011 Verso published 'Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America'; it also bears witness, but from up close. The book begins and continues with diary-like reports on the atmosphere of camp and marches, the deliberations during general assemblies, the internal strife between the drummer circle and the rest, the problems of camps not being truly representative of the 99%, the doubts and insecurities that slowly creep in, the mayhem of eviction and of course the logistical nightmare of the laundry. There are 28 authors beautifully edited with each new author adding a new perspective, historical essays on China town, labour unions and consensus decision making, some writers are celebrities like that Hegelian Harlequin (rousing) and Angela Davis (short but strong), unknown writers drop in narratives from other occupation sites. Oakland, Atlanta, Philadelphia each finding a way to deal with the problems generated by local historic and political circumstances. The book is consistently intelligent (there are only two contributions that I like less for being abstract) and well-paced, all the more remarkable for the immediacy of its subject and speed of its production. The design also gets top marks.

Perhaps Michael Sayeau is right when he writes in the Guardian that the picture of Occupy that emerges from this book is a little too educated, too well-argued and too clear to do justice to the more prevalent attitudes of confusion, anger and irrationality. Personally I'd like see the best qualities of Occupy be saved for next generations rather than the mediocre ones. Another criticism one could give about this book is that it is too busy conveying the excitement, adventure and, later, the daily sorrows of camping out that it fails to properly address it's goals, aims and experiences as a protest. Which is a way of saying that Occupy is just another middle class vehicle for personal growth. There may be a point and maybe not; if the citing of violence is the way the 'system' tries to discredit a protest movement, calling everybody who appears to be slightly better of then you 'middle class' is the surest way for protest movements to discredit each other.  

Surely this book, the first book, will be referenced for as long as Occupy will be studied. It focuses on the US only and in fact doesn't even suggest that it has gone world wide. I can only hope that in other countries and on other continents people will want to turn their bearing witness into books as lively and as well produced as this one. OWS is the mother ship of Occupy but the smallest camp you can think of in the obscurest part of country is just as important, and I want to read about it. 

The majority of the authors presented here are affiliated with the Nplusone magazine which published three issues of the Occupy Gazette, all available online, from which this book is compiled.

El Tono's Line and Surface

At least ten years ago I was asked to write the accompanying texts for a book that would document the work of a number of street artists. The book never materialized but through it I was introduced to the post-graffiti street art scene which at the time was at a period of incredible artistic ferment and which was also a very lively international scene with many artist collaborating. Fond memories of great parties! El Tono was one the people to be covered in the book. He is from France originally and was living in Barcelona at the time, I never got to meet him but his work was well known. Even between 30 other street artists his style (abstract tuning forks in bold lines and bright colours) immediately stood out, no easy thing. But, as these things go, the scene imploded under its own weight, but the people involved didn't stop. This is how it happened that Local boy W%D, who at the time was running the popular street art website Stickit is now using the name to run a small publishing firm and his latest release is 'Line and Surface', a nearly 100 page-long overview of a decade of El Tono. It is well documented, beautiful to look at, and it is amazing to see how El Tono's work has evolved from project to project. The best things for me: I wrote a tiny bit for the book, did get to meet El Tono and just got back from a great release party.

  

Occupy as psychogeographic urbanism [draft 5]

[Draft 5 is much longer and edited in many places, to make it a bit easier: # mostly unchanged, # changed, # new paragraph.]

“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.” - Declaration of the Occupation of New York City [1]

“It is like a little village. They have got a food tent, a welfare tent, a first aid tent, an information tent, a library tent and a university tent where they have their daily meetings. It is very well organised… They have organised there own portaloos but there is still a problem with street urination… The rainwater gullies have been blocked up with food waste.” – Assistant director of Street Scene on OccupyLSX [2]

“At night, with such a big crowd in it, the space had started to redefine itself a bit, and more by ambience than function. People arranged themselves in it more according to how they felt about it. There was an unanswerable question in the air, or so it seemed to me, about what forms of life are possible. In different parts of the Park people gravitated toward different answers.” - McKenzie Wark on Zucotti Park [3]

"The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life." - Ivan Chtcheglov[4]

# Psychogeography has moved from revolution (say: Guy Debord) to nostalgia (say: Iain Sinclair) and I think I know why. The psychogeographers of the middle 20th century imagined the city as a collage of grandiose shape-shifting sectors that would be endlessly explored by its inhabitants. The city would be in permanent revolution, urbanism would by participatory, work would have be abolished and play would be the core activity of life. Sixty years later we find psychogeography evoking historic and fantasmagoric cities as part of the contemporary city through narrative pyrotechnics and the wilful paranoia of associative anecdote. Its politics is regressive rather than pro-active, its demands on reality humble. The psychogeographer rather than create alternative visions from scratch has gone searching for them in places that have so far escaped ‘development’. The psychogeographer of today walks, in various funny ways, reports it finds and little else [5] with the idea that keeping streets alive by using them non-functionally is politics enough. For some psychogeography has become a career. Where did the enthusiasm for town planning and architecture go? City planning has become suspect and socially responsible architects are without exception the ones who destroy the most in their wake. Beware of the demagogue who knows morality and justice on his or her side.  Architects are upmarket pimps hiding deprivation and slavery behind a smokescreen of perfumed pompadour and slick braggadocio. Nicholas Hawkmoor had style, Baron Haussmann at least was earnest and who do we have? A bunch of nameless 'partners' kissing some hand of some godfather in some back room. Psychogeography has become nostalgic because the present has so little to offer. The psychogeographer looks out over a tower block, a gigantic mall, a four-lane motorway and sighs (a psychogeographer is by definition someone without a driver’s licence). As it happens the psychogeographer is the only one left to sigh because the rest of the world is too busy talking into their mobile phones. Needless to say: psychogeographers are suspicious about mobile phones too…

# Sure, an interesting building sometimes gets built but nobody can still look at a modern building without seeing the invisible hand behind it: the cabal of investors, bankers, estate-agents, crooked politicians, construction firms, marketing firms, law-firms, extractive industries, all dodgy, all corrupt, all purely self-interested. Housing has ceased to be a basic human right and the simple wish to have a roof over your head means being forced to commit yourself to a pyramid scheme where the newcomers will always pay for the exorbitant riches of those who came first. A house is no longer a home but an investment, a city is no longer a society but a marketing ploy to be sold to its inhabitants. Of course you can download a ‘psychogeographic’, ‘Situationist-inspired’ augmented reality app that helps you to forget all this. They cost only 99 cents and will keep you just as stupid as you already are.

# Every city has its cryptoforests, places that are camouflaged by nature to hide the discontinued urban. Cryptoforests are places that are forested and wild but which will inevitable reveal humans at the heart of it. All forests are psychological actors and the cryptoforest is no exception, but the cryptoforest is not a 'real' forest, it's also city and all cities could improve by allowing themselves to cryptofy: to become cryptoforests, or, like a half-empty glass is also half-full, cryptocities. Cities that cater to the needs of tent-dwelling semi-nomadic foragers who dance the night away to celebrate the new grub season. The forager is the psychogeographic double[6].

# The eviction of the Occupy Wall Street camp from Zuccotti park on grounds of hygiene is akin to the arrest of Al Capone for tax evasion. And far away from Manhattan, in my sleepy Utrecht where nothing ever happens, the same gambit has been tried for the local camp. Conservative politicians objecting to the camp on the front door of the city council are citing the major disruption of tourists tripping over tent pegs as reason for eviction. Apart from offering a way to get rid of a camp on terms that might lead to awkward accusations of curtailing unarguable rights like the freedom of speech, political and judicial resistance to Occupy has a deeper reason: they need to protect the housing-investment pyramid scheme. It is probably safe to say that not a single one of the 2600+ Occupy groups the world has counted defined beforehand which of their goals should be met before they will voluntary abandon camp[7]. They exist indefinitely until society changes significantly and this is unlikely to happen soon. As Pete Wright has written: “Change happens through the imperative for change, not the request,“[8] and because the economic crisis is the best thing that ever happened to the established economic superpowers the imperative is not thereat all[9]. In the indeterminate process of occupation people will quickly learn that a house really is a luxury you can do without, that long exposure to winter cold (talking about Europeans winters here, not Canadian or Russian ones) makes you look a bit scary but is perfectly survivable. The criminalization of squatting and the eviction of Occupy camps are part of the same motive: you are not allowed to escape.

# The General Assembly model where "the process toward creative synthesis is really the essence of the thing" is such a fragile process that it will create a close-knitted community of trusted others or will fall apart[10]. The consensus model takes away endless talk from a professional class of politicians to the 'people' and everybody who has ever been involved in non-hierarchical decision making knows that a person with strong opinions but little facts and little self-criticism can turn any meeting into a race with the red queen of dreadful infinity and this alone provides an excellent reasons for socially cohesive subgroups to break off from the main camp and try their luck elsewhere.

# The internal organization of Occupy, the refusal to create leaders, the refusal to legitimize outside power and governance (even if only in theory), its indeterminate duration, its state of permanent crisis (read: the risk of eviction) can create a situation where tribal life-ways can be discovered and explored. Occupy starts a process that can turn a well functioning, socially cohesive camp into a self defined tribe (as much Hell Angel as Yanomami) that may feel the need to turn their back on society[11]. At least a few people have recognized from the start that this is the real substance of Occupy. Anthropologist and Occupy Wall Street co-organizer David Graeber has written:

"Zuccotti Park, and all subsequent encampments, became spaces of experiment with creating the institutions of a new society - not only democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries, clinics, media centres and a host of other institutions, all operating on anarchist principles of mutual aid and self-organisation - a genuine attempt to create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old.” [12] [13]

 

What he is really saying is: we don’t have concrete demands because we are not interested in changing the world, we are interested in finding a way to live where we can more fully ignore it. Occupy provides a meeting place and testing ground for would-be communards. The Scriptonite blog perhaps puts it best:

“To understand Occupy, you must get one thing. The Occupy Movement is as much about education and information sharing as it is about protest.  The purpose of the camps, are to act as villages.  They bring people together to share a space, food, ideas and build the personal relationships that galvanise a movement.  There is also a massive support structure behind that of social media, direct action and organisational capabilities able to manifest ideas generated on the camps, into realities in the outside world.” [14]
 
# Once village utilities are in place camps may want to look further for ways to severe more links to the outside world. Learning from experts on foraging, alternative sanitation, alternative energy, alternative medicine, etc, etc, to become fully prepared to move from Wall Street to Wild Street.

# There comes a moment for every Occupy camp that eviction is the best thing that can happen to it. In Utrecht, where the Greens are the biggest political party and likely to agree with Occupy demands, the camp is protected from eviction. But where does that leave you? The camp wilts under the stress of fluffy non-committing tolerance. I was genuinely surprised by the activity and the conversation that was generated at one of their first Saturday-afternoon festivals, but as camp continues people will probably just get used to it and once people get used to they will start to ask awkward questions like: what do you really want. And: does the 99% really exist outside of statistics and is it a statistic that is valid outside the US?

# The occupation of a square or a park may be a photogenic way to show that what’s happening on the news is also happening in the lives of millions of people, but there comes a time to declutter. A few weeks before its eviction the OWS Tumblr page mentioned the rumour that the police were telling homeless to move to Zuccotti park. True or not: the phenomena is recurrent, homeless people find Occupy camps congenial to their own needs but they will often fail to take notice of the rules. Occupy Amsterdam went as far as to negotiate a strategic half-eviction with the police that would evict the drunks, the homeless and the Slavic and leave the prudent and well-behaved true occupiers in their tents. The police as the mercenaries of a middle class tea-cup revolution. Occupy’s Empty Tent Syndrome may not be as bad as the media likes to make it appear but it’s certainly there: taking a bath, recharging your Iphone, phoning you mother, eating a take-away meal (with all that cold you can use the grease), catching an event of your favourite sport, those are things most people prefer to do at home and this is where the homeless and the vagrant win: they can afford to be there all day.

# A movement without leadership is controlled by an elite. There is no reason to invoke a Bourne Provocateur to explain it. A supposedly egalitarian social structure will always create informal leaders and these will have more power if the number of participants increases. I can’t explain the process as a law like a social psychologist can but I am sure it is true. Instead of clinging to willful naivety of 19^th century anarchism why not borrow from tribal knowledge and install a chief. Someone from whom you demand feasts and impeccable generosity. Anthropology can offer many cases of social systems where the chief has to work twice as hard to acquire the goods for redistribution he needs to keep his people happy without ever gaining him any power other than the right to speak at the general assembly. I repeat: a leader has the right to speak, and the guarantee that no one will listen. Chiefdom is a way to keep the bossy ones from being boss by isolating them[15]. Start a meeting by calling for a volunteer to be the chairman and then send him or her away to clean the toilets. The Golden Bough starts with an overview of ancient ways to get rid of kings when their time is up; find inspiration there.

# There is a maxim that a culture in decline needs to look outside of itself to freshen up and Occupy is a good example. It has borrowed the idea of a tent camp from Tharir Square, the general assembly model from Quaker public worship (as the Spanish Indignadas claim) and it comes as no surprise that David Graeber, an anthropologist, has become the most visible representative of Occupy Wall Street and by affiliation of the world wide movement. Graeber's thesis advisor was Marshall Sahlins, whose 1966 essay 'The Original Affluent Society' is a foundational text in modern day hunter-gatherer studies (and often reprinted as a primitivist punk zine) pioneering the thought that foraging people are not backwards but free, egalitarian and happy[16]. Add Pierre Clastres' observation that most foraging societies are not relics from the stone age but forms of self-barbarization, a way to be flexible and permanently ready to escape from outside control and you begin to see the true vision of Occupy: the tent is not just a symbol of resistance, it's a promise of tactical lightness that is not defined by protest but by its incorporation of alternative sources of practical skill. Occupy doesn’t need politicians, it needs Eskimo’s, Aboriginals, Bushmen and other people with genuine commitment to their independence. Looked at like this the Occupy movement is not an anarchist movement but an anthropological experiment in  creating a situation in which different ways of being a political and social individual can be experienced. There is also a paradox: the only successful communities that could be called successfully anarchic came about by being ignored by the state, not by breaking away from it.

# Dutch newspapers extensively covered the story of 14 year old runway Kelly who disappeared from suburbia to Occupy Amsterdam where she fell in love with a 17 year old Czech nicknamed Pikachu, after Pokemon, how sweet. Together they travelled to Occupy Paris, were involved in a failed attempt to set up camp in Central Marseilles and planned to travel to Barcelona when her parent intercepted her and took her back home. A newspaper quoted her mother as saying: “She was driven by love and a bad time at school[17]”. It shows that Occupy provides a much needed setting for adventure. It also shows how Occupy has created a network of places for people to freely move in to, meet people, discuss the world, share the food, and, hopefully, offer to help prepare it too. This practical, welcoming, quality of occupy where a willingness to help pays out in comradely dividend is also addressed by the New Yorker in an article describing Ray Kachel’s move from unemployment in Seattle to the adventures of Occupy Wall Street. More than anything else the article stresses the open sociality of Occupy as one of its strongest assets:

“He tweeted regularly, and soon had more than thirteen hundred followers. Perhaps readers were drawn to the modesty and the objectivity of Kachel’s notes on the occupation. October 8th: “There are elements of communal living. it’s a really amazing experience tho totally out of my comfort level.” October 22nd: “It surprises me i have a guardian angel. it doesn’t surprise me he’s a soft-spoken, hard working Irish guy from the bronx.” October 23rd: “Dear mr. ferguson. i have lived in new york for over two weeks now. it does not smell of wee.” October 27th: “Keep seeing reference to ‘horrendous police abuse’ re: ows. I’ve been here 2+ weeks and have seen none and heard of little.” November 13th: “I lived in my old apartment in Seattle for nearly a decade and barely knew 2 other tenants. . . . i’ve lived in liberty square for just over a month and regularly talk with many of my neighbors and have made many new friends.[18]”

# By March 2012 Occupy Utrecht had been dealing with street violence for a few months but this time one of the occupiers had retaliated a harasser by beating him on the head with a hammer. A statement was issued by Occupy condemning the action in the strongest terms without taking the only proper consequence. They should have pulled backwards from the boat in order to enter it, as Coleridge would say, and disbanding camp citing their unwavering commitment to non-violence. They didn’t, displaying a shocking lack of strategic insight while showing the unwavering stubbornness of the true believer, and everything that will happen from now on will be a deception. Incidentally: a while back a university teacher involved with Occupy Utrecht allowed himself to be interviewed by a newspaper and was quoted as saying that there are good bankers and bad bankers and that it is important to see the difference. I wonder how that stellar insight would go down at an OWS GA. It shows that not all camps are making the same choices when it comes to tactics, and that not all camps have strategies.

# “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” It’s a 1845 Marx quote used by Occupy groups around the world. Marx had little patience with the well intentioned but doomed naivety of small groups trying to design a perfect society in the seclusion of a wilderness. If you want to improve society you must start by improving political structures. Occupy is unequivocally not seeking to change the political system from the inside out and this makes it, in the Marxian analysis, a utopist movement misunderstanding Marx’s slogan. Still: it is to better to quote Marx wrongly than to quote rightly from that great unwashed Hegelian harlequin: Slavoj Zizek.     

# “The dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.[19]” Debord wrote this in 1956 and it has been quoted by psychogeographers every since as its defining statement. What it means is that the drift (usually taken as the same thing as psychogeography, though it wasn’t for Debord) is a political act that releases you, even if only temporarily, from all  forms of economic productivity and consumption. Sixty years later we take extensive leisure time for granted and the drift is evoked as a value free term for personal advancement by artists, app-developers and all other scum that wants to make it in the so-called creative industries. The drift is not a walk that is not from A to B, it’s a way of life that feeds into the psychogeographical restructuring of the city as a platform of political struggle. Creating a village on the footsteps of the stock-exchange is psychogeographic, reading Walter Benjamin in a Starbucks is not. 

# Tent city urbanism (and what comes after) is a far cry from the spectacular models of Constant's New Babylon or the magico-marxist rereading of the Hawksmoor churches and Canary Wharf. In that the psychogeography of the recent past has fallen for the spectacle of the 'legacy'. My first impression of the Occupy camp was that it was paltry, a dynamo of underwhelming sadness, a place of insignificant littleness, but I soon realized my initial response was a form of conditioning that must be exorcised with a pickaxe. I was looking for a hacienda, baroque optical illusions and empty spaces creating richly filled time and I saw..... battered tents against a grey building on a clouded day on a miserable Monday morning[20]. And it may well be that at least a few tents are permanently empty, but I like the idea of Potemkin tent village, a farcical pow-wow of bleeding ugliness at the heart of the city. Dubai is a travesty, a weed patch a place of wonder and discovery. The cryproforest is also battered and paltry, a cheap undefined green that is not a forest, not a garden, not even a park, but give it half a chance and it will take over everywhere where humans retreat. The urbanism of the future is the cryptoforestation of derelict properties, abandoned carparks and never developed building sites. In this respect the economic crisis is on our side. Occupy communities are working toward it from the other end, and when the cryptocity arrives they will find themselves fully prepared for it.

[December 2011 – March 2012]

- Image from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053463/Occupy-London-90-tents-St-Pauls-protest-camp-left-overnight.html

The general assembly planning the occupation on Wall Street, 13 Augustus 2011.

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[1] From October 2011, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/01/1021956/-First-official-statement-from-Occupy-Wall-Street

[2] The problems of urbanism in a nutshell: http://www.ehn-online.com/news/article.aspx?id=6010

[3] http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/10/07/mckenzie-wark-zuccotti-park-a-psychogeography/

[4] Ivan Chtcheglov's Formula for a New Urbanism.1953; see: http://www.bopsecrets.or/SI/Chtcheglov.htm

[5] For an overview of contemporary psychogeography see the Psychogeographic Field Reports [2011]: http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/p/psychogeographic-field-reports-zine.html

[6] See: Forage Psychogeography: http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/p/what-is-forage-psychogeography-suppress.html

[7] "By October 9, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 95 cities, across 82 countries, and over 600 communities in the United States. As of November 17 the Meetup page "Occupy Together" listed Occupy communities in 2,609 towns and cities worldwide." quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement

[8] http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2012/03/protest-occupy-global-change

[9] Manuel Castells on the economic crisis in a TV interview:

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.

[10] David Graeber: http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/

[11] For a historic precedent see Gary Snyder, Why Tribe, 1969:

We use the term Tribe because it suggest the type of new society now emerging within the  industrial nations. In America of course the word has associations with the American Indians which we like . This new subculture is in fact more similar to that ancient and successful tribe, the European Gypsies-- a group without nation or territory which maintains its own values, its language and religion, no matter what country it may be in. The Tribe proposes a totally different style: based on community houses, villages and ashrams; tribe-run farms or workshops or companies; large open families; pilgrimages and wanderings from center to center. A synthesis of Gandhian "village anarchism" and I.W.W. syndicalism.

[12] David Graeber: Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html

[13] This sounds like a distant echo from Buenaventura Durruti’s quote from 1936 that was quoted and re-quoted by a number of Occupy-related blogs

"We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute."

[14] http://www.scriptonitedaily.org/2012/02/voices-from-occupation-sleepless-night.html

[15] For a fascinating similar discussion from the early 1970ties read Jo Freeman’s ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ and Cathy Levine’s response, ‘The Tyranny of Tyranny’.

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

http://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine

[16] Sahlins ‘The Original Affluent Society’ also offers an aesthetic of forage psychogeography, http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm:

The construction of substantial houses likewise becomes absurd if they must soon be abandoned. Hence the hunter's very ascetic conceptions of material welfare: an interest only in minimal equipment, "if that; a valuation of smaller things over bigger; a disinterest in acquiring two or more of most goods; and the like. Ecological pressure assumes a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered. If the gross product is trimmed down in comparison with other economies, it is not the hunter's productivity that is at fault, but his mobility.

 

[17] http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1012/Binnenland/article/detail/3074503/2011/12/13/Ouders-weggelopen-Kelly-gek-van-geluk.dhtml

[18] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/05/111205fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all

[19] http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm

[20] Paraphrasing Ivan Chtcheglov's ‘Formula for a New Urbanism’.

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