Guy Debord

Guy Debord

Debord and Wolmann formed Letterist International in 1957, the thing that interests me is that they  developed the atc of the  Dérive (or drifting). They would wander the urban environment  for hours and during their wanderings they came across an Algerian man whom they discovered ' Physcogeography' from. He suggested that they map out the emotive patterns that they experienced while drifting,  building on systems of unitary urbanism.

Guy Debord is actually considered the founder of Psychogeography, He states it is a  “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.''

'Psychogeography' was the study and correlation of the material obtained from drifting. It was used to work out new emotional maps of the existing areas and to help them draw up plans for 'situations' to be devised. In doing this they were considering new forms of communication and deconditioning within the city.

Psychogeography overlaps with Kevin Lynch’s work on mental maps, as reviewed in Denis Wood’s article “Lynch Debord” as well as work on non-visual sensory-scapes  (smellscape, soundscape, touchscape, tastescape, etc.).

The most famous psychogeography map is Debord’s Guide Pychogéographique de Paris:

Debord discussing his book La Societe du spectacle says that this spectacle was capital accumulated until it becomes an image, I love this concept and it makes so much sense to me. We live in a consumerist and capitalist society and we need things, material things, things that can become an image as Debord says. He discusses these spectacles and suggests they are accumulations of real things: things that exist in everyday society, magazines, cars, traffic, events, travels, trees, walls. But he seems dismayed at the fact they we just get on with things and do not question why we look at images in magazines, why we stop at traffic lights or even why we build walls, it is because we are fuelled through passivity within our societies! Have we become a totalitarian society? Are we the actors or the spectators? 

Debord and The Situationists suggested that leisure started where 'art' left off. Imagination should be applied directly to the transformation of reality itself, not to its symbols in the form of philosophy, litetature, painting. It was the  normal everyday life that should be made passionate and rational and dramatic, not its reflection in seperated 'world of art'. (I cant help thinking that it was their lives they were so dramitically trying to change)

The first few years of the  SI were devoted to a systematic exposition of the Letterist philosophy and life-style. They lived what could be considered the bohemian lifestyle living of small grants, husling and occasional labour in the cultural field.

They became dominated by the idealilistic  concern that all utopian town planni g should be fused withart forms and that arctitects 'should be building adventures'. Debord started to make some films.

A friendship formed with Henri Lefebvre, he was their first mentor in social revolution. He  contended that contemporary society wasnt suffering from any shortage of comsumer goods but from a new poverty, 'a poverty of everyday life' and that a revolution must be had to focus on theregeneration of this . The SI considered his opinions on the everyday as relyable, they tended to reject his philosophy as been too acedamic and their relationship suffered.