DRAWING MATTER SETS DRAWINGS OF THE WEEK 7 JUN 2017

GUY DEBORD

Guy Debord (19311994), Guide psychogographique

de Paris. Discours sur les passions de lamour, 1957.
Lithograph, 595 735 mm.

But I must here, once and for all, inform you that all this will be
more exactly delineated and explained in a map, now in the
hands of the engraver... not to swell the work ... but by way of
commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages,
incidents, or innuendoes as shall be thought to be either of
private interpretation, or of dark and doubtful meaning after my
life and my opinions shall have been read over (no dont forget the
meaning of the word) by all the world ...

Guy Debord quoting Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram

Shandy [1]

For Guy Debord the problem and critique of modernist urbanism in itself
drew on cartographic and photographic techniques, and even the evidence
put forward by planners themselves. On the one hand, this was the result of
the entirely self-conscious strategy of dtournement, of using the enemys
material against itself; but on the other hand, it also represented a kind of
collusion based on a mix of nostalgia for the original aims of a modern
urbanism for what avant-garde urbanist did not dream of a unitary
solution? and a historical sense that alternative traditions, rooted in the
seventeenth century conflict between Cartesians and Pascalians, had been
suppressed. For Guy Debord, in particular, the maps, ideal and real, that
traced the settlement of the earth, and the aerial photographs that viewed
these settlements in all their three-dimensional complexity, were charged
with more than their official origin. From the outset they acted as objects of
memory, reflection, and strategic plans.

The drive is a product, not of concentration, but of distraction, a

technique of displacement without any aim. [2] Meynier describes the
principles of mapping a territory, from the very local to the global, with
detailed comparisons between aerial photography images taken at oblique
angles and geometrical plans. Where the photograph taken at low height
allows one to see all the details: number of houses, trees, railroads, roofs and
limits of properties, the map, at the same scale allows scale to be measured,
but shows only a few details. [3] In this comparative method we can begin to
see the germ of Debords cartographic imagination one that moves from
aerial photographs to ideal maps, to his own constructions, with all the rigour
of a precise dtournement, one that preserves the fundamental roles of
photographs and maps as guides, but now to a way that has not been
mapped before.

More directly, the effect of the Carte is manifested in the collage map of
Paris constructed by Debord in 1956 under the title Guide
psychogographique de Paris, and published in Denmark by Jorn in the
series of the new Bauhaus Imaginiste. Vincent Kaufmann has termed it
another carte de Tendre (or more precisely the first one), and pointed to
the sub-title of the map: Discourse on the Passions of Love. [4] This, of
course, joins the map as a symbolic return to the celebrated essay, attributed
to Pascal, and probably written between 1753 and 1754, also entitled
Discours sur les passions de lamour. [5] The distinction drawn by Pascal
between geometrical and subtle minds, and those driven by ambition or by
love, as well as his conclusion that youth should be driven by both love and
finesse was evidently appealing to Debord, as was the idea of constructing
his own version of the Carte de Tendre, delineating not the rivers towards
Tenderness, but the psychogeographic slopes traced by the urban driveurs
as they sought to define hitherto unknown territories according to the sense
of their ambient unity.

Even more intriguing was the choice of the map of Paris, the pieces of which
formed the collage. The Guide Psychogographique selected a birds-eye
view meticulously drawn by G. Peltier and published by Blondel la Rougery
in 1951. Consciously modelled on the celebrated Turgot map of Paris (1739),
it showed the city in perspective, at an angle roughly equal to the point of
view established for the Carte de Tendre. This oblique view, as opposed to
the geometrical survey of the map, offered a sense of place, space, and
buildings analogous to the aerial photograph, allowing for the viewer an
imaginary entry into the urban fabric. Indeed, in the same year Debord will
go so far as to credit Chombart with the perception that an urban
neighbourhood is defined by more than the sum of its geographical and
economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of
other neighbourhoods have of it. Data of this kind, noted Debord, were
examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional
reactions. [6]

Anthony Vidler, excerpted from Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a

Landscape to be Invented.
1 Guy Debord, Panegyric Volumes I and 2, trans. James Brook and John
McHale (London: Verso, 2004), p. 167.
2 G.-E. Debord, Jacques Fillon, Rsum 1954, Potlatch 14 (30 November,
1954), p. 53.
3 Gographie, p. 22.
4 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: La rvolution au service de la
posie (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 160.
5 Pascal, Blaise (attrib.), Discours sur les passions de l'amour (1652
1653) ed. S. Pestel for the electronic collection of the Bibliothque
Municipale de Lisieux (27.X.1999), on the basis of the edition edited by
Jacques Haumont (Paris, 1940) : http://www.bmlisieux.com/
6 Guy Debord, Theory of the Drive, in Liero Andreotti and Xavier Costa,
eds., Theory of the Drive and Other Situationist Writings on the City
(Barcelona: Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, 1996), p. 22. The
original article, Thorie de la drive, was published in Les Lvres Nues no.
8, 1956, and was reprinted in Internationale Situationiste no. 2 (December
1958), pp. 1923.

Tag Testing Ground: January In 8.44 / Out 8.16