Society of the Spectacle and Beyond Boredom & Anxiety (or: what exactly is Psychogeographic Flow)
I’ve been looking again at Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967, translated 2014) and Csikszentmihaly’s Beyond Boredom & Anxiety (1975) and trying to make specific links between them so that I can firm up the creative piece to exemplify psychogeographic flow in Black Country writing. Here are some notes:
In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord developed and presented the concept of ‘the spectacle’, by which he meant ‘mass media’ and its effect on society. In it, Debord presents, in a series of 221 short theses, a negative, critical stance towards the development of the spectacle, which, for him serve to reinforce the exploitation of society under advanced capitalism, forging individualisation and separation of human beings. Debord presents a society in which, because of the spectacle, the commodities rule the workers and the consumers. In Thesis 17, for example he refers to: ‘The decline of being into having…and having into merely appearing’ with the implication that the worker becomes driven by the need for commodities, and being seen with those commodities, and is thus enslaved by work in order to afford them, and all of this is powered by the spectacle. In Beyond Boredom, Csikszentmihaly says,
‘At present, most of the institutions that take up our time – schools, offices, factories – are organised around the assumption that serious work is grim and unpleasant. Because of this assumption, most of our time is spent doing unpleasant things.’ (1975: 1) Further, he says, ‘By the time they grow to be adults, most people have been conditioned to respond predictably to external cues, usually represented by the symbolic rewards of money and status.’ (1975: 2) According to Csikszentmihaly, a cultural norm in Western society is that extrinsic rewards such as money and ‘success’ at work through promotion etc. are more greatly valued than intrinsic rewards, which has the effect of diminishing the value of the work itself.
‘When a teacher discovers that children will work for a grade, he or she may become less concerned with whether the work itself is meaningful or rewarding to students. Employers who take for granted the wisdom of external incentives may come to believe that workers' enjoyment of the task is irrelevant. As a result, children and workers will learn, in time, that what they have to do is worthless in itself and that itsonly justification is the grade or paycheck they get at the end. This pattern has become so general in our culture that by now it is self-evident: what one must do cannot be enjoyable. So we have learned to make a distinction between "work" and "leisure": the former is what we have to do most of the time against our desire; the latter is what we like to do, although it is useless.’ (1975: 3)
Debord goes further, drawing equivalence between the role of mass media in the present and religion in the past. To him, the spectacle has this power because it demands obedience without any possible dialogue. The sense that worshipful behaviour to commodities extends to ‘fetishism’ (his example is the inclination to be seduced into buying luxury goods partly because of the ‘free bonus gift’ which then, in itself, becomes a ‘collectible item’ generating more need to acquire more commodities) has only one purpose: ‘producing habitual submission’ (Thesis 67).
According to Richardson, ‘One of the ways Situationists resisted the spectacle was through the medium of their published materials which often took the form of DIY maps and architectural designs reflecting their proposals for a unitary urbanism, and their urban walking practice, psychogeography.’ (2019: 405).
In attempting to link this to the Black Country, perhaps the hangover of the ‘industrial area’ aspect of the Black Country has convinced us that its geography – it’s working class culture, maybe – is also grim, and that this element of walking, of experiencing what I am calling the sensation of the place, whilst not normatively extrinsically rewarding, requires something more complex than (in behaviourist terms) simple primary reinforcers in order for the gain of intrinsic rewards. By which I mean the element or achievement of flow (which I’ll explain later) in psychogeographic terms here in the Black Country, means overlooking, or looking through the fug of the spectacle in order to see its value, or to reverse Debord’s appearing and having, back to being.
To explain further, perhaps for many, the Black Country canals, lined with factories (some derelict, some not), dilapidated buildings and neglected sidings represents a region run-down, left behind, depressing through uselessness. According to Debord:
‘The development of productive forces has been the unconscious history that has actually created and altered the living conditions of human groups - the conditions enabling them to survive and the expansion of those conditions. It has been the economic basis of all human undertakings. Within natural economies, the emergence of a commodity sector represented a surplus survival.’ (Thesis 40)
The value, then, argues Debord, appears to be in the growth of ‘productive forces’. By extension, any reduction (caused, say, by economic recession) equates to a lack of value.
Richardson sites Edensor (2005: 7) who recognises dereliction and ruin as spaces of heterogeneity, and considers that if we regard them as ‘useless’ we are, effectively, missing the point and that this rather typical view actually hides ‘the social, political and economic processes through which decisions about space and value are reached.’
This, then, is not so much about (or as simple as the concept of) ‘place’, but about what has been done and how new-meaning-making can emerge. Perhaps psychogeographies are (or psychogeography is) a refusal to accept the given or commonly accepted or normative meaning of the situation.
Flow, then, according to Csikszentmihaly is a dynamic cognitive state. It is:
‘the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement. In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He [sic] experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future. Flow is what we have been calling “the autotelic experience”.’ (1975: 36)
Csikszentmihaly says that this state usually happens for short periods, and can be easily broken by surfacing into an outside perspective (perhaps this links to Debord:
‘Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers' direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.’ (Thesis 53)
I am proposing that topoaesthesia, or sensation of place, occurs when one is in a state of flow, occurring specifically through urban psychogeographic walking (in this case, in the Black Country.) What will be interesting is how this could materialise in Black Country writing and how it can be explained.
Here’s Csikszentmihaly:
‘Still another characteristic of a person in flow is that he is in control of his actions and of the environment. He has no active awareness of control but is simply not worried by the possibility of lack of control. Later, in thinking back on the experience, he will usually conclude that, for the duration of the flow episode, his skills were adequate for meeting environmental demands; and this reflection might become an important component of a positive self-concept.’ (1975: 44)
I like that phrase ‘thinking back on the experience, he will usually conclude that…’ and I can see how that links to my style of writing. Looking back, he will usually conclude. What is that grammatical construction called? It looks like a contradiction: looking back, he will. Past and future put together. It doesn’t feel conventional, as if it isn’t following a rule. Debordian, that. And Csikszentmihaly says, of flow:
‘What counts even more is the person’s ability to restructure the environment so that it will allow flow to occur.’ (1975: 53)
and
‘But whether the structure is internal or external, the steps for experiencing flow…involve the same process of delimiting reality, controlling some aspect of it, and responding to feedback with a concentration that excludes anything else as irrelevant.’ (1975: 53-4)
I need to consider all this, and I know I need to edit and amend what’s going on in God’s Country in light of it all. I just need to consider exactly what.
(Referencing will follow)