ARTIFICIAL HELLS

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Guy Debord, Psychogeographical Guide to Paris, 1957, fold-out map
Guide to Paris (1957), a fold- out map subtitled ‘Discourse on the passions
of love: psychogeographic descents of drifting and localisation of ambient
unities’, is highly suggestive for considering the instructional character of
SI activities. The city is shown as fragmented, joined by blank areas indicated
only by the flow of red arrows. It is not a record or report of a state of
affairs, nor does it have a function: the map is unquestionably hopeless as a
guide to Paris, but also as a guide to understanding Debord’s own subjective
responses to the city. (In this, it differs from the Surrealist group’s Map
of the World, 1929, in which certain countries are vastly enlarged while
others vanish altogether, corresponding to their status in the Surrealist
imaginary.) Like Debord’s map of Parisian ‘unités d’ambiance’ dated January
1957, in which particular districts are circled and shaded, his
Psychogeographical Guide to Paris shows a form of notation that is significant
less as a record than as a trigger for us to ponder our own sensitivities
to the urban environment. It suggests a method or tool, or – following Ivan
Chtcheglov’s psychoanalytic reading – a technique. 36
When the Lettriste International was superseded by the Situationist
International in 1957, a third term came to prevail: the ‘constructed situation’.
This was defined in the first issue of I.S. as ‘a moment of life,
concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a
unitary ambiance and a game of events’. 37 One of the key characteristics of
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