PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL CURRENTS AND THE REINFORCEMENT OF HIERARCHY IN CHICAGO
by Jordan ML
The Chicago of 2004 is a time and space odyssey; an odyssey which no Homer could have imagined nor
put to lyrical form, precisely because the lyrics to the song of the city are contained in the same community
and sense of place that the very form of the city disrupts and conditions. It is for these reasons that we must
become conscious of the reification of bureaucratic and capitalist ideology -- because we are conditioned,
and our daily lives disrupted, by the products of our constant, alienated labor -- and study the psycho-geography
of the city, which is the chronicle of our experience of those disruptions and of those degrees of conditioning.



The littered candy wrappers that we leave behind us in our race to consume have become a perfect metaphor for our urban centers. Decomposing, surrounding the public way, having once contained something sweet -- we have moved beyond the stage at which nature was subjected to our will; we have come to be dominated by a nature made up of unwilling objects. The man-made ecology of the overworked urban wasteland, at the edge of the "city that works" -- what follows is a subjective report, comprised of experiences, not data; it is a derived from spontaneous interactions in the city of Chicago, from drifts through certain ambiances in a intentionally heightened state of awareness.



Preliminary Considerations Concerning the Psychogeographer’s Study


Because the environment surrounds us, we experience it from within. We move around in and through the scene and are in a sense part of it, but we generally interact with the environment with a specific goal or plan in mind; this influence of preconceived aims has a diminishing effect on psychogeographical awareness, since some aspects will therefore be highlighted and others will be neglected or ignored. The study of psychogeography is, according to the situationist international, “the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.” (Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958.)




The psychogeographer’s study is a study of ambiances, their shifts, and the sentences they pronounce upon him or her. S/he drifts through them, experimenting with surroundings and constructing situations in order to study their repercussions. The lettrists declared people to be psychogeographical in certain ambiances, states of being, conceptual frameworks (ideologies, philosophies). The subconscious mission of the modern proletariat is to become psychogeographical everywhere: everyone must become a dialectician.


Chicago doesn't feel as psychogeographical now as it did when Nelson Algren wrote about it, because it has been redesigned for the capitalist class (as hierarchical power manifests itself most concretely today), who have no time for wandering around feeling effects like these unless they're PR researchers (who have created fascinating studies about psychogeographical interaction -- most of which are "trade secrets" -- and have wasted them revolutionizing supermarket decor*), since there has been a world-wide increase in speed with respect to investment and business decision-making, due in part to this streamlining of the world to fit the needs of that class and to make its activities ever more the center of attention. But hierarchical power was always looking to contain potential opposition, and cities have always been enclosed areas, conquered areas where power could focus its energies on creating the surroundings that suited power's justificatory ideologies.


Psychogeographical currents have been held back and diverted according to power's dictates for too long, so long that it seems that people have no way of riding them in any other direction aside from the most obvious one. By this I mean that we have lived life according to economic and hierarchical imperatives for too long, so long that we have forgotten how to live any other way and would perhaps be scared to (to whatever degree one has laid one's foundations on unstable ground).


Chicago, for instance, was built on a bog. Here and everywhere, one feels vaguely insecure about everything one does. The society of the spectacle is a needless protection racket that claims to compensate for this feeling, a feeling whose reinforcement is very profitable (hence the "terrorist threat warnings" we've been getting lately) for that very reason. The many reassurances provided by an advertising-saturated landscape seem to solidify the ground, at least until the next interaction with the unplanned world of those who are still unencumbered by the capitalists' "duty and responsibility" to maintain a "respectable" position or level of income.


Chicago is a city of many façades, and its old sections (mostly on the south and west sides) are so completely different from the downtown area that as a whole it can hardly be generalized about in terms of its psychogeography. Indeed, one feels psychogeographical in certain places, i.e., one feels more keen to the behavioral and modal effects of the ambiance there. But in other places there is a stultifying psychogeographical effect carried out by the surroundings (i.e., on La Salle st. around the skyscrapers at 4:25 p.m., during "rush hour" foot and automotive traffic), in that there is such a barrage that one cannot possibly remain focused enough on particular effects to reach any heightened state of psychogeographical awareness; one is suffocated by the thickness: of the air, of the psychogeographical currents, of the constant activity around; perception is gummed up by the formalism in the air -- the businessmen whose constant checking of their watches rushes you along unconsciously; the blank stares of the bureaucrats.


Distinctly hierarchical effects like these, which I assume the reader has felt, illustrate the reinforcement of hierarchical power's ideology: that the individual, made impotent, requires mediation by hierarchical channels to communicate his desires, hierarchical channels whose existence is supposedly set in stone and immutable. The buildings themselves convey the illusion of permanence given to hierarchical power, since they're so huge, concrete, and ostensibly all bustling with activity (though most of this activity is of an inactive, bureaucratic nature).


This illusion flows from the psychogeographical effect on the individual by the presence of power and its structures, which dull one's consciousness of the subjection of the self to extrinsic will and filling the mind with elaborate details constantly justifying and implying the existence of a specialized, final authority on every subject. The buildings are the corresponding capitalist ideology, materialized.


Psychogeography is anti-ideological because it deals with unmediated interactions between the mind and the environment, is not guided by any doctrine, and espouses no social or political plan -- indeed, it is against plans of such sort by its nature, in that psychogeography involves figuring things out as you go along and in that psychogeography derives its ideas directly from sensation, rather than trying to derive sensations from ideas as the ideologues do.


The southern and western sections of the city of Chicago comprise a city in themselves, of intense decentralization and generally distended structures surrounded, in a more or less broad sense, by interzones in which the ambiances fade into limbo in a transitional area. Part of this interzone invades the very content of the ambiance, as everywhere dumpsters are found beside heavily traveled paths, appearing in all the glory of the present world’s decomposition. These are comprised of grassy areas which are generally inaccessible, according to the law and according to the fences that surround them.


All this combined produces a set of emotional up-and-downturns, and pulls the passerby with obvious yet secret forces of subtle attraction and repulsion; nevertheless, these aspects of the city’s experience are deflected entirely by the plastic and metal shells surrounding those select people who drive the cars that have molded the city to their whims. The cars simulate autonomy while stripping it; without passing through milieus of autonomous beings, without dealing with anyone besides the role-playing businessmen these lovers of the car culture speak to on their cellular phones as they drive along between 25 and 65 mph, leaving all semblance of life a blur, autonomy is a miserable sham. This is a great loss, as humanity deserves the contributions of unbridled autonomous creativity that every individual human is capable of expressing; an autonomy that the city has torn out from generations to inadequately represent it to the present in the architectural, cultural and social forms that dominate the urban ecology.


Psychogeography of the Traffic Jam


The production of cars has for a long time been faster than the production of streets. Freeways in Chicago are packed daily between 7 and 9 a.m. and again between 4 and 7 p.m. The "rush hour" phenomenon is obviously linked to alienated labor and its typical cycles of dead time -- time spent commuting to work is as deserving of recompense as time spent at work. The rows of cars create a limited landscape that is slowly disintegrating, an allegory for the city itself; horns blaring, the frustrated subject is filled with an insatiable thirst for movement, for change -- a passion that cannot be satisfied builds up in the occupants of the cars, their anger spills into the ambiance. Businessmen look at their watches, others stare at the billboards.


Certain theoreticians have recently undertaken the study of the psychogeography of traffic -- or at least its physics. Like gas molecules, traffic flows in relation to itself and its form, imposed by the surroundings. Given a certain combination of vehicle density and vehicle flow rate along a highway, there is a sudden phase shift from freely moving traffic to a sort of "synchronized traffic." Cars in all lanes abruptly slow down and start moving at the same speed as the cars in adjacent lanes, which makes passing impossible and can cause the whole system to jam up for hours.


Any compression in the flow travels back through the stream of oncoming traffic like a shock wave. This is precisely analogous to the well-known phenomenon of standing in line at the supermarket. Waves of stop-and-go movement are transmitted "upstream" along the highway. Like a fish in water, the driver feels impelled to swim ahead, frenetically searching for escape by weaving in and out of lanes and getting off at nearby exits -- but most drivers don't get off the highway, instead waiting out the traffic. They are dragged along by the psychogeographical current and the inner impulse towards relief of the compression taking place ahead. The shock waves effect everyone, and introduce a feeling of extreme anxiety.



...Traffic congestion can arise completely spontaneously under certain circumstances. No bottlenecks or other external causes are necessary. Traffic can be flowing freely along, at a density still well below what the road can handle, and then suddenly gel into a slow-moving ooze. Under the right conditions a small, brief, and local fluctuation in the speed or spacing of cars -- the sort of fluctuation that happens all the time just by chance on a busy highway -- is all it takes to trigger a system-wide breakdown that persists for hours after the blip that triggered it is gone... such spontaneous breakdowns in traffic flow probably occur quite frequently on highways.

... In any complex interacting system with many parts, each of which affects the others, tiny fluctuations can grow in huge but unpredictable ways.

-- Atlantic Monthly, dec. 2000


I recall an experience when I got a chance to study freeway psychogeography first-hand -- As I was hitchhiking back to Chicago from Milwaukee, Wisconsin on a sunny spring day in 1997, traffic built up considerably and brought movement to a complete halt. I told the aging real-estate salesman who had picked me up that I was getting out, and I walked down the rows of cars, along the freeway to the next exit with my bag over my shoulder. Passing the people in the cars, you could sense a strange aura of resentment and anxious impotence running through all of them, whether they had noticed me or not -- those who looked at me seemed incapacitated with amazement. I kept on walking, and as I had gone about 1/4 mile past the next off ramp, I saw an awful accident to which no police had arrived. Blood coated the windshield -- another casualty of the car culture. Everyone had been slowing down to look to the shoulder and gawk; traffic was clearing up beyond that point. I walked off the shoulder and to the next on ramp, where I got a ride.


Geographical considerations on Chicago


Chicago is a geographically compelling city -- it is built at the convergence of waterways, and is generously productive agriculturally. However, the buildings and enclosures constructed upon these once beautiful pieces of land (objects, pieces of property to those who did not actually know how to enjoy living in them) create a psychogeography of misery, a poverty-stricken psychogeography, and naturally a silent mocking of the individual by his surroundings themselves, and by their obvious capacity. Whipped into a frenzy of repetitive, rubbing friction; pulled between surroundings of sterility and dreamlike visions of inaccessible abundance; the city catches people up in a dried, ossified dialectic (the dialectic of the individual and power, of history and the spectacle’s “eternal present”), surrounding them with its materialized representation.


In this city of bureaucratic capitalism and its hierarchical divisions, people are driven to identify with the various specializations, labels and classifications they are provided with as goals, ideals, or images, and to take pride in them. If they do not, pressure quickly builds in the mind as it is progressively stuffed with representations of success in these categories; whole frameworks of philosophical discourse and even, eventually, of an autonomized logic and reason, are built up everywhere, and they fit neatly within them in the mind. In the end people know how to take pride in little more than in their work, and in how willingly they submit to those economic imperatives which the capitalist regime imposes. Out of this incomplete suppression of insecurity (a job reproducing the culture and objects that alienate) is borne the inversion of our desire to know ourselves -- we feel the need to choose to take to such fleeting reassurances as marriage, psychoanalysis, commodity fetishism, irrational aggressiveness, masochism, drugs, television, “crime” (though these are not independent categories) when their jobs lose meaning -- or when they lose their jobs -- to try to heal those same dearly regarded, yet imposed, divisions.


Psychogeography shows us how there are zones within the city that are more and less conducive to feeling different relative proportions of relief and anxiety. Psychogeography is the ecological analysis of the absolute or relative effect of compression in the ambiance of the city as a whole, and of de-compressive fissures in that urban network; it studies the role played by microclimates; of distinct zones and currents with no relation to administrative boundaries; and above all of the dominating action played by the centers of attraction; the scattered repulsive/inaccessible areas; and the routine passageways of a place on everyday life.


It is studied more or less consciously each day by each of us when we feel the presence of autonomy from without expectations and assumptions; it is a weapon each day when we discover something new seeping out from those fissures and into the free flow of subjective passions. The prevailing boundaries are all dead weights we carry, conscious, upon our imaginations and upon our daily lives. When you drift without them, that sense of freedom clarifies psychogeographical perception.


An analytical drift for the express purpose of psychogeographical study must be conducted in complete insubordination to habitual influence. Goals and plans distract and misdirect you from your free association of distinct elements as they appear. Generally, the faster you go, the more you miss, and this assists in making power‘s ends meet, creating a hierarchical relationship in the form of judgments that appear necessarily related because of their constant relative presence.


The uninterrupted pseudo-dialogue of power, which takes on the appearance of incontestable truth (precisely because it is not constantly contested by the full exercise of autonomy and its necessary corollary, the creative satisfaction of common and uncommon needs by autonomous individuals freely associating with one another to do so), retains its control by creating these hierarchies in everyday life and reinforcing them with economic, social and geographical structures, such as class, race, and the skyscraper-lowrise dialectic, all of which condition one's experience of life in the city.



Microclimates in the urban wasteland.


Because of the concentration of social activity in the city, and its all-encompassing moods and roles, there is an amplified psychological effect experienced from climate. The psychogeographer drifts along, subtly guided by the constant fluctuation of the urban ecology's microclimates, which, when their blurring together is extreme, serve quite a disorienting function, and which, when they are distinct, condition even those conscious of their effects. A building such as a project has a distinct temperature around it which can hardly be felt through the air conditioning in one's car. Walking through, however, one notices that they feel colder than other places do, and inside them it feels cramped and sweaty, and one thinks one is warmer, regardless of the wintertime chill. The variations in microclimates cannot be defined according to particular, objective criterions, because these are subjective effects -- their proliferation, however, is so intense that descriptive factors gleaned from other people's expressed feeling-observations and one's own can be applied to the following psychogeographical states:

Empty or cold : uncomfortable, desire hijacked, diverted towards sedation & cozy contact -- wants to be wrapped up in speculations on other movement (non-physical movement occupies attention -- TV.; affairs) -- active boredom, feeling of rigidity, crispness, frank & earnest alienation. Large containers, pots, brittle feeling, depression, shivers -- poison. Distension or atomization.

Warm or crowded : desire hijacked to sense of security, laziness (passive boredom), rottenness or dirtiness, abundance of objects or multiple small containers -- wants to be stripped clean (frenzied consumption, anxiety), spectacularized alienation. Closeness or claustrophobia, feeling of melted-ness, over-malleability; obvious presence of other movement, coercion, control.


Psychogeography of the passage of two people through a relatively short stretch of roadway and the varying microclimates found therein once time was living-dead.



There is an intersection at Milwaukee, North, and Damen; it is a center of attraction towards which approaches, from all sides, a psychogeographical current of considerable force. The following accounts for a drift on North Milwaukee avenue from Western to Damen: there are interrupted progressions through various ambiances on each of these streets, beginning about 20 blocks out from the center along each of them, starting out going from relative bleakness and euphoria to a strip mall, and then being interrupted by an interzone, and then going from dollar stores and the emanating rap/Hispanic music to a gradually interspersed cultural consumerism (trendier stores, retro shops); boutiques with a "thrifty" appearance and high prices, and then the center itself, with its restaurants and cafes that ooze with the subsequent unaffordable rents' eviction notices, spraying them up into the surrounding apartments.


Blacks move out for Mexicans move out for artists move out for yuppies. The centralized social order is broadcast in all directions; from the consumption-centers, arranged in concentric belts, you pass: the distribution factories, and then the production barracks, and, scattered in between, the cramped living quarters. Brenner's 1920 "The City" describes social activities in Chicago thus, but now his analysis extends to the socioeconomic spheres. Project-colonies that look like dumpsters, encircled by Mexicans with low-paying jobs living in the old apartments that were falling apart when they were built, encircled by higher echelons that look like storage units. The people living in the storage units work in the Loop, whereas the people from the old apartments work in the dolled up service industry jobs, and the people the state dumps into its garbage cans have to work in the armies of spectacular production, and if they refuse to they're forced -- in the numerous privatized jails. The lofts are put up in the old warehouses, and immediately the rents go up so high the old apartments clear out and the projects start getting denounced by the city again, as if things had suddenly gotten any worse. The city starts to look like a bunch of brick boxes stacked next to each other, behind fences next to huge sidewalks and across from empty lots. Blacks move out for Mexicans move out for artists move out for yuppies.



In-situ considerations on emotive and rational impulsions


There are psychogeographically magnetic contour lines in the city which act as a kind of current influencing the movement of individuals; this is ignored in city planning because the realization of these psychogeographical currents opens the way to the realization of the degree to which one is conditioned and moved about by hierarchical power in daily life. Because the city is so huge, and cannot be perceived all at once, we convince ourselves that the zone we are fixed within comprises the entire city, and, due to the dialectical interconnectedness of everything, these perceptions tend to be microcosmic representations of the larger-scale reality. The function, for example, of section eight housing, which is privately managed by various investors entirely removed from the daily reality of the people living there, is to contain those elements in society the violence of whose desires is uncontrollable. Small areas are colonized by these brick constructions, which usually house a few families in wretched conditions which externally tend to be "aesthetically pleasing" and internally tend to be hovels. The newest condominium constructions are virtually indistinguishable from the newest projects.


The currents created by this aesthetic homogenization play an implicitly unilateral role in the establishment of routine, which involves repetitive movements and submission to the exigencies of power: rather than celebrating autonomy, they regularly strip it of its function while contributing to the illusion of its presence. The people who live in this city planner's dreamland are managed according to the arbitrary decisions of property managers and cubicle bureaucrats, who have no idea what really causes the drug use and prolific reproduction that their programs try to compensate for. City housing units, those festering wounds of callousness and repressed despair, are now being shut down all over the country -- but the problems caused by the oppression of moving people around against their will can't be solved by evicting them again. "Neighborhood is a myth". There are no roots in Chicago because they're always being pulled up; the illusion of hierarchical power pulls a blindfold over the eyes of the most forward thinking and turns them around.


This illusion is proffered in the form of an identification with such fascistic, whitewash concepts as race, class, and political category, an identification which, at the same time as it integrates people into hierarchies, providing them with a sense of security, abstracts the individual from his or her real experience of interaction with conditions as an individual, and thus reinforces the very alienation it set out to attack by multiplying separations. Chicago is an intensely separated city, with frenetically proliferating racial and economic quasi-boundaries and a multiplicity of atomized causes. It is organized in belts, & every five or ten blocks there's a main street where you can usually get anything you need. There are concentric circles of alternating wealth and poverty throughout the city. This leaves the passer-through feeling jolted and jarred around by it; the city having been built on a bog, after all, geographically sunken, it cannot help but become psychogeographically depressed.


The city government and its playmates the capitalists have a game they enjoy very much, in which they wipe out the unitary ambiances of neighborhoods to replace them with Starbucks-style cultural homogenization and the subsequently higher rents or with “mixed-income housing” where housing projects once stood, as cheaply constructed as the buildings on the north side (predominantly more wealthy) but inhabited by human beings who apparently only exist to correspond to numbers on forms in the Chicago Housing Authority’s bureaucratic mess of filing cabinets.


Politicians, like Chicago’s mayor, assume people’s ignorance of the obvious solutions that exist to the problems created by the ideological structures they serve, and on this assumption they’ve announced recently that they would expand O’Hare airport, already one of the most enormous airports in the world, instead of making use of Meigs field, an airport used primarily by the super-rich whose destruction has been planned and put off for 20 years. This would involve building a new road to cut across established ambiances into O’Hare. Meigs Field is a part of the city that is rather inaccessible by foot, as will be the park Daley apparently wants to build. The brutality of the city in doing this, sticking an obnoxious, disruptive freeway in next to your house and then kicking a few hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money down to the schools and neighborhood police in compensation, is typical.


This airfield was the other option a few years ago when Mayor Daley’s plan to revitalize the city with higher-income housing ended up tearing down numerous projects in its stead, and was brought up by the loyal opposition, yet only superficially; a much more radical change could be made to the entire city, but anything but gentrification and its sidekick, eviction, it seems, would be entirely unprofitable for those in power here. Meigs Field, according to the following article, will remain open until 2006 -- unless the governor and his friends the capitalists have their way, in which case, until 2026 -- and the Mayor can’t think of a better use of it than to turn it into another park.


That people’s housing is of such little concern shows where their concerns primarily lie. The real cost is people’s livelihood.


…The deal contained the eight-runway configuration Daley sought for O'Hare that will nearly double the capacity of the airport. Included in the $6.6 billion project will be the controversial southern airstrip that will require the demolition of about 500 homes and apartments mostly in Bensenville. The agreement also proposes a western-access road into O'Hare and provides $450 million in additional soundproofing for nearby homes and schools. In exchange, Ryan dropped his insistence on limiting flights at O'Hare. As the two worked to hammer out a final agreement, the linchpin remained Meigs. Ryan managed to extract a concession from Daley who agreed to keep the lakefront airport open until Jan. 1, 2026, though Meigs could be closed anytime after Jan. 1, 2006, by a vote of the General Assembly. Daley has wanted to build a park on the Meigs site.

-- Chicago Tribune, Dec. 6, 2001.

The path to autonomy (the only autonomy allowed, of course, being that which tolerates the existence of extrinsic, conditioning powers) appears much clearer when it is completely surrounded by and seen through the lens of abstractions -- stereotypes, generalizations, labels. It’s much easier to evict 500 families when you look at them as though they were mere numbers.


The city’s planners, vaguely conscious agents of the socioeconomic superstructures imposed by the hierarchies of state and capital, present us with cultural forms that continue to decompose, requiring that provisions be made for the exigencies of the individual’s sense of autonomy in the world. Thus the dialectic of the individual and power at present being played out on a massive scale throughout human societies continues loosening and blurring, though only in the realm of appearances, dominated primarily by urbanists and public relations executives. These professional boredom-merchants illustrate our world providing us with such wonderful parking lots, housing projects, wide streets, shoddily constructed towers of capitalist and bureaucratic babble that all eventually crumble -- whether as a result of heavy wear or of airplane hijackings -- in the face of which we are offered little more than the occasional opportunity to paint murals on certain walls.



In Ravenswood, vandals are making known their dislike of yuppies in some nasty ways including graffiti on "for sale" signs and people's homes. Most recently, "bias zone" was spray-painted on a Starbucks. In response, Ald. Schulter has put up $5000 of his own money to find those responsible. Meanwhile small businesses in Lakeview and on Southport are being pushed out by high rents. -- Chicago Tonight, Feb. 1, 2001

This is merely a recent example of this ongoing process of gentrification; the poor are always in the way, it seems, and they are relocated over and over, creating what ends up the mindset that, according to a man living at 63rd and Halsted on the south side, “you’ve just got to do whatever you have to do to survive.” Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives: “whatever you have to do” is whatever the boss at whatever job you manage to get (or whatever the letter from the CHA) says you do, unless you commit one or some of the many profitable crimes listed in the law books.


Accounts of psychogeographical exploration in the "West Pilsen" and "Marshall Square" "neighborhoods".


According to a man from the Mexican state of Guerrero who lives near me, a bit east into Pilsen on 18th street, and a member of the youth gang “folks” says that breaking the law is essentially all there is to do “for fun” in Chicago’s south and west side neighborhoods -- economically undeveloped except by small, relatively overpriced shops -- “since everything else is so boring”. There's definitely an emptiness here that begs to be filled.


One man says in a conversation in Spanish that he mostly spends time hanging around the area that leads into chinatown from the west down Cermak, which is 22nd street, and usually doesn’t go further east than the I-55 and 90 freeway or further west than Ashland, where the 18th street El stop is. This is an interesting area because the angles of the well lit streets create a sort of funnel which draws from the east and narrows towards the south and the west, under the arch to "Chinatown" or west to the "Little Village".


These neighborhood names are not really used very often, since they have vague boundaries and are intersected by the strange architectural designs of structures that seem to be out of place amongst the old buildings, numerous storefronts, and the drifting litter rolling and gliding along with the wind. Moving northward up California avenue, a friend and I found ourselves passing through areas inhabited by people of skin color that would change as we passed through five to ten block sections. As we were walking, a black kid interjected: “what’s up, officers”, having assumed we were cops since we were white, to which I laughed and said: “I’m not a cop”.


This interaction took place at the corner of California and Roosevelt, where the Parkview grocery store seems long shut down, and where liquor stores with packaged goods suddenly begin to appear alongside empty lots and abandoned buildings, starting just north of Ogden and California avenues and continuing north to the sudden change to the Ukrainian Village. The Sinai hospital divides the ambiances, an interzone with Douglas Park on one side of the street and the hospital’s rushed white employees walking quickly to their cars. When you try to talk to them they say little more than “I don’t have any change” and keep walking away before you have a chance to ask them anything, or they stand ten feet away and warn you that “people have been found dead in that park over there”.


The people in the more psychogeographically vague ambiances are usually black or latino, due as much to the city’s insistence on hiding poverty and the lack of public funds to be distributed to small business as to the generalized lack of initiative generated by the psychogeography of the area. People in these psychogeographical regions tend to hang around in the streets at all hours, talking, making deals, waving at cars, drinking, etc. People in the more actively magnetic regions tend to populate the streets during shopping hours and working hours, and keep moving down the sidewalks or through the streets in their cars.


This is an instance in which we can see the effects of psychogeographical interference, in clear circumstances, on the movement of the human body. Thus a revolutionary movement will only successfully cultivate human desire and autonomy if it reflects and is in harmony with the flowing, sexual state of the body united with the mind; the psychogeographical and physical rigidity and oppressive magnitude of downtown Chicago as well as outlying areas is a parallel with the regimentation of the modern consumer who inhabits them, locked into routine by the very circumstance of his existence.


I met another psychogeographer today, a black man who asked me for change. I told him was broke at the moment and we started to discuss life in the city and movement within it. “Yeah, for sure, there’s definitely zones, man," he said. "I usually don’t leave Chicago Av., I just stay between Homan and Pulaski and that’s it. People leave their doors open, everything’s cool. But down a few blocks they’ve got other folks moving in now … and they’ve got the places all fixed up now but they keep everything locked and they’re never walking around… and as you go there’s all of a sudden cars up and down both sides of the street.”


The years and years of alienation residual in the walls, ceilings, floors and doors of the rented apartments in this part of the city have rubbed off by creating the psychogeographical effect of the rooms themselves; the buildings exert a strange reversal on everyone who inhabits them. This reversal is a result of the mediation between the builder and the project -- a mediation carried out by the numbers and charts, schematics and plans inherent in the labor of construction contractors and workers, who had these buildings built without experiencing the influences of the area around because they had had so many other jobs it had become routine, and of course, the workmen simply followed orders passed down from the architects, who were much too busy to see more than a set of specifications before making their blueprint; perhaps a leisurely drive past the location, but surely the booming industrial-era architect of the first half of the 20th century, rebuilding the city after fire and economic collapse, had better things to do than try to get a feel for what he was really working with.


This separation inherent in capitalist labor, between intellectual and manual work, communicates itself in that psychogeographical aberration which is the experience of living in a city apartment. In our apartment at 16th street and California avenue for instance, the door which was intended to be the front door has never been used as such; rather, the back door has always been used as the front door. This is explained in that the only access to our apartment is through a side door down a narrow alley. This creates a streamlining, focusing effect. The alley is blocked off for half the trip down on the right with a fence between the alley and the house next door, which is recessed from the street and whose front yard is a near perfect square. This illustrates the city’s and the property owners’ arbitrary aesthetic considerations and their insistence on the maintenance of straight lines between properties.


I was told by a man I met in my neighborhood who had lived here for 32 years, named Nick, who was a sewer worker. He'd made some observations that clarified my own: "I've been all over this city underneath it and on the streets... A sewer's a sewer. It's just as bad above the concrete as it is below." I asked him whether he thought the city's relatively new multi-billion dollar project to dig sewage tunnels for when the lake would naturally have overflowed, otherwise carrying sludge back into the drinking water, and he replied that "it was a bad idea, trying to make up for what happened after they got another bad idea going. All I can say is this city was screwed from the start. You hang out in those black neighborhoods, huh? don't go in the alleys over there. People resent you in those alleys." Comparing this judgment with the streamlining effect I experience in the alley around my apartment it seems understandable that the alleys would be conducive to a heightened feeling of spite; their streamline effect would remind one, seemingly, of the negative effects of the streamlining of the city -- the cleaning out of the "undesirables" -- that has lead to widespread disdain in the growing presence of ever-whiter people, whose skin must represent the spectacular process of whitewash homogenization that's been brought to Chicago.


At the halfway point the door is on the left side, leading up to stairs with doors on either side, which feel somehow choking, as though the doors were all faces staring at you as you walk up; this makes the staircase entirely unappealing, but it is so ostensibly because in these areas of the west side, as well as in most of the older parts of the city, it was the profit motive (a fetish for needless accumulation, since they have obviously never worried much about space considerations, hence Chicago’s horrendous, stultifying urban sprawl) that drove capitalist contractors to heavy speculation and to the construction small apartments for large families, in an effort to squeeze as much fodder as possible into their cannons behind the vaunted, spectacularized representations of authentic life that they fire at our imaginations.


And these are the cities that these duped workers would inhabit, after having produced them under orders. Victimized daily by the parasitic capitalists whose ignorance of the unity of body and mind, desire and action, made those inhibited, frightened con artists feel impelled to construct justifications for their guilt complexes and alienation by financing the construction of a subtly alienating city, whose factory-like character has never left it. "And he must pay for this house of death."


Moving on down the hall you’d come to an un-lockable gate leading to a larger, perpendicular alley, to the left of which are a set of stairs that, when ascended, keep the block and its skyline visible on the left at every floor. The perpendicular alley guides the receptive psychogeographer, in tune with the surroundings and their impulsions, pulling him or her up the stairs in the back, making the “back door” the most used door for every inhabitant of the back half (four floors including the basement, which I haven’t explored) of the building.


Perfect inversions such as this between actual use and intended use point up the discrepancy between the experience of a place by the individual and its experience by power. To power, which owns the city, Chicago is a city where one can drive everywhere and see few differences between places aside from the obvious “racial” boundaries between areas. To the individual, it is a completely different story every time. The measure of this sameness seems, incidentally, to be proportional to a measure of power’s infiltration into your own mind.



Between the hours of 6 and 9 pm, I walked between California and Western avenues on Ogden avenue, which runs diagonally between them in a west-southwesterly direction. I had to cash a check at Western and Ogden, and so I walked past the Ogden Courts housing project, where three heavy set men stood at a barbeque in front of the fence. I told them it smelled good and they offered me a polish, which I graciously took.


We chatted about how it was to live in the projects there and one of the guys said "it's just another momentary place, another few months or maybe another few years and we'll get moved somewhere else." They didn't feel quite at home, and the modern spectator -- who would never go outside and have barbeque on the sidewalk, much less talk to passersby -- doesn't feel at home anywhere.


So being in the inner city, with at least a semblance of community, albeit in a hastily thrown together area with poor upkeep, at least gives you the subsequent notion that since you feel at home nowhere, you might as well feel at home everywhere. The spectators who would think this a dangerous encounter for which I was "risking my life" (in the words of a white lady to whom I mentioned it) are merely incapable of understanding that everyone, including them, is being moved about by power at every turn, whether geographically or psychologically.


These extremes correspond to the extreme upper and lower classes in capitalist society and particularly in Chicago, where capitalists are explicitly involved in the molding of the city to frenetically changing ideological concerns such as hiding poverty, presenting a good image, etc., which leads them to build ever higher so that more people could have 225,000 dollar views of the lake (this was the average price for a highrise apartment to be constructed where the Cabrini Green housing projects once stood, before being torn down in favor of Meigs field remaining on the lake itself) and less people could have $150 per month views. This hindrance to autonomy, in the form of constant, other-directed change, compounds the problem of self-realization in an unreal world of unmanipulable masses and abstractions -- moved about so much, presented with violently changing images and with great velocities that seem uncontrollable, people are forcibly disoriented, regardless of class position.


On 17th place, west of Western avenue, there's a factory warehouse whose dead-end street is a parking lot; the asphalt is worn away and the hastily laid bricks below shine through. You have to make a wrong turn to see anything, it seems, in Chicago -- the city that in 1968 threw up wooden fences along the roadway leading to the Amphitheater where the Democratic Convention was to be held so no one would have to see the broken down houses behind them -- hiding poverty and decomposition has always been a big part of the "City that Works", even though "not working" is at its very heart.


The plans and maps that led to the "urban renewal" of an old, alley plagued city like Chicago mark out only the main streets and boulevards, ever-uprooting the ever-sprouting seeds of "neighborhood": these are the new lines of battle, drawn over like a grid of hopelessness and distension; a spider's web that nets the poor in like flies. Neighborhoods are always transitional points here; people are always trying to get out of the city, but it pulls them around in its world, if not directly, like the CHA moves people, then definitely indirectly, like gentrification or other hierarchical/cultural imperative does. The city picks them up and drops them, over and over, into different psychogeographical zones, amidst so many abrupt changes in decor and design that it almost seems like an absurd joke.


“The Chicago Housing Authority began in 1937 with high ideals about the positive effect decent housing could have on people’s lives. By the late 1940s that idealism had been almost destroyed by Chicago politics.” So says Wim de Wit, in his "The Rise of Public Housing in Chicago, 1930-1960," published in 1993. Public housing’s miserably failed in its attempt to “clean up” the crime, poverty, disease and drug use that always exists among the oppressed (since they’re taunted into it, psychogeographically surrounded by once-beautiful, lush lands with great capacity for abundance, and yet suffering from scarcity). Years ago, for instance, Chicago bulldozed a shantytown with fruit trees, replacing it with a mega-complex of high-rise public housing, some 4,000+ units called Robert Taylor Homes, later known as "The Hole." All efforts to eradicate its problems failed, and the complex is now being torn down.



This is a scandalous exposition of the lie spoken in the typically American idea that any individual “worth his salt” can come out of the slums to get ahead, raise a family, and stand up, proud and happy. Much more often, the slums get taken out of the city so the property value around where they'd once stood can be raised, and $200,000 lofts can be put on the market surrounded by blocks of warehouses and abandoned storefronts.


When you look at the “privileged” or "underprivileged" people who come up with these projects it's clear that they too suffer from an alienation incurable from within their mentality -- that lie that money, or lack of money, can confer any meaningful, satisfying pride in one’s self. Just look at their atomized "communities" and the ones the speculators have put up all over the city. The rich, too, use drugs and commit crimes (albeit crimes in a less acknowledged sense), as well as live in ghettos with all their wealth -- the highrises, projects and condominiums of Chicago are cramped, claustrophobic, and alienated-detached, like the private homes of the property owning classes (elaborately decorated fortresses), they are all fenced in and there's only little, atomized groups to play with.


Upper class "loft" neighborhoods appear everywhere amongst the abandoned warehouses, projects, factories and streets, white folks flashing anxiety ridden looks at the blacks and mexicans as they hurriedly get into their cars to drive the 3 blocks to the supermarket. A black man told me that he hated "all these niggers around the neighborhood who don't want to work and just hang out in the streets." I told him they'd probably decided creating with the people in the boring streets was more fun than producing with the bored people in the factories. He drove off in a Mercedes-Benz smoking a cigar.


The very concept of race is as imposed and fascist a concept as the concept of class. Race and class are constructs created to justify hierarchical power's existence; the desire to "ascend in the class structure" is as much an excuse for ignoring one's common interest with humanity as the desire to "identify with a racial background". Black people and Mexican people are faced with the ugly reality of hierarchical power, whereas White people tend to be faced with the dolled-up unreality of the hierarchized degrees of alienation and boredom available for consumption that power and its tool, the commodity-spectacle, presents as the end-all-be-all. The absurdity of this ideology and its civilization demands their destruction.



General conclusions drawn from the foregoing promenade-excursions


Anti-racism and exclusive anti-capitalism are recuperated anti-statism. Anti-racism reinforces the concept of race -- while appearing to oppose the domination of one "race" over another or the rest (which certainly is happening...in the realm of appearances), they in fact make that fascist concept "race" seem more real, and encourage identification with them. This, like every categorization and compartmentalization, always tends to lead to the formation of hierarchies, which necessitate the division of peoples and the manufacture of statist ideology. Anti-capitalism alone doesn't bring into question the existence of bureaucratic hierarchies, and thus contains potentially fruitful resistance until the "vanguards" or the "proletariat" present directives -- every individual, however, is capable of making a revolution in their daily life, against alienation -- against immutability and unilateral pseudo-communication, that is, against the state and its spectacular representations of a phony "privilege".


A U.S. officer aboard the US aircraft carrier, Carl Vinson, described the use of 2,000 lb cluster bombs dropped by B-52 bombers: "A 2,000 lb. bomb, no matter where you drop it, is a significant emotional event for anyone within a square mile." At the time of this writing, most folks in America, including Chicago, of course, are unaware that 3,767 people have died from bombings in Afghanistan; if Mr. Vinson can understate death and destruction so extremely as to call it an "emotional event", I can certainly talk about the alienation-bomb dropped on Chicago as an ongoing "emotional event", which drives people to depression and anxiety -- if not suicide. In effect, we have the same problems here as in the third-world.


Chicago is desperately patching up this sinking boat called civilization, but all the hot air it's filled with is escaping fast. Its program of urban renewal is a program of pure spectacle. It plans to show the rich only representations of their strangely missing selves, and to show the poor only the illusion of the happy rich, and it has realized its plan -- on the level of carefully managed appearances such as these, anything is possible for those who happen to be in power, and only false choices are possible for those who happen not to be. Hierarchy has to create scarcity in order to justify its existence. Chicago is a city that was built to cater to a doomed set of tastes; a set of tastes needlessly requiring an enormous amount of dwindling resources.


Urban planning turns the world upside down, making what is not real at all the most real of all. Methodically replacing each experience with a representation, each project with a condo, each factory, landfill, and quarry with a park, the city is also methodically polluting each neighborhood with the presence of corporate strip-malls and then evicting them underhandedly as rents rise indiscriminately. Chicago has, in the loop and in malignant patches all over the city, become spectacularly dull and banally spectacular in its psychogeography.


Decor determines gesture as long as gestures are not seized upon with passion. We must create passionate surroundings, and no longer be subjugated to the "worship! consume! obey!" that conditions and abolishes the psychogeographical currents operating in the cities, pulling us only towards the hackneyed promised land of infinite consumption, the "lemonade tide on the big rock candy mountain" we never arrive at, and disallowing us from being pulled in other directions by stripping those places of their vital autonomy. Each commodity is a Stalin, and each urban center of attraction is a Chernobyl. The clogged freeways are concentration camps, and the factory is everywhere.


Chicago is just a shining example of an ideal that has failed and is doomed -- the ideal of satisfaction from infinite consumption and infinite resources. Its personality is uniquely representative of the homogenization encroaching upon us, a guilty, tainted homogenization that wants to burst with laughter and individuality, but that instead just beats out the drum-roll leading American civilization over its lemming cliff, consuming at a suicidal rate and producing useless-objects-to-be, careening ever faster down the expressway to suffocation or starvation -- and the junction isn't far up the road.