More New Drawings From an Infinitely Ongoing Series Cataloguing Every Object, Both Real and Imaginary, in The Entire Universe.
Karl Jung is a Grass: Pathology, performance with slide show, 2012
Emma Cummins wrote a paper on what she calls "Pathological Geographies". I've been reading it in preparation for this talk.
Pathological
Geographies are, according to Emma, landscapes of the built
environment which exhibit the inherently contradictory nature of
capitalism.
I'll let Emma talk more
about it in the discussion afterwards – these are her photos by the
way.
The built environments
she talks about in her paper are the Ghost Estates of Ireland, and
the Ghost Towns of Spain.
Emma went to Ireland
and Spain for her research, driving around with a friend,
visiting half built housing developments that were abandoned
after the housing crash of 2008.
The psychogeographical
idea of walking as thinking is inverted in Emma's research. By
driving rather than walking, she compresses time and removes the
possibility of contiguous connections. She bridges the gap between
the points on the map.
She told me about
visiting half finished estates in Ireland. As she approached the
houses, taking photos, the only occupied house would open its door,
and a hopeful face would appear. They would approach Emma and say 'are you moving in?'. They would talk about being completely
stranded on the estate: no infrastructure, no neighbours, no way of
moving out because the property had halved in value and they were locked
into a mortgage.
These developments
exhibit the inherently pathological nature of capitalism in boom
times. Investors need somewhere to put their money, otherwise growth
slows down, and over-accumulation leads to a slump. But eventually,
the investment outweighs any possible profit, and then, as we saw in
2008, a crash happens – a rupturing of the boom reality, and an
incursion of a new, "real" reality. No one wants the houses, no one
wants to fund the houses, no one wants to build the houses. The
developers go bust, the builders stop working, the houses are never
finished.
What I think is really
interesting about boom and bust, especially in terms of these
abandoned developments, is the reversal of causality in linear time.
When the housing crash
happened, it reached back in time and realigned events and processes
that happened in the boom, which made the crash seem like an obvious
consequence of the actions of the developers and investors. These
houses were not abandoned because investors realised that no-one
wanted them anymore, but because they realised that no one
had ever wanted them. The rupturing of the boom involved a
rupturing of time, and a reversal of cause and effect.
The pathological
behaviour is that investors kept investing long after there was any
chance of making a profit, long after the crash became an
inevitability, but all this is known only after the crash.
Just like the V2 rockets that explode before you hear them coming – capitalism inverts our
perception of causality. And as we have seen in popular economics,
once causality is inverted, all we have left are paranoid theories.
Who shall we blame and what can we do?
But the idea that we
can act upon a problem that has already happened and solve it for
next time, is inherently ridiculous in the context of a paradoxical
system like capitalism.
In my opinion, the idea
of anyone doing anything at
all is absurd. For me there is no will, there is no action, there are
just swirling chaotic systems, feeding back and flowing in unknowable
directions.
--
In terms of cities, I
want to think about psychogeographical activity as a pathological
behaviour, just another form of paranoia.
When I walk in cities, I'm constantly inventing theories about how and why things happen the way they do – urban regeneration and development always seem to have sinister back stories, networks of power and
money that enact unseen, devious plans.
When I'm walking, I
become a paranoiac, inventing conspiracies and inferring causal connections between things I can see and things I think I know.
It is your brain's job
to work things out as if they make sense, to see things as having a
direction and an order. To see a human hand behind the built
environment, to see it as someone's decision to develop an area, to interpret a
failed attempt at regeneration as the fault of some person or group
of people.
But what about the city
itself? Perhaps the conspiracy is not just that of investors and
developers who build the buildings, perhaps the pathological
behaviour, the paranoia, is in the architecture itself.
This requires a new
level of paranoia on behalf of the psychogeographer.
–
First you need a 'Them Paranoia', a conspiracy of humans behind what you are seeing.
Then you need an 'Us Paranoia', a paranoia that involves your own actions as being part of
a conspiracy that you know nothing about.
But you now also need a
'Concrete Conspiracy'. The city itself is a paranoid agent, it has
conspiracies about Them, just like we do, but it also has
conspiracies about Us - its architecture is an expression of its
nonsensical theories about its inhabitants.
Could a city be
paranoid? Could it be implying unseen motives on behalf of its
population? Could it be just as wrapped up in theorising unlikely
conspiracies as we are?
Who does the city work
for? Or who is working for the city?
Maybe the city is just
as freaked out as we are, trying to work itself out, trying to catch
a glimpse of a reality behind the conspiracies, behind the
connections, behind the cloak of cause and effect.
New Drawings From an Infinitely Ongoing Series Cataloguing Every Object, Both Real and Imaginary, in The Entire Universe.
Beef Object, pen on paper, 2013
Lars Von Trier Object, pen on paper, 2013
