An Interview with Spurse Beth Hinderliter
The following interview was conducted between Beth Hinderliter and the art collective Spurse, an international group of urbanists, geographers, artist, philosophers and others. Spurse developed their answers via group discussion online and in person and then drafted a collective response. This interview examines the use of psychogeographic methods in Spurse’s project Working Waters: A Complete Human and Non-human Psychogeography of the Coasts of Maine (2003).
BH: You describe your project “Working Waters” as a “complete human and non-human psychogeography of the coast of Maine.” What drew you to use psychogeography in this piece? Spurse: It is important to state upfront that our use of the term psychogeography is quite idiosyncratic and perhaps incorrect in terms of a strict definition. Nonetheless -- setting up a tension between differing ways of understanding this term was important to the piece. Perhaps it is first most useful to begin by describing this project briefly. This project “Working Waters: a complete human and non-human psychogeography of the coast of Maine” (2003) was a project that we undertook in collaboration with the sound artist Rob Rosenthal and that was initiated by CEI - a type of NGO that develops projects to help low income communities in Maine. They were concerned about the rapid changes in the conditions of the fishing communities along the coast of Maine. They wanted to work with an artist to highlight these changes, to develop a type of portrait of life as it had once been. They approached Rob and us. We were skeptical from the beginning of this approach and its idea that there had been an ideal state to the coast consisting of fishing boats, working families and lighthouses. It seemed to assume far too much about how to understand a place and the continuous dynamics of change in advance of actually engaging with the question and the concrete dynamics of the coast. (Though it did turn out that CEI were very savvy people who had a very sophisticated understanding of how the coastal conditions were developing.)i But this initial skepticism between us was nonetheless very constructive. We were interested in beginning from a position of curiosity about what immanent forces were developing on the coast. So we suggested an alternative methodology. What interested us was to do a project with and on the coast to affect the dynamics of the coast. In short, we proposed getting a boat, setting up a type of field research center/reading room/community gathering point on board and then going from community to community along the coast and actually inquiring about how the coast was changing and inflecting this back into the lives and worlds of the people who live and work along the coast in a manner that could help make emergent connections and develop new linkages between peoples, things, processes, and techniques. The title, and the use of term psychogeography therein is to stress a tension between a human centric perspective of a “mental geography,” the “psyche” in psychogeography, and all of the non-human forces that co-participate in the making of the events of the coast that cannot be easily anthropomorphized into having a “mental geography”- the event of the coast, the “working waters,” being the tension between these systems and perspectives. We were interested in using the techniques of psychogeography- to get people to sit down and develop a geography using mapping techniques. We created an interview process with the people who came on board where we sat down with them and developed a parallel diagram of their practices and modes of being in the world. This process of going back and forth between interviewer and interviewee was also recorded as a type of oral history (figure 1). The focus of the interviews was to develop an emergent diagram of systems that could connect to other practices across scales and logics. For example, we found connections between one person lobstering (in Maine) and practices in Chile, between the sounds of fish to fish processing in Portland and labor practices in Portsmouth, and between kelp cycles off northern Maine and migrant populations. Here there are subtle distinctions between the S.I. and our practice of psychogeography, where the “classical” form of psychogeography is deployed to show how the conditions of physical space effect the mental space of individuals in relation to an idea of spectacle and alienation we were not willing to make any such assumption that there is a generic and universal human condition from which we are alienated. Before we go on let us quickly note that there was, in addition to this idea of psychogeography, a second inquiry into a “non-human psychogeography.” We made use of simple drawing machines that would make drawings as a type of by-product of the movement of the boat in the waves and wind. This was done in collaboration with the artist Brian Derosia. The drawings that come out of such a procedure are quite interesting in that they do not, in a literal sense, picture anything (figure 2). They are from something, but not of it or about it. You know that famous argument from Thomas Aquinas about how man is made in God’s image and how could this be possible given that God does not have an image? And he says it is like smoke without fire. For us this idea of an emergent non-pictorial space of drawing and mapping is at the core of this work. This is a concept that Jean-Luc Nancy refers to as “the vestige.” BH: Is the S.I.- as an international collective- a model for Spurse? Spurse: In a direct sense no. But then forms of influence are more complex and in such matters causality is inherently far from linear. When we began as a collective in the late 90s, we drew more on philosophical models of practice in the abstract sense, on ideas of how reality is composed, ideas of assemblage theory, Deleuzian pragmatics, ideas from biology such as symbiosis/symbiogenesis. Here we have also been close to the work of the anarchist philosophers Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldmann as well as the Italian Autonomia movements. But this is hard to say as we are now quite a large collective, loosely about 70 people from around the globe. In most projects, we have about a dozen of us plus all of the people outside of Spurse with whom we are collaborating (which is often far more than us, usually the ratio is something like five to one). So our identity necessarily shifts with each project. In an important sense when we began we did not know what we were doing or what we were becoming. Early on, we were a bunch of architects, philosophers, urbanists, geographers, etc. interested in testing the ideas that we were thinking about and reading. We began as a type of study circle or glorified reading group. From this we started to develop a series of interventions to test ideas we thought were important from writers such as Gilles Deleuze, Susan Oyama, or Lynn Margulis. Also, we wanted to test things we saw in the world that seemed quite curious or perplexing. This led us to develop in a haphazard manner a series of techniques, forms of experimentation, and organization. We did not plan on becoming a collective or ultimately finding ourselves in the art world. Perhaps this is also simply where we are currently temporarly located? We were then, and still are, much more affected by fields of research related to our specific work, such as the earth sciences, biology, ecology, philosophy, or architecture or urbanism. In these fields, collaborative practices are the norm with regards to research, experimentation, and making. Our most common mode of working is through distributed research cells that undertake multi-year and multi-phase projects. We are interested in models of collective and distributed subject formation as both a way to develop as a collective and as areas of research semi-separate from the shape and logic of our collective. In this regard we use ourselves as a test site for questions. One of our key areas of interest is how such practices spread, develop and mutate in relation to contemporary forms of the production of subjectivity, what Deleuze called the “dividual,” where the model of subjectivity is continuous modulation and not essence production. We, as Spurse, are continuously inflecting our own loose and open model of collective practice to push these questions. In a simple sense we work from the perspective that all forms of individuation are forms of producing a collective which are themselves forms of institution production. We are all involved in the production of institutions as part of the production of practices of subjectification. But back to the S.I. question... In this manner, the S.I. in particular and other artist collectives in general have never been of much interest to us as models of practice. There are many reasons for this as we have begun to suggest, but the limited model of agency, becoming, and capital, eventually developed by the SI and their crude tool set meant that it was hard to see much potential in their models of practice. This is obviously too brief a take on their work but we can come back to this. That said, the original idea of the production of moments in the sense developed by Henri Lefevbre and taken up by Constant Nieuwenhuys, which became the idea of “situation” is of great continued relevance. For us, this develops through the debates of various theories of ‘the event” (Martin Heidegger’s idea of Ereignis, Gilles Deleuze’s haeccity). A project that we did a couple of years after “Working Waters,” “The Lost Meeting”[2] does involve a loose dialogue with the work of Constant and some of his spatial proposals and these ideas of the production of moments (figure 3). Well, one last thought on the logic of our collective practice before we move on. Currently we draw on models from all over and our models necessarily shift with differing projects. For us there is a real pragmatics to how we individuate into new forms of collective becoming with differing projects. But honestly the arts are simply of little interest to us in terms of a site for models of practice. The arts always seem perplexingly removed in odd manners from other fields that would be most interesting to its practices, take for example the oddness of coining of such practices: “relational aesthetics” or “participatory art”- a simple question on an ontological level is would be what is not relational or participatory? Is that not what Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad et al. are proposing? It is important to keep in mind that it is not radical, in a critical sense of the term, to be a collective, or to be participatory or have an interest in relational questions. These are rather emergent qualities of our contemporary condition and need to be seen as critically as any others. For us, we imagine these are types of historical givens (today all practices are collective, participatory, relational, quasi-dividual etc.) and we have to respond critically from within this place. BH: Isn’t deeming the S.I. as “the arts” overlooking their conflicted history? But, beyond that, maybe it is not radical to work as a collective but perhaps it is important to redefine what a radical collective is, especially in the face of exploding nationalisms and fundamentalisms that insist on homogenous identity? Spurse: Yes, to an extent, you are right. We are speaking too fast and general in this regard. The history of their early experiments in unitary urbanism are remarkable in regards to new forms of collective behavior and the concern for systems of communication that are part of the original idea of the derive (using walkie-talkies to develop synchronic emergent histories).[3] The second part of this question is important in terms of the project of inventing new forms of collective action. But let us first state that it is ironic to be talking about the Situationists and fundamentalism given the histories of Debord’s expulsions and drive to purify the collective state of the Situationists. Let us switch gears slightly to answer this question. We differ from groups such as the S.I. in that we are less interested in the invention of new collectives in the normal sense of new groups of human agents acting collectively with some form of identity, or in the development of groups per se. Nor are we interested in the development of a group for a radical purpose. Rather we are most interested in the development of practices and modes of being in the world that are based in new forms of collective action that does not separate epistemology, ontology or ethics.[4] We are further interested in practices that understand agency as a form of distributed, material, pre-subjective entanglement that allows for new forms of emergent connections and relations. Such a logic of collective becoming involves a refusal of classical forms of individuality and individuation (this includes most logics of collectives as groups) and their necessary logics of causality, distance, reflexivity as critique and interactive forms of relationality with the other. We need to develop posthuman models of our inherent collective becomings that involve an ethics of intra-action and intra-responsibility. We need to become responsible from within distributed forms of collective becoming that moves across all registers, human and non-human. This is for us a form of engaged, enactive experimental practice that leads to how we organize ourselves. As Karen Barad states, “Events and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed.”v This is where we locate the question of collective practice today in a world of exploding new bio-technologies, the rapid movement of populations, the explosion of all sorts of forms of new identities etc. It is important to note that this list (technologies, populations, identities) is not reducible to a human scale- these actions happen across and within all sorts of entanglements. This is where we locate the question of a theory and of events/moments/situations in relation to fundamentalisms of all kinds. BH: TJ Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith have argued in the not too distant past that what you call the “crude tool set” of the S.I. is perhaps what makes the S.I. ever more relevant today as their capacity for political organization might combat the contemporary political dispersal and inefficacy of the Left. I’d like to pry this tool set apart further and inquire into how psychogeography was mobilized in your project. Separating their project from the Surrealist wanderings that embraced chance, the S.I. strove for more “objective conclusions” about the nature of urban space. Were any such conclusions drawn from “Working Waters”? Spurse: Well they could be right, but we have never felt it our obligation to correct the inefficacies of the left or to stop political dispersal. Perhaps these are useful forms of becoming? It is a complex question, or set of questions, of how or what should be understood by the term “the Left” (if anything), and what is the meaning of political dispersal today. We would be cautious about too quickly taking on the narratives of failure and dispersal. Perhaps we would suggest that the “left” is better thought of as an attitude or an atmosphere than a concrete movement? But more particularly on a certain level these ways of framing action miss the development of new forms of agency in general and political agency in particular. And it is at the level of emergence, the not yet fully here (what Henri Bergson calls the virtual) that we are interested in as a space of politics. We can come back to this in a moment, but let us say a few words about the Situationist tool set. It is not so much the idea that they are crude that is problematic, perhaps that was the wrong phrase, but rather that they are designed for critiquing and undermining ideology. To simplify for the sake of brevity, these tools are based upon a model of the world and the subject that assumes we are all in some manner deluded by the forces of ideology and that if we could shed this ideology we would be in an unalienated state, an ideal and pure state in which we would understand ourselves and the world as it really is. This model fixes both human subjectivity (in its unalienated form) and the world (other than the specific nature of the ideological illusion, for we are suffering from many differing ones). It is ironic that the politics of the problem has a history (we are now living in the age of the spectacle) but that what we are to become (the unalienated subject) is outside of history and becoming. Let us return to our project in Maine for a minute. “Working Waters: the complete human and non-human psychogeography of the coast of Maine”, as we noted, the title is meant to act as a type of impossible provocation, a “complete” psychogeography etc. (figure 4). But, we are neither interested in nor believe it is possible to produce such forms of completion, those forms that could be called “objective conclusions” in Debord’s sense. (We say this not as a critique of the idea of “objectivity” in general -- we are realists (in the sense that Isabelle Stengers uses the term and not in the sense utilized by Anglo-American philosophy) Our provocation was intended more as a catalyst to new forms of participation. So if there is a simple contrast to be made rather than drawing objective conclusions about space we are interesting in deploying pragmatic tactics towards finding emergent catalytic points in a field that allow for new forms of becoming to emerge. So two differing forms of realism and two quite distinct deployments of psychogeography? The project began by us being commissioned to make a type of portrait of the coast of Maine to highlight the problems of the working coast (lack of access, property values, loss of species, urbanization etc.) and to remind people that this was/is a working coast. Well, we are not much of portrait artists or sociologists. We decided that we were interested in simply finding out what was happening on the coast, what new forms of collective action were emerging, before we decided if it was good or bad -- a type of micro-research into the new. (To this point in the project you could say to all intents and purposes that we parallel a Situationist methodology). But as you can see from even a cursory list of the “problems,” access, property values, species loss, pollution, overfishing, urbanization, we are crossing and re-crossing the purported divisions between the natural and the cultural as well as between the human and the non-human. These are in practice entangled in specific complex manners that lead to the type of events that we are part of, such as a “working coast,” or better yet to see this as a complex plurality of coasts- working waters. All of these forces, systems, and things in their specific relational historical logic make our condition at which point it is hard to simply talk about the human as the issue or event that defines this field. Things are everywhere entangled, emergent, and relational. A second related divergence from Situationist logic is to frame the whole project from the perspective of how the new comes into being (and here there is a related question of how it first becomes felt, affective, sensed before becoming knowledge or information). And how could we develop forms of engagement with these quasi-spaces and subjects in the state of becoming (the virtual). Here there is a further key assumption at play that to interact or to study a system is to be part of that system, within a system, interacting and changing and being changed, even if only on a very small level. Thus, the forms of mapping and recording in “Working Waters” were not for the sake of an objective knowledge of the coast that would be more complete for being less human centric but rather for the development of mappings of the complex “mangle of practice” as Andrew Pickering says. Such forms of mapping are meant to allow for the strategic linking between systems and practices, all of which is working towards and within the catalyzation of new forms of becoming. We were interested in becoming agents of the emergence of a type of “community to come.” In relation to models such as those coming from the Situationists, one could call their models “enlightenment” models in the literal sense of shedding light or bringing to visibility something that is hidden. We are not interested in this model because it assumes that there are pre-given “things” that are simply waiting to be brought to the light and that engaging with things does not change these things or us. It is a model that does not fully conceptualize becoming in its radical forms of immanence. Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson define this as “enaction,” where the emergence of an individuation of something and its environment co-develop each other as a form of walking a world into being. Importantly, this is not to say that such practices of bringing to visibility what is simply pregiven and hidden are not useful politically. To uncover injustices or practices that are deliberately hidden is of great importance. But such forms of politics need to be re-conceptualized within a political project of immanence that imagines all forms of individuation (individuals, groups, ideas, institutions, cells, ecosystems) as processes of becoming that are ontologically open. BH: How did this political project of immanence work specifically in “working waters?” Can you give an example of ways in which your project succeeded where ideology critique might have failed? Spurse: This is a difficult question for like most things it had a modest impact, especially on a grand scale. It was a type of microphysics of action and engagement. But, yes there are a number of good examples. First, during the component of traveling the coast we managed to help form a number of emergent communities of peoples and practices that were quite far apart geographically and ideologically such as the sharing of conservation techniques (between island trusts and fishermen and property owners), the setting up of research (directly between fishermen, lay-people and scientists), the sharing of harvesting and farming techniques (between people forced to change professions and long time harvesters ), the spread of local knowledges and the connection of peoples and ideas to politicians and others with outside resources (figure 5). What is quite interesting is that this brief list does not get at how distinct and far apart the groups of people we connected were by any classical standard (class, profession, culture etc.) and how these connections can be forged around the production of common areas of interest. These connections, while sounding banal (the connection always is) are related to the long range impact which is what is interesting- that new forms of fishing do actually spread and develop, that new cycles of knowledge making are further rooted, that politicians have to take into account differing perspectives on a long term basis, that a dock, house, or boat is purchased, that the idea of what a working coast is becomes changed. As a second phase of the project we participated in the passing of legislation for the change of access to the water and regulations covering working docks and their ownership. Our part of this involved setting up a research station with all of our materials gathered from the coast in the state capitol just outside of the Governor’s office during the period that that this legislation was being written and debated. This had a number of effects. In a sense, we controlled the visual space of the Governor’s press conferences, and made a type of sieve that those seeing the Governor had to pass through. This became the waiting room, full of diagrams, maps, oral histories, books, literature, studies (figure 6). The third and ongoing phase of the project is how these materials fold back into other worlds. They are a type of resource for the critical rethinking of the coast of Maine that has been used for writing a number of books, documentaries and radio programs. The materials continue to have agency many years after the events of the initial project. In fact, as we are finishing this interview, we are being invited to a book launch by people who used the archive as a resource to write a history of the coast of Maine. We hope to see these types of projects, in some sense, only begin when we complete them. We as artists are interested reframing Duchamp’s idea that the audience completes a work. How does agency circulate from and through a work as part of other systems and logics long after we finish a work? It is these emergent practices and networks that are the forms of collective practice that we attempt to work with and model our ideas of collective towards. BH: The Situationists’ formulation of psychogeography as a “social geography,” proposes that the best urban space is human, unmechanized, and unalienated- a notion quite different from Spurse's idea of a "human and non-human psychogeography." What is a non-human psychogeography and its benefits? Spurse: Well, firstly, if you take the original idea of pyschogeography as "a study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals" then it already proposes the need to study the non-human in that it is a study of an environment. That said the Situationists assume the human as a type of given that is necessarily at the center of any psychogeographic practice. There are many problematic assumptions about the human as being distinct and having an essence that we are separated/alienated from via contemporary conditions that are inherent in the way that the S.I. frames this issue. It is apparent in the mental and subjective (psycho-geography) component of this geography, which in turn also replicates the mind body dualisms and the self-world separation that are also problematic. What is most useful about psycho-geographies as a pragmatic strategy is that they quickly get one into multidimensional spaces of engagement. Simply to ask someone to begin by mapping out their world does this in remarkable manners. Quite quickly the world floods in, contradictory worlds flood in and need to be accounted for. This is where we begin to really hone in on collectively figuring out how the world is part of us and what needs to be felt, sensed, understood, engaged with, re-articulated, shifted, given a new place. Beginning with a focus on the immediate context of peoples lives and then trying to draw out that which is gathered by their practices across all modalities and systems is the power of such a method. Secondly it is a method that begins with what Whitehead called a “matter of concern,” the relational emergent composition of the world shifts depending on the composition of matters of concern such as “the Working Waters.” Just a brief note on how we did this: we would set up a meeting, discuss the project and the general issues and then begin drawing and recording. They would be working on a map and we would be working on a diagram. Both the map and the diagram would consist of working through questions via maps (from global to local), sketches (of various systems, objects, and techniques), diagrams (of processes, practices, structures and histories) and note taking (figure 7). This brings us to a series of more general concerns in our practice. Much of our work is part of the historical re-evaluation of the limits of social constructivism. While the project of social constructivism in general was and is part of an important critique of naive forms of realism and naturalism, it is clear that it is fully embedded in the same post-Kantian genealogy as the forms of realism that it is critiquing. We are interested in the development of new theories of complex realism that see us as an intra-active co-emergent component of the world, and not involved in a form of species exceptionalism of merely engaging our representations of the real. In this sense we see ourselves as coming after or existing beside practices such as institutional critique, which we would understand the S.I. as an important part of this project. BH: Debord quotes Marx to this point in “Theory of the Derive” (1959): “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves.” Yet does psychogeography reflect on this condition or go beyond? Spurse: This is such a difficult question to the degree that the model it assumes, reflection, is such a difficult model to develop methods to slowly work one’s way out of. Reflection and forms of critical reflexivity - tie us to models of the real as representational, pre-existing divisions between subjects and objects, and in some sense a pre-given world that we can or cannot move closer towards. We are interested in the development of entirely distinct models of engagement that do not rely on such reflexive ontologies. The classical work of people like Spinoza, Whitehead, and Bergson as well as the recent work of Susan Oyama, Karen Barad, and Isabelle Stengers offer important alternatives. Karen Barad and Donna Haraway’s proposal of a model of diffraction is a very good example of this as an alternative to reflection. In an important sense then we are not psychogeographers but people who use a technique that begins as something like psychogeographic mapping and quickly becomes something quite distinct. BH: At a time when orthodox Marxism considered issues of space to be retrograde (time being the register of history and revolutionary becoming), the S.I. focused on problems of space and mapping. As Spurse has a different model of politics than the S.I., how did you use mapping and in what ways did it become distinct from such projects as Debord’s psychogeographic map of Paris, The Naked City (1957). Yes, it is an important focus. Let us remember that the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and even Structuralism in general were all producing very important writings on space alongside the important work of the Situationists. The question of space on a global level becomes a key question in the post-war period. The Algerian wars, and the wars in Indo-China all reshaped the questions of space in the 1950s and 1960s the spatial logics of protests, occupations, invisible enemies, colonial struggles, resource struggles (and the SI are amongst many who point this out and develop their ideas in relation to these developments). Our interest in mapping is in the production of a geography/topology of an event. The contrast between Deleuze and Guattari and the S.I. is instructive. Here is what they write at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus on mapping: “The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency.”[6] This leads to a question of how to understand actual spaces and the practices of actual spaces. It seems that one needs an understanding of the production, deployment and use of places in a temporal framework. The two cannot be usefully separated if the practices of space are necessary to the formation of space. BH: The purpose of psychogeography- originally defined by the S.I. as "a study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals"- was to defeat the alienation of contemporary society that voided the possibility of a true social collective. Indeed, one of the most cited lines of Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" reads, "separation is the alpha and the omega of spectacle." Recent work has, however, criticized the very desirability of the unseparate. Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of an "in-operative community" insists on the function of spacing- that is, of distance and difference- to establish being-in-common. Alternatively, Jacques Rancière has pointed out that Debord's theory of spectacle relies on the Romantic idea of truth as unseparateness and suggests instead that distance should not be abolished, but rather recognized as the normal condition of communication. Thus, to follow these critiques, one might understand that rather than eliminating separation and alienation, the attempt to suppress it is what actually constitutes the alienation in the first instance. Is there a way to turn psychogeography around so as not to be working in the pursuit of the idea of a collective as unseparate? Spurse: We, or at least some of us, are casual readers of Nancy and Rancière so it is difficult to answer this question and really get at what they mean. Simply taking the question the way you describe this work suggests a number of things. Separation is a key component of all forms of individuation, of a cell, an idea, an individual or an institution. Action is a form of boundary making and remaking and in this sense ethics, ontology, and epistemology are not separate from these moments of transformations in the real. What we are interested in, in such projects as “Working Waters” is precisely participating collectively in these processes of individuation and hence boundary production. Distances are produced, perspectival distances and closenesses. The real is in some sense multiple intractive relational systems out of which emerge and re-emerge subjects and objects through performative engagements. Neither the collective nor the individual is a pregiven fixed form of individuation. Perhaps this is a good place to stop. The desire for unmediated and direct connections to the real or each other is to misunderstand the status of things, representations and events. Rather than seeing these things as what get in the way of contact with the real, they are what make the real. The problem is not shedding the glasses of illusion and mediation. There are no glasses! We are in a world best understood as full of modulations acting upon modulations, fold upon fold.
[1] This project was supported by many remarkable people and organizations: CEI, Maine Arts Commission, the artist Catherine D’ignazio, ShunPike Audio, and many remarkable community groups and people up and down the coast of Maine.
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