The concept of psycho-geography is cultivated particularly in situationist circles, although according to the socialfiction.org webstie its history goes back at least to the time of the English landscape garden.

# posted by alvaro @ 12:27 AM 0 comments

Agustín Codazzi

Nace en Lugo (Italia) el 12.7.1793
Muere en Espíritu Santo (Colombia) el 7.2.1859

Geógrafo, explorador y militar italiano. Fueron sus padres Doménico Codazzi y Constanza Bertoloti. A la edad de 17 años, cuando se preparaba para ingresar en la Universidad de Bolonia para cursar estudios de derecho, cambia de opinión y decide alistarse en uno de los cuerpos militares que se formaban en Italia para combatir a los ejércitos de Napoleón Bonaparte. Destinado a la Escuela de Artillería y Zapadores de Módena, egresa con el grado de suboficial de artillería en 1813; participa en la campaña de Alemania (1813-1814) y asiste a las batallas de Lützen, Bautzen, Ulm, Dresde y Leipzig. A Comienzos de 1814, forma parte del Estado Mayor del teniente coronel Armandi en la batalla de Mantua. Posteriormente, ante la disolución de ese ejército, se alista como teniente de artillería en la Legión Italiana, organizada con los restos del ejército de Eugenio de Beauharnais. Después de la batalla de Waterloo (junio de 1815) y del derrumbe del imperio napoleónico, Codazzi, se dirige hacia Constantinopla donde se encuentra con un amigo suyo, el capitán Constante Ferrari. Juntos, emprenden un viaje de aventuras por el norte de Europa; atravesando Grecia, Moravia, Valaquia, Rusia, Polonia, Prusia, Suecia y Dinamarca, llegando hasta Holanda. En este último país, decide embarcarse hacia Estados Unidos, para participar en el proceso de independencia latinoamericano.

En 1817, encontrándose en Baltimore se alista en la expedición que en apoyo a Simón Bolívar, organiza el marino Agustín Gustavo Villeret, a bordo del bergantín América Libre. No obstante, desavenencias con el almirante Luis Brión, el comandante del bergantín, hacen que la nave en vez de viajar hacia la isla de Margarita, se desvíe hacia la isla de Amelia, frente a las costas de la Florida. Allí le tocó a Codazzi dirigir bajo las órdenes del capitán Luis Aury, una acción militar contra buques corsarios y apoderarse de la fortaleza de la isla donde permanece acantonado hasta la evacuación de Amelia por parte de los patriotas hispanoamericanos y la ocupación del territorio por Estados Unidos ( a fines de 1817). Luego de esto, Codazzi, Ferrari y Aury, se dirigen a la isla de la Providencia, donde establecen, a su vez, una base para sus operaciones corsarias (1817-1822). En 1819, Codazzi es enviado por Aury a Bogotá con el fin de ofrecer los servicios de su pequeña escuadra a Simón Bolívar; pero a su llegada, el Libertador no se encontraba y le vicepresidente, Francisco de Paula Santander desestima su ofrecimiento.

# posted by alvaro @ 10:41 PM 0 comments

PANOPTICON;

OR

THE INSPECTION-HOUSE:

CONTAINING THE

IDEA OF A NEW PRINCIPLE OF CONSTRUCTION

APPLICABLE TO

ANY SORT OF ESTABLISHMENT, IN WHICH PERSONS OF

ANY DESCRIPTION ARE TO BE KEPT UNDER INSPECTION;

AND IN PARTICULAR TO

PENITENTIARY-HOUSES,

PRISONS, HOUSES OF INDUSTRY, WORK-HOUSES, POOR-HOUSES, LAZARETTOS, MANUFACTORIES, HOSPITALS, MAD-HOUSES, AND SCHOOLS:

WITH

A PLAN OF MANAGEMENT

ADAPTED TO THE PRINCIPLE:

IN A SERIES OF LETTERS,

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1787, FROM CRECHEFF IN WHITE

RUSSIA. TO A FRIEND IN ENGLAND

BY JEREMY BENTHAM,

OF LINCOLN'S INN, ESQUIRE.

# posted by alvaro @ 8:06 PM 0 comments

April 27, 2000 | D iscussing an eccentric 18th century peripatetic named John Thelwall in her new "Wanderlust: A History of Walking," Rebecca Solnit writes that he suggests "something of a pattern: autodidacts who took the trinity of radical politics, love of nature, and pedestrianism to extremes." While I'm pretty sure Solnit herself has a formal education, her astonishing range of reference and her indefatigable curiosity suggest the passion of an autodidact, and in every other respect she fits the pattern, too. Whether she takes this trinity to extremes is a matter of interpretation, but you could argue that even the attempt to write a history of walking -- arguably the defining human activity -- is itself extreme. Why not the history of talking, or breathing?

Of course, as Solnit points out, she has written a history of walking, not the history, which is all but infinite. Her history is, as she puts it, "an idiosyncratic path traced ... by one walker, with much doubling back and looking around." That's accurate, if a little modest; "Wanderlust" is a delightful, mind-expanding journey that strays from Søren Kierkegaard's Copenhagen and William Wordsworth's Lake District to the top of Everest and the New Mexico desert, from the first hominids to walk upright (whoever and wherever they were) to contemporary women who face the hazards of solitary walking. It's a journey led by a guide of tremendous erudition and just as much common sense, capable of slipping almost imperceptibly from the personal mode -- she describes several entirely non-metaphorical walks -- to the analytical and back again without appearing self-indulgent. (Full disclosure: I've had several friendly conversations with Solnit but don't know her well.)

Historically, walking has had many functions; for most people most of the time, of course, it was the only method of getting from one place to another. As Solnit says, "walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it," and it allows us to know "the world through the body and the body through the world." This is not merely a theoretical construct. One of Solnit's principal concerns is that the connection between the body and the world that walking exemplifies has begun to fade as we spend more and more time isolated in technologized cells -- SUVs, offices, suburban homes -- and trapped in a culture that sees unstructured time alone in the world as inherently unproductive.

In search of the multiple meanings of walking in (mostly) Western culture, Solnit begins with the Athenian philosophers -- although no one really knows whether they walked to think -- and moves on through Jean Jacques Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Wordsworth, who collectively promulgated the romantic idea of solitary rambling as a contemplative exercise. Her layperson's exegesis of the anthropological and anatomical debate on bipedalism, or the question of when and why our ancestors first rose up on two legs, is a masterpiece of wit and economy. It's amusing, if not all that surprising, to learn that these discussions seem to be shaped as much by contemporary concerns about gender roles as by science.

The breadth alone of the material that Solnit has absorbed would have thwarted me; she's read obscure 19th century memoirs of walking tours, histories of mountaineering, feminist theory, studies of urban design, Victorian novels and Beat poetry. She knows more about the history of labyrinths and about the Renaissance mnemonic device called the memory palace than any normal person should. She's at her very best, I think, when her passion for history and landscape meets her progressive politics. Her mini-chapter on the late 19th and early 20th century right-of-way battles between working people and aristocrats in England's Peak District, in which the refined taste for natural beauty implied by the English landscape garden became democratized, is rich with brilliant observation and detail. Correspondingly, she's weaker as a literary critic and an urbanist; her chapter on the literature of walking in London and New York feels thin by comparison.

Her fine chapters on pedestrianism as a forum for protest and rebellion, from Paris to Prague to San Francisco, and on the methods of social control that have often prevented women from being walkers lead her finally to Las Vegas, of all places. It's typical of Solnit's daring and of her lyrical, unquenchable optimism that she sees hope in America's most suburbanized, most theme-parked city. On the crowded sidewalks of the Strip, with its synthetic volcanoes, pirate ships and Venetian canals recalling the 18th century pleasure palaces of Europe, she finds evidence that "the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers."

In the end, the guiding spirit of "Wanderlust," the lonely traveler always in view on Solnit's horizon, is not Wordsworth or Rousseau but Walter Benjamin, whose rambles through the streets of Paris had the sense of wonder, the air of open-minded exploration and imminent discovery, of Solnit's own journey. Solnit observes the sexism and snobbery inherent in Benjamin's idea of the flneur, the idle, solitary gentleman strolling through the crowds, but she can't quite resist it. In describing Benjamin's writing she seems to be half-consciously describing her own: "more or less scholarly in subject, but full of beautiful aphorisms and leaps of imagination, a scholarship of evocation rather than definition."

# posted by alvaro @ 7:47 PM 0 comments

Tal vez el más profundo intento de análisis que la Internacional Situacionista hizo con relación al arte fue la consideración de su valor social, directamente ligado a la estructura de la situación construida. Asger Jorn escribe que "la magnitud que determina el valor es el espacio-tiempo, el instante o acontecimiento" (Internacional Situacionista: 129). Una vez más se parte del marco social de la vida cotidiana, de su articulación en situaciones.

En su informe, Crítica de la economía política (1960), en el que pretende hacer una trasposición de las tesis elaboradas por Marx en El Capital pero aplicadas a la vida para dar cuenta del valor social de la misma, encuentra que la privatización de las cualidades humanas (los hobbies) se ha "convertido en una desvalorización de la vida humana" en tanto que el valor social de un individuo está en la variabilidad de comportamientos con relación a los demás. De nuevo entra en juego la idea de "excedencia del ser" y de nuevo su medida está determinada por el acontecimiento, por las situación. El arte no tendría más funcionalidad que "liberar los valores humanos mediante la transformación de las cualidades humanas en valores reales" (Internacional Situacionista: 130), o sea, siguiendo con el planteamiento inicial, el arte liberaría a la verdad mediante la transformación del ser, de la situación, de la vida, en realidad. Es por ello que "el valor del arte es un contravalor con relación a los valores prácticos, y se mide en sentido inverso a éstos". El valor artístico no sería, pues, una cualidad inherente al objeto en sí, sino, más bien, "la confirmación del hombre como fuente de todo valor" (Internacional Situacionista: 130-131).

Se trata de realizar el arte, escribían los situacionistas alrededor del 68. Y sólo se puede realizar el arte suprimiéndolo. La propuesta de la Internacional Situacionista dejaba al descubierto una de las fallas más relevantes de la ideología burguesa: la separación de la práctica social en realidad e imagen. Durante años el arte se encargo de impedir que la totalidad pudiera ser abordada, que la vida pudiera ser comprendida.

# posted by alvaro @ 7:39 PM 0 comments

Promising “all of the history that the mainstream tours (and PBS) leave out,” Bruce Kayton walks the countercultural walk. ($10; 718-492-0069; Radical Walking Tours)
Greenwich Village I Tour

# posted by alvaro @ 7:17 PM 0 comments