Psychogeography & Territory – Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Blakely
By: The Diary Of A Snail
Tags: Atlanta, Communism, Climate Change, Politics, Georgia

Leaving home in Westside Atlanta for a bus to Baltimore, stationed behind a strip of shops in Doraville. Before this I am on MARTA, and I recall the night before when Kat tells me that blood is a connective tissue. It appears as liquid, flowing along predetermined paths, separated from the muscles, organs, and functions of the body by walls. It is in fact of that flow, all the mechanisms that produce it, the motion, motive and means of the machine itself. I began with a walk, it’s raining. In the train and its tunnels, one is inside a piece of an immense vascular system, a body transporting bodies. The passenger is not themselves separate from it, their existence presupposes it, and vice versa. Violent bursts of memory and speculation throughout, another component of that distance, passage along territories. Some weeks later I read from Minima Moralia, Adorno writing that “speculation is hit hard from the outset by separation from reflection.” It would be good of me to keep this in mind in the future, but it can be so hard with what we are experiencing now.

The relatively sudden, rapid drift through these cities, a trip taken for many reasons and of necessity for clearing (or rather filling) the mind. I want to visit Philadelphia, to an occupation of their city’s housing authority, and meet up with the tenant union there supporting it and learn from their work. I also have friends I wish to see in Baltimore, and spend time in that city, it quite acutely captures my interest. I plan and carry with me little, it is not necessary to do so much when you can feel the connections between people and movement one makes pulling you in these directions. There is an altogether different energy that flows through the Mid-Atlantic cities than does Atlanta. A different localized history and politics, but with far more in common. I want to be refreshed. To do so, I want to feel myself swept up through and within their currents and the people embedded in them, even if briefly.

The Situationists developed a practice of psychogeography, that of the drift [dérive], to describe traversing the regions of the city and seeking to understand the effects of, as Debord says, “the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” There is a drifting quality to this trip I’ve made, but not in reference to the space of the city, but to the personal connections of the people I am drawn to in these cities. The drift may have its limits in the one city, though not exclusive to its particular limits. I have drifted much in Atlanta, it’s good to take it elsewhere and experience it in terms of regions. This is how we reconstitute territory. Traversing organically, through understanding that which we have access through, testing and expanding the space we share, making this movement shape itself through that which is common.

I aim to keep this in mind as I travel through cities. In two weeks from this point, Kat and I are driving to camp in Southwest Georgia, the Kolomoki Mounds, closest town Blakely, Georgia, population 5000. Kat remarks how the highway initiative began in the 1950’s under the Eisenhower administration, heavily-backed by the then burgeoning military-industrial complex, to transport weapons and link military bases together, and the automotive industry. The highways were and remain a critical infrastructure to the movement of capital. Trucks traverse through determined coordinates, large equipment on larger flatbeds, fossil fuels burning everywhere. The painted luxury of individualized transport and blocked public transit infrastructure have maintained this historically. Americans were sold this infrastructural development under the auspice of increased freedom of movement, the ability to take vacations, that tool for the social reproduction of labor-power, and travel the expanse of the United States. The old romance of the road trip, the taking of the use of the highway, can indeed be an irruption of smooth space in the striations carved into the Earth for the movement of capital. To travel these roads for our own purposes and to connect the movements we are engaged in feels like a smooth space that inhabits the roadways directly, and constructs the passage anew. It seems a beginning to understanding the possibility of our expropriations, but certainly not the end of it. Smooth space alone will not save us.

Baltimore gives many impressions at once in my mind, predominantly those of destitution and possibility. Open space tends to lend itself to both. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but capital constantly must maintain a vacuum. This particular city has been continually hollowed out over the past half century. As disinvestment has become increasingly hyperactive after 2008, its character sharpened by the corresponding vulgar excesses in investment, its modes have adapted from the 20th century’s punishment of the Black city to a capitalism that, as the cities become new terrain for capital, has learned to make the hollow a site of extraction as well. Capital finds a way.

Atlanta is different in that its intense poverty is hyper-localized in pockets throughout the city. One can find themselves in areas of total poverty, cut off from any sensible connection to the city proper, any places to buy food, or the infrastructures needed to travel the city. I think of many of the apartment complexes, like Forest Cove / Four Seasons Apartments, places where the poor were placed in enclaves carved out in the woods of Atlanta, surrounded by trees, out of sight and out of mind, but still arenas for the extraction of surplus-value. Between Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, it is the cities that precede the car and a city that was very much built with the car in mind. In many ways, Atlanta is a city constructed in the most complete image of the demands of capital to the extent that it defies any formal logic of city planning. Any consistency of a grid or standard connectivity is completely absent, one finds roads that go into forests, or odd disjunctions in what could have been straight lines through neighborhoods, remnants of a city planning that sought to maintain the color lines at all cost. Atlanta’s infrastructure is almost a perfect vision of what will increasingly result from the privatization reached through the neoliberal trend of the past half century, this reactionary form of the “withering away of the state”, reconstituting and redefining state power increasingly into that of pure Capital.

Sam picks me up in Baltimore from the vacant brick building the bus leaves me at, across the street from a cemetery. Intersection of Interstate and O’Donnell. We go to Greenmount, another cemetery. He leaves me there to go to work, I read Michael Hardt on Thomas Jefferson. I do not myself altogether understand my interest in the American Revolution as of late, but some form of the political consciousness of the US seems present in it, in a sense of its material construction and its spirit. The bourgeois revolutions should not be written off simply for being such, there is still much to learn.

There is the smell of fire in the air, and ash falls on me and the book in my hands consistently for the next two hours. “The constant becoming of the revolutionary process must be punctuated periodically with (often bloody) ruptures. Jefferson’s revolutionary thought thus moves back and forth between these two poles: from rebellion to democracy and from democracy to rebellion” says Hardt. There is the eternal return to him. The idea of a transition that contains a fixed beginning and end vanishes here; the process of constantly forming, dissolving, reforming revolutionary becomings as the model for society, or rather, its perpetual resistance to fixed arrangements. Jefferson has a surprisingly insurrectionary flair to his thought. This dialectic of constitution and rebellion in a way too mirrors the boom and bust cycles of Capital, of cities, the way that people move through them, the way they breathe over centuries.

I leave that post, and circle Greenmount Cemetery. This cemetery has a gravity of its own around this block. The place where Sam brought me for coffee possesses the usual aesthetic of gentrification familiar to Atlanta, across the street the scene changes drastically. It is difficult to tell what is, in particular, vacant or inhabited. The vacants, worn by countless storms, heat & moisture, give the appearance of breathing walls. Some of them wheeze, some of it is still. Atlanta sees this more scattered, one can find the sterile cubism of the new Sim City-esque homes of 21st century gentrification alongside vacant homes built in the 40’s reminiscent of rural Georgia many times on the same block. It’s easier to hide poverty when you can put a tree-line between it and your new McMansion.

On our trip to Philadelphia the following day. Olivia makes the connection with people there, the Philadelphia Tenants Union is supporting Occupy PHA (Philadelphia Housing Authority). A woman and her children are in a tarp shaped into an overhang for some protection on the sidewalk directly to the side of the PHA front entrance. There are strong demands. Sam says that some of them are impossible, and he is most likely correct, but that is not to be the point I’m sure. I wear my Tent City ATL shirt, from when we occupied Turner Field in Atlanta for 63 days to protest Georgia State University’s rejection to a Community Benefits Agreement for the residents of those neighborhoods.

PHA’s building is brand new, costs $45 million according to those present, with vacant retail space on the bottom. The housing authority aims to be a trendy strip mall. Across the street is a vacant spot, nothing but rubble. Old buildings wilting around the Apple chic of contemporary urban design. One can’t help but feel the occupation as a bold encroachment upon PHA, that territory on the sidewalk no longer theirs. The city creeps in like a vine, and one knows this new flat thing is nothing to the brick around it.

We make our connections, exchange our literature with each other, Philadelphia and Atlanta. Talk to each other of our practices in our contexts. I won’t reproduce that here, it’s not the purpose of this. What I feel is a warm swell, my hairs rise a few times with the current of resistance around us, as small as it may look on the outside. Sam says there is little hope in the occupiers’ situation. I’m not so sure of that, either. Perhaps none of this is about hope at all. I feel that there, I am happy and proud to share that space.

Baltimore, the next day, Sam and I wake up and join Caroline in a screening of a new film, Hottest August, of New Yorkers’ anxieties for the future: political, social, economic, ecological. It’s a consistent dread that comes up in a lot of conversation on this trip. We know the earth can’t take us anymore, and we all are figuring out what to do about it. Not long after we go to Baltimore IWW / IWOC’s jail support work. There’s a small tent and some supplies for people being released from the city jail. Baltimore City Jail unsurprisingly offers no services or resources for anyone after release. A young man comes out, his lip swollen and face bruised. He misses his ride after borrowing our phones for a couple calls. Sam gives him a ride back to where needs to go. The night prior he was beaten by a cop and charged with assaulting an officer. At least he got a ride back. Small efforts, but still incredibly important.

Rural Georgia is not so different from these cities I am typically more comfortable navigating. The heat is strong, there is still ruin throughout. We drive through stretches of fields, some actively being irrigated, but most still un-planted this season. Mobile homes throughout, difficult to tell whether anyone lives in them or not. The only way to be sure really is a parked car. Blakely, GA, and this entire region, was devastated several months ago by Hurricane Michael. Residents we talked to would still casually refer to it as The Storm. I remember Hurricane Irma, just a year before Michael, that came so far inland as Atlanta and felled trees on several homes in the city. We go into Blakely several times on this trip and explore it a good deal. It’s not large, but it is interesting. There are still piles of rubble left over in what constitutes its downtown, Main St is lined with pristine rows of American flags. The most intriguing passages are the small corridors of residential streets surrounding it. A highly racialized geography present, Black residents live in much of the homes still left in disrepair, presumably post-Michael but also surely on the decline for some time beforehand. A mobile home park of mostly Black residents lies directly next to the Early County jail, a ramshackle structure surrounded by barbed wire with a hand-painted sign that looks more like a repurposed hangar than a prison proper.

The campgrounds at Kolomoki are themselves a bizarre construction, more roadways throughout and pockets for camp settlement that don’t lend themselves easily to travel on foot. They invite the car to drive throughout its premises. A massive mound is its key feature, part of an array of eight ceremonial and burial mounds built by the Swift Creek and Weeden Island peoples that inhabited the area from 250–950 CE. One cannot help but to wish to see what that looked like, before the striations of asphalt and fenced barriers punctuating the space came and marked this as a “recreational” territory. Seeing Blakely and Southwest Georgia in the Sisyphean task of reconstructing itself in the face of intensifying waves of storms certain to come soon, I cannot help but to see the parallels of the remnants left of these distant, expelled cultures and what awaits us in the near future.

Anxieties of biosphere breakdown are pervasive in all my experiences the past year, and in those of many of my friends. It feels impossible, and quite honestly reckless, to not connect the developing ruin we inhabit to the slowly dawning realization of where this is all headed. The sound of the city is the sound of fossil fuels burning. 91% of the world’s plastic scrap is never actually recycled. There are tens of millions of acres of corn left un-planted this season, in comparison to this time last year, in the states most dominant in corn production in the country, and as a result corn futures have skyrocketed. The capitalists are poised to profit from it. History shows us that it is most often not the terrain of abstract political struggle that creates revolution, nor is it the naked dispossession of people for Capital’s gain, but the scarcity and price of food. When that hits, much more will in turn. It’s difficult to know where it’s best to be, where one can make the best chance of a sustainable and resilient future for our communities as this goes on. Atlanta’s rate of rent increases outpaces much of the rest of the country’s, and sometimes I wonder if we can hang on here.

Despite that, it increasingly feels as if the only options left to us are to prepare ourselves and organize our communities accordingly, to situate ourselves in the ruins and intensify our inhabiting of them. Wandering will not be a path to the longevity of any project if the only fuel our predominating modes of transportation currently rely on becomes scarce and is unsustainable as it is. That being the case, it is still important to not succumb to the false connectivity that our revolutionized means of communication seem to imply is available to us. Online linking of struggles and coordination of efforts is still insufficient. Our world is inexorably succumbing to a process of fragmentation, and the rise of reactionary movements globally pose the contradictory action of closing the exits around us. In these trips through cities taken to connect our movement, the solution presents itself; we may have to fortify ourselves locally, but we must still create traverse the pathways between these fragmentations, in real life, and bring our territories in mutual knowledge of each other. New alliances across and through these fragments.

This is probably where I find the strategic necessity in tenant organizing, in the struggle for the security of our very right to the home we inhabit now. The act of organizing directly in the home is itself that of immediately overcoming the urban isolation of our current situation. It is the pursuit of reversing the trajectory of displacement, organizing ourselves accordingly to remain and provide the more stable foundation by which we may reconstitute territory. Gentrification itself makes this necessary, as it finds the rich flocking to and reconstructing the cities in the image of the suburbs they long isolated themselves within, almost unconscious of the fact that they are constructing fortresses to buffer themselves from the inevitable conflict that will result as crisis intensifies, crisis itself as a fixed state. A quote attributed to Milton Friedman reads “If you want to force a change, set off a crisis.”

The wealthier residents flowing in already treat their movement into the city as a response to crisis, even if they do not understand that they are doing it or for why. Yes, the privatized sprawl construction entering the city allows for more accumulation of capital for the landlord and developer capitalists, and the exploitation of the labor needed to valorize the land. Marx says of this:

“by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.” Capital, Vol I, Chapter 24: The Transformation Oof Surplus-Value into Capital

There is also something of an expression of the bourgeois unconscious in the suburbanization of the urban landscape. It is making its home for what it fears must come, though I remain skeptical of their ability to reconquer the cities and expect them to turn tail as soon as life takes on too many hardships in their proximity (those that still believe in their desk job will gladly go back to commuting 4 hours a day, especially if they can have a military escort in the martialized city sure to result when food shortages kick in). We, however, do not have to succumb to their world of irrational fear and impossible construction. We are those that may create the world we must, and those that best understand their surroundings, best suited to overcome our alienation to that which we inhabit.

It is difficult not to see ourselves situated in this dialectic of constitution and rebellion that Jefferson lays out in much of his thought, often in personal correspondence. In a letter to James Madison, written in Paris on September 6, 1789, Jefferson writes:

“…it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [Jefferson’s timeline assumed for a single generation]. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”

The US has a long history of uprisings, though not in the totalized visions of generational rebellion, the constant transformations of society that Jefferson seems to have had in mind. This process is also found in his thought in the continual transformation of the subject through this eternal realization of self-governance. Self-governance, autonomy, is here developed in the exercise of this practice throughout successive movements of people in time. It is left as a project that can never fully be realized, because it is itself an eternal return that embodies here and now the formation of new, revolutionary (perhaps actually insurrectionary) becomings that, if they are to realize anything, is the movement’s ability to shape itself as a historical force. Self-governance does not arise out of spontaneity or the building of alternative institutional power alone, though its foundations are found in both. What we may need to realize this is a fluid dialectic of the two to further advance the cause of an emancipatory society, as is seen in Jefferson’s fluid dialectic of constitution and rebellion. The bringing together of means and ends, combining the powers of decision and action. A perception of our struggle as seizing the reins of history and how we have constantly made and shaped its progression, how we may still do so.

The communist movement in the US is rapidly developing this historicity, but we must continually affirm the necessity of it to be constructed in a manner that contextualizes our work locally and makes the connections to those histories and contexts being established in other regions and that are realizing the movement as well locally. The merging of the local and the global, the overcoming (or rather through-becoming) of our fragmenting world. This begins a way we can form the base necessary to realize in turn the whole territory that constitutes our struggle. It is almost a drawing from scratch the national consciousness necessary to make the fluid transition to one more universal, one that can see through the borders that make nationalism alone a black hole collapsing in upon itself, that develops a new consciousness that has no need for the nation as such. That consciousness begins in a new political conception of how we constitute territory, and how we inhabit it and consequently seize it.

The world that lies ahead of us is one that rightfully makes us shudder, and quite understandably drives many to despair, but that is only because we cannot see past our own atomization, even as current means of communication hurl us closer together than we’ve ever been before, and showing us quite plainly our potential to overcome it. Back to psychogeography, we have fully the ability to observe and take stock of the body that we are, to begin to see its pieces in the whole and construct our territory anew, emancipation gradually erupting from where we are now. Constructing not only the knowledge of self-governance but the means of maintaining it and further developing it, the territory in which we exercise it, towards the historical and political infrastructures of a communism that fits our multiplicitous contexts, that we all may control in common.

***