When a space has a history known to those who walk it, a virtual element is added to its psychogeography — objects and structures become iconic, in the sense that they stand for particular ideas and events. This association is accessible only to those who know the context. Unlike the explicitly didactic stained-glass and frescoes of a cathedral, constructed to be legible to the illiterate masses, the configuration of stairs in a famous murder house or the wear on the testicles of the bronze bull statue on Wall Street require outside knowledge to become meaningful. Such spaces are haunted, in the sense that cultural memory has imbued it with meaning that changes how people interact with it without affecting the space physically.
Spaces are not, generally speaking, engineered to be haunted. The exception may be explicitly sacred spaces like churches or temples, where the layout is somewhat standardized and certain rote behaviors are associated with that layout without being generated by the physical space itself. A catholic and a buddhist visiting each others’ temples would not move in the same way as they would in their own. Most haunted spaces become so because of an event (sometimes imaginary) that recontextualizes the geography — a gruesome death on the stairway makes a dark splotch on the banister horrifying; the publication and acclaim of Ulysses elevates a particular path through Dublin to an odyssey; the apocryphal tale of a bunny-suited axe-wielder or a wronged woman’s suicide drives traffic to and away from a bridge at night, sorting people by their courage or foolhardiness.
Memorials are a unique kind of haunted space, one with institutions dedicated to keeping them haunted. So long as a space like Auschwitz remains haunted by the memory of what happened there, we can point to it as an example of something to avoid. Control is placed on a memorial’s psychogeography. We place explicitly iconic items in place of the things they signify, provide context to visitors as they enter, and perform careful environment design to ensure that for the most part the private experience of visitors is in line with the story we are haunted by.
Private experiences cannot be fully controlled — psychogeography has a margin of error. However, well-engineered spaces can be set up so that, at scale, independent people have a particular experience, and the differences cancel out. There are problems when groups of independent individuals are replaced with crowds: tour groups and field trip groups have different interests and different dynamics. People who know each other clump together or drift apart based on their affinity, which, in large enough groups, is a kind of complex astrodynamics of interacting orbits. Museums and memorials are designed to handle this, too.
When Pokemon Go came out, the alternate psychogeography it laid atop Auschwitz was immediately identified as problematic. We do not need to reference sacredness, offensiveness, or respect to understand why. The function of a memorial is to be haunted in a specific way, overlaying a conflicting set of values on that geography, accessible only to some, disrupts the ability of environment design to maintain that haunting. Memorials are functional, in that they specifically remind us of mankind’s biggest mistakes, and warn us against them. Detouring a memorial weakens that warning.
Read the first part of this series here.
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