Merlin Coverley has produced a concise, highly readable history of the development of Psychogeography. The aim of the book is simple:
Increasingly this term is used to describe a bewildering array is ideas from the occult and urban walking, to avant-garde experimentation and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what does it mean?
The roots of the movement are traced to Daniel Defoe, whose work are regarded as the earliest examples of the novel to be written in England. However these fictions contain fantastical journeys, most famously Robinson Crusoe, or the setting of Moll Flanders in the labyrinthine streets of the London low-life alleyways. However, Defoe's historical and factual works - his account of the Great Plague and account of his travels in Britain blend biography, local history with personal reminiscence which transform as much as describe the territory it inhabit. There are no maps, the writer narrates his space through trial and error.
The work of William Blake has been highly influential in the development of psychogeography. 'Blake was a walker, a wanderer whose poems describe the reality of eighteenth-century street life, but they are overlaid by his own intensely individualistic vision to create a new topography of the city. His legacy to psychgeographic thought here is clear: the transformation of the familiar landscape of his own time and place into the transcedent image of the eternal city. (p. 40).
However although Defoe and Blake can be regarded as antecedents of psychogegraphy it is De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater that is generally regarded as the first fully realised psychogeographical text. 'De Quincey is a prototype for the obsessive drifter, allowing his imagination to shape and direct the perception og his environment; his purposeless drifting at odds with commercial traffic and allying homself to the invisible underclass whose movements map the chaotic and labyrinthine aspects of the city.' (p.43)
These ideas were further developed later in the nineteenth century by writers in Paris and London. What Coverley terms 'urban gothic' was developed by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle who established a an image of London as a fog-bound maze, seductive, strange and menacing.These essentially fictive responses were rejected by Arthur Machin who fused writer and walker to become the archetypal urban wanderer. 'In books such as Near Things and Far and The London Adventure Machen narrates his own adventures within "those red, raw places all around the walls of London" , outlining his peculiar "London science" in which the aim is to" utterly shun the familiar" in favour of a deliberate attempt to lose oneself in the overlooked quarters of the city.' (p. 49)
In Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century a parallel development occurred which gave rise the notion of the 'flaneur' an urban wanderer who seeks the anonymity of the crowd. a figure tinged with nostalgia for a city under threat from modernisation. The roots of the figure, developed by Baudelaire and Rimbaud can be traced to characters created by the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, whose creations such as the detective, Dupin inhabit a fictionalised London. Walter Benjamin, in his unfinished 'Arcades Project' offers a series of insights into Parisian street-life before the vast glass arcades were swept away by Housmann's wide boulevards.
'Ultimately the flaneur is a composite figure - vagrant, dandy, explorer, detective and stroller - yet, within these many and often contradictory roles, his predominant characteristic is the way he makes the street his home and this is his true legacy to psychogeography.
Coverley next explores the phenomena of what Rimbaud termed 'robinsoner' - a verb to describe 'to let the mind wander, or travel mentally'. However the concept of 'mental travel' predates Rimbaud, In the spring of 1790, Xavier de Maistre, confined under house arrest 'embarked on a journey around his bedroom every bit as arduous as Magellan or Cook but one that took place entirely within the boundaries of his own imagination. Joris-Karl Huysman's dandyish protagonist 'Duc Jean Floressas Des Essientes is the protagonist in the decadent novel Against Nature. This sickly, indolent aesthete, unable to muster the energy to wander the streets retreats into mental travel. Such figures 'exiled renegade poets leading marginal and disreputable existences act as template's for a number of fictional 're-appearances by 'Robinsons' over the next century - in Kafka's Amerika; in Celine's Journey to the End of the Night; in the Work of the poet Weldon Keys, who disappeared mysteriously himself in 1955, leaving as his legacy a series of poems about Robinson. Finally in the present day, Film-maker, Patrick Keiller's psychogeographic trilogy which he completed in 2010 with Robinson in Ruins draws on the tradition of the flaneur when it finds Robinson "wandering through the English countryside, wondering aloud whether the failures of late capitalism in the UK can be explained by the flora and detritus he passes. Keiller's materialist approach yields ravishing results, affirming his status as a serious thinker with a knack for finding the "moving wind in the trees". As with London and Robinson In Space, the titular protagonist's philosophical musings remain a constant, guiding the viewer's attention to the manifold histories hidden within each object he encounters." (Rotten Tomatoes 2012).
Developments in France took a different turn, absurdist and political rather than bohemian and mystical. Breton and Aragon's pre-surrealist novels written just after the Ist World War recast the flaneur in a more erotic role where the streets of Paris are places to procure, seek out or simply think about sex. The flaneur is driven by desire, the flaneuse cast in the role of prostitute. Aimless strolling saw the figure of Robinson and the flaneur coalesce, where the wanderer is able to revolutionise the mundane through the operation of chance encounters and break down the barrier between reality and the realm of dreams.
"We may imagine the mind's greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls"
Andre Breton, Nadja, p. 112.
In the years folowing the second world war a number of radical movements developed such as the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Lettrist. As Coverley points out their programmes were frequently puerile, but they shared an interest in re-defining urban spaces, wresting them from what Chtcheglov termed the worldwide mental disease of 'banalisation'. It was in one of the publicatiions of the short-lived Lettrist journal 'Potlatch' that the term 'psychgeography first appeared. The term was taken-up in the late 1950s by the developing 'Situationalist' movement, whose leader Guy Debord, attempted a definition:
"Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural f0rces, such as soil composition or climactic conditions on the economic structures of society [...]. Psychogeography, could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. (p. 89)
Debord, in developing and leading the Situationalist International (1957 - 1972) emerged as one of the leading Marxist thinkers of the 1960s whose work was influential in the Paris uprising of 1968. His notions of derive and detournement, though related to psychogeography are templates for activism rather than aesthetic response. 'Gone are the romantic notions of an artistic practice; here we have an experiment to be conducted under scientific conditions and whose results are to be rigorously analysed.' (p. 89)
The French Jesuit scholar, Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' was more influential than Debord's work, particularly in America. Using what is essentially semiotic analysis, Certeau links the practices of psychogeography to issues relating to consumerism. As Coverly explains at times Certeau's prose is almost impenetrable.
'Upholding the finest traditions of contemporary French theory, de Certeau's comments display an utter disregard for clarity, instead favouring an approach that ensures his work a place within the burgeoning ranks of the unread.' (p. 103-4)
This being the case, one of the wonders of the modern age is that there is always Wikipedia to come to the aid of those of without the time and inclination to wrestle with the more impenetrable aspects of 'contemporary French theory'!
The Practice of Everyday Life
To date, Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.
Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" acting in environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the influential chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
According to Andrew Blauvelt who relies on the work of Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life:[2]
"Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the "arts of doing" such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these strictures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations.
Wikipedia
In the past twenty years psychogeography has emerged in London as a significant literary and cultural movement. As you might expect, given the legacy of Defoe, Blake, and de Quincey, the form of psychogeography which emerged, though associated with anarchist activism, leaned towards 'new age' ideas rather than Marxism. The immediate precursor of this approach were Arthur Machen and Alfred Watkins; this latter writer's somewhat dubious claim to immortality is associated with his 'discovery' of 'ley lines' - a prehistoric 'network' mysteriously linking earthworks, standing stones and barrows. Coverly sums up this latter writer's contribution somewhat wryly:
'Alfred Watkins discovered his theory in a single relevatory insight whilst riding in the Hereford countryside on 30th June 1921. A somewhat unlikely prophet for new age ideas, Watkins spent much of his life as a sales rep for a local brewer, a biographical fact that was seen by his detractors as a revealing source of his inspiration.' (p. 51)
In its most recent manifestation as a primarily literary movement based in London, psychogeography is an eclectic phenomena in which radical situationalist politics mixes with new age ideas and post Ballardian dystopian visions of urban space. Coverley identifies the key protagonists as follows:
- J. G. Ballard: nicknamed the 'seer of Shepperton' Ballard has written at length about 'The Death of Affect', the loss of emotional engagement with our surroundings, and novels such as Crash and High Rise offer accounts of the unexpected and bizarre forms of behaviour our new technological landscapes can provoke.
- Iain Sinclair: Like Ballard before him, Sinclair has been keen to expose those obscure places that lie at the margins [...} and his series of walks across the city immediately place him within the earlier traditions of urban wandering. But it is in his Lud Heat, with its proposed alignment of Hawkesmoor's London churches, that has been the key text in the neo-psychogeographical canon. Sinclair pays no allegiance to situationalist theory, instead invoking the theory of ley lines proposed by Alfred Watkins and reviving the previous occult concerns of earlier London visionaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machin.
- Peter Ackroyd: ...described, not altogether helpfully, as a 'historico-mystical psychgeographer' and through his recognition of cyclical currents unfolding across history, Ackroyds vision of the city also owes less to the rigorous approach of the Situationalists than it does to a conservative sense of national identity and a belief in the enduring power of the city.
- Stewart Home: (his) work goes some way to re-affirming (psychogeography's) theoretical authenticity and spirit of political radicalism. As the key figure in the London Psychographical Association, reconvened between 1992-1997, Home produced a steady output of pamphlets and novels as well as performing a series of avante-garde activities, reintroducing the provocative spirit of situationalism and its predecessors. Home's peculiar brand of theoretically alert, sex and violence fuelled parodies combine the plagiaristic tendencies of the avante-garde with some home-grown political radicalism and Sinclair's sense of London's past.
- Patrick Keiller: Finally in a move from text to film, the circle is completed by Patrick Keiller who, in his films London and Robinson in Space, marks the return of Robinson and with him the figure of Defoe with whom this survey began. In these two films, Keiller provides a psychogeographical meditation on London and the country as a whole, combining a politican response to Thatcherism with an inquiry into the literary history of the city and a final word on the fate of the flaneur. (pp. 111 - 114)
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