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Pychogeography and the English tradition
By John Rogers
The term psychogeography was first coined by French Situationist Guy Debord in his 1955 publication, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography". Debord's psychogeography and the practice of dérive or drift were techniques “to explore and extend the imaginative, experiential qualities of urban and other landscapes, as part of a wider attempt to achieve a revolutionary transformation of everyday life” (Patrick Keiller).
The psychogeography that I was introduced to in the 1990's was very much an English interpretation that exploited the fact that Debord noted that the adjective, psychogeographical, had a “pleasing vagueness”. When looking at the work of Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home and Andrew Kotting, you'd have to say that English psychogeography owes more to Alfred Watkins’ ‘The Old Straight Track’ (1925) with its revolutionary theories about Ley Lines, and E. O Gordon's ‘Prehistoric London, its mounds and circles’ (1914), which uncovers the capital’s sacred landscape. In ‘The Situationist City’, Simon Sadler refers to this post-Situationst variety as “neo-psychogeography”.
In 2004, when I had just embarked upon a psychogeographical project of my own, Remapping High Wycombe, I saw Iain Sinclair (‘Lights Out for the Territory’, ‘London Orbital’) in conversation with Will Self at Hawksmoor's St. Luke’s Church. Will Self inevitably got on to the vexed question of 'psychogeography' and asked Sinclair how he defined his variety of psychogeography, adding the aside that it didn't seem to relate much to the Guy Debord/ Situationist idea, which he said, largely seemed to involve “lying about drunk on the Ile de France, to liberate Paris from its collective obsession with work, consumption and industrialised mass "leisure". Sinclair acknowledged that although he had an awareness of Debord et al he picked up the term via Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association and it gave him a convenient brand name for his obsession with the occult architecture of Nicholas Hawksmoor, Ley Lines, and what he termed “nodules of energy” (the choice of venue was apposite as Sinclair waved his arms in the direction of the house where Milton lived, William Blake’s grave over the road in Bunhill Fields, and 17th Century plaque pits). Sinclair talked of the dérive as being a “purposeful stalk, travels that lie outside the schedule.”
The revival of the London Psychogeographical Association had been announced with a statement in their first newsletter in 1993, “The revival of the LPA corresponds to the increasing decay in British culture, and indeed of the British ruling elite. It has been, in fact, an historical inevitability”. In an essay entitled ‘Why Psychogeography’ Stewart Home reinforced the point, “Psychogeography is not a substitute for class struggle, but a tool of class struggle.”
1993 was the 14th year of the divisive rule of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party. Thatcher’s policies and a renewed campaign of bombing by the IRA had altered the mindset and fabric of the country’s urban centres. This mood of decay and paranoia is brilliant captured in Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film ‘London’, whereby an unseen narrator embarks on a series of journeys across the city with his friend Robinson, in the course of a study of “the problem of London.” Robinson engages in “exercises in psychic landscaping and drifting and free association.”
When I actually came to apply some psychogeography of my own to a public art project in the town of my birth, High Wycombe, I returned to the Situationist variety. This seemed to fit, as the project was a response to the town centre's redevelopment and the Situationists were responding to what they saw as the failure of modernist urban planning. I also experimented with the practice of algorithmic derives pioneered by Dutch psychogeographers Social Fiction whereby the dérivers follow a simple instruction such as 'First Left, second right, second left, repeat.’ I used this in a programme of “Lunchtime Dérives”, where workers and students dropped their usual lunchtime routines and went out to reexperience the town, jolted from their preconceived ideas of the streetscape by the algorithm, before returning to their economically productive activities.
But as the project progressed and the layers of the town seemed to peel away, I found that I became drawn to Iain Sinclair’s idea of “nodules of energy”. My dérives now gravitated towards Iron Age earthworks, nuclear bunkers, the site of a Holy Well, the home of a forgotten Restoration poet. The work became a kind of “archaeology of the present”, sifting through the various layers of everyday life to discover what lie beneath, to re-imagine a familiar landscape, to question the use and ownership of the land, to elevate neglected neighbourhoods and derelict industrial sites to the same level of importance as accepted notions of ‘heritage’.
The title of latest addition to the canon of psychogeographical texts, an anthology edited by Iain Sinclair, gives an indication of where neopsychogeography in England has arrived; it is called ‘London, City of Disappearances.’ As Keiller said in ‘London’, “As a city, it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern: London was the first metropolis to disappear.” In many ways I’ve come to see psychogeography as a coping mechanism in a city that is constantly undergoing a process of disappearance and re-birth. It is the cognitive behavioural therapy for the perambulators of an elusive landscape.
© John Rogers 2006
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