Conclusion of Walking Inside Out

When I author-edited Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (Rowman and Littlefield International 2015) back in 2014, I wrote two conclusions. The first one was, in the most part, a reply to the critics of psychogeography. Below is an extract from the second draft, the one that was published (please click here to download the whole chapter), which I am making available for the first time. I will post the original draft in the next blog post. 

Conclusion: The New Psychogeography

Tina Richardson

Resurgence and Revival

In an interview in Fortean Times in 2002, Sinclair was asked what his involvement was in the revival of psychogeography during the 1990s, he replied: “In a classic sense I don’t think I had anything to do with it. But the whole term has been dusted down and reinvented and re-used by people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association” (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, 3). Of this period in psychogeography, Sinclair explains that “there was a kind of strategy to this rebranding, I was quite happy to run with it as a franchise, as a way of talking about doing the things I'd always done and providing a useful description that could be discussed in public. It became a bit of a monster on the back of that” (ibid.). He goes on to explain that by the time he was using the term it was “more like a psychotic geographer…a raging bull journey against the energies of the city” (ibid.).

At the point of writing this conclusion, well over ten years on from Sinclair’s comment above, what has psychogeography become in the second decade into the 21^st century? And, is the current resurgence just a continuation of the one Sinclair mentions (the one of the London Psychogeographical Association), or has it morphed into something else?[i] James D. Sidaway says of human geography and its related fields that “increasing attention is being dedicated to the social relations of emotion and action under the label of ‘affect’” (2009, 1092). If there is a current focus on the affective response to space then this could be connected to what is called placiality (Edward Casey). Postmodern space has become so complex in its palimpsest form that our reaction to it has reached a kind of critical mass whereby we feel compelled to attempt to articulate our response to the terrain. This is also reflected in cultural theory on space/place of the late 20^th century (such as that of Henri Lefebvre and Gaston Bachelard), as discussed by Stephen Hardy in ‘Placiality: The Renewal of the Significance of Place in Modern Cultural Theory’ (2000). In 1984 Michel Foucault stated that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (2001, 237), but of today’s epoch we can confidently say that it is one of ‘place’. The concept of place is now finding its way into popular/everyday vocabulary. In December 2014 a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled Sense of Place was broadcast. It included an interview with Joanne Parker who, on the concept of place, said: “one person’s place is very much another person’s space…landscape is first and foremost a way of creating belongingness and tying us together” (2014).

Writing at the same time as Sidaway, Bonnett says that “British psychogeography should be understood as a site of struggle over the politics of loss within radical imagination” (2009, 46). Our desire to not only explore the social history of a particular space, but also to express it in a personal and affective way that responds to the aesthetics of that place as it is for us, is one that comes about through description via our imagination, an individual expression which is different for everyone, in other words a psychogeographically articulated response. Bonnett says a “much broader group of people are now interested and involved in psychogeography, many of whom have no interest in the Situationists. It may be argued that this is a form of depolitization or that psychogeography has outgrown the limited and exclusionary world of the revolutionary avant-garde” (2013). If this is the case, then the sharing of psychogeographical accounts from whatever perspective (activist or otherwise) have been enabled through contemporary technology, with websites, blogs, social networking and aided by new ‘geo apps’.

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have granted individuals access to data and aided them in creating representations of space/place in a totally different way, as the hobby of geocaching attests to (geocaching involves individuals locating secreted packages, with clues to their location loaded online, via GPS). Even navigating the internet itself has been compared to exploring urban space (see ‘Psychogeography, Détournement, Cyberspace’ by Amy J. Elias [2010]).[ii] Often appearing under the umbrella of neogeography, the use of the internet and mobile technologies opens up space for groups and individuals and enables them to readily share the products of their walks. For example, OpenStreetMap is open source software by the OpenStreetMap Foundation and is a collaboration by its contributors providing free geographical data and mapping. Anyone can contribute by signing-up online. The data of routes walked can be picked up by using GPS software on a smartphone, then made into maps and freely shared.[iii]

This digital and satellite way of creating maps enables a synthesis with the older peripatetic method of simply talking and writing about walks. It allows the psychogeographer to include more tools for tracking their walks, presenting their information and making it available for others to access. These maps and forms of data collection show the infinite possibility of cartographies and ways for walkers to present personal and qualitative information. They offer a large degree of control of the mapping process to the user/cartographer. The open source software that is often used for these types of collaborations to a large extent disengages the data from capitalist production and, hence, provides more freedom of expression, production and distribution. This enables their use in explorations of space, creating mapping-oriented art for pleasure or for a variety of community-based projects.

The current resurgence in walking has coincided with a renewed interest in cartography encouraged by the availability of digital tools. While these tools are often used by non-specialist users in community and arts-based projects, the contemporary psychogeographer is at once embracing and critical of the new technology, preferring to use it as one tool amongst many for creating, recording and producing output from the dérive.

In The View From the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (2013) Keiller says that the current revival in the UK is very much Situationist oriented and is connected to the desire to explore the urban landscape with tools such as the dérive (2013, 133). While this seems to counter what Bonnet says above, this is may be more to do with a matter of perspective. Both seem to be occurring, separately and simultaneously. The objectives for walking are over-determined. Some groups and individuals are interested in the process and practice of the dérive-type walk and are not politically-oriented. Others are attempting an activist pursuit, on differing scales. And some, even though they are not overtly being interventionist, nevertheless will be intervening in the space as a side-effect of what their other intentions might be.

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[i] In an online article in June 2014 on The Quietus ‘‘A Living Memory’: Iain Sinclair on Life at 70’ describes the term ‘psychogeography’ as having “threatened to become an albatross around his neck” (Burrows 2014).

[ii] The flexibility of psychogeography enables it to be extended into many field, such as tourism, as can be seen in Charles McIntyres book Tourism and Retail: The Psychogeography of Liminal Consumption (2012).

[iii] For those who are interested in technology and its uses in psychogeography, the geographer and psychogeographer Tim Waters provides examples of his own work in this field on his blog www.thinkwhere.wordpress.com.

Extracts From Walking Inside Out - Memory, Historicity, Time

This is the first of a series of blogs that includes extracts from Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. This section is entitled ‘Memory, Historicity, Time’ and begins with a summary of that section followed by extracts from the individual chapters/authors.

Our relationship with the city is intrinsically tied up with our knowledge and memory of it. If a particular city is somewhere we know - from today or from our past - we are unable to separate our psychological responses to it from the materiality of the place itself. This, in fact, is psychogeography and is what makes us all psychogeographers to a degree. A sense of place connects us to a geographic region in a specific way that becomes apparent when we start to explore the emotions attached to particular urban pockets that spark something in us. It might be a memory from our adolescence, such as an independent record shop in our hometown where we purchased our first piece of vinyl, or a more recent memory we have of the experience of moving to a new town or city and the differing aesthetics of that place compared to our last home.

These memories are not separate from our self, they inform and form us. The experience of the everyday that is played out in space - walking to the train station, going to the supermarket, taking the dog for a walk – make up a significant part of our day. These practices are imprinted on our psyches over time, forming our relationship with space and at the same time are laid down in our memory of that place, creating our attachment to it. What is particularly pertinent to our memory of place is that it is subjective and partial – it cannot be anything other. It is this that lends itself to the multifarious and often contradictory accounts of specific spaces.

In this section contributions range from qualitative research on memory and place, to personal accounts which interweave fact and fiction. They express the variety of styles of writing on place, but also the effects of time and memory in the way that they become part of our own histories.

Walking Through Memory: Critical Nostalgia and the City
by Alastair Bonnett

This chapter explores how nostalgia for the city shapes the way we use it and think about its future. I will be examining how fond memories and a sense of loss amongst ex-residents shape their movement within and relationship to the city. Building on recent reappraisals of the role of nostalgia in psychogeography I point out overlaps and connections between avant-garde psychogeography and the supposedly conservative and backward-looking sensibilities of ex-urban residents. . .

The image of ex-residents of the city as “escapees” offers one of the most influential stereotypes of counter-urbanisation (for example, Osbaldiston 2010; Salt 2004). Yet the 26 interviews this chapter draws on suggests we should expand our vision of ex-residents towards a more complex picture of continuing engagement. It also allows us to begin mapping individuals’ memories of the city upon their contemporary use of the city. Our interviews were carried out with long-term ex-residents of Tyneside (an urban area comprised of the four Metropolitan Boroughs of Newcastle upon Tyne, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Gateshead) are the now living along the Tyne valley to a distance of 22 miles (the principal towns in the study are Prudhoe, Corbridge and Hexham). “Long-term ex-residents” were defined as those who lived in Tyneside for over 10 years and left Tyneside over 10 years ago.

Our interview technique directed interviewees to talk about their early memories and then their contemporary use of the city. Each interview began with the request: “Tell me about your earliest memory of Tyneside”, eliciting a variety of rich accounts and pictures of the city. . .

The Art of Wandering: Arthur Machen’s London Science
by Merlin Coverley

In the summer of 2013, I was amongst a small group of fellow writers and enthusiasts who gathered in Caerleon in South Wales to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Machen. Here, in Machen’s birthplace, surrounded by the enchanted landscape that inspired him so greatly, we discussed his experiences of both Wales and his adopted city, London, and sought to account for the enduring impact of his work. For in recent years Machen has enjoyed something of a comeback; his many works, for so long out of print, have gradually been reissued, and his unique voice has found a new audience. And, as his inclusion in a series of essays such as this would suggest, this renewed interest has resulted to a large degree from his having been adopted, retrospectively, into the psychogeographical tradition, that community of writers and thinkers which enables a diversity of figures to come together, finding common ground where perhaps none might have been sought previously. It is Machen’s role within this tradition and his continued relevance to contemporary debates surrounding psychogeography that shall be the subject of this essay. . .

By 1936 when ‘N’ was first published, Arthur Machen was 73 years old and the books which had established his reputation, such as it now was, were long behind him: The Great God Pan (1894); The Three Impostors (1894); The Hill of Dreams (1907). This final period of Machen’s long career has since elicited little critical attention, and yet ‘N’ is perhaps his strangest and most revealing story. The title is intriguing, for while its meaning is impossible to establish with any degree of certainty, it may well refer simply to the area in which it is set, Stoke Newington being represented by the single letter N, the postal district for North London at this time. In this sense then, the story is almost, but not quite, the perfect backdrop to Machen’s search for the north-west passage, instead revealing a route to the north-east, but in any event a more romantically inclined title, to my mind, than its contemporary equivalent, N16. . .

Wooden Stones
by Gareth E. Rees

It’s the sea air, as I stand by the ruined pier, which brings me the first whiff of Mike’s memory. The instant the salt hits my nostrils I’m transported to that morning when he was found by a dog walker, laid gently on the rocks beneath the castle at low tide. It didn’t happen here in Hastings, though. You’d have to travel 900 miles north up the British coast to St Andrews in Fife, and nineteen years back in time, to see me beside the castle, staring in horror at what lay below. Mike was still wearing his tweed jacket, jeans and leather soled shoes. But his glasses were gone. It looked as if he was curled up asleep.

He was buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Edinburgh among myriad rows of glittering marble on the brow of a vast manicured lawn, high above the city. Months later I left Scotland for a job writing radio adverts in Cardiff. A few years after that I migrated to London, where I lived for fifteen years, morphing into a middle-aged man with a wife and kids. I’ve been back to Edinburgh several times, but never to that cemetery. I never thought about why. Not until I came to live by the sea once again.

Not until I discovered the wooden stones. . .

Selective Amnesia and Spectral Recollection in the Bloodlands
by Phil Wood

Why I should spend my time walking around places that most people would choose to avoid has never been entirely clear to me. My parents suggest the experience of falling unnoticed into a subterranean coal cellar as a toddler, and spending several hours there, has burned itself into my subconscious. My childhood playgrounds were old colliery spoil heaps, slowly slipping back into nature, and I can recall the uncanny thrill of my first illicit entry to an abandoned building – the recently closed mine near my home at Lepton Edge in the British town of Huddersfield. Doubtless there is also the eerie experience of seeing the film Stalker (Tarkovsky 1979) at an impressionable age. Whatever, I can endorse Iain Sinclair’s view that the act of walking, or purposeful drift, is the route to revelation.

Yet it also seems, in my case at least, to be the places of past or recent tumult, where the silt has been stirred and agitated, that the greatest spectral potential lies. Thus, in Britain, it is no surprise I should be drawn to the remnants of the industrial revolution and its long tail (Edensor 2005; Hill 2013). But for decades I have been drawn also to the east of Europe – particularly the regions dubbed the Bloodlands (Snyder 2012) - where past and present still co-exist in a more dynamic and occasionally dangerous relationship. And, whilst industrial ruination proliferates (Pusca 2010; Schönle 2006), there are other sources of tumult too. In Britain most boundaries are defined by the sea, and ethnic identities have remained fairly stable for centuries whereas a 20th century resident of Lviv in western Ukraine, for example, might feasibly have been a subject of five different national jurisdictions without once having moved house (Snyder 2003). They would also have witnessed mass deportations of neighbours and other atrocious acts, many of which remain psychologically and politically unresolved, leaving behind unexorcised ghosts. . .

Please click here for more extracts: Outsider Psychogeography

Walking Inside Out – Conclusion Extract 1

Resurgence and the Virtual

Our desire to not only explore the social history of a particular space, but also to express it in a personal and affective way that responds to the aesthetics of that place, is one that comes about through description via our imagination. It is an individual expression which is different for everyone, in other words a psychogeographically articulated response. Alastair Bonnett says a “much broader group of people are now interested and involved in psychogeography, many of whom have no interest in the Situationists. It may be argued that this is a form of depolitization or that psychogeography has outgrown the limited and exclusionary world of the revolutionary avant-garde” (2013 Oxford Bibliographies Online: Geography). If this is the case, then the sharing of psychogeographical accounts from whatever perspective (activist or otherwise) have been enabled through contemporary technology, with websites, blogs, social networking and aided by new ‘geo apps’.

The digital and satellite way of creating maps enables a synthesis with the older peripatetic method of simply talking and writing about walks. It allows the psychogeographer to include more tools for tracking their walks, presenting their information and making it available for others to access. These maps and forms of data collection show the infinite possibility of cartographies and ways for walkers to present personal and qualitative information. They offer a large degree of control of the mapping process to the user/cartographer. The open source software that is often used for these types of collaborations to a large extent disengages the data from capitalist production and, hence, provides more freedom of expression, production and distribution. This enables their use in explorations of space, creating mapping-oriented art for pleasure or for a variety of community-based projects.

The current resurgence in walking has coincided with a renewed interest in cartography encouraged by the availability of digital tools. While these tools are often used by non-specialist users in community and arts-based projects, the contemporary psychogeographer is at once embracing and critical of the new technology, preferring to use it as one tool amongst many for creating, recording and producing output from the dérive.

Conclusion Extract 2: The Matter of Psychogeography

Related Links:
Walking Inside Out – Available for Pre-order
Axis of Exploration and Failure - Animated Map

Memory, Historicity, Time

From Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography

This is the second section of the above upcoming book. Please click here for the first section: The Walker and the Landscape.

Our relationship with the city is intrinsically tied up with our knowledge and memory of it. If a particular city is somewhere we know - from today or from our past - we are unable to separate our psychological responses to it from the materiality of the place itself. This, in fact, is psychogeography and is what makes us all psychogeographers to a degree. A sense of place connects us to a geographic region in a specific way that becomes apparent when we start to explore the emotions attached to particular urban pockets that spark something in us. It might be a memory from our adolescence, such as an independent record shop in our hometown where we purchased our first piece of vinyl, or a more recent memory we have of the experience of moving to a new town or city and the differing aesthetics of that place compared to our last home.

These memories are not separate from our self, they inform and form us. The experience of the everyday that is played out in space - walking to the train station, going to the supermarket, taking the dog for a walk – make up a significant part of our day. These practices are imprinted on our psyches over time, forming our relationship with space and at the same time are laid down in our memory of that place, creating our attachment to it. What is particularly pertinent to our memory of place is that it is subjective and partial – it cannot be anything other. It is this that lends itself to the multifarious and often contradictory accounts of specific spaces.

In this section contributions range from qualitative research on memory and place, to personal accounts which interweave fact and fiction. They express the variety of styles of writing on place, but also the effects of time and memory in the way that they become part of our own histories.

Chapter contributions for this section are by Alastair Bonnett, Phil Wood, Merlin Coverley and Gareth E. Rees.

Related Info:
Walking Inside Out – book cover and abstract.