Extracts from Walking Inside Out – The Walker and the Urban Landscape

This is the fifth and final of a series of blogs that includes extracts from Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. This section is entitled ‘The Walker and the urban Landscape’ and begins with a summary of that section followed by extracts from the individual chapters/authors. Please click here for the other extracts: ‘Memory, Historicity, Time’, ‘Outsider Psychogeography’, ‘Power and Place’ and ‘Practicing Psychogeography’.

The solitary walker situated within the landscape is not a modern phenomenon, even if the term psychogeography is. The cover of Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) shows Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) (1818) by Caspar David Friederich. It depicts a man in a frock coat standing on a craggy rock with his back towards us, contemplating the buffeting sea below. He carries a walking stick, telling us that he is a walker and has not just pulled up in his Landau where his coachman awaits his return. The wanderer is elevated above the sea of which he looks down and is separated from. What this image depicts is the privileged position of this figure in the landscape. Not just because of his elevated position on the rocks, but because he is male, middle-class, Western and white (his red hair is blowing in the wind, the colour punctuating the image). Our protagonist represents both the 18th century coloniser and the stereotype of a classical psychogeographer.

However, in the 21st century psychogeography takes up multiple positions. From the perspective of the background, gender and age of the individual urban walker, to their relationship with urban space itself. Today the walker feels some sort of direct connection to the space s/he explores, even if that is from a critical position. It is no longer about the tourist’s gaze, but a reflexive response where both the walker and the space s/he moves about in is momentarily changed. This section looks at the different perspectives a walking critic might take and provides three different urban spaces in order to demonstrate the variety of places available for interpretation. Taking the perspective of two walkers, and providing one analysis of the writing of a walker, these essays draw upon the place of the contemporary psychogeographer in the everyday landscape.


Incongruous Steps Towards a Legal Psychogeography
by Luke Bennett

In Scarp: in search of London’s outer limits (2012), Nick Papadimitriou conjures with many dissonant ideas, images and registers. In this short essay I will dissect two of his strange conjunctions, and in doing so consider through them the prospects for extending contemporary British psychogeography’s embrace of the incongruous – the out of place, the absurd and the out of keeping – beyond psychogeography’s usually aesthetically inclined preoccupation with liminality, and into the mundane sphere of law’s everyday manifestations within the built environment. Papadimitriou takes us – early on in his traverse along the escarpment of what is now the lost county of Middlesex – to ‘Suicide Corner’, a stretch of the A41 snaking out its path North West of London. He recounts for us a succession of fatal car crashes, and of the people, creatures and other matter caught up in each event that occurred there. In doing so he draws forth isolated incidents, from the pages of long forgotten local newspapers and memory, activating these incidental archives in order to show a reverberation of these events within the landscape itself. At one point in his rumination Papadimitriou figures an anonymous “civil engineer working for the transport ministry” who “through eyeing the scraggy wood just to the north of the farmhouse, sees only camber, curve and how best to extend the planned M1 extension over this high ground from its present terminus” (Papadimitriou 2012, 20).

Papadimitriou captures in this passage how the task-orientated gaze of the engineer sees the topography as a set of logistical challenges, a puzzle to solve as he works through in his mind’s eye the most feasible path for his roadway. Papadimitriou’s description seeks to show how all other sensory inputs are blocked (or discarded) as irrelevant to this man’s purpose. He is standing there for a reason. He is harvesting the landscape for what he needs today.


Longshore Drift: Approaching Liverpool from Another Place
by Roy Bayfield

There was a single silver hair resting between the pages of the free Metro newspaper I found on the seat of the train to Waterloo (Merseyside) station, the starting point for the walk. It was quite early but the Northern Line train had already been back and forth a few times between the Lancashire market town of Ormskirk and the centre of Liverpool, an artery for a half-hour commute – the strand of hair, with its burden of time, could have belonged to anyone. The cover of the Metro that day was a wraparound advertisement for Merseyrail, asking the question: “want to know more about you and me?” (Metro, 2013). Inside, a short article stated that “ONE in six of us is so averse to walking that we rarely venture 500m (1,600ft) from the car” (ibid., 9). Signs were starting to manifest.

I changed trains at Sandhills and travelled to Waterloo, not quite reaching the city before heading out to its edge. At the station I had my first sighting of an image of Antony Gormley’s Another Place sculptures, aka the Iron Men, on a fading print over the stairs from the platform up to street level. It would be the first of many – sightings of two dimensional digital ghosts outnumbering the three-dimensional metal figures of the actual installation. As well as the Gormley image (a lone metal figure staring out to sea) there were other images of people sited around the stairs: pictograms depicting various ways to exit the station – climbing stairs, using the lift in a wheelchair, or pushing a pushchair. Outside the station, a map of the area included a sponsor logo based on a Gormley figure rendered into silhouetted pictogram form; I now knew that (wherever else I was) I was in the territory of the Crosby and Waterloo Business Village Partnership and that an Iron Man was their avatar. From pre-walk research I also knew myself to be in Merseyside...


Walking the dog. (For those who don’t know how to do it.)
by Ian Marchant

I’m a sort-of-travel writer. I’ve published three sort-of-travel books. Sort-of-travel books are usually shelved with the actual travel books. I get shelved in ‘travel’, and so does Iain Sinclair, the granddaddy of both British psychogeography and sort-of-travel writers, and so do Will Self’s psychogeographical writings. I am on the same shelves as the psychogeographers, but I’m not of their number. Psychogeography is not what I do. My stuff is too full of people, or too full of rambling anecdotes about my nocturial adventures. This would be forgivable maybe, if I was from a city. Or even interested in cities.

Whoever has tried to define what psychogeography is, however wildly they might disagree about everything else, they all agree that it is something that can only be done in cities, on foot, and with a pinch of Theory. Theory, fair enough, hands up, (or Theory Lite, anyway) but I don’t do cities.

I live in a little town called Presteigne. My wife and I go shopping in Hereford, our nearest city, 25 miles away. The Cathedral is worth a visit, and the best place for lunch is All Saints. Our engagement with Hereford is entirely bourgeois. I work two days in a week at Birmingham City University, in a respectably edgy part of the city, partway between Villa Park and The Hawthorns. It’s a two hour drive due east of Presteigne, and I never get out of the car until I’m in the University Car Park, and I never go off campus.

Other than Birmingham and Hereford, the main cities I go to are small French provincial ones, on holiday with my wife. We visit the cathedral and have lunch in a bistro. When I go to London I go to meetings, and afterwards I bimble around the bookshops and then maybe go to a show, or a talk. I have neither the time nor the inclination to go yomping round abandoned multi-storey car parks.

Extracts from Walking Inside Out – Power and Place

This is the third of a series of blogs that includes extracts from Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. This section is entitled ‘Power and Place’ and begins with a summary of that section followed by extracts from the individual chapters/authors. Please click here for the other extracts: ‘Memory, Historicity, Time’ and ‘Outsider Psychogeography'.

The psychogeographical project, as it was for the Situationists, was to tear down the spectacle and reorder space so as to express the needs and desires of the community. They did this in a number of ways, such as through their Unitary Urbanism project which involved redesigning city architecture. But in a practical way this was carried out through their dérives. By formulating chance routes through the city, the Situationists challenged the domineering nature of urban décor and offered a new approach to the city. By, literally, chopping out the areas of the city they disliked – for instance, areas dominated by the spectacle or under redevelopment – they reformed sections of existing city maps into quarters of their own choosing. These quarters reflected their own urban preferences and they added ambiances to them to express what they would represent in their new city, for example, Happy Quarter. The new maps, the Guides Psychogeographiques or the Naked City maps, suggested a new way of moving through urban space that was counter to the capitalist dominated city and encouraged people to reconnect with a city they were increasingly being pushed out of through bureaucracy and urban planning.

For many contemporary psychogeographers, even those who would not consider themselves to be activists, the imposed boundaries that appear in urban space represent power structures that are critiqued as part of their practice. It is the critical act of walking in urban space that enables one to understand first-hand how power operates on the body-politic in subtle and enduring ways. While there have been a number of psychogeographical movements since the disbandment of the Situationists in 1972, as there still are today, it is the SI that holds a prominent place in our memory when discussing political urban walking practices. The chapters here offer a historical overview of the activist project of the SI in relation to psychogeography, alongside a subjective account of running an urban walking group in the 21st century. These essays are very different to each other in form and writing style and reflect the heterogeneity of psychogeographic writing today.


Psychogeography Adrift: Negotiating Critical Inheritance in a Changed Context
by Christopher Collier

‘Psychogeography’ was codified in the mid-20th century to explore the effects of spatiotemporal situations on subjectivity and enjoyed a resurgence in the UK during the 1990s. It has seen further renewal within contemporary culture, particularly in conjunction with the development of its own tentative canon as a literary subgenre. Debate on the ‘recuperation’ of psychogeography has occurred between various practitioners, partially coloured by the polemical approach of the practice’s early avant-garde propagators.

I propose that both sides of such a debate are somewhat problematic: firstly, the ‘literary’ conception of psychogeography, as an artistic tradition, not only tends to disavow its radical Marxist heritage, but also fails to account for the conditions of its 1990s re-emergence, fundamentally based as they were in social praxis and politicised material culture.

Secondly however, to decry psychogeography’s fundamentally ‘literary’ or ‘artistic’ dimension as recuperation is also unsatisfactory, implying a fall, or troubling deviation from definitive, political origins. Such notions of recuperation deploy a neat, stagist narrative, at odds with the manner of psychogeography’s emergence and proliferation. Focusing on psychogeography as a primarily critical practice that has been recuperated potentially fails to acknowledge its immanent, open and pre-figurative dimensions. It also glosses over a number of developments since the 1950s and thus risks trapping psychogeography in the ideology critiques of a former age.

By briefly re-examining the conditions of psychogeography’s renewal in the 1990s, looking at its embeddedness in contemporaneous social praxis, I argue that psychogeography is literary, but in an iterative, excessive sense - as what one might tentatively call ‘infra-literary’, that is ‘literature’ as a material, social activity and a condition of possibility for collective subjectivation and resistance. By using this term ‘infra-literary’, I mean to imply the submerged, amorphous, material basis of communication networks and everyday resistance that as Stevphen Shukaitis notes, is already apparent in former Situationist Raoul Vaneigem’s description of “an infra-language”, around which “declarations of power dance wildly” when they cannot grasp or define its contents (Shukaitis 2009, 194; Vaneigem n.d., 24). This, Shukaitis implies, corresponds with the conception of ‘infrapolitics’ articulated by James Scott (Scott 1990) and Robin D.G. Kelly (Kelley 2002): “[T]he partially hidden public sphere […] a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible and legible to the view of those in power” (Shukaitis 2009, 209). What I intend is not literature in the sense of a necessarily individualised, commercially or academically published discourse, but something more akin to a literary ‘dark matter’, to appropriate Gregory Sholette’s metaphor, an underground potentiality, an undercommons, related to what Stewart Home—deploying the Russian term for clandestine, self-published literature—labels ‘samizdat’ (Sholette 2011; Home 1991, 102). I propose this practice has functioned as the material cultural and social basis that nourishes psychogeography’s more visible literary or artistic ‘tradition’.


Confessions of an Anarcho-Flâneuse or Psychogeography the Mancunian Way
by Morag Rose

This chapter explores my experiences as a founder member, and continued participant in, The Loiterers Resistance Movement (LRM) a Manchester based psychogeographical collective. The first time I heard the word 'psychogeography' I had a minor epiphany, because it seemed to me to give a shape (albeit an amorphous one) to something I could feel on the streets but not quite define. It was 2006 and I was involved in running an autonomous, anarchist social centre which we constructed in a disused warehouse in Manchester, as an attempt to create a non-commercial alternative space in the rapidly expanding neo-liberal city. Around this time I drew a Venn diagram to explain my conception of psychogeography.

I still believe this to be a good illustration of contemporary psychogeography’s seductive interdisciplinary qualities, although it misses the vital all-encompassing circle of embodied experience. By this I mean the multi-sensual interaction produced through walking and its capacity to generate a relationship between self, space and left-behind traces; the reason why I believe walking has terrific power as a kinaesthetic learning tool. At the time The LRM was founded I was somewhat disillusioned and burnt out from conventional activism, and frustrated by what I felt was the limited impact of shouting (and indeed writing) about spatial justice and inequality. I wanted to explore the use of psychogeography as a participatory tool to disseminate radical theories and stimulate critical debate. It was crucial to me that Loitering was a form of stealth politics that hid its intention under ludic joy, inspired in part by the imperfect avant-garde neo-Marxism of the Situationists. It is important to acknowledge here other Loiterers have different influences, motivations and memories. Early members included artists, activists, academics and a heterogeneous treasury of moochers who were curious about their environment. We wanted to be as open and welcoming as possible and our fluid structure still reflects this; people float in and out and define their own level of commitment. Some see Loitering purely as an aesthetic or social activity and indeed the convivial atmosphere during the post-dérive debrief, almost always in the pub amidst a cacophony of shared experiences, is very enticing. Many new, enduring and often unexpected alliances have formed during our walks. For me, psychogeography primarily offered a form of public engagement with radical theory that was fun, irreverent and active, a praxis developed out of a desire to find appealing methods to critique the hegemonic view of the city.

Walking Inside Out: Contribution Details

Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography

Here is further information on the upcoming Rowman and Litlefield volume, which I am editing and will be included in their Place, Memory, Affect series. This blog will give a brief summary of the essays that will be contained therein. Please click here for the previous blog on the volume, which gives you a more detailed overview of the book and links to the authors’ own work: Walking Inside Out.

Abstract
While psychogeography in its broadest sense is as a method of urban walking which responds to and critiques the terrain, there are many different approaches to it. This can be because of the way the walking is carried out or in the way the practical work is written up or analysed. This book attempts to bring the work of literary/creative psychogeographers and academics together in an edited volume that looks critically at psychogeography today. Contributions are from academics and researchers, and from those working in the area of urban walking. The voices expressed here highlight and explore the setting and climate as it is for psychogeography in the UK in the 21st Century. The essays provide current examples of contemporary psychogeographical practices, demonstrating the differences between them. Examples of the different forms of urban walking are discussed alongside different theoretical approaches. This book represents psychogeography is aimed at scholars, students and urban walkers alike.

How the City Appears
This section looks at visual urban phenomenon from communist architecture to public sculptures. Concentrating on the appearance of the urban landscape and how walking with a critical eye opens up the spaces in which we live and move, these essays draw our attention to both the aesthetics of the cityscape and the minutiae that can be easily overlooked on a casual stroll.

Roy Bayfield
This essay comprises an account of a walk undertaken on the Sefton coastline of North West England in August 2013, with collaborators Robyn Woolston (artist) and Irene Delgado-Fernandez (physical geographer). An objective was set: to connect two types of human intervention on the coast, Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ sculptures (‘art’) and a university research site that monitors the movement of dunes over time (‘science’).

Luke Bennett
In his essay Bennett will set out a psychogeographically informed account of the multiple lives of a small spot of pavement in order to explicate this rich realm and its various facets and tensions. In doing so he will also reflect on the novelty of this approach, and the survival strategies that he has evolved, in order to endeavour to justify this preoccupation and set of methodological strategies within the academic disciplines to which he is affiliated.

Phil Wood
Wood is drawn to places of neglect and abandonment, especially in isolated and obscure parts of Eastern Europe. He is intrigued by the region’s turbulent history of both cultural conflict and hybridity. Wood’s journeys are unaccompanied, deliberately under-planned and occasionally serendipitous. Most are illicit with a frisson - not always imagined - of danger. His essay includes walks around Kaliningrad, Lviv and Odessa.

Memory, Historicity, Time
One of the ways past psychogeographical accounts have been used is to understand the aesthetics of a particular city at a specific moment in time. The three essays contained here deal with explorations and knowledge of the cityscape (in the past and today), by examining personalised accounts and histories. They reflect on how space is mapped out and how it is connected to memory, culture and geographical space.

Merlin Coverley
Arthur Machen’s self-proclaimed ‘London Science’ was a means of gaining mastery over his adopted city through an exhaustive attempt to map and communicate the otherworldly atmosphere of late nineteenth-century London streetlife, through an exploration of the outermost reaches of the suburban city. These urban wanderings were documented in works such as The London Adventure (1924). 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, and this essay will outline his pioneering contribution to psychogeographical ideas and practices.

Alastair Bonnett
The active and creative capacity of memory and nostalgia to both guide the steps of ex-residents and fashion critical forms of engagement within the city are addressed in this essay. Using interview material drawn from people who once lived on Tyneside, it examines how the past, present and future are mapped onto spatial practice. This argument drawn into dialogue the memory rich content of literary psychogeography, contrasted with the anti-nostalgic strategies of avant-garde psychogeography.

Gareth Rees
This essay looks at a common urban phenomenon - memorial benches - as a way of exploring how human identities are encoded in the landscape. Like many coastal towns, Hastings is a repository of memory, where people come to contemplate the past, as well as to create new memories. As Gareth E Rees drifts through the town, tragic moments from his life are reanimated by the topography, while the voices of the dead begin to speak.

Power and Place
Looking at psychogeography from the perspective of an artist, writer and academic researcher, these essays discuss how urban walking can be used in an activist way through the insertion of the body into socio-political space. By demonstrating how psychogeography can become an intervention once applied to the modus operandi of a specific group, these authors explore and critique the way collectives of individual can challenge dominant power structures through the act of walking. Looking at the activist nature of psychogeography, today and in the past, these texts offer and examine specific case studies so as to analyse its efficacy as a means of radical political engagement and social change.

Ian Marchant
This essay documents a series of psychogeographical interventions by the agri-prop theatre company, Reborn Rebecca. The Welsh Rebecca Riots against taxation continued in Radnorshire into the 1930’s. Reborn Rebecca revives this tradition via a series of documented walks to Powys CC Headquarters to demand that they vacate County Hall, giving the buildings over to the Free University of Radnorshire. This essay asks: are psychogeographical examinations of power over land possible outside the city?

Morag Rose
This essay offers field-notes from autoethnographic experiments in Feminist anarcho-flânerie. Inspired by the Situationist International there is an explicit political agenda to Rose’s walks which reveal power relationships and inequalities within Manchester. Using psychogeography as a tool for community engagement she blurs the boundaries between activism, art and academia. This essay gives voice to some of the tales uncovered by her adventures and explores the potential of dérive methodology.

Christopher Collier
Enjoying a resurgence in the 1990s, psychogeography has seen further renewal within contemporary practices. However, the drift of psychogeography away from antagonistic and autonomous contexts into more institutional forms requires a reconsideration of any claims to criticality. Collier proposes that recent artistic iterations of psychogeography potentially fail to account for the convergence of their playful, participatory methodologies with the recombinant modes of subject construction that characterise contemporary post-Fordism.

Practising Psychogeography/Psychogeographical Practices
By examining the walking and spatial practices of individuals who specialise in psychogeography as a critical methodology, these essays look at how it can be used as a tool and developed in specific ways so as to put forward the practice as an analytical device. These urban walkers have worked through their walking strategies, and created their own type of psychogeography, which suits their own individual requirements, enabling them to analyse the city in a specific way.

Victoria Henshaw
Sensory walks have emerged in recent years as a form of psychogeography which seeks to explore sensory characteristics of the environment and their perception by people, by examining experiences gained through one or more of the senses whilst walking through physical, usually urban environments. However, the characteristics of the sites through which sensory walks are implemented impacts directly upon the experiences gained, the data collected and the resulting overall findings and thus if a pre-identified route is to be selected, this warrants careful consideration. Drawing from experiences of implementing smellwalks in cities across the world and focussing specifically on a detailed study with fifty-two participants in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and subsequent group smellwalks in European and North American cities, this chapter includes examples of issues encountered whilst undertaking and designing such sensory research.

Phil Smith
Smith will consider the central role of multiplicity in mythogeography and its reconnection to certain strands within British psychogeography, such as the workings of Alan Moore and Tim Perkins and the ‘drifts’ of organisations like the Loiterers Resistance Movement. He will argue that mythogeography continues to pose a challenge to certain limited and revivalist elements, but at the same time celebrates the panoply of practices that even where there is no acknowledgement of the influence of the tradition of the International Lettristes/Situationist International, betrays a knowledge of them.

Tina Richardson
Richardson's essay will be on her own psychogeographical practice, schizocartography. She has developed this particular urban exploration methodology from the psychogeography of the Situationists and the theory of the philosopher/psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Concentrating on the concepts of affect and aesthetics, Richardson has taken Guattari’s theory on "schizoanalytic cartographies" and applied it to psychogeography, using archival explorations and philosophical enquiry in order to help bring a particular form of theoretical critique to urban space. Schizocartography attempts to discover the tensions between discourses of power in space and the social history and heterogeneity hidden in the topography. This essay will be in addition to the introductory essay.

Outsider Psychogeography or Walking ‘Outside the Box’
The two contributions in this section do not sit within the usual arts-based humanities walking practices, with the authors using psychogeography in their own discipline in creative and constructive ways. These essays look at the interdisciplinary nature of psychogeography and how it can be introduced into the social sciences as a way of helping individuals via an engagement in urban space. They also open discussion of the value of psychogeography in its acknowledgement as an affective methodology.

Andrea Capstick
For many people with dementia, memory for places known in their youth remains strong in the face of difficulties they now have with short-term memory. This essay draws on a series of walking interviews with people diagnosed with dementia in order to explore a more collective reconstruction of place memory.

Alex Bridger
Some of the main limitations of psychological research on environments are that there has been scant focus on how people politically experience their social worlds. Moreover, much of the existing research in psychology is limited in terms of focusing only on place-identity and studying behavioural processes as if cognitions and attitudes are ‘things’ that can be found in peoples’ heads. Bridger will explain what the limits are of that existing research and will explain why an anarchic, anti-psychological and radical critique of environments is needed. Bridger makes an argument for a situationist-psychoanalytically informed approach to psychogeography. He will draw on specific psychoanalytical concepts including free association and disorientation.