Merlin Coverley's 'Hauntology'

 

Merlin Coverley's latest book - Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past - has just been published by Oldcastle Books (2020), and I am lucky enough to have a review copy. This isn't going to be a 'traditional' review. Rather more, in providing some extracts and discussion, I am going to highlight a couple of my favourite theories from the book. If you would like a straightforward review, you can go to The Indiependent or Horrified Magazine, but I will also include the blurb from the back cover, so that you get an overview of this non-fiction text and can see where the theories I will be discussing fit into the overall book. I just want to add, though, that despite the fact I am looking at two of the key theories elucidated in the book, this is a book for anyone interested in: the past, the occult, psychogeographical literature, popular culture, ghost stories, folk horror, nostalgia, and so on, and not just for academics:

Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean?

This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artefacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

DERRIDA'S HAUNTOLOGY: Utopian Futures and Enduring Spirits

Coverley's opening launches with a proposed answer to the question above in regard to our fascination with the past. He says that our "preoccup[ation]...can be found through the examination of what one critic has described recently as 'perhaps the most important, political-philosophical concept we have right now': hauntology''. Quoting Thomas Wyman, here, Coverley then leads us to the inventor of that theory, Jacques Derrida, explaining its explication through Derrida's text The Spectres of Marx (1993). While the theory of hauntology was formulated by Derrida as a way of examining the enduring nature of Marx's work, today it has become common parlance in certain circles and is about how the past constantly reappears in our present through its various cultural manifestations, but also in regard to the political ramifications of the past and how they come back to haunt us. A perfect contemporary example of this is the populist political figurehead and the current draw, amongst many, towards more authoritarian political stances. On this point, I like the way Coverley highlights the utopian aspect of hauntology when he states: "Derrida used hauntology, his science of ghosts, to demonstrate that...the spectre of Marx, like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future". Something we should all hope for after the 2020 we have had, which has both politically and medically invoked the ghosts of the past!

Coverley also evokes - actually under the rubric of hauntology, he rather invokes - Mark Fisher's work (see Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology & Lost Futures) in regard to his discussion on "temporal currents". For Fisher, hauntology operates when phenomenon that is "not yet" present "haunts the present from the future". It is also the case that something that "no longer" exists "haunts the present from the past". Both these spectres are evident in the present via "repetition or anticipation". Coverley explains that this "ghost...comes from the past to manifest itself in the present and yet...belongs to neither". This is where Derrida's interest in the ghost as a deconstructive mechanism becomes apparent, the spectre being both "absent and present". Later in the book, Coverley revisits Derrida's hauntology in more depth by examining the paradox functioning in these types of binary oppositions - e.g. absence/presence - that intrigued Derrida so much. Coverley says the ghost is "both inside and outside of time, both beyond and of history" and one of the themes that recurs in his discussion of Derrida's hauntology is 'the return', which leads me neatly on to a discussion of the uncanny in regard to Coverley's book.

FREUD'S UNCANNY: The Return of the Father

For Freud the uncanny (The Uncanny 1899) is something which - to put very simply - is both familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely (heimlich and unheimlich in the German). Because of its definition, it is clear why Derrida was so interested in Freud's uncanny: there is a contradiction at the heart of its very being. For Coverley (and he does allude to the knottiness of the term), the uncanny is used in the sense that it represents for Freud "death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts" (Freud's words). Coverley explains that Freud is uncomfortable with using the language of the spectre due to his academic standing. However, we can see how the ghost (in the form of the returning 'thing', the repressed) is actually a fundamental part of psychoanalysis, as both a phenomena located in the unconscious and in terms of the psychoanalytic process itself: returning, repeating, and so on. Whether it is the compulsion to repeat (the returning trauma) or the revisiting of that trauma within the consulting room of the psychoanalyst. Coverley explains: "the repetition and doubling [are] to be found at the heart of Freud's concept [and] are replayed through the returns the re-enactments of the historical past". 

The section that follows the above in Coverley's book takes a look at Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Derrida 1995), in relation to literature. For those literature boffins who read this blog, Coverley discusses M R James, Robert McFarlane and H P Lovecraft in this section. I think this is a neat inclusion of Archive Fever here by Coverley, where he examines the death drive in relation to the literature he discusses. But I would also like to add to that the ghosts that appear at the outset of Archive Fever, Derrida's inspiration for the book, and there are two. In Archive Fever Derrida writes of how the private event of Freud’s circumcision becomes public when its trace becomes part of the archive which is the Freud Museum. An inscription appears in the archive in the form of a bible that Freud’s father has re-covered in new leather and re-gifts to him. Freud's father presents it to his son on his birthday. For Derrida this private inscription is both the note from Freud’s father, and Freud’s circumcision. I would argue, too, that both these (in their ghostly manifestation) are ever-present, ever-absent...spectres...the haunting of which appear in the trace that is left by what was...

You can order Coverley's book here!

I have also written about the uncanny on this blog before (in relation to psychogeography), so if you are interested, click on the following:

Taking an Urban Walk With Freud

Uncanny Effects and Perambulatory Weirdness

South by Merlin Coverley

From the beaches of Tahiti to the streets of Buenos Aires, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley’s wide-ranging study throws light on the ways in which the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our collective imagination (from the cover of South).

Coverley tackles this vast subject eloquently, breaking his book into six chapter (The Idea of South, Goethe’s Law, In the South Seas, Magic South, The Polar South and South of the River), in order to examine the concept of the South from a philosophical, geographical, cultural and literary perspective so as to demonstrate the complexity and fascination it holds for us. I shall be writing about ‘The Idea of the South’ (the introduction) and ‘South of the River’ here.

The Idea of the South

Being a cultural theorist the concept of ‘the south’ is particularly interesting to me (as are the other points of the compass, since they are often set in binaries and have values attached to them when set in opposition – for example the North/South divide in Britain). Coverley begins the introduction by showing us a 17th century map of the south pole and then describes the work by the artist Andy Goldsworthy entitled Touching North (1989) (see below). Touching North was situated at the North Pole, with the four individual parts of the sculpture facing each other and also outwards, with holes in the centre providing them with an opening which enabled them a space accessible from anywhere and everywhere. Coverley says that the sculpture “demonstrates how the directions of the compass may effectively be rendered meaningless: emerge through any of the four arches and one finds oneself heading south” (page 9). Thus Coverley launches the reader into the ambiguity of the term ‘south’ and in the introduction begins to explain how it developed.

South of the River

Having spent most of my working life in London the idea of north and south of the Thames means something for me, especially since I worked and lived only in the north of London during my time there. Coverley begins the final chapter by discussing Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children (1991) and how the protagonists live on “the bastard side of Old Father Thames” (Angela Carter), in other words ‘the south’. Coverley explains that he has lived in south London on and off for about twenty years and notes that this division is now “less distinct, as the process of gentrification refashions the city into the one we inhabit today” (page 224). I must say, this was also my experience. Having moved to London in the mid-1980s (at the beginning of the property boom) and having left in 2002, there was certainly a smoothing out in regards to what was considered, when I first arrived, to be “broad concentrations of wealth and power in the North at odds with the poverty and lack of political representation to be found in the South” (page 224). The urban development and rising property value throughout the capital during the time I was living there, eventually made this distinction redundant.

Coverley also mentions one of my favourite books about London Soft City (Jonathan Raban 1974) and quotes Raban talking about how when one lives in the north of London, visiting someone in the south can seem like a real trek when it involves crossing the river. So this is about the perception of the distance – broken by the river as a boundary - rather than the actual mileage.

Coverley’s latest book will have a wide appeal. I’ve only included a few of my own observations here (this is not a proper book review), but in the rest of the book he examines imaginary places such as Atlantis and books like Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition (1970), and the concept of ‘the noble savage’ to the works of Iain Sinclair (let’s not forget Coverley is a psychogeographer).

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

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.

The New Psychogeography - Update

I had originally planned to do a series of blogs following on from my first blog on The New Psychogeography, but since then I’ve decided to make the whole final chapter of Walking Inside Out about the new psychogeography instead of turning these blogs into an article. The first blog sparked a lot of discussion online, a considerable amount of hits and, also, the related slides from the Huddersfield lecture, that this all stems from, has been downloaded a number of times on academia.edu.

So instead, I am posting some of the original section on the new psychogeography from the first draft of the introduction to the book. I’m afraid you will have to wait for the book to be published to see the full concluding chapter which will now be dedicated to ‘The New Psychogeography’. I really appreciate all the input and discussion, etc – thank you.

*

In 2002 Iain Sinclair said of psychogeography that "the next step is to bury it completely! Let it go and let it re-emerge. I think it needs 15 years to gain some new energy, as I think this energy is rapidly running out" (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, 7). Since we are now fast-approaching the end of Sinclair's 15 year embargo, perhaps this is a salient moment to begin to discuss psychogeography again in a critical way, and take a serious look at the work being carried out in the field. I hope this text contributes to this discussion. At the same time I appreciate criticisms of the academisation of psychogeography might be levelled at this volume, but since I am oriented in academia and my field is psychogeography, it is impossible to do the work itself without being caught in this trap. Sinclair further comments on this problem when discussing the work Stewart Home did with the London Psychogeographical Association: “Stewart Home says that the LPA deliberately mystified and irrationalised their psychogeograhical ideas in order to prevent them from being academicised in the future. But they inevitably will be because Stewart himself is a sort of rogue academic, so it's self-contradictory in some ways. By doing it, it becomes part of this machinery in talks and interviews.” (cited in Pilkington and Baker 2002, 3).

But, nevertheless, Sinclair is in praise of walking itself despite his concerns with the term psychogeography. One thing that many walkers are preoccupied with, from activists to The Ramblers, is not just the marginalisation of our public spaces, but the marginalisation of the very act of walking itself. As Sinclair says in an interview in the Ramblers own publication: "We're at the bottom of the food chain and the day will come when we'll have the equivalent of bike lanes: a narrow suicide strip chucked in among the traffic. We'll have to have ghost walkers, like the white ghost bikes you see to commemorate dead cyclists" (2012, 98). So, it seems, psychogeographers perhaps do have more in common than can be expressed in their differences.

In The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker (2012) Merlin Coverley includes a chapter on ‘The Return of the Walker’. Situating the preceding 30 years within a literary tradition that is also reflected in the creative arts, he finishes his closing chapter with Nick Papadimitriou, whose rise in popularity followed Coverley’s previous book. Walking Inside Out presents the work of some of the contemporary literary psychogeographers alongside those working in academia, thus bridging the gap which means these texts are commonly presented to different audiences, but also demonstrating the inherent value to academia of the ‘creative’ psychogeographical account. On May 1 2014 the BBC online news magazine published an article by Finlo Rohrer ‘The Slow Death of Purposeless Walking’, which is posed rather more as a question than a statement and alludes to the number of recently published books in the field. While his article was not about psychogeographer per se, it provided walking tips to the novice, some of which supported and some of which countered psychogeographical practices in the broadest sense. But despite this, it is an encouragement to walk and one of the tips that is common to ‘purposeless walking’ and psychogeography is to “walk mindfully” (Rohrer 2014). This mindfulness will be apparent from the chapters of the book.

The beauty of the inexact art that is psychogeography, appearing in the innumerable forms that it has and continues to, attests to the durability and relevance of it still. It can be crafted, manipulated and even re-appropriated to suit your particular needs. It can be carried out fundamentally, creatively or ironically. And it can be picked up and put down like a handy tool that helps you metaphorically whittle away the parts of urban space of which you disapprove, rather like the SI did with their maps. Psychogeography is continually being reworked, reflected upon and reimagined. It has the ability to absorb the urban space in which it occupies, situate itself socio-politically and creatively employ innumerable tools in order to express itself.

Bibliography:
Pilkington, Mark and Phil Baker. "City Brain." Fortean Times, 2002.
Rohrer, Finlo. "The Slow Death of Purposeless Walking." In BBC News Magazine, 2014.
Sinclair, Iain. "My Perfect Day: Iain Sinclair." Walk: Magazine of the Ramblers, 2012, 98.

GWMs, Dead Psychogeographers and Funerary Enclaves

Image of map taken by Mark Barker.

I was down in London this week doing a talk at the Cass Business School (City of London University) in EC1. This was an area I knew really well in the 1980s as it was my 'patch' because I was a sales rep. I knew every path and alley of EC1 since I walked every one of them, marking them off on my map as I traipsed. Clearly I was already a psychogeographer-in-waiting.

I do remember Bunhill Fields cemetery from that time, although I don't remember exploring it. It sits within a busy, 'businessy' part of London just North of the square mile. It is one of those surprise little 'hidden' places that seem to have somehow survived the inexorable urban encroachment taking place around it.

These signs (above) show you the positions of the graves of the famous people buried there. While the graveyard is full of GWMs (Great White Men) what was a pleasant surprise was the discovery of two dead 'psychogeographers' in the graveyard there: William Blake and Daniel Defoe. So here are the photos of their graves, and also an extract from Merlin Coverley's Psychogeography book which orients them in the 'tradition' retrospectively.

"Defoe inaugurates a tradition of London writing in which the topography of the city is refashioned through the imaginative force of the writer. [...] These 'Cockney Visionaries' are thus able to recognise sites of psychic and chronological resonance and can align these points in order to remap the city. Elsewhere this sense of an eternal landscape underpinning our own has been termed genius or loci or 'sense of place', a kind of historical consciousness that exposes the psychic connectivity of landscapes both urban and rural. In recognition of such resonance, Defoe is followed by William Blake whose poetry celebrates the spiritual city behind our own, the New Jerusalem whose coordinates he identifies within the streets of the eighteenth century city." (Coverley 2006:16)

Part 2 of the blog is here: Neon Tabards, Dead Dissenters and Insect Hotels

The Psychogeography Franchise

The British psychogeographer and writer Iain Sinclair is known for highlighting the problems of psychogeography, at one time calling it "psychotic" geography and describing it as a type of "franchise". (Fortean Times 2002) Historically it has often been considered to be the pursuit of middle-aged men, fortunate enough to have the luxury of time and money, who wander through urban space formulating a commentary on it, as was the case with the flaneur. However, in contemporary times, and perhaps in part because it has become a method and practice for art, there are many more women who partake in it and could perhaps classify themselves as psychogeographers. Probably the most high profile female psychogeographer in recent history is the Situationist Michèle Bernstein.

British psychogeography, in particular, has been criticised for being nostalgic, with Sinclair being cited as one of the main proponents of an approach where "loss and redemption are explored and negotiated". (Bonnett 2009: 54) Alistair Bonnett's recent article 'The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography' explores these notions alongside a consideration that this strand often sits next to a radical activist lineage of psychogeography in Britain.

For the purposes of my own project I mostly use the definition of psychogeography as it is set out by the Situationists. Psychogeography is: “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” (Situationist International 1996: 69) However, I think it is pertinent to note that another form of psychogeography was given the same name by Howard F. Stein. In his book Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (1987) Stein does not see psychogeography as a nebulous or cryptic response to space at all, but something that is ever-present in the individual. Approaching it from a psychoanalytical angle, Stein sees psychogeography as referring to "people's shared psychological representation or 'map' of the natural and social world". (1987: 3) In his edited text with William G. Niederland Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography (1989) it is described thus:

Psychogeography is the study of how issues, experiences, and processes that result from growing up in a male or female body [...] become symbolized and played out in the wider social and natural worlds, which serve as 'screens' for these inner dramas. (1989: xvii)

Psychogeography for Stein and Niederland takes a Freudian look at space, in considering the inner life of the individual and, therefore, their gender. This form of psychogeographic study aims to look at what connects someone to place and how geography makes a person who they are. It is possible that this form of psychogeography pre-dates that of the Situationists, as the introduction to Maps from the Mind states that Niederland developed it in the 1950s when looking at river symbolism. (1989: xxix) Joel Greenberg uses Niederland's definition of psychogeography in his oedipally named essay 'Psychogeography: A Freudian Look at the Search for Mother Earth...or, How I loved My Mother, Hated My Father and Discovered America' (1978) which looks at exploration and cartography. Greenberg looks at "the unconscious libidinal components linked to geographical pursuits", why the ego projects imagery onto the outside world and how geography appears in representative form. (1978: 90) This type of psychogeography is not the direction I take. I include it here to show the 'grey areas' in the different types of psychogeography. Also because the work of Niederland and Stein has authority in its own field in academia, and to not acknowledge it would be to provide an incomplete picture of what psychogeography is considered to be.

Merlin Coverley talks about how psychogeography resists definitions, and while this could be considered its downfall, it could also be part of its enduring nature: it can be picked up like a flexible tool and re-shaped to suit the individual practitioner. The downside of it is that practically anyone on a causal stroll through town could describe themselves as a psychogeographer, and while this is not really a problem for many individuals involved in this field, it is another criticism levelled at it. In order for psychogeography not to be an elitist pursuit, I prefer to be generous in the use of the term. However, one urban walk does not a psychogeographer make and I would also attach the premise that the walk needs to have certain qualities for it to be of a psychogeographic nature, for example, it needs to be an intentional act that elicits an aesthetic response of some sort in its critique of that space. Coverley describes it as "cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city's inhabitants" (2006: 12) and I think this would be a good way of describing what many contemporary psychogeographers do, including the Situationists (it is also true of the psychogeography I carry out, on my own and with Leeds Psychogeography Group). It would be at least partly correct to say psychogeographers "seek to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the every day" (Coverley 2006: 13); however, this sentiment is problematic, as it implies that there is a truth underlying postmodern space that can be revealed, and this is not the case; there is no single truth present under the surface, nevertheless, the act itself does allow one to reveal social histories which might otherwise remain hidden.

Not only are there different definitions of psychogeography, some of which have been discussed, but there are alternative names for different forms of psychogeography, and some of the differences are quite subtle. Papadimitriou calls his own type of urban walking "deep topography":

What is deep topography? It's not a programme. It's an acknowledgement of the magnitude of response to landscape. Something that I don't see in most accounts that I read of landscape. I find there's two ways that descriptions of landscape go. One of them puts the person who is experiencing at the centre; and it always seems a little narcissistic to me: 'I respond to this', 'I spotted that'. It's more about them than about the landscape. And the other way it goes, it tends to be greened or touristed, one of the two. So there's either an attempt to place the landscape within the framework of mainstream green philosophy, or else it goes the other way, which is it just becomes touristic: 'The field are really nice in April'. That sort of thing. (Papadimitriou 2009)

The London Perambulator is predominantly about Papadimitriou and his deep topography. There is also a well known form of walking known as mythogeography, subscribed to by a number of artists, writers and academics who are part of a fluid collective. On the Mythogeography website there is a page which differentiates mythogeography from psychogeography. It says:

In the UK the concept of psychogeography was detached from activist meaning and reconfigured as a literary practice in the work of writers like Iain Sinclair and also gathered some occult trappings during this time from Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and others.
Mythogeography describes a way of thinking about and visiting places where multiple meanings have been squeezed into a single and restricted meaning (for example, heritage, tourist or leisure sites tend to be presented as just that, when they may also have been homes, jam factories, battlegrounds, lovers' lanes, farms, cemeteries and madhouses). Mythogeography emphasises the multiple nature of places and suggests multiple ways of celebrating, expressing and weaving those places and their multiple meanings.
Mythogeography is influenced by, and draws on, psychogeography – seeking to reconnect with some of its original political edge as well as with its more recent additions. (Mythogeography 2011)

This definition of mythogeography attempts to return to the more activist form of psychogeography proposed by the Situationists, while at the same time allowing for multiple meanings to reveal themselves through those spaces.

Psychogeophysics analyses the effects of geography and place on the individual. Walking is one of the means for carrying out this semi-scientific-based research. Mostly examining the city from an ecological perspective, it uses measuring and mapping devices when creating 'situations'.

Because of the historic problems attached to the term psychogeography, and in order to differentiate my own style of psychogeography from the many other existing forms, I have formulated my own term: schizocartography.

I have developed schizocartography from Félix Guattari's terms “schizoanalysis” and "schizoanalytic cartography". While the term “schizoanalysis” is derived from “schizophrenia” (as discussed in depth in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia collaborative series of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), it does not promote mental illness; rather, “schizo” is used as a way of offering up the possibility of multiple voices, and alternative world-views, amongst other factors. Schizocartography enables alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in space and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. This is my definition of 'schizocartography':

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that both questions dominant power structures while at the same time enabling subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

Bibliography:

Bonnett, Alistair. 'The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography', Theory, Culture and Society, 26, 1 (2009), 45-70.
Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials).
Greenberg, Joel. 'Psychogeography: A Freudian Look at the Search for Mother Earth...or, How I loved My Mother, Hated My Father and Discovered America', Science News, 113, 6 (1978), 90-91.
Mythogeography, 'Not Psychogeography', Mythogeography, (2011), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Sinclair, Iain, 'City Brain: A Meeting With the Pioneer Psychogeographer', Fortean Times, (2002), [accessed 08 July 2011]
Situationist International. 1996. Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City, ed. by Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona).
Stein, Howard F. 1987. Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press).
Stein, Howard F. and William G. Niederland. 1989. 'Editors' Introduction', Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography, ed. by Howard F. Stein and William G. Niederland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press) pp. xvii-xxix.