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 21st 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 20th
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.
[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.
