Anywhere in 'Anywhere': An Unconventional Look at Cecile Oak's New Book

"Please feel free to read Anywhere in any way you want and take away from Anywhere whatever you wish; read it as a novel, as a failed conference report, as travel writing, as a meandering guidebook, as a textbook written by a drunken geographer. Or all of these. I hope that everyone, whether on the ground or in their imaginations, will use this book as a guide to making their own journeys in their own 'South Devon'"

This is how Cecile Oak prepares us with her author's note at the beginning of Anywhere: A mythogeography of South Devon and how to walk it (Triarchy Press 2017). So, rather than present a formal review of her new book, I will be taking her literally and choosing some extracts from 'anywhere' in the book as a way of offering an introduction to the text. I would however like to begin with an introduction to the characters in the book and make a comparison with this particular approach to writing with the film Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov 2002).

This mythogeography of South Devon is explicated through the discussion between Cecile Oak (known as the stranger) and her companion A. J. Salmon (known as the guide). While we are all familiar with Oak's academic lineage and her doctoral thesis, Salmon may not be so familiar to readers. Seemingly, he is both a thief of poetry books and a provider of poetry education - one of these leading him to jail and the other providing him with a distraction while incarcerated in 2009. These characters are comparable to the Narrator and the European in Russian Ark (which also uses this dual narrative technique). In Russian Ark the narrator tells the story, but also has a guide (the European), who acts as a sounding board but also introduces the narrator to Russian works of art, and historical facts and characters, of interest in the film.

Below are some of the urban characters that caught my interest in the book - some living, some inanimate - with images sourced elsewhere. The text is Oak’s...

St Luke’s Church by Derek Harper

“There are a lot of hypnotic objects to be dealt with in Buckfastleigh before we can get out. The brutalist church with a chain running out of a gutter and down the back of the building and through the grilled of a large drain. We decide it isn’t mechanical, but there simply to guide the stream of water into the drain, A thin drizzle is starting to fall, we watch how the water flows from link to link…” (page 300)

Guide Psychogeographique de Paris by Guy Debord

“Frustratingly – or maybe this is why it serves everyone so well! – there is very little documentation on these situationist wanders. And [Andrea] Gibbons has the reason. It’s directly attributable to the failure of the Situationists to defend their Algerian comrade Abdhelhafid Khatib after his psychogeographic survey of Les Halles was cut short by arrest (in the context of the Algerian War this constituted an existential threat to Khatib); instead the Situationists seem to have closed down the whole project.” (page 199)

Snails Overlapping by Tina Richardson

“There are two kinds of patterns in the water. The reflection that transports a here to a there, reproduces itself, but also replaces somewhere else with itself. When that kind of reflection is the main metaphor for comparing and connecting things, it reinforces analogy, homogeneity and conformity…[The] second pattern: diffraction is a kind of dynamism in the matter of the world. It is what the theorist Donna Haraway calls a 'metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world'. This works all the way down, so at a certain level, incredibly small things overlap, interfere, and make a difference all on their own.” (page 79)

Rosy Cross of the Golden Dawn

“On the bricked floor of the parking space are symbols set around a Kabbalah ‘tree of life’…When I put the images up on Facebook later a ‘friend’ comments that the combination of symbols is characteristic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Hmm… Someone else posts that these are symbols of a spirituality of light generated from an “electrical pivotal point”, not the sun, not the centre. Could we be talking about diffraction here? My correspondent guides me to a Plymouth University astronomer called Percy Seymour. When I look him up he seems to have been a fairly conventional academic, studying magnetic fields around planetary objects, until he suddenly ‘flipped’ and began to interpret everything, including human personality, as subject to the magnetic and gravitational fields of the sun and the planets.” (page 160).

'Anywhere', a new book by Phil Smith

Anywhere is the product of much wandering and writing and researching (about 20 years give or take a few months). For this, Phil Smith has drawn on walks and performances with groups like Wrights & Sites and GeoQuest and a longstanding fascination with the layers of terrain in South Devon, UK (which reach out far beyond its boundaries). In 2010 Triarchy Press published his Mythogeography in which he proposed an approach to exploring and performing the multiple layers of place; now, in Anywhere, for the first time, those principles are applied to make a sustained and intensive account of the mythogeography of a specific area. In order to get at its elusive layers and narratives, Phil has approached it through different authorial voices, pseudo-autobiography, fiction and personal immersion and mythologisation; there have been many journeys, sometimes lone, sometimes convivial.

If ‘mythogeography’ means anything – as a method that anyone can use anywhere – then it stands or falls by this book.

            

It can be ordered here through Triarchy Press.

Extracts from Walking Inside Out – Practicing Psychogeography…

This is the fourth of a series of blogs that includes extracts from Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. This section is entitled ‘Practicing Psychogeography/Psychogeographical Practices’ 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’ and ‘Power and Place’. 

Guy Debord wrote The Theory of the Dérive in 1959, setting out instructions on how to drift through the city in such a way where the participants are in tension between a relaxed state of being open to what may arise on the walk, and a conscious awareness in regard to the controlling force of urban décor. Recommending it as a group practice (even specifying the number of participants), suggesting the duration of the walk and discussing the logistics of the area under observation, we can see the genesis of a methodology unfolding in Debord’s text. He tentatively describes psychogeography as a methodology under development at the time of writing his essay and tells the reader how the dérive can be used as a springboard to further the purposes of the Situationists’ wider project, later laid out in Basic Programme of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism (1961).

Formulating a methodology for philosophical (or scientific) inquiry is often necessary for an academic in order to propose potential work and to validate the results of findings. There are a number of situations where this might be required, for instance: when presenting one’s work to a particular body (such as an ethics committee) in order to validate a prospective research proposal. The three essays in this section represent the academic work of three individuals from three different fields: performance, urban planning and cultural studies. The authors have developed a methodology for their walking-based practices and named the methodology in order to distinguish their form of walking from other psychogeographical practices. These essays show the development and evolution of a methodology over time, the fleshing out of a process for a specific project, and the practical aspects of applying a methodology to walking-based research.


Psychogeography and Mythogeography: Currents in Radical Walking
by Phil Smith

The mythogeography project was not planned. It emerged from particular circumstances that still mark it; a transition within artists’ collective Wrights & Sites (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Cathy Turner and myself) from making site-specific performances to making interventions in everyday life. What it then became is more a result of emerging opportunities for dispersal than of any coherent strategy; an interwoven set of terms, theory-tales and praxis-narratives made available as far as resources allow to that assemblage of ambulatory and ‘resistant’ practitioners who escape the more popular and literary summaries of psychogeography (Coverley 2006).

‘Mythogeography’ is a theorization of multiplicity and mobility that hangs on the texture, grit, sweat and emotion of individual journeys. Its promotion of its own ideas stems partly from a painful awareness of how quickly actions can melt into air, and partly from a grudging admiration for those, like postmodern performers Forced Entertainment (Etchells, 1999), who have created a critical-theoretical scaffolding around their own activities (getting their retaliation in first).


Developing Schizocartography: Formulating a Theoretical Methodology for a Walking Practice
by Tina Richardson

My interest in psychogeography began in 2009 on a Masters module that included the work of the Situationist International (SI). At the same time I set up Leeds Psychogeography Group and also decided to develop my own specific form of psychogeography as a critical method of urban walking. This was because I wanted to differentiate the urban walking I did from that of others, and at the same time to add nuance to a seemingly vague term. Also I needed to think through my own type of critical walking as a more formulated methodology that could stand up to critique, to the extent it would be credible as part of a PhD.

By applying Félix Guattari’s theoretical critique to the practice of psychogeography, I formulated the term ‘schizocartography’ from his terms “schizoanalysis” and “schizoanalytic cartography”. In its combining with psychogeography, what schizoanalysis does is enable alternative existential modes for individuals in order to challenge dominant representations and power structures as they appear in urban space. This provides an opportunity for multiple ways of operating in and reading the environment; it critiques the conventional ways of viewing, interpreting and mapping space. In this essay I will detail the theoretical aspect of schizocartography, explaining the comparisons with Guattari’s work and that of the walking practices of the SI, describing the methodology of schizocartography by providing examples.


Route Planning a Sensory Walk: Sniffing Out the Issues
by Victoria Henshaw

Sensory walks have emerged since the late 1960s as one form of psychogeography with a focus upon environmental characteristics, experiences and perceptions gained through one or more of the senses. Their emergence as a research method was as a consequence of the coming together of a range of philosophical and theoretical thought and debate, influenced predominantly by feminist and ecological movements where the investigation and analysis of everyday experiences are argued important and necessary in gaining insights into the physical and social environment…

Despite the increasing use of sensory walks as a research method, little has been written about the practical considerations and decisions to be made by the researcher during their planning and implementation. In order to promote and inform the continued use of sensory walks as a method, further debate and discussions are therefore required. In this chapter, I seek specifically to examine the decisions faced in selecting the environments through which a sensory walk might travel and in doing so, to highlight the implications of research site selection on factors such as the nature of the data collected and participant reflections upon the research design.

Practicing Psychogeography/Psychogeographical Practices

From Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography

This is the fourth section of the above upcoming book. Please click here for the other sections, The Walker and the Landscape, Memory, Historicity, Time and Power and Place.

Debord wrote The Theory of the Dérive in 1959, setting out instructions on how to drift through the city in such a way where the participants are in tension between a relaxed state of being open to what may arise on the walk, and a conscious awareness in regard to the controlling force of urban décor. Recommending it as a group practice (even specifying the number of participants), suggesting the duration of the walk and discussing the logistics of the area under observation, we can see the genesis of a methodology unfolding in Debord’s text. He tentatively describes psychogeography as a methodology under development at the time of writing his essay and tells the reader how the dérive can be used as a springboard to further the purposes of the Situationists’ wider project, later laid out in Basic Programme of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism (1961).

Formulating a methodology for philosophical (or scientific) inquiry is often necessary for an academic in order to propose potential work and to validate the results of findings. There are a number of situations where this might be required, for instance: when presenting one’s work to a particular body (such as an ethics committee) in order to validate a prospective research proposal.

The three essays in this section represent the scholarly work of three individuals from three different fields: performance, urban planning and cultural studies. The authors have developed a methodology for their walking-based practices and named the methodology in order to distinguish their form of walking from other psychogeographical practices. These essays show the development and evolution of a methodology over time, the fleshing out of a process for a specific project, and the practical aspects of applying a methodology to walking-based research.

Contributions are from Phil Smith, Victoria Henshaw and Tina Richardson.

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

On Walking . . . and Women

While I’m a psychogeographer and female, I don’t classify myself as a feminist psychogeographer per se. This doesn’t mean I don’t carry out a feminist psychogeography but rather that I don’t use feminist theory directly in the analysis of my practice or the urban spaces I explore. It is my intention to address this at some point in the future (and I have been thinking about looking at in relation to ‘dress’ and/or ‘safety’). However, in the meantime I would like to draw your attention to Phil Smith’s latest book On Walking...and Stalking Sebald (Triarchy Press 2014) and his chapter ‘Women and Walking’.

Smith opens ‘Women and Walking’ with this quote: “This is the big one around walking – so obvious and banal. And out of it and around it and if we grasp the centrality of it, then everything else can come from it” (p.160). This reminds me of the opening of my undergraduate module on deconstruction where the lecturer said, and I paraphrase: “All binary oppositions ultimately originate from female/male”. Therefore, understanding this dichotomy/dialectic is a fundamental one which helps explain how other work – which is what Smith is also saying about women and walking.

Smith’s chapter is very sympathetic to the woman walker, but not patronising. His experience of walking with hundreds of different people enable him to consider how space, and the culture and powers that influence it, operate on individuals. He quotes Dee Heddon and Cathy Turner’s essay ‘Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility’ where they discuss the absence of the female psychogeographer in postmodern urban space. He challenges this by citing a number of contemporary women psychogeographers, including myself and Morag Rose. However, he acknowledges that urban space has historically been the domain of the male, even though a shift is now occurring towards a feminist psychogeography.

Smith concludes: “Walking needs to put its own house in order, identifying those gross prejudices that it has inherited from its romantic traditions [and] until women are free to walk wherever they choose and without fear, any so-called ‘high enjoyment of going on a journey’ [Robert Cortes Holliday] will continue to be a reactionary illusion, a fluid prison in which some are more stuck than others” (p.164).

More of Phil Smith’s work: Mythogeography

Links to the work of female/feminist psychogeographers:
Morag Rose
Dee Heddon and Cathy Turner
Alex Bridger
Tina Richardson

The Great Walk – A Film, a Mystery, a Cult…

The Great Walk (2013) Directed by Clive Austin.

I watched this film the other day, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in walking, psychogeography, or those who just like a good old mystery.

This is what the director, Clive Austin, says about the film:

Anton Vagus is a legend, of this we are not in doubt. A product of the sixties walking revival he has inspired a generation to take to their feet in search of the world and of themselves. This is the story of nine of them. Unconventional walkers who, through circumstance and design, became his walking companions. From their discovery of a hidden city beneath Venice to the tragic incident at Berry Head that finally tore them apart, The Great Walk treads a curious path exploring the world that they crafted out of their remarkable experiences. As the layers peel steadily away the mystery that lies at the heart of the group is bought closer into the light, until it becomes clear that, as the last person to see him alive, it is Anton Vagus to whom we must look for our answers. The only question is, how does one find one of the most elusive people on the planet?

This is not just a psychogeographical film, it’s also about group dynamics, the dangers of cliff edges, flirting on aeroplanes, and Don’t Look Now-esque appearances and disappearances. Here are some extracts from the online reviews:

“I never knew walking could be so exciting. I’m setting up a Ramblers splinter group right away!” Alfred in Affpuddle, Dorchester

“I’m sure I saw Anton Vagus in the chip shop with Elvis the other day.” Charlie from Crapstone, nr. Plymouth

“I’m joining a walking group tomorrow if it means I can get off with handsome men on planes.” Melanie in Melbury Bubb, Yeovil

The Great Walk on IMBD
The Great Walk on Facebook