My interview with
Fenella Brandenburg coincides with her move from academia into the world of a
full-time writer-author. Here we talk conference storm-outs, academic
superegos, psychogeography and passion projects. I hope you enjoy our dialogue:
as C. S. Lewis said ‘Fenella is on the move’!
I find Dr. Brandenburg sitting - not coincidentally, I’m
sure – in the Islington café she insisted we meet in, called ‘Tina, We Salute
You’ (her little psychogeographic joke). When she told me we were meeting here,
I honestly thought she was making up the name. I’ve included the photo above to prove
its existence.
Dr. Brandenburg, who was promoted to Reader just before her
retirement from academia (it turns out this was her way of saying ‘f**k you’ to
Higher Education), looks very unlike the person I saw last at the 2017 4WCOP
Psychogeography Conference. It transpires she was wearing a white bobbed wig and
was dressing like a ‘bag lady’ in order to maintain her disguise. It seems there is now
no reason to keep up the pretence. I note that she actually has somewhat Titian
hair (not unlike my own) and is a zappy dresser: not a fleece or ankle sock in
sight!
Brandenburg, who recently moved from somewhere in the North
of England (she seems reluctant to say where, for some unknown reason –
although the academic rumour mill says it is related to reports of stalking
made by another academic) to Islington to, as she says “Be with my peoples”.
The pressing questions are ‘why her move from academia?’ and ‘what was the
fallout of 4WCOP?’. Here is the transcript of our interview in full and
unedited:
TINA: Thank you for meeting me, Fenella. I love the choice
of venue. How have things been since you left academia a month ago and how did
the university feel about being snubbed when you resigned the day of receiving
your readership?
FENELLA: Well, it had been a long time coming, the
Readership, and I had been overlooked on a number of occasions. I actually only
hung on in HE for that long so that I could resign when I finally received it.
You know the adage ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’, well the ‘cold’ was
about 5 years of torture, but was well worth it. The adage turns out to be
true, but for all the reasons that are the opposite of what is implied by the
adage, if one wants to get semantic about it. That, and also I heard rumours
that that Bollinger bloke was moving to my university, and I just wasn’t up to
having to deal with his ‘advances’ any more.
T: I’d like to talk about David Bollinger later, if that’s
alright with you, but for the moment, what have you been doing, since you left?
F: Well, I very speedily set up a local writing group. I
plan to take the same approach that the postmodern university does to how it
‘tasks’ its own academics. This is oriented around what HE calls the Work Load
Model (WLM), however I will be calling my model of work allocation applied to
the members of my fiction writing group the WLF, The Work Load Fiction. I think
this will work out well for all concerned and it allows me to take a firm hold
on what is happening and provide a hypodermic approach to the management of the
group (for those of you not familiar with the term it comes from communications
theory, it means top down and coming from above). People love being
micromanaged, despite their protestations to the contrary.
T: So what do you see as being wrong with academic workload
being managed by those who are clearly qualified enough to be managers?
F: The WLM epitomises the postmodern university par excellence. It is the moment where
the university’s bureaucratic superego reaches its full potential in the daily
control of its academics. For Freud, the superego represents all authority
figures (initially the Father), but eventually the part of the individual that
negotiates with the id (the basic instincts), producing the ego, the aspect of
the individual that is presented to the world. On the level of power, say a
Foucauldian model of power, if you will, this is tantamount to a kind of
self-surveillance. I am absolutely behind the WLM and have no problem in
bringing it into the creative sphere, in this case fiction writing. Creative
people can get completely out of control, there is no absolute structure for
them to adhere to, and they must be constrained at all costs.
T: Thank you, Fenella. I’m not sure everyone would agree
with you there, but I appreciate your candour. Can I ask you: Why the move to
creative writing?
F: Well, I’d met my 5 year plan: to leave at the point of my
Readership. Let me just say, plans are incredibly important: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 year
plans are not fiction at all, whatever academics say. They help keep you on track
and ensure you meet targets, which are not at all unreasonable despite what you
may read in regard to those adversaries of HE research-related policy. In
regard to my move: I’m a well-published academic (as you know, your own
publishing company has published some of my work on 'presupposed actualization'). I’m already an author. Really,
how hard can it be?
T: Can we talk about psychogeography? What are you currently
working on in that field and do you still consider yourself a psychogeographer?
F: Well, I am currently working on a project on abandoned
shopping centres in the US. Partially inspired by your research on the Trafford
Centre. I am also looking at a rural space, the Black Forest national park in
Baden-Wűrrttemberg. As you know, I was born near there and I inherited my family cabin in the area. I am however, somewhat offended by your second question:
that I may no longer consider myself a psychogeographer. I appreciate the
damage done by the paper Bollinger and I delivered at 4WCOP 2017, but I feel we
more than made up for that in our paper based on Ballard’s Concrete Island in 2019.
T: Talking about David Bollinger: can I ask you some
questions about some of the gossip about where you and he were located. During
2016-2020 rumours abounded about where you were both working. I heard that
Bollinger had an office in the Psychology Department at Huddersfield at one
time. But managers in that school denied that he even existed, despite him clearly
having a desk and a label on the door. One of the academics - a friend of mine, Dr. Alex Bridger - said he knew Bollinger was there as he saw his coat over the
back of the chair. That, and he actually shared an office with him. I also
heard that you had a temporary office in the old Maltings building, that once
was the Geography Department at the University of Leeds, but has now been demolished. You also, purportedly, had an office in the School of Design at one point. But then, I also
heard that you were popping up in online Zoom meetings at MMU in the early days of Covid.
F: I cannot vouch for Bollinger. You could ask Charlotte
Tilbury, his wife. She’s a counsellor and also writes for The Guardian, I believe (good luck with her psychoanalysing that
miscreant, is all I can say!). However, I can confirm that I did work at Leeds
during the period you mention, and I will supply proof of that, which you can
include on your blog. [included above]
T: Thank you for your clarification of the rumours, Fenella.
Can I just ask one more question before we end the interview, for our
psychogeographic audience? Where do you see psychogeography going?
F: Well, as you know, you very arrogantly labelled the current phase of
psychogeography as ‘The New Psychogeography’ in your own book Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British
Psychogeography. I have to say, however reluctantly, that I am more on the same
page as Bollinger with this: psychogeography is reaching its zenith inasmuch as
it is now all about its own undoing and negation. This is best summed up by an
urban-walking colleague of mine, who will remain nameless, who said, when I
asked him the question ‘Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?: ‘I’ve no
idea why the psychogeographer crossed the road, but I bet when they got there
they found Iain Sinclair had already written about it’!
T: Thank you so much for your time, Fenella.
