Focus On: Psychogeography

[haptalaon]

(Image: A Year In The Country)

What is It?
Geography is the study of the land, psychology the study of the mind. Psychogeography explores our experience of the land: what we can see, wreathed about with its history, its politics, the experiences it brings to mind. Our life is a unique map across the territory - when one passes down a street and remembers being kissed there, this is a psychogeography.

Psychogeography is often political: it is impossible to exist in a space without people policing how you are supposed to behave there, who owned it, who has been displaced from it, what laws enclose it, and so forth. Although it draws from history, it is rarely a nostalgic genre: the social changes impacting the land right now, the way spaces are contested, are essential to it. For example, the Situationists who originated the term saw it as a way of resisting capitalism: idling around the city without aim was a challenge to the demand to be productive; modern writers often discuss colonialism or gentrification.

• The Conversation: Psychogeography: A Way to Delve into the Soul of the City
• Wikipedia: The Flaneur
• Wikipedia: Psychogeography
• Wikipedia: Derive
• The Double Negative: An Introduction to Psychogeography
• Tate: Psychogeography
• Mapping Weird Stuff: Psychogeography
• Aeon: Psychogeography: where Writers Should Now Fear To Tread <- I find this one's ambivalence very relatable

Why is it important to Fencraft?

Inexplicably, I did not rediscover the term psychogeography until like...three years into my practice. This is bizzare, because no other genre better evokes the Landweird. Everything that has happened has somehow imprinted upon a place: not literally, as in a Roman wall, but emotionally or psychologically. We can traverse the landscape in a way unbound by maps - for example, visiting all the London graveyards, or travelling on the first and final Tube of the day. Place as memory, place as emotional state.

Psychogeography informs our Walking practice: the call to ramble without aim. It describes spaces as palimpsests, layers laid over one another, echoing through time and indelibly marked upon the land and upon the people who live there. It depicts the land as an intensity of meaning, dense prose and memory as if the whole city was vibrating under the weight of it.

For Pagans generally, the politics of psychogeography give us ideas for activism around the environment, resisting gentrification, capitalism, and so forth.

What should I Read?

Psychogeography is a pretentious-ass genre. Nothing that's important about the land can be spoken, only felt. I have taken very strongly against Iain Sinclair, the iconic psychogeographical writer of London: I do not recognise the city he walks in, and am put off by the density of his prose. It can also become too self-aware - a book in which one reflects simultaneously on Thatcher, the Corn Laws, and the revelations of John Crow sparked by seeing a traffic light, like edgy travel writing. There are popular themes they all return to - like Hawksmoor churches, or the lost rivers - which seem to me to block off authentic responses to the environment. Instead, we're performing other people's routes and ways of seeing.

Seek works evoking parts of the past which hold interest for you, and landscapes near where you are. More important is to be inspired by the concept of the derive, of the idea of travelling through spaces in unusual ways or ways they were not designed to be explored.

• As a practice: Getting Started with Psychogeography
• More ideas: Mookychic
• There's an app for this: Derive
• Book Blog: The Psychogeographic Review
• Films: Where to begin with British psychogeographic film

Any specific recommendations?

This section is a WIP list of things in this genre I have enjoyed - it will be updated as and when I find things worth sharing.

• Diamond Geezer - My favourite London writer; and a genius for finding challenges to get him to new parts of the city
• Let England Shake - PJ Harvey
• Arcadia (2018)