!! more to be done on this to incorporate notes and large infographic I started to develop in a sketchbook for this module. Currently based on work for OCA Landscape Photography
Psychogeography is essentially the broad terrain where geography – in terms of the design and layout of a place – influences the experience, i.e. the psyche and behaviour, of the user. It has walking as a central component (Alexander 2013 p74)
Guy Debord (1931–94) leader of The Situationist International defined psychogeography as follows:
“Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.”
(http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html quoted Alexander 2013 p74)
Psychogeography in literature has a long history. London, as imagined by writers including William Blake (1757–1827), Daniel Defoe (1659–1731), Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), have all been identified as a place where early traces of psychogeography can be found.
It has also veered between being:
- a mode of artistic expression
- associated with Marxist ideology and political and social change.
Two inter-linked terms that are key to understanding psychogeography:
- The dérive is a key method of psychogeographical enquiry. The literal translation from the French is ‘drift’ and a dérive is a spontaneous, unplanned walk through a city, guided by the individual’s responses to the geography, architecture and ambience of its quarters.The dérive can be seen as one strategy to help bridge the gap between the actual, physical observations of the stroller and their subconscious. Similar techniques have been used in geography, sociology and anthropology as a means of research that opens up possibilities and new questions based on direct observation.
- The flâneur (a term that originates from Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin) is essentially the protagonist of the dérive, but more generally the ‘gentleman stroller’ (as Baudelaire put it) who enjoys the aesthetic pleasures of the sights and sounds he experiences. The emphasis here is more on the aesthetic interpretation of the observer and emotional responses to the views and events that unfold. The flâneur has been identified in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (1840) and in the shady figure lurking in the corner of Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Listen to Philip Pullman discussing Manet’s painting in depth.
- Brassai (1899-1984) flaneur
- Robert Adams
- Mark Power
- Moriyama
However, alternative arbitrary methodologies have also been employed, championed initially by the Situationist movement as a necessary means – as they would see it – to subvert capitalist ideas about correctly engaging and functioning within the city. Other strategies included:
- the production of alternative maps, such as Debord’s The Naked City (1957), which attempted to facilitate users to experience the city according to their emotional state and responses.
- Robert MacFarlane’s simple alternative strategy of tracing a circle around the rim of a glass on a map and walking it, you can leave yourself open to new subject matter and unthought-of creative possibilities (see MacFarlane in Coverley, 2010, p.9).
The genre of street photography is often taken (and often mistaken) as evidence of psychogeography today. But although psychogeographical enquiry has traditionally been associated with the city, in more recent years it has expanded beyond its traditional boundaries, and is nowadays less associated with left-wing politics, having returned to a literary position.
- Iain Sinclair: fictional and non-fictional literary responses. In the book (and accompanying film) London Orbital (2002), Sinclair chronicles his epic walk along the M25 which encircles the capital, taking him to golf courses, retail and business parks, and other generic spaces.
- Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (2011), celebrates subjects as diverse as shipping containers, landfill sites and wooden pallets.
- Some have identified the urban sport of parkour (or ‘freerunning’) and even the Occupy movement with psychogeography.
‘Edgelands’
Initial reactions to ‘Wire’ and ‘Power’ – I found the descriptions evocative and also reminiscent of forbidden forays of my own early teenage life with my best friend or my dog into old bombed sites and semi-urban lanes on the outskirts of Manchester – with their potential threats of meeting with men in wait for teenage girls, gang knife fights between rival football teams and the odd murder.
Many of the descriptions also resonate with areas along my daily walk in Cambridge that I have chosen for ‘Transitions’. And the book is definitely one source of inspiration to which I shall return many times as I progress with that project.
But I agree with Marion Shoard:
This book could perhaps have had more investigative rigour. The edgelands now need something beyond a merely subjective celebration of their identity. Far more than our towns and countryside, they are being subjected to ceaseless change. Wild space is being prettified at the expense of its character and creatures. Industrial ruins are being cleared away.
We could be in the process of losing this landscape just as we are discovering its charms. Should we be trying to conserve it, as we conserve the best of rural environments? Or would any attempt to regulate this space destroy the wildness that makes it special?
It is time for us to consider what relationship we want to see in the long term between our activity in the edgelands, their epic infrastructure, their unique wildlife and industrial archaeology and their peculiar place in our imagination.