The Urban Wanderer course returns to the Mary Ward Centre after Easter 2023.
The content of the course will be much the same as previous versions. The first five weeks will be focused on the formative texts and authors of ‘psychogeography’ (Poe, Baudelaire, Debord, Sinclair, etc.). The remainder of the course explores the numerous other directions we can take the idea of literary walks.
This will also be the final opportunity to take the course in the dérive-friendly surroundings of Queen Square in Bloomsbury, as the Mary Ward Centre will be moving to Stratford later in the year. A look around this website will give you a sense of the style of the course.
Course details:
Thursday evenings, 6:30-8:30 pm 27 April to 29 June 2023 (no session on 1 June) 42 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AQ Enrol at marywardcentre.ac.uk
I’m very pleased to say that the course “The Urban Wanderer” will be revived next month.
It was originally run as a six-week course at the Mary Ward Centre in London, beginning in February 2020, but it was abruptly terminated after two or three weeks with the first Lockdown.
This website served to host some material from the course, and to allow the enrolled students to share some stories and information.
Since then, as classes moved to Zoom, I’ve become quite at home with online teaching. It cannot compete with the social element of meeting in person, but I’m proud to say that students have frequently remarked on the convivial atmosphere that my courses have: they transcend the distance of the webcam.
The new course is much expanded: it’s twice as long, in fact: twelve weeks instead of six, allowing us more time to spend on some crucial early texts, and more scope to examine the field as it stands in 2021. As such, it’s equally suitable for students who enrolled on the course last year and for newcomers.
Friday mornings, 10.30 – 12.30, from 30 April to 16 July 2021. Classes conducted on Zoom, so you can join, in theory, from anywhere in the world.
This is a response I wrote a few years ago to Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice. I think it fits well with the subject matter on this page, so I am reproducing it here.
January 2009:
Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice: Munich – Paris, 23 November – 14 December 1974
Translated by Marje Herzog and Alan Greenberg, Free Association, 2008
Suffolk, December 2009
Pale brandy on my left thigh, which hurts from my groin down with every step. Why is walking so full of woe? I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me. Bockighofen – Sontheim – Volkertsheim.
(27 November)
In November 1974, upon learning that the film writer Lotte Eisner was seriously ill, Werner Herzog set out to walk from his home in Munich to Eisner’s in Paris, with the conviction that she would stay alive if he travelled on foot. Of Walking in Ice is Herzog’s published diary of the journey which has the same sense of grand folly he has often committed to film. In Fitzcarraldo (1982) a paddle steamer is dragged over a great peak between two strands of a river. The remarkable triumph of this famous endeavour, which led Herzog to describe himself as ‘Conquistador of the Useless’, inspires a sense of wonder at this magnificent, pointless achievement. During the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog felt alone: isolated by his cast’s and crew’s lack of faith in the project. The solitary expedition of his walk to Paris exhibits a similar self-inflicted exclusion from society. His descriptions of his isolation and physical pain are at times comical in the light of the wilfulness of his seemingly unnecessary walk.
It is a great walking book, possessing a kind of sublime whimsy which stands at odds with the artful strolling of psychogeographers. In its initial, French form, defined by Guy Debord in the 1950s, psychogeography was the term used for a random navigation of a city, deliberately dismissing the prescribed routes to create new and mysterious correspondences between locations. Iain Sinclair is credited with redefining psychogeography in Britain, imbuing the term with a mystical sense of the history of the land uncovered by walking. Herzog’s walk contains neither of these aspects. The closest he comes to the British form of psychogeography is when he visits the house where Joan of Arc was born, at Domrémy: ‘There is her signature, before which I stand a long time. She signed it “Jehanne,” but most likely her hand was guided’ (7 December). Meanwhile, French psychogeography is vaguely discernable in his accidental deviations: ‘I’ve probably made several wrong decisions in a row concerning my route and, in hindsight, this has led me to the right course. What’s really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don’t have the nerve to turn back, since I’d rather correct myself with another wrong decision’ (2 December). Primarily, however, Herzog offers us a bald account of his various pains and his loneliness on a journey with a serious and defined destination. His book drifts with the artlessness of a diary not intended for publication, its observations plain, sparkling with direct clarity: ‘Because of the frost, the earthworms unable to cross the asphalt road have burst’ (8 December).
The weather is consistently bad. Upon waking in a display mobile home that he had broken into for rest and shelter,
I immediately pulled the covers of my display bed over my ears when I saw how hard it was raining outside. Please, not this again! Can the sun be losing every consecutive battle? […] then it really began to rain, Total Rain, a lasting-forever winter rain that demoralized me even more because of its coldness, so unfriendly and all-penetrating. (7 December)
Yet the danger threatened by the sun’s lost battles is not principally a soaking. When he finally arrives in Paris, he is indulged: ‘she knew that I was someone on foot and therefore unprotected’ (14 December). He was indeed unprotected from the terrible weather, but more tellingly, in being unshielded by the metal and glass body of a car, train or aeroplane – mechanical exoskeletons which sustain a private world in the midst of unfamiliar and inhospitable territory – he was unprotected from psychological affects of lengthy and solitary travel.
‘Utter loneliness, a brook and its dell are my companions’ he writes (8 December) before following the halting flight of a heron for many miles. The next day, a stray dog follows him, again for many miles. These days of loneliness, pain and communion with animals transform him. On the first day of the walk, his powers are godlike: ‘Our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it. […] When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes’ (23 November). After eighteen days of walking, however, his identification with the numinous animals has been shaken: ‘When I have to get up now, a mammoth will arise’ (11 December). No longer moving as a mighty buffalo, Herzog is sat on by a mammoth. He loses both his humanity and his animal power, describing himself as, ‘disfigured’ (10 December), or ‘the Gloomy One’ (11 December), to the point where his face ‘wasn’t altogether known to me anymore’ (11 December). Alongside this loss of identity is a paranoia that even a rare spell of good weather cannot expel:
For the first time some sunshine again, and I thought to myself, “This will do you good,” but now my shadow was lurking beside me […]. At noon, my shadow cowered there creepingly, down around my legs, causing me in truth such anxiety. (1 December)
Although his confidence and humanity are shaken, Herzog remains tied to the essential truth and necessity of his expedition. He complains repeatedly of the appalling weather, the pain in his groin and thigh, and while he occasionally accepts brief lifts from passing cars or tractors, he always stubbornly returns to the walk. This persistence in the face of his self-inflicted misery is not admirable in itself, and his diary is certainly not filled with the kind of wondrous revelations that would advocate a similar trek to others, as you might hope to find in recent nature writing. Yet there is a value simply in doing a thing that few others would think to do: he gains an experience which is rare in the machine age.
His encounters with other people are, for the most part, perfunctory and reticent: someone who offers a lift, café waitresses, security guards. Otherwise there are only exchanged glances, less meaningful than those he exchanges with animals. 2 December must have been a good day, though, for he concludes with a positive qualification of his solitude: ‘Is the Loneliness good? Yes, it is’ (2 December). It is the same day where, earlier, he encountered an elderly woman who tells him about her children,
one by one, when they were born, when they died. When she becomes aware that I want to go on, she talks three times as fast, shortening destinies, skipping on the deaths of three children although adding them later on, unwilling to let even one fate slip away […]. After the demise of an entire generation of offspring, she would speak no more about herself except to say that she gathers wood, every day; I should have stayed longer (2 December).
He had hitherto passed and spoken with several other people without much comment, yet only here he feels he should have tarried. It is the same desire to stop and speak, or simply to stop and be together, in the face of death that stimulated the walk. Perhaps it was this encounter that encouraged his conviviality during his short stay in the house of ‘two aged women’ and two young girls, later that same day. There is unexpected tenderness in the brief exchange with one of the girls:
soon she grew trustful and made me tell her about the jungle, about snakes and elephants. She would probe me with trick questions to see whether or not I was telling the truth. […] I hand her my knife for the night, just in case I turn out to be a robber after all. (2 December)
This life-affirming day, when even loneliness is good, holds the elusive key to understanding the motivation behind Herzog’s grand foolishness. His method is vindicated as his respectful conversations delicately reveal life’s joy and misery.
In this course, I wanted to cover the most influential of the ‘canonical’ texts of writing about urban walking, but I also wanted to make time for some less obvious candidates. Esther Kinsky’s River (published in German as Am Fluß in 2014) is a novel that resists categorisation as ‘psychogeography’: it’s not about walking as such, but the narrative it describes is almost wholly experienced on foot, in cities, by rivers. It is narrated by an unnamed woman who is drawn repeatedly to riverbanks, ruminating on their symbolism and the memories they bring to the surface.
Kinsky also has new book, just published in English translation: Grove.
The main narrative of River begins with the narrator in a metaphorical self-imposed exile in north-east London in the early 2000s. She has laid her life aside, without saying goodbye, and not knowing where to go next. In her solitary walks from the green slope of Springfield Park to the River Lea, she rediscovered ‘bits and pieces of my childhood, found snippets cut from other landscapes and group photographs, unexpectedly come here to roost’ (22). This sense of rupture with her past, and subsequent exile, mark the beginning of a transitional process leading to a new phase of life.
Railway edgelands by the River Lea, looking out to Docklands, May 2009 (Ben Pestell).
The epigraph for the German edition is from Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk: ‘The ultimate condition of everything is river’. This has been removed from the English edition, substituted by a line from Charles Olson. The erasure of an explicit link to Sinclair is telling. It is also there in the blurb by Claire-Louise Bennet (who is also published by Fitzcarraldo Editions), who writes, “we are closer to the realm of Bakhtin’s carnival than we are to the well-trod paths of psychogeography” (River, 3). There is a strong sense that the publisher seeks to avoid River’s being seen as a coat-tail-riding late-addition to an overwhelmingly crowded literary field. It is a decision that chimes with Kinsky’s professed lack of interest in writing psychogeography (she briefly discusses this in an interview in the “Unsound Methods” podcast, from 17’40”).
It is surely correct that we should be able to think and write about walking the city without always being drawn to the dread word ‘psychogeography’. The new epigraph for the English edition of River (translated by Iain Galbraith) is ‘Your eye, the wanderer, sees more’, from Charles Olson’s poem ‘A Discrete Gloss’. This calls to mind a parallel tradition in the comparison with Woolf’s gliding, ‘enormous eye’ of ‘Street Haunting’.
Similarly, Claire-Louise Bennet’s allusion to the carnivalesque is a suggestive one, with River’s cast of dispossessed characters who occupy social and mercantile ecosystems seemingly disconnected from mainstream economics, and, no less, a King who is not a King. The novel also figuratively dissolves boundaries through the liminal states described along the narrator’s walks: a city’s edgelands, the end of industry, sedentary travellers, gold that is never gold, and teeth that often are.
The setting of the novel changes from chapter to chapter. It’s not obvious at first, but I eventually realised that the chapters are grouped in repeating sequences of four, thus:
Chapters set around Clapton, Stamford Hill, and Stoke Newington, seemingly in the early years of the twenty-first century
Chapters describing a walk along the River Lea from Clapton to Canning Town at the Thames, in the same time-period
Chapters set by other international rivers (Rhine, Thames, St Lawrence, Nahal Ha Yarkon, Oder, Neretva, Tisza, Hooghly), in different times between the 1970s and 1990s, I think
Chapters set during an earlier stay in London, in the 1980s, I think.
This pattern repeats eight times until chapter 32, after which, the final five chapters are set in London (but still changing time-period). Naturally, you could be forgiven for not spotting this pattern, but once you have, I think it helps to lock in with the rhythm of the novel.
Similarly, the reader is left to infer the dates by noticing minor details, like an Internet café, or picking up on the facts of recent history, like Hackney Wick before the Olympic development, the regular threat of IRA bombs in the 1970s or 1980s, or the presence of refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Old Ford Lock, May 2009, with the Olympic development dimly visible in the over-exposed skyline (Ben Pestell)
The walks of the novel become a way of thinking through post-war trauma, mingling the narrator’s childhood in Germany in the years after the Second World War, with the IRA campaign in London, and the Yugoslav wars, among others. But this all resides in the background of the narrator’s daily travels through cities, by rivers, in the edgelands of London, and among local economies, such as street markets, Sam Stoller’s Kosher Egg Stores on Stamford Hill, and the independent local shops that I identified from my own memory around Cazenove Road, N16.
Egg Stores, Stamford Hill, June 2008 (Google Street View)
Naturally, I was looking forward to discussing this in class. In the absence of that, please do read the PDF of chapter 1 (link at the top of this page), and forgive the indulgence of my reproducing an excerpt (below) from a forthcoming academic article I wrote about River and mythic readings of walking literature.
In the chapter titled “Folklore,” the narrator describes the shops serving observant Jews, the new Eastern European shop, the mysterious “King” in Springfield Park at twilight, and a dance—witnessed from the pavement—inside the new shop. The dance is one of the more mysterious episodes in Am Fluß. The Croat shopkeeper and the Kurdish taxi drivers stand on the pavement watching the Eastern European shop girls dancing inside the closed shop. ‘They . . . danced as if for dear life to music that was inaudible outside’ (194). It is an entrancing spectacle to the spectators, but any sense of objectification by the almost exclusively male audience is ignored in favour of the narrator’s own focus on the dancers’ careful, uniform choreography and easy-going intimacy. They apparently comprise a hermetic unit, dancing to their intended audience of Black Sea resort posters—images of the homeland: the household gods. The chapter summarizes the diversity of folk or religious traditions of the area, and, significantly, the narrator never reports on the gentrified region of Stoke Newington Church Street, a mere two-minute’s walk from the area she describes. She completely ignores the dominant, wealthy milieu in favour of the diverse multiplicity. Ignoring the major financial and political power of the region consequently diminishes its power in the novel, as attention is shifted to a network of unofficial relations. The dream-like description of the dancers, moreover, injects a note of magic into the narrative, without going so far as fantasy. The city is shown to be a site where moments of mystery and enchantment emerge spontaneously, and without mediation or approval by established structures of power.
The first and last chapters of River are named ‘King’, after an enigmatic figure who has a rapport with the ravens of Springfield Park. He looks, to the narrator, like a dispossessed African king, and wears a gold-embroidered robe and ‘a magnificent headdress of stiff brocaded cloths, held together by a clasp adorned with feathers’ (15). The dominant associations are with an Egyptian Pharaoh, but the symbolism also evokes Odin (with his ravens), the Fisher King (in his apparent frailty and wavering power), and Brandigeidfran son of Llŷr (legendary British king whose name means Blessed Brân, or Blessed Raven). For the narrator, he is also a gatekeeper, for he marked the transition between the city and ‘a landscape abandoned to all kinds of wildness’ (23). Moreover, he is a liminal figure: he is revivified by the twilight and dawn, when the ravens return to him. Away from this threshold he is powerless, unregal, but he awaits the moment of contact. He is the book’s archetype of liminal god-king: seemingly lost or deposed, perhaps psychologically deeply troubled.
In the final chapter, the narrator witnesses the King experience an anticlimactic apotheosis, which sparks a strong, unarticulated emotion in her. The narrator’s apparent emotion at the conclusion offers hope that the unspoken anxieties or traumas in the novel will finally be given voice. As the book’s structure draws together, the narrator leaves London and the region of her exile. Her walk along the Lea has reached the Thames. River observes the area with a patient eye and a persistent tread which effortlessly transcend the paths of capital to emerge into unknowable edgelands and liminal lives.
‘Mythogeography’ is a relatively new addition to the lexicon of literary walks. It finds its expression in a range of books, videos, and events by Phil Smith, often using the pseudonym ‘Crab Man’. Despite Smith’s position as principal practitioner, he encourages collective walking, which privileges the peripheral observations of the group in favour of following a leader. At the same time, his publications give freedom to the individual mental flights that propel almost all walking literature. Its roots in theatre practice are evident in the way Mythogeography makes walking into a site-specific performance. Mythogeoraphy is also rooted in the Situationist analysis of the society of the spectacle, and the practice of the dérive. But it is not necessarily an urban practice: it is the practice of walking ‘sideways’, as Crab Man puts it, adapted to any location. The mythogeographer can construct situations or perform a mode of walking which is an implicit protest against the paths and speeds demanded by the free movement of capital, and which revivifies place. Of Smith’s numerous books on the subject, this post focuses on just one: Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways (Triarchy Press, 2010).
against psychogeography
The name ‘mythogeography’ invites comparisons with ‘psychogeography’, but while Smith explicitly names Guy Debord as an influence, he distances himself from ‘anglo-psychogeography’, and much writing about walking, which he dismisses as too writerly and insufficiently devoted to the practice of walking. The likes of Rebecca Solnit are ‘too interested in writing’ (Mythogeography, 172). Well, do we want a book or a walk? Smith tries for both.
Equally, in a capsule critique of ‘anglo-psychogeography’, it is clear that literariness is its main crime: ‘the fate of anglo-psychogeography is a caution: not so much because of the depredations of its dalliance with the occult, but rather that its effect has been to attach its dérive to literature’ (129). Iain Sinclair is afforded a few mentions in Mythogeography, at one point called ‘Audi Sinclair’ (157) – a reference to the preposterous promotional-puff-film that Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit made for Audi in 2009. Despite their shared interests, the respective writings of Smith and Sinclair are sufficiently different in temperament that I don’t imagine the authors getting on.
Smith is also responsible for ‘Counter-Tourism‘: an active critique of the heritage industry. This overlaps with Mythogeography as a serious criticism of the commodification of historical sites combined with humorous, playful action. A collection of short videos demonstrates some ‘Tactics for Counter-Tourism’. Some are symbolically potent, others simply daft. Here are a couple of examples:
‘Fire’
‘Visit Museums and Galleries when they are Closed…’
I gave up on the term flâneur a while back. I went for [fugueur] instead, like the mad walkers of the 19th century who took off on enormous journeys across France. There was a plumber from Bordeaux who walked out the door one day and finished up in Moscow. Then some dreadful writers took up with it and within a few months, the middle classes were all on the road pretending to be [fugueurs]. I feel a bit like that now with this whole walking fetish. Now everywhere you go, you find people doing strange conceptual walks, taking photographs of road signs and trying to get arrested in the car park of IKEA. I copyrighted that a long time ago.
(Iain Sinclair, talk on ‘The Last London’, 2017; I’ve corrected what I took to be a mis-transcription of ‘fugueur’)
Whatever the tendency towards silliness, Smith’s works evinces a dedication to living and activating the promise contained in the aesthetic aspects of situationist theory. He is less influenced by Hegel and Marx than Debord was (and more by Gilles Deleuze), but he is still ethically and politically motivated, while exploring on the cusp of materialism and transcendentalism.
is it mythic?
Smith’s work is of particular interest to me for its serious engagement with theories of myth. Mythogeography does contain a detailed explanation of his understanding of myth (following Claude Lévi-Strauss to a certain extent, 131-37), but I found it elusive when it comes to tying it to his mythogeographical practice. I’ll spare you the full extent of my thoughts on how his reading of myth corresponds with my own, but offer this example from ‘The Mythogeographical Manifesto’:
[Mythogeography] is also a geography of the body. It means to carry a second head or an appendix organism, in other words to see the world from multiple viewpoints at any one time, to always walk with one’s own hybrid as a companion (113).
I don’t know if Smith is aware, but in this he echoes Belgian classicist Marcel Detienne on the mind of Classical Athens. Detienne viewed the ancient Greeks as having ‘two heads’: a mythological and a philosophic. ‘Each one rules his territory and the first seems undisturbed by the discourse of the second. Moreover, the philosophic head shows no intention to dominate his mythological neighbour. No tensions, no conflicts’ (Detienne, The Creation of Mythology translated by Margaret Cook, 117). This openness to ‘multiple viewpoints’ in which the rational or ‘philosophic head’ is able to exist harmoniously with mythological perspectives is at least one area where ancient and modern approaches to myth are in agreement.
the book
Image from Mythogeography (181)
Mythogeography is attributed to numerous pseudonymous authors and ‘The Central Committees’, but credited to ‘CrabMan (Phil Smith)’ on the Triarchy Press website. Despite the professed collaborative nature of the book, the authorial voice is too distinctive to maintain the illusion. It is a familiar mixture of reportage, memoir, socio-political observations, and local (secret) histories, but given a unique presentation as a self-contradictory, experimental handbook that defies categorisation and contains its own critique.
The text is complicated by numerous footnotes (which are not at the foot of the page) and endnotes (which are not at the end of the book) which discourage a linear path through the book. Once or twice I found the compulsive addition of references, puns, annotations, and digressions infuriating when I was trying to follow the flow of the text, but it’s another technique of mimicking the walking brain: introducing new thoughts and diversions.
Mythogeography includes a main narrative section, which follows the walk of Crab Man as he re-traces the steps of Charles Hurst who, in 1906, planted scores of acorns along a two-hundred-mile walk from Manchester to Rutland, described in The Book of the English Oak (1911). As he walks, Smith’s situationist-inspired observations are combined with a gentle whimsy, as in this recollection of a previous walk:
In the South D— town of N—- Abbot, an agitated man had approached a ‘drifting’ group who were pausing at, sketching, noting and arguing over a sessile oak set in a grassed bowl of land within a suburban estate. The man was angry, accusing the group of being property developers, come to take away a fiercely defended space of green. But on learning the functionless and vague nature of the group, his anger melts . . . and he explains how this dell, when full of water had been a decoy pond where ducks were lured to their deaths. Later redundant, it became infested by rats and was drained. He invites the group into his garden where he serves tea and cakes, and the drifters admire an eel swimming upstream in the small rivulet at the bottom of his garden. This is part of an elastic journey, for both eel and drifters. In the case of the eel, one that has crossed an ocean; a journey that was once a short swim downstream, but over aeons has stretched as the continents divided, and beginning grew further and further from the end.
Walk like an eel; let your journey be stretched by what moves around you.
(Mythogeography, 45)
Equally, Smith does not neglect the occasional trials of his walk:
And so begins a day of something like nightmare. For; to get off the roads, the Crab elects to walk The Viking Way. Soon he realises why it’s called The Viking Way – because until he came along no one since the Vikings has been stupid enough to walk it. It’s not a bridleway at all; gateless, it’s been churned to mush by cross-country vehicles and dried to rock-hardness by a fortnight of sun. To avoid a broken ankle he must walk with his eyes fixed to the ground. . . . Fixed to the ground he begins to disappear inside himself. (96-7)
He comes to a pub, closed for a private function – ‘This is the cruellest privatisation of public space yet!! And on screaming blisters he limps to S—stern, harassed by a pair of weedy but malevolent hoodies on mountain bikes’ (97). At the next pub, he unwittingly eavesdrops on crude conversations, and encounters difficult dogs. When he leaves the pub,
He is no longer the dispersed and open pilgrim, but steely, closed and angry, sick of harshness, sick of the lack of communality, sick of the assumption that you have no right to the road without a machine, sick of the swathes of property, sick of ‘beware of the dog’. He stops waving to motorists, cuts through the country as sharply as he can, until he’s mellowed by the friendly village of South W–ham.
(98)
This frank depiction of the opposition and isolation experienced on the walk is striking for its expression of the difficulty of achieving a successful dérive, and the possibility of a walk utterly failing to produce an open, ‘dispersed’ self.
Elsewhere, Smith writes of ‘disrupted walking’ as a ‘rolling thought experiment’ (38) which involves the same sorts of imaginative responses to the environment seen in Nick Papadimitriou’s ‘proximity flight’. Like Papadimitriou, Smith takes what could be seen as aggrandised daydreaming as a serious artistic practice. He also helps us understand the situationists’ caution around using ‘chance’ as a tool, preferring ‘instinct’:
Get rid of rational way-finding! At worst use chance (dice or sticks) to determine which way to go, but best is to go by instinct. If it feels equally good or bad whichever way you turn, then you have come to a ‘plaque tournante’ and your life will be radically different depending on which direction you choose (nothing but strength of will can help you make this decision, you are Buridan’s Ass, everything else is equal).
(119)
In one pseudonymous section, the book allows an angry, typo-strewn complaint, which laments this being yet another book by ‘white blokes wit degrees’, which ignores the walking that is done non-philosophically: whether water-carrying, in refugee flight, going to the shops, or going to work (156). Indeed, Smith seems acutely aware of the problems inherent in being seen as another (white, male, educated) leader of a walking practice. This democratic theme is elaborated upon in the section ‘The Significance of Walking’ (198-202):
today a majority of people continue to walk from necessity rather than choice. And those that walk by necessity are those held in contempt and fear for their presence on the highway. This necessity is not always a symptom of poverty but also of prejudice.
In this sense the dérive is an obscenity and a privilege. Philosophical walkers should always walk with extreme sensitivity to the feelings of others. And with an obligation, for they will never be able to walk comfortably until walking is a choice for everyone physically able to make that choice. Nor until those who are not physically able have, wherever possible, access to equivalent mobility.
(200)
Smith aligns these egalitarian hopes with the ecological necessity to abandon private transport. Ten years on, their realisation remains beyond Smith’s (and our collective) political powers. Meanwhile, the dériviste ideal is approachable, for those who are able. Smith builds on the familiar individualist fantastical walks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to emphasise the pleasures of the group:
Mythogeographical walking is a participatory, rather than an immersive or distanced, flow state, in which self and world and time slide within each other . . . . Changes of step and rhythm effect changes of consciousness.
(198)
online mythogeography
Do explore mythogeography.com. Phil Smith’s book reviews (here) will introduce you to tangents that are beyond the scope of my short survey on this website.
The Mythogeography book is usually available from the publisher, Triarchy Press, with an enticing discount. However, the press has put delivery of physical books on hold until further notice (due to the virus), and the e-book contains only the text, and not the images of this sumptuously illustrated book. If you’re keen, it is available from the usual online bookshops. Smith has written several other books on walking, and has an active presence online. A longer film, The Devil’s Footprints, is also on Youtube, in three parts:
Is psychogeography confined to the city centre? Are we practising something different when we walk in the country? We are surely channelling a more Romantic literary / artistic tradition in a rural walk. Where, then, is the line which marks the extent of the city? These liminal areas between city and country have become known as ‘edgelands’. This use of the term is widely attributed to the environmentalist Marion Shoard (a PDF of the chapter ‘Edgelands’ can be downloaded from her website).
Britain’s towns and cities do not usually sit cheek by jowl with its countryside, as we often casually assume. Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different from either. Often vast in area, though hardly noticed, it is characterised by rubbish tips and warehouses, superstores and derelict industrial plant, office parks and gypsy encampments, golf courses, allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy, farmland. All these heterogeneous elements are arranged in an unruly and often apparently chaotic fashion against a background of unkempt wasteland frequently swathed in riotous growths of colourful plants, both native and exotic. This peculiar landscape is only the latest version of an interfacial rim which has always separated settlements from the countryside to a greater or lesser extent. In our own age, however, this zone has expanded vastly in area, complexity and singularity. Huge numbers of people now spend much of their time living, working or moving within or through it. Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man’s land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.
(Marion Shoard, ‘Edgelands’, in Remaking the Landscape, edited by Jennifer Jenkins, (Profile, 2002, p. 117)
Shoard emphasises the essential role that art plays in aestheticising, or, as she puts it ‘kindling an interest in’ edgelands, with an aim to feeding into a coherent planning policy that recognises the attraction of such spaces.
Local councils commonly require far lower standards of design for new buildings in the interface than they do elsewhere: effectively edgelands have become the lowest grade of landscape in UK landscape conservation terms. . . . We do not expect the hypermarkets or the giant factory sheds of the edgelands to blend in with the local vernacular architecture, and where any tree planting is stipulated by councils as landscaping it is usually only the barest minimum.
(Shoard, ‘Edgelands’, p. 120)
In the two decades since Shoard’s interventions, I’ve yet to be made aware of the large-scale transformation of practical / architectural attitudes to the edgelands, but the aesthetic work is certainly being done. She notes a precedent in changed attitudes to the landscape:
Moors and mountains were once considered hideous places. Daniel Defoe reflected the accepted tastes of his day when he described Westmorland, with its Lake District mountains, lakes and fells, as ‘a country eminent for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself ’ [Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain]. Yet in the twentieth century the protection of mountain and moorland became an overriding component of policy and when, in the 1950s, the National Parks Commission came to single out stretches of countryside on which to bestow the highest level of landscape designation – the newly created status of national park – it was to moorland and mountain to which they most frequently turned. This reversal of public taste was spearheaded by writers like William Wordsworth and Emily Brontë. When they were living in a remote part of the Lake District and the Yorkshire moors respectively, mountain and moorland were still thought of as places it would be a misfortune to have to visit let alone inhabit, but their lead helped turn Britain’s moors and mountains into magical landscapes of myth.
(Shoard, ‘Edgelands’, pp. 145-46)
For the edgelands, the most prominent literary contribution is the collaboration by poets Paul Farley and Michael Simmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (Vintage, 2011). Since then, bookshop tables heave with works which blend the psychogeographical with the liminal: journeys into and out of, from city to estuary, beside old paths and new, where nature writing and urban exploration are the same thing.
The author who has dedicated his life to the immersion within the liminal landscape – edgeland explorer avant la lettre – is Nick Papadimitriou. In 2012, Papadimitriou published Scarp, an exploration of the limits of the high ground — the escarpment — above north London. It includes a map with an almost comical failure to show the extent of the area: it has a shaded area showing ‘elevation of over 400 ft’, but that area is sparse and dispersed. After the initial confusion, though, the map serves to highlight the elusiveness of the ridge, and of Papadimitriou’s quest.
Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp, map by Sandra Oakin
The book is as far from revolutionary politics as Machen or Woolf in the 1920s, but rather than the everyday mysticism of Machen, or the well-heeled escapes of Woolf, Papadimitriou is grounded in a troubled youth and the fantastic desire to merge with the landscape. And if Shoard calls for a Wordsworth, or Brontë of the edgelands, Papadimitriou has, in parallel, been becoming the de Quincey of the north-west London escarpment. But instead of de Quincey’s metaphorical urban northwest passage, Papadimitriou is enchanted by a more prosaic scene:
Some years back I became lost when I strayed from the canal close to the A40. After wandering about in a thicket of willows and alders I stumbled across a wasteland of derelict factories. The chipped cement floors and concrete tracks – all that remained after the factory buildings had been demolished – were pierced by fountains of Canadian fleabane and orange-tinged weld. Everywhere, scattered amidst the rampant sycamores there were burnt cars and motor scooters, coils of wiring, its insulation blackened. Masses of Michaelmas daisy showed off their mauve florets, it being late summer, and buddleias dangled over the top of every wall left standing, their purple spikes turning to brown as the hot day phased into a purple night. I have never been able to find the place again.
(Papadimitriou, Scarp, 36-37)
The location that can never be found twice is familiar enough in this writing that it’s almost cliché, but I prefer to see it as a mythologem which is perpetually reactivated in new ways. It is the proof of initiation: we need to know that the author is familiar with the magical and infuriating mysteries of the walk.
Scarp introduces two new ideas into the lexicon of literary walks: ‘deep topography’ and ‘proximity flight’. Deep topography emphasises the total immersion in the environment: on foot, and over long durations of time, combining practical knowledge with the psychogeographer’s sensitivity to the intuitive associations between disparate objects or events. Papadimitriou’s home, we are told, contains – or is – an archive of the area: the detritus most people ignore collected in Kilner jars. His personal effects merge with those taken from skips and deserted houses, such that he supposes, ‘were I to die suddenly and be found months or years later, the officials bearing the responsibility of informing my next of kin would be hard-put to identify me. And this is as it should be: I’m not Nick Papadimitriou; I am Middlesex’ (Scarp, 77).
He elaborates,
I always approach my chosen subject from a position of near total ignorance. Examining an Edwardian suburb, a complex network of manorial boundaries or an industrial corridor on the margins of a market town, I’m faced with and threatened by an awful blankness. I hardly know what it is I’m looking at and in spite of all the effort expended on getting to know and understand the deep topography of my region I never seem to gain the accretion of knowledge that would enable me to declare myself an expert. However often I swan in like some dishevelled, smoke-infested Richard Mabey of the buddleia set, I forget the names of plants and have to relearn them every year. I squint short-sightedly at small brown birds flapping in hedges, my lips gibbering as I attempt to name them. Rivers and parish boundaries slide around in my mind and become a squirled nightmare of shifting lines and borders. Names of historic figures slip down through the sluice gate into the main drainage scheme of my mind. It’s a bastard.
But while knowledge of structure or nomenclature can foreground discreet aspects of a place, it can also occlude. Sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through – a particular moist wind that flaps about the face like a flannel, a singular quality of light remembered but seldom encountered – are screened out all too easily if the primary focus is on the type of cornicing found on a building passed or the names of the building companies that transmuted field parcels into batches of housing back in the 1930s. Which aspect of the experiential field serves as the sine qua non for understanding a place? For me this question has never been adequately answered.
(Scarp, 78-79)
Deep topography is Papadimitriou’s particular method, and, it seems, it is an extremely idiosyncratic and difficult-to-duplicate method, owing to the decades of immersion in the landscape required to become part of it. ‘Proximity flight’ is a creative response to this method, in which the practitioner becomes sensitive to other lives and other times in the location.
A particularly strident line of pylons follows the stream’s course and adds a peculiar intensity to the landscape: this is definitely a place of history and power, one of those Celtic ‘thin places’, where a sense of something other lurks just behind the visible. At one time, a few years back there were nettle-edged ponds, but they seem to have dried out. I love to sit by the track crossing below the high-tension cables and imagine that I’m somewhere in the Ukraine, circa 1952, staring up at these triumphant monuments to the electrification of my region. I’m a veterinary surgeon working on a sovhoz located somewhere unpronounceable deep in the shimmering wheat plains. I see tractors and fat sows; I see Olga, the pig-tailed farm nurse who comes to me at night. In the evening I smoke cheap cigarettes and drink vodka. I will die of cancer in 1972. Proximity flight: that’s what I call this using of environment to trigger mental journeys to another place and time in which the same stimuli can be found. I find it lifts my sense of the environment out of its codified framework and into fresh possibilities of interpretation, my eyes wiped clean by the resultant defamiliarisation or – in keeping with my Soviet theme – ostranenie, a term first used by the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky in 1925.
(Scarp, 43-44)
Proximity flight is expressed in the book in three fantastical ventriloquisms of marginal characters encountered around Scarp. The first is the most surprising, as a new paragraph begins with the narrator’s ‘croak’, and the reader soon realises that we are reading the narrative of Merops, a timeless rook, tied to the land over a millennium. This is followed by the amazing psychedelic-transcendent experience of Gloria Geddes and the sinister story of John Osborne, the labourer-turned-faery-vagrant. These narrative elements are matched by Papadimitriou’s own memoir of his youth, arson, and treatment by the police and justice system, which is compelling to the point that it’s sometimes a shame to go back to the slower ruminations on the landscape.
Before the publication of Scarp, Papadimitriou’s method was the subject of The London Perambulator: a documentary by John Rogers (a distinguished literary walker in his own right). The divisive celebrity status of some (or all) of the talking-heads in the documentary — Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Russell Brand — may sound warning sirens to some readers, but it would be a shame to be put off, and not to let Nick Papadimitriou’s distinctive voice stand on its own.
Some years ago, in a second-hand bookshop, I saw a silver spine with only the words ‘The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering’. The title and the seeming obscurity of the 1970s Village Press paperback was enough to secure my purchase, and I recognised the author, Arthur Machen, from his supernatural tales. I thought I’d chanced upon a forgotten curio in Machen’s oeuvre: the missing link between the flâneur and twentieth-century London. Only later I realised, to my great disappointment, that Machen’s book is recognised as a central text of psychogeography (e.g. by Iain Sinclair in Landor’s Tower, Merlin Coverley in Psychogeography, and several academic articles).
Arthur Machen, The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering (Village Press edition, 1974)
The London Adventure is ostensibly the third volume of Machen’s autobiography, but it fulfils this only insofar as any psychogeographical work incorporates memoir with the imaginative re-creation of the city. Details of London streets evoke memories, dredging with them a plethora of Latin tags supposedly remembered from his school days, and literary allusions. In the tradition of Baudelaire’s ‘Le joueur généreux’ and de Quincey’s Opium Eater, Machen begins his Adventure with an image of the forgotten or overlooked in the city:
There is a certain tavern in the north-western parts of London which is so remote from the tracks of men and so securely hidden that few people have ever suspected its existence. (p. 5)
Instantly we are in a world familiar and unknown: the realm of the uncanny. Incidentally, Machen acknowledged his admiration of de Quincey, but professed (in a letter to American critic VincentStarrett) never to have read Baudelaire, though he knew Poe’s works well (reported in Starrett’s book, Arthur Machen: A novelist of Ecstasy and Sin, 1918). Similarly, Machen claims only an accidental kinship with William Blake:
William Blake, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (‘Copy E‘, printed c. 1821, p. 78)
I do not think that I have ever consciously borrowed from Blake, of whom I know very little, I am sorry to say, but I do remember that he makes the Farthing Pie House—it is now the Green Man, close to the Great Portland Street Station of the Underground—one of the limits of that Syon of his which is, somehow, London. But the unknown world is, in truth, about us everywhere, everywhere near to our feet; the thinnest veil separates us from it, the door in the wall of the next street communicates with it. There are certain parts of Clapton from which it is possible, on sunny days, to see the pleasant hills of Beulah, though topographical experts might possibly assure you that it was only Epping Forest. But men of science are always wrong.
(The London Adventure, 99-100)
Beulah (in the distance), as seen from Clapton, 16 August 2009.
Machen’s mysterious city encompasses scenes ‘absolutely new and unknown, as if the African Magician had suddenly set me down in the midst of Cathay, [so that] I was as true an explorer as Columbus, as he who stood upon a peak in Darien’ (40). Through the exoticising language of his time, Machen’s passing reference to the final line of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ invites the allusion-seeking reader to reverse Keats’s metaphor. Chapman’s translation of Homer gave John Keats access to new worlds (although Keats’s reference is to Cortés, rather than Columbus). Inversely, Machen’s geographical discoveries do the work of myth. No longer hero’s quest nor solemn pilgrimage, the contemporary myth-walk is a ritual dedicated to the reinvigoration of the past—not as nostalgia, but as the ever-present myth-ritual ‘now.’
Machen’s The London Adventure was published in 1924. A year later, the Hogarth Press published Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The two books have very little in common beyond their setting in 1920s London, and the presentation of the thoughts of those who walk its streets. Clarissa Dalloway’s concerns are very different from Machen’s, and yet, we recognise the technique: walking the city, thoughts transcribed on the page interspersed with local detail, and pauses to notice items in windows, reflections, or people. The London of Mrs. Dalloway is Westminster, Bloomsbury, the parks — a world away from Machen’s King’s Cross, Clapton, and Holloway (Machen explicitly contrasts London’s well-known streets with the areas he frequents, p. 49). Consequently, it is profitable to read them together to broaden our picture of London in the 1920s.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), photographed by Gisèle Freund, 1939
In 1927, Woolf published the essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ in The Yale Review. I’ve found no account of conscious influence of Machen’s London Adventure on Woolf’s. As established, the history of walking literature is everywhere we look, and, like the other texts on this course, ‘Street Haunting’ presents an accurate portrayal of the mind on foot.
When [Nature] set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience’ sake a man must be a whole.
Woolf is stylistically more restrained than de Quincey, or Machen, or other authors more inclined to indulge in transcendence or the occult, but she expresses just as clearly the porous boundaries maintained by the walking self around her identity. In a classic definition of psychogeography, Woolf reads the street as a book, and book as street:
The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.
Early in the essay, Woolf offers a metaphor which seems at once as transcendent as Machen, as immersive as Baudelaire, while adding a new perspective. When we go outside and shut the door, Woolf writes,
The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. . . . we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
Woolf’s metaphor evokes the same perception as those other writers, but it is a marked contrast to the taxonomical, obsessive eye of Poe, or the objectifying eye of Aragon or Baudelaire.
Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure is currently available as a rather expensive hardback (similarly expensive are the second-hand copies I saw online), or a moderately priced e-book from the unnameable website which doesn’t pay its taxes or its workers properly.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is readily available everywhere (under normal conditions when the shops are open). ‘Street Haunting’ can be found in numerous collections of her essays, and various places online (including a 1930 facsimile at the British Library website). It was the last handout I gave you before classes were stopped, but I’ve since corrected a few typos and you can download a PDF here.
If you’d like to follow the walks in Mrs. Dalloway, there are several maps and guides online. These are the most comprehensive I’ve found:
Having introduced the key terms of flâneur, psychogeography, and dérive, I’m left with the question of where else we can find these ideas in action. The answer depends, of course, on how strictly we define the terms. Whatever their differences, these terms connote a creative response to the emotional experience of walking in a city.
Taking this loose definition, I’m led to the earliest written human narrative that we have, namely, The Epic of Gilgamesh. (People who know me well will not be surprised that I bring this up.) Gilgamesh is the mythical demi-god king of the city of Uruk in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. He built the city walls, but he is too wild and unruly to be contained by them: much like us in lockdown, he feels constrained by his walls. His response is to abuse his people, claiming conjugal rights to new brides, and such like. The citizens pray for intervention, and the gods deliver Enkidu – a rival and partner for Gilgamesh. This pair do not walk the city, but leave it, on a quest to the Cedar Forest, to kill its guardian Humbaba. Although it is not an urban walk, the encounter between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Humbaba reveals the inner conflict of the ‘heroes’ as civilised animals, symbolising the city-dwelling human’s anxiety over our lost connection with nature. Notwithstanding the significant differences between Bronze Age cities and twenty-first-century cities, the ecological, political, and existential concerns of today’s cultures are anticipated in the expedition from Uruk to the Cedar forest.
Clay Mask of Humbaba (Huwawa), 1800-1600 BC, from Sippar, southern Iraq. Now in the British Museum.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu walk for several days into the forest. It is a mythic quest, much like Gilgamesh’s later quest for immortality, or like the final walk Odysseus must take inland once he has returned home from his long wanderings. The mythical significance of walking is apparent in the songlines of Aboriginal Australians which make physical connections across the continent as they make cultural and spiritual ones in the accompanying stories. Intuitive, emotional, and creative responses to walking our environment are as old as human culture — if there is anything novel in psychogeography, then it is only the urban setting (and perhaps the urge to theorise). As Rebecca Solnit writes, ‘The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures’ (Wanderlust, 3).
David Mowaljarlai, Map of trade routes and storylines linking Aboriginal nations across Australia (1993). [source]Solnit’s book is a terrific history of walking, or really a history of thinking and writing about walking. She takes in many of the writers that I address on this course/site, and many more besides. One way which she describes the connection between writing and walking is in their ability to negotiate contact with someone or something that is absent:
Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there—not saints and gods anymore, but shepherds, hunters, engineers, emigrants, peasants to market, or just commuters. Symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys. (Wanderlust, 72)
This is a passage that evokes the histories, memories, emotions, and occult resonances that suffuse so much psychogeographical writing. The walk — and the subsequent text about the walk — becomes a magical enchantment to disclose an arcane truth.
And so I return to my initial question: where can find these ideas (flâneur, psychogeography, and dérive) in action? My first answer would appear to be everywhere in human culture. So I must take a more strict definition. Even if I narrow the focus to London, we could make a case for Pepys, Defoe, Hazlitt, Blake (especially Blake) as psychogeographical precursors. The Situationists argued that,
London was the first urban result of the industrial revolution and the English literature of the nineteenth century bears witness to an increasing awareness of the problems of the atmosphere and of the qualitatively different possibilities in a large urban area. . . . In fact, Thomas de Quincey’s real life from 1804 to 1812 makes him a precursor of the dérive.
The anonymous author goes on to quote a passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) which has become one of the principal starting points for any discussion of the origins of psychogeography.
Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terræ incognitæ, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821 (p. 81 in the 1986 Penguin ed.)
John Watson Gordon, portrait of Thomas de Quincey (1845). National Portrait Gallery
de Quincey’s opium experience has been extrapolated from its narcotic context to serve as a guide for all aspirant psychogeographers. The nautical principle of discovering the elusive northwest passage resonates with the drift-like qualities of the dérive, while the mythical evocation of the sphinx, and feeling of discovery of uncharted territory anticipates similar tales by Baudelaire, Aragon, Sinclair, et al.
Matthew Beaumont has this to say of de Quincey’s account:
London itself, in the opium-tinctured nightwalks that De Quincey took at this time, acquired the complexity of consciousness itself. And consciousness resembled a byzantine city for which there was no guidebook or map. Consciousness and the city, the metropolis and mental life … Both were scenes of creative destruction, abysmal or abyssal building sites.
Decades before Freud, and millennia after Gilgamesh, de Quincey explores the city as he explores his unconscious: psychology and geography are intimately intertwined.
Iain Sinclair, whose name has become synonymous with ‘psychogeography’ has, in recent years, done his best to distance himself from the term. In a 2016 interview, he brushed off the question of psychogeography:
I don’t think there is any more than can be said. The topic has outlived its usefulness and become a brand.
But even in 2004 he was worried that he was marketed under the “brand image as the London psychogeographer.” He continued,
For me, [psychogeography is] a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I’m just exploiting it because I think it’s a canny way to write about London. Now it’s become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to walk the South Downs with a pipe, which has got absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography. There’s this awful sense that you’ve created a monster.
How did we get here?
Iain Sinclair in London Fields, circa 2012.
Sinclair was familiar with the Situationists in the 1960s, but he does not share their revolutionary intent. He keeps an ironic distance from the leftist political moments and figures that he documents. He does share, however, the Situationists’ passion for negation, and it can be argued that his writing matured in opposition to Thatcherism, and the subsequent transformation of the public sphere in the mould of Blairite managerialism.
It was much less philosophically subtle than some of the previous attempts, more of a raging bull journey against the energies of the city.
Tauroctony (bull-slaying) statue from the Temple of Mithras. Relief sculpture, 3rd century. Museum of London.
In Lights Out for the Territory (1997), Sinclair relates ‘psychogeography’ to the occult significance of the discovery of the Temple of Mithras in the City of London:
The act – Mithras cutting the bull’s throat – as depicted on the votive tablet discovered near Bond Court in 1889 is one of the crucial icons in any understanding of the psychogeography of the City. The figures of the god and the bull form a triangle within the framing circle of astrological symbols. Mithras, in his characteristic curved cap, turns away from the animal, cutting the throat from behind with a right-handed stroke. Light, in the form of blood, will gush from the wound. And the point, where the blade touches the throat, will be a sacred site in the mapping of London.
Lights Out 115-116
The unveiling of occult significance is a central component of Sinclair’s early writing about London. No more is this true than in Lud Heat (1975), which gathered together a dizzying array of associations, linked by his mapping of Hawksmoor churches.
Brian Catling, map from Lud Heat (1975)
Sinclair relates Hawksmoor’s designs to Egyptian iconography, taking descriptions from Herodotus; he adds to these M. R. James’s commentary on ‘the lost pyramids of Glastonbury that flanked the burial place of Arthur, that mythologist’s bottomless pit.’ (Lud Heat, p. 34 [Vintage edition, 1995]). This is psychogeography as an intensely personal mythology of the city — as idiosyncratic as Blake’s mythology (which is also referenced in Lud Heat). Sinclair’s writing records all the crazed ideas and associations which spark from his observation of London, opening a portal into a new vision of the city.
Christ Church Spitalfields (date of photograph unknown)
Sinclair’s literary profile grew following his novels White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Downriver (1991), finally merging with the zeitgeist around the turn of the century. Between Lights Out For the Territory (1997) and London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2002), Sinclair honed his style of writing about walking as a means of uncovering the hidden, uncanny traces of lives, stories, and histories that were at risk of being forgotten by an increasingly gentrified city. And as part of a constellation of re-mythologisations of London, such as Alan Moore’s From Hell (1999) and Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000), Sinclair became the reluctant high priest of a publishing phenomenon which seemingly knows no end.
In Sinclair’s The Last London (2017), the term ‘psychogeography’ reappears, but it has become derisive:
The last London is a lost London, a city of fracture and disappearance. I set out early one morning, with notebook and pocket camera, to map the emerging favela of huts. I mean those secret places — riverside shacks, containers, empty packing cases — where urban explorer collectives have established their hides. Two things became clear very quickly. There were many more of these alternative free-Airbnb accommodations than I’d previously suspected. And they weren’t all operated by Bradley L Garrett and his crew. The germ of the idea was out there now and it was spreading fast, facilitated by technologies I scorned or misunderstood: fractal worlds beyond the reach of my Nokia duncephone.
My crudely assembled chart, very much like the one I produced, many years ago, for the alignment of Hawksmoor churches, was outflanked before it began. All this stuff was already available on YouTube and a dozen apps. Streamed with ads for Santander bikes, MYRUN TECHNOGYM (the intelligent home treadmill) and WALK LONDON MAYFAIR VELVET STUDDED LOAFERS. I spotted one cod-psychogeographical plan of Hackney, contrived from mystical pentagrams and triangles, emblazoned on the rear flank of a silver hire car, right over the petrol-flap.
The Last London, 164.
Sinclair is witness to the repackaging of his own technique: a victim of his success. Just as the Situationists aspired to resist the possibility of recuperation by the spectacle, Sinclair discovers that everything can be co-opted. He records a graffito:
THE ALBION SAILS ON COURSE. Black script on white wall. The spill-zone around Corbridge Crescent, the painted devil heads and hybrid monsters, the bare-breasted pin-ups from naughtier times mouthing Situationist slogans, are captured and made fit for purpose by film crews and television set-dressers, lighting technicians and catering caravans, responding to dissent as: exploitable edge.
After Baudelaire, we are staying in Paris, but to get to the Situationists, it’s worth looking into some of the intermediate steps.
In 1853, Emperor Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon) authorised Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to redevelop the city.
The transformation of Paris by Haussmann. Map by Alphand. From Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, p. 471.
Haussmann’s plans involved the demolition of many of the arcades, and the creation of public parks and the great boulevards — known as ‘cannonshot boulevards’.
Avenue de l’Opéra, from the Opéra to the Louvre and the Rue de Rivoli. Image from Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, p. 482.
Haussmann affirmed that his plans were designed ‘to assure the public peace by the creation of large boulevards which will permit the circulation not only of air and light but also of troops.’
Louis Aragon
The Surrealist Louis Aragon (1897-1982), in his novel Paris Peasant, lamented the loss of the arcades (or passages) in the process of Haussmannisation. In a spirit which is not exactly nostalgic, but an attempt to articulate the ephemeral, he wrote,
Although the life that originally quickened [the passages] has drained away, they deserve, nevertheless, to be regarded as the secret repositories of several modern myths: it is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that were incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know.
(Aragon, Paris Peasant, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, p. 14)
The Surrealists’ influence on the Situationists was a grudging one. Speaking in 1983, Michèle Bernstein, a founding member of the Situationist International, plainly stated their position: ‘“Everyone is the son of many fathers,” she said. “There was the father we hated, which was surrealism. And there was the father we loved, which was dada. We were the children of both.”’ (Quoted in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 181).
Dada, the avant-garde movement which briefly flourished at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (among other locations) as a reaction to the butchery of the first World War, aimed for a confrontational ‘anti-art’. An influential technique was phonetic poetry — a poetry divested of recognisable words and literal meaning, and devoted to the exploration of sound.
Raoul Hausmann, ‘Optophonetic Poem’, 1918. Reprinted in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art p. 121
You can hear recordings of phonetic poems at UbuWeb (page for Hugo Ball; page for Raoul Hausmann — note especially #6 & 7).
This style of poetry was pared-down even further by Isidore Isou (1925-2007), founder of the Lettrist movement. (Listen to him reading his poems here.) And it was from the Lettrists that, in 1952, following a violent disagreement about Charlie Chaplin’s visit to Paris, the founding members of the Situationist International, led by Guy Debord, split.
Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, and Asger Jorn, Paris, 1958.
In the arts, the Situationists’ other main influence was Isidore Ducasse, known as Compte de Lautréamont (1846-1870). Lautréamont is best-known for his transgressive Les Chants de Maldoror, but it was his Poésies which inspired the central Situationist tenet of détournement. This idea may be defined as plagiarising existing materials and adding new meaning, inverting the meaning, or otherwise altering the original. The aim of this is to expose and oppose the spectacular nature of cultural products. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman clarified:
The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond any idea of mere scandal. Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp’s] drawing of a moustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation.
(‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’ (1956), translated by Ken Knabb.)
Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, November 1962
As much as the Situationist International was an artistic avant-garde movement, it was a politically radical one, drawing on G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Karl Marx (1818-1883), György Lukács (1885-1971), and Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). They developed a critique of capitalist / consumer society which they defined in terms of the ‘spectacle’. Briefly put, the society of the spectacle describes a theory of human relations in capitalist society which regards life as mediated by images. It may be regarded as an extension of the Marxist critique of alienated labour, where the spectacle infiltrates all areas of life: not only the work-place, mass media, and consumerism, but also what is regarded as leisure time.
Graffito, Paris, May 1968, from Christopher Gray, ed., Leaving the 20th Century, p. 24.
Situationist ideas were influential during the events of May 1968 in Paris, but the Situationist International did not last long after the revolutionary failure of that moment, finally disbanding in 1972 after numerous resignations and exclusions.
“Humanity will not be happy until the day the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist”. From Guy Debord, Panegyric p. 124.
The legacy of the Situationist International has been the source of much conflict, particularly between those who would claim them as a vital political movement, and those who focus on their contribution to (anti-)art and the avant-garde. Certainly, as a critique of consumerism and media in capitalist societies, the Society of the Spectacle remains valid and illuminating. Similarly, their posture of negation (which, somewhat comically, resulted in the expulsion of the majority of their members) can be a bracing corrective to any complacent tendendies we may have with regard to contemporary culture.
But for our purposes, the theory of psychogeography and the practice of the dérive are essential for our urban wandering.
The dérive is sometimes translated ‘drift’. It is a ‘technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences’ (‘Definitions’, Internationale Situationniste #1, 1958). Dérive is a mode of navigating the city according to the spirit of détournement: not random (although chance can play a role) but responding to intuitive or emotional desires to connect disparate regions.
Psychogeography is ‘The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (‘Definitions’, Internationale Situationniste #1, 1958). It is the theorization of the praxis of dérive: the redrawing of the city’s map in relation to randomized, intuitive, anti-cartographical associations of atmospheres and emotional response to the environment.
Claude Lorrain (1600–1682). Port of Geneva from the sea, c. 1630
Debord wrote,
I scarcely know of anything but those two harbours at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain—which are in the Louvre and which juxtapose extremely dissimilar urban ambiances — that can rival in beauty the Paris Metro maps. I am not, of course, talking about mere physical beauty — the new beauty can only be a beauty of situation — but simply about the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a sum of possibilities.
(‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955), translated by Ken Knabb)
Metro map of Paris, circa 1955. From Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, p. 86.
The metro map connects individual named places with others by a network of lines which bend and cross each other, creating associations between distant points which disregard scale and the architecture around these points. So we can see the influence on the cut up plans of Paris designed by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. By linking disparate areas of the city with routes that disregard distance and scale, and the lines of the street plan, these maps are visual representations of the potential of the dérive.
The Urban Wanderer 