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Psychogeography

Oldcastle Books

London and the Visionary Tradition

The triangle of concentration. A sense of this and all the other triangulations of the city: Blake, Bunyan, Defoe, the dissenting monuments in Bunhill Fields. Everything I believe in, everything London can do to you, starts there.

Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory

Like many revolutionary theories anxious to protect their origins from those who might question their attempt to provide a definitive break with the past, psychogeography remains firmly entrenched within a particular time and place: Paris in the 1950s. However, as soon as one looks beyond the narrow context that gave rise to it, it becomes apparent that psychogeography is retrospectively supported (or undermined) by earlier traditions and precursors that have been neglected or wilfully obscured. When we focus upon the predominant characteristics of psychogeographical ideas – urban wandering, the imaginative reworking of the city, the otherworldly sense of spirit of place, the unexpected insights and juxtapositions created by aimless drifting, the new ways of experiencing familiar surroundings – one can soon identify these themes in the examples of earlier figures whose work pre-dates the formal recognition of the Situationists.

This historical trawl for psychogeographical back-markers has become common practice amongst contemporary writers such as Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home and Peter Ackroyd as they attempt to resurrect and reconnect with earlier literary and historical currents. Any reader of their work will soon become familiar with a small band of the usual suspects who are repeatedly name-checked in their texts and often recruited in support of a specifically English, or more precisely London, tradition. The first of these contenders for psychogeographical progenitor is Daniel Defoe, whose character Robinson is a recurrent figure within the literature of psychogeography. Alongside him we find William Blake, described by Iain Sinclair as the 'Godfather of Psychogeography.' Thomas de Quincey's drug-fuelled wanderings in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater were given official recognition by the Situationists themselves, while Robert Louis Stevenson's fictional portrayal of London in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde was to confirm this city as the most resonant psychogeographical location of them all. In his The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering, Arthur Machen continued Stevenson's portrayal of the urban gothic, while also providing a blueprint for today's generation of urban wanderers. Finally, alongside these historical and literary figures, we have a writer whose work has possibly been as influential on today's self-proclaimed psychogeographers as Debord and the Situationists themselves. Alfred Watkins The Old Straight Track was originally published in 1925 but it was not until its rediscovery in the 1970s that the theory of ley lines was to become a cornerstone of the new age 'Earth Mysteries' school that has since provided an esoteric counterbalance to the stern revolutionary proclamations of the Situationists.

All these figures can be corralled into a loose allegiance of overlapping themes, whose geographical centre, London, is, together with Paris, one of the two poles of psychogeographical activity. They are linked, however, by more than merely a shared preoccupation with London, reflecting a wider awareness of genius loci or 'spirit of place' through which landscape, whether urban or rural, can be imbued with a sense of the histories of previous inhabitants and the events that have been played out against them. Peter Woodcock, in his book This Enchanted Isle: The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries, attempts to map the history of this occult sense of place through the writers and artists that have employed it in their work. He identifies the hallmark of genius loci in the Neo-Romantic movement of Paul Nash and other artists who flourished in the inter-war period, but extrapolates their concern with English landscape and identity to develop a tradition that includes Blake and Samuel Palmer as well as contemporary figures such as Sinclair and Keiller. 'Released from its historical location like a ghost in the machine, the genius loci has spawned a hybrid of forms,' he writes, concluding that 'The spirit of place is still deeply embedded in our national consciousness ... The old Neo-Romantic world has long gone, but the dream persists.'

This dream is one that has been endorsed by Peter Ackroyd, himself a subject of Woodcock's book, who has written at some length upon his belief in genius loci and its relationship to English national identity. In a lecture entitled The Englishness of English Literature Ackroyd argues that a 'Catholic' strand of English consciousness, one that is exuberant, irrational and, indeed, visionary, has been overlaid and repressed by the protestant rationalism that has prevailed since the Enlightenment. This visionary continuity is described as a 'chronological resonance' and is the point at which place, history and identity converge:

Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who live within them, is it not also possible that within our sensibility and our language there are patterns of continuity and resemblance which have persisted from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond that? And is it not possible that in outlining what I consider to be a buried Catholic tradition, such a pattern can be seen to emerge?

This is a pattern whose emergence today re-routes the orthodoxies of situationism. Ackroyd's 'Cockney Visionaries', from Blake to Sinclair, expose the essence of place obscured by the flux of the everyday and highlight the threat to the identity of the city posed by the banalisation of much urban redevelopment. The figures that I shall be discussing here provide not only a broader historical and literary context, within which psychogeographical ideas can be judged, but also demonstrate the distance these ideas have travelled since their original conception.

Daniel Defoe and the Re-Imagining of London

Iain Sinclair identifies Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters burial ground, as the focal point of his psychogeography of London, but surely it is Stoke Newington, where Defoe was schooled at the Dissenters Academy and which was later to provide a home for Edgar Allan Poe, that must take precedence as the city's most resonant psychogeographical location. In either case it is the figure of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) who inaugurates London's long psychogeographical tradition. With his twin roles as political radical and father of the London novel, Defoe is the first writer to offer a vision of London shaped according to his own peculiar imaginary topography, and in his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe introduces a character who has haunted both the novel and the literature of psychogeography ever since.

Defoe's extraordinary career as journalist and spy, pamphleteer, poet, travel writer, satirist, economist and merchant is overshadowed by his relatively late foray into the world of the novel, where he is judged by many to have provided the first example of the genre in English. In this sense he illustrates the way in which psychogeographical themes are as old as the novel itself. The novel's staple form of the imaginary journey naturally lends itself to the character of the traveller reporting back from beyond the bounds of our everyday experience. Robinson Crusoe, with its twin motifs of the imaginary voyage and isolation, provides a broad outline of a character who encapsulates the freedom and detachment of the wanderer, the resourcefulness of the adventurer and the amorality of the survivor. In short, all those characteristics necessary for the urban wanderer walking unfamiliar streets. As a consequence, this novel has released a troop of fictional counterparts who populate an extraordinarily diverse range of works, from the novels of Céline and Kafka to the poetry of Weldon Kees and the films of Patrick Keiller.

I shall be discussing the role of Robinson in more detail elsewhere, but while Defoe's most famous creation reappears with an uncanny regularity throughout this account, it is in his A Journal of the Plague Year that Defoe can be said to provide what is, in essence, the first psychogeographical survey of the city. At first glance, Defoe's blend of fact and fiction would appear to have little in common with a set of ideas and practices first named some two hundred years later, but his Journal, both in style and content, portrays the city in a manner that shares almost all the preoccupations that have come to be termed psychogeographical. Firstly, Defoe's account of the plague year of 1665 gathers the bare statistical facts, the precise topographical details and the peculiar local testimonies that were to become the hallmarks of psychogeographical investigation and presents them in the non-linear and digressive fashion that was later to characterise the drift of the dérive. Furthermore, this blend of fiction and biography, of local history and personal reminiscence, is bound together to form an imaginative reworking of the city in which the familiar layout of the city is shown to be transformed beyond recognition by the ravages of the plague. Beyond the scenes of individual suffering and mass panic that the plague induced, Defoe's account of London is one of an organic city itself afflicted by disease and, as the plague ebbs and flows, so both Defoe's narrator and the reader find their perception of the city altered as the means of navigating it are gradually obscured. The London that Defoe writes about here and in other London fictions such as Moll Flanders is one that describes the medieval core of the city, a labyrinthine layout to be negotiated without the help of street lighting or house numbers. Cynthia Wall writes in her introduction to Defoe's Journal: 'Navigating this urban space in the 1660s could be tricky, both physically and conceptually ... There were no maps for ordinary people to guide them through the city. You made your way by sight, by memory, by history, by advice, by direction – and by luck.'

In the London of this period one traversed the streets through recourse to a mental map established through trial and error and by reading the signs that the environment displayed to you. This alertness to topographical detail and the construction of a mental overview of the city would later form the basis of psychogeographical technique, but in the time of the plague, these techniques became less a choice than a necessity. Only by re-learning the signs as they were rapidly deformed and distorted by the passage of death and disease could Defoe's narrator hope to survive its onslaught. Defoe reveals a 'sense of a haunted geography' through which the progress of the plague is meticulously documented from street to street and house to house. Soon busy thoroughfares are deserted or blocked off, escape routes emerge only to swiftly disappear and this landscape, with its literal signs of death (the red crosses on the doors marking out a map of contamination), is completely reshaped, becoming alien to the Londoners who had previously prided themselves upon an intimate knowledge of its secrets. This sense of the ground shifting beneath one's feet, as the plague advances and retreats, is mirrored in Defoe's prose style, as a series of digressions and narrative cul-de-sacs afford the reader, both spatially and temporally, that sense of dislocation experienced by the characters. In effect, the catastrophe of the plague creates the characteristic sense of disorientation that we find in all narratives of urban catastrophe, whether caused by warfare, revolution or natural disaster. In such moments the city is momentarily made strange, defamiliarised, as its inhabitants are granted a vision of the city as it might be, as heaven or hell. Of course the Situationists, using psychogeography, also sought a revolutionary cessation of the everyday, hoping, by the imposition of their own imaginative vision, to reveal the city in all its wonder, but it is here in Defoe's account that we are first granted an insight into the ways in which the most familiar geographies may be disrupted.

Defoe was to provide an account of his travels across Britain in his vast A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, and in this work he once again displays an acute awareness of place as well as accumulating a monumental collection of economic, historical and architectural detail. The format of this book loosely informs Patrick Keiller's film Robinson in Space with which my account of psychogeography closes and in this sense this entire project is bookended by Defoe. But it is in London that his sense of place is at its most heartfelt and it is the image of a solitary walker navigating the city and recording his impressions of it that dominates the tradition which he inaugurates.

William Blake and the Visionary Tradition

William Blake of Soho. Child Blake seeing angels in a tree on Peckham Rye. Naked Blake reciting Paradise Lost in a leafy Lambeth bower. Blake the engraver, in old age, walking to Hampstead. Blake singing on his deathbed in Fountain's Court. Blake, lying with his wife Catherine, in Bunhill Fields. Blake the prophet. Blake the psychogeographer. Blake the red-cap revolutionary, watching Newgate burn. Blake the happy-clappy revivalist of Glad Day, banging a tambourine with Michael Horowitz. Blake, at the last night of the proms, burning in the mad eyes of sentimental imperialists.

Iain Sinclair, Into the Mystic: Visions of Paradise to Words of Wisdom ... an Homage to the Written Work of William Blake.

Iain Sinclair has described William Blake as 'the Godfather of Psychogeography' and, with his emphasis on the imaginative reconstruction of the city, Blake takes his place within a tradition of London writing that foreshadows many of the later psychogeographic preoccupations. Born in London where he was to spend almost his entire life, William Blake (1757–1827) began his career as an apprentice engraver and student at the Royal Academy. His twofold passions for engraving and poetry were to coalesce to produce a unique body of work – a series of illuminated books in which the battle between the anti-rational forces of the imagination and the repressive and systematic forces of authority is laid bare. Blake's work is bound up with his experiences of the city in which he spent his life to the degree that his identity and that of London itself seem to become indivisible. As he himself claimed in his epic Jerusalem, 'My streets are my Ideas of Imagination.'

In his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd writes, 'He had a very strong sense of place, and all his life he was profoundly and variously affected by specific areas of London.' Blake was a walker, a wanderer whose poems describe the reality of eighteenth-century street life, but they are overlaid by his own intensely individualistic vision to create a new topography of the city. His legacy to psychogeographic thought here is clear: the transformation of the familiar landscapes of his own time and place into a transcendent image of the eternal city; 'the spiritual Four-fold London eternal.' He is, as Ackroyd has described, a 'Cockney Visionary', whose awareness of London's symbolic existence through time allowed him to perceive the unchanging reality of the city. Thus, in his poem London, he wanders the streets witnessing the eternal features of urban life:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Blake's superimposition of his peculiar worldview upon the geography of London's streets creates strange juxtapositions between familiar names and locations and visions of a transcendent city. Thus he was able to perceive angels in the unlikely environs of Peckham Rye and gives precise coordinates for the New Jerusalem:

The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood:
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalems pillars stood.

Blake remaps the city as he walks its streets, but if the city is to be rebuilt as Jerusalem, then it must first be destroyed, and his poems abound with apocalyptic imagery that is shaped, not merely by an anti-rationalism and anti-materialism, but also by a strong sense of political radicalism that stands in opposition to authority of every kind. Thus Blake once again pre-empts psychogeographical ideas in his revolutionary call for the destruction of the power structures of his day.

Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to psychogeography today: the mental traveller who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by an awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging; and the use of antiquarian and occult symbolism reflects the precedence given to the subjective and the anti-rational over more systematic modes of thought.

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Excerpted from Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley. Copyright © 2010 Merlin Coverley. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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