the surreal within the real
an essay by Edward Smart
introduction
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The Australian Aborigines’ dreamtime is an intimate knowledge of the land; an awareness of life in time and eternity; and acknowledgement of experiences past. The dreamtime was / is a vitally creative, collective activity, essential to mental and physical survival. Beyond this superficial summary, I am unqualified to describe their culture.
When we talk of the political and the personal in western psychogeography, it’s useful to recognise the impact of having your past forgotten for you by the unaware colonialism of us. In other words, whilst we are at the mercy of our technology in New York, Liverpool and Melbourne, the underlying basis for psychogeography – its connection with the past beneath the pavement and the people who lived it – is still barely understood. We can grasp what psygeo is in theory, but are unsure what to do with it in practice. We remain detached from the truths of the word.
This essay sets out to suggest new, yet old approaches to exploring public space. Part one deals with the orthodox tradition – a 19c european literary bias, with a projection of the occult onto the reality of the city. Part two advocates a complete renewal of psychogeography, embracing firstly the advances made by Freud and Jung, and secondly our improved awareness of the dangers inherent in creating fictions about ourselves and others. Lastly it unifies these threads into a singular activity that reawakens our inbuilt intuitions and compasses.
For a crystallisation of european psychogeography (of which my part one includes a rough summary of, with part two being a break from), see Merlin Coverley’s Pocket Essential guide to psychogeography
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part one : atlantis resurfaces
london in the 18 and 19c
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Western, city-based PsyGeo probably came into existence soon after Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Years and William Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane, in the form of William Blake.
Blake’s late-18c walks around London’s Soho prompted him to describe critically the influence of city on the psyche. Few took any notice of his concerns about the effects of the industrial revolution, which drew overwhelming numbers to the city; nor anything else he said, drew or wrote for that matter. But Blake is the first early-modern city observer who can be compared to the richness of the dreamtime. Or, as the writer Iain Sinclair puts it, Blake is the godfather [and goodmother] of psychogeography.
In the 19c, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and the character of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (all with The Scottish Connection), formed what many still consider to be the essence of genius loci in the UK – a dark, brooding, smog-bound Gotham-on-Thames – prim by day, decadent by night, observable and knowable only through a mixture of animal cunning and superior intellect, edged by substance abuse (yes I know it sounds like the synopsis for a BBC1 sunday night serial).
This is probably why the place of Charles Dickens in this era is often overlooked – not a mad bad dangerous drug addict, but still a prodigious explorer of the streets and hinterlands of Victorian London. He for me is the era’s most concerned – and personally experienced – city chronicler. It is his sublimation of the inhabitants to the archetypes we all recognise and feel sympathy for, that marks him out to be the antithesis of Poe’s dystopian insanities, brought on by the all-too-viscerally-imagined squalour of the gothic dark romantic mind.
All this dis-ease is of course a trillion miles away from your high street sainsburys and NHS 24 – it’s now transferred to, and lives vicariously in, that opiate-laden cesspit of psychological trauma that squirms and seethes with vicious intent from its plasma kingdom, 4 feet off the floor – EastEnders’ Albert Square.
paris during the fin de siècle and belle époque – the city of the six senses
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Meanwhile in Paris, Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flaneur (and Walter Benjamin‘s later Arcades Project, based on this idea of the stroller), was making new imaginative and emotional connections with citypsyche, along with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (translated by the Scot C. K. Scott Moncrieff). Some would say these Paris experiments were indulgent, exclusively male activities, forming the figure of the Loiterer, the stroller, the voyeur, into a slightly risky middle-class waster, focusing more on prostitution than city exploration. But this first French work is only a prefiguration of what will happen later in La Republique…
the crisis of faith
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In the runup to the First World War, many intellectuals had lost their belief in the structures of faith. Great Britain’s colonial activities in India had opened up several alternatives, resulting in bastard neo-faiths like Theosophy. Along with Violet Paget, Arthur Machen was one of the more intriguing literary dabblers in other people’s religions, with an interest in exploring the unconscious results of these fusions between eastern mysticism and western gothic. But as a realist, with a journalist’s understanding of the limitations of spiritualism, Machen would I think be frustrated that today, some western writers still attach bogus occult undertones to psychogeography – I for one am against the Dan Brownification of PsyGeo. But thankfully, as the cliche goes, the truth is always stranger than whatever it is that Madonna and Tom Cruise are up to.
broadway boogie-woogie
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In the US, during the 20s 30s and 40s, photography became the conduit for exploring the city. Photographers like Berenice Abbott, Ruth Orkin and Helen Levitt defined a new way of looking, angst-free, at positive urban space. This period produced a complete break from the heavy european and bostonian literary baggage of the 19c. Later, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston would create the surreal within the real; intense responses to environment and the human situation.
the letterists and situationists
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Mid-century, Paris comes back. Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, two Marxist writers, set about constructing a new language and theory of life in the city. In this period – from the early 50s to the Paris student riots of 1968 – psychogeography is first “officially” named, formulated and practiced. Rather than discuss the Situationist International, the group that Debord was ringleader of, it’s perhaps more useful to summarise in three parts the remarkably prescient concerns that emerged from the didactic (and often sexist) proclamations of the group.
Firstly, situationist is political. It attempts to undermine capitalist and consumer culture by subverting the messages being broadcast to the population via, for instance, advertising. This is Détournement – or what we might loosely call agitprop; i.e., the work of Jenny Holzer, Naomi Klein or Barbara Kruger.
Secondly, its urban concerns are “green” – freedom for the pedestrian to assert ownership of the city (the Dérive, or Drift), banning of cars, intelligent community planning for new developments (Unitary Urbanism).
Thirdly, it seeks to make the city an imaginative space again, free of commercial constraints and public bureaucracy. For the worker, the daily commute should be a beautiful and enriching experience, not an enslaving one. In this sense it is perhaps helpful to suggest that the Situationists have their hearts in the sensibilities of the Chaplin film Modern Times. Actually, Jacques Tati’s masterpiece, Playtime, is nearer the mark as a contemporaneous example of the SI’s concerns.
post blairbush
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Today, imaginist writers like Iain Sinclair and J G Ballard (if you like it steampunk or selfharming-tekno-gothic), Will Self (if you like it socio-deconstructivist) and Rebecca Solnit (if you just like being normal) are useful places to start uncovering contemporary context. TV pundits like Lucinda Lambton and Jonathan Meades are a lot easier to digest though, and bring a healthy dose of wit and irony from left-field.
But the work that represents a coherent, contemporary UK psychogeography is Patrick Keiller‘s 1990s films London and Robinson in Space. These two films are still, over 20 years later, I think essential viewing for anyone interested in contextualising PsyGeo in the real world of supermarkets and starbucks, cctv and social disembodiment. I would also consider the artists Janet Cardiff, Rachel Whiteread and the architect Zaha Hadid to be “psychogeographic”.
To finish part one, another documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis, brings together the irradiated truth and the corpo-reality of our recent past, and makes critical but enormously fun and fast-paced short films that explore some of the uncomfortable facts about our current state of somnambulism.
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part two : psychegeography in century 21
fleeting flickers, future past
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Part two coming shortly