Psychogeographical Experiments

Here's a section from an essay/article I've been working on, titled 'A Psychogeographical Experiment: Wolverhampton train station to Birmingham New Street Station'. If all goes well it will be published in Nat and Chris's book ( see http://ourfineartma.blogspot.com ) -

The first question I come to – a pretty major one that needs answering - what is my position on psychogeography? What is this psychogeographical experiment/ stupid idea aimed at? Am I aligned with Guy Debord and the Situationist International in feeling out the psychological contours of the city through the derive? Or am I closer to Will Self and his eotechnical world-view? Indeed, the Selfian approach (if I can call it that) was the inspiration for this first foray into the world of psychogeography. After watching on YouTube Will Self’s lecture at Google[i], promoting his recent book documenting his own psychogeography, I became fascinated with the division between psyche and place that ‘modernised’ methods of transport bring about. ‘Walking to New York’ is Self’s attempt to bridge this divide. In the modernised world of machine mediated travel, London and New York exist separately, with no physical relationship in space, or indeed psyche as, Self argues, perceptions of space are registered by the body on a physical, not a mental, level. Self’s chosen method for bridging this divide is walking, thus re-registering his spatial perception of London and New York, and destroying his London and New York micro-worlds as he puts it. His route took him across London to Heathrow airport, from there by plane to JFK airport, and then on foot again to his Hotel in New York. The plane journey across the Atlantic, in terms of physical exertion, isn’t recognised, and so, as far as his body is aware, he has traversed one continuous landmass, as I’m sure his legs would concur.

Late capitalist society creates for us an illusion, argues Guy Debord, to whom Self, in his psychogeography, is indebted. This illusion, encompassing daily life, roughly comprises work, home/leisure and consumerism as, according to late-capitalist society, these were the only things we needed to live[ii]. Self’s notion of micro-environments, is derived from the Situationist’s concept of spectacle: Our experiences of place and spatial relations, registered on a mental level become ruptured by modernised, non-eotechnical modes of transport. Our experiences of place then become subsumed under the spectacle of late-capitalist society. Put simply, we don’t know where we are, and this is just the way late-capitalist society wants it. These concepts of spectacle relate back to Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Critique of Everyday Life’. Indeed, Lefebvre was at one time aligned with the Situationists, and his concepts of alienation and mystification formed the theoretical basis for Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Lefebvre insists that the transformation of life, and indeed its critique, not only must take place on an everyday level, but that the everyday as category, crucially, retains the possibility of its own transformation. For the Situationists and Will Self, psychogeography provided just such an everyday act.


[i] Authors at Google Lecture: Self, W (2007), Mountain View, CA (accessed 27/06/08). Also see: Self, W. (2007) ‘Psychogeography’ London: Bloomsbury

[ii] Debord, G. (1995) ‘Society of the Spectacle’ New York: Zone Books (Originally published in french in 1967 as ‘La Societe Du Spectacle’)