PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY 101: A POTTED HISTORY

Flâneur

NOUN:  A man who saunters around observing society.
Example sentences: ‘Baudelaire was a flâneur himself, and drifted through the streets of Paris in between writing poems and spending his trust fund on dandy outfits and opium.’

Oxford English Dictionary

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“Where did I first come across that word, flâneur, so singular, so elegant and french with its arched â and its curling eur? I know it was when I was studying in Paris, in the 1990s, but I don’t think I found it in a book... I can’t say for sure, which is to say I became a flâneur before I knew what one was...”

Lauren Elkin

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I know exactly when I became a flâneur. It was June, 2011, and the Viking and I had spent the afternoon dragging dumped clothing by the Lea into the shape of the maligned 2012 Olympic logo. I’d got a flea up my arse about the event and it’s development, and started a grumpy Tumblr, where I’d post ‘re-populated’ versions of the marque, using the brand guidelines to justify my mischief.

It wasn’t a good time for me generally; we’d lost two family members in as many days late the previous year (my first true, if OTT, introduction to the world of grief), and I’d decided to stop taking my medication. I isolated myself, spending dog-years in bed, subsisting on half-eaten takeaway and self-pity. I’d stare out of the windows, across the reservoirs to the suburbs, and I’d cry. I cried for the unfairness’s of family and loss, for the lack of meaningful help from the NHS, for the friends I was shedding at a rate of knots. And, as I saw parts of my home change – scruffy, dirty places that nature was reclaiming, one Buddleia and Mitten-Crab at a time, places that I loved – I cried as I watched them being swallowed up by the Olympic Development.

These were selfish tears initially; The Lea and Bow Backs rivers were places I’d escape to in my childhood. Places to smoke illicit B&H, listen to my Walkman, and pretend I wasn’t surrounded by concrete and car fumes. Compared to the main road, the Lea, with its weeds and crumbling red brick walls, was like a secret world, populated only by shopping trolleys, mating dragonflies and me. Ok, so some of the Bow Backs were toxic enough to strip-clean the pennies of the unfortunate squat-ravers who fell in after nights in adjacent warehouses, and in hindsight, perhaps weren’t hugely suitable environments for a 12 year old girl to go wandering unattended, but I did, I loved them. They felt like mine.

So, I got the ‘ump. Oh God, did I get the ‘ump! And I started to find mention of others who were also unhappy about it all. People who weren’t just losing their childhood hideaways, or raving spots, but their businesses, their homes, their sense of safety even. Tower blocks in strategic locations had surface-to-air missiles placed on their roofs; tiny black-clad figures milling about them as we stared through my Grandad’s old binoculars toward Leyton.

Ironically, for an organisation that guarded the 2012 brand with almost scientologist-levels of litigiousness, LOCOG overlooked the opportunity for meme-based pisstakery presented by the Wolff Ollins guidelines. The logo, which pretty much the entire country had thought was shit, and could do much better themselves, had been designed “to be populated, to contain infills and images, so it is recognisable enough for everyone to feel and be part of London 2012 like never before”, and as I collected the many ways in which these games were changing the landscape for the worse, I infilled, populated, and posted.

There were logos for the people who lived on the river, who were being pushed off by unaffordable mooring increases, strangely only being applied to the waterways within or close to the Olympic site. Logos for the people having to breathe in the toxic dust of industries past, as the land beside their homes was ‘re-mediated’. For the dead fish washed upstream by the addition of new locks, ostensibly there to allow deliveries, but in practice solely to provide the new housing with the “Waterfront View” needed to bump up their value… And as I infilled and populated, my grief solidified into something harder, pointier. I got angry and I got up, and I walked. I walked, and I mapped, and I created and I recorded every last tiny detail of it all. I learned to describe my aimless walks as dérives, my logos as détournements. I found others - others who were walking this place - lots of places in fact - feeling this same love. And so, all hopped up on Guy Debord and protective fury, that June I became a flâneur.

And then shortly after came the riots. A budgetary tug of war between the government and the Met., with a grieving family and half the UK’s young and daft drawn into the game. Mark Duggan was shot on Ferry Lane, close by to where the Lea passes through Tottenham Hale. A spot I pass by every time I leave my home to go anywhere. Where I go to buy fags and milk. A spot as familiar to me as my own road, my own front-door. I found out only because the Viking had been driving a band from Tottenham the night it kicked off and he phoned to tell me not to go out with my camera. When I did go out the next afternoon, I expected it all to have calmed down - but as I got to the retail park I walk through, it was clear that it hadn’t. OSB where glass was, the car park a sea of coat-hangers and emptied trainer boxes. As I walked up to the High Road, a burnt out police car still blocked the lights. The air crackled with something unsettled and anticipatory, each face passed taut and suspicious. I took my photos quickly, walked with a bit more of a bowl than usual, and went home to watch as, postcode by postcode, everything lit up. 

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“… Unfold a map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on a map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation... Watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage.”

(McFarlane 2005)

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Psychogeography is defined by the OED as ‘The study of the influence of geographical environment on the mind or behaviour’ (OED 2017). It was first coined by Guy Debord, a Marxist theorist and writer in 1950s Paris, but has its roots in the earlier literary tradition of the Beaudelairian flâneur, and movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism. (Coverley, M. 2010)

The Surrealist practice automatism had extended to include walking; “free-floating exploration” guided by the unconscious. (Coverley, M. 2010 p74). Surrealist texts such as Breton’s Nadja and Aragon’s Paris Peasant have been described as “documents of a city disappearing before (their) eyes” (Coverley, M. 2010 p76) and it was these that drew attention to the notion of walking as a cultural, protective act; “If the urban wanderer was to continue his aimless strolling, then the very act of walking had to become subversive, a means of reclaiming the streets...” (Coverley, M. 2010 p77)

It was through the Lettrist International, a splinter-group of the avant-garde Lettrists led by Debord, that the term psychogeography first made its way into print, in 1954. Influenced by the dominant Marxist philosophy that prevailed during that period, the “playful but harmless activities of the Lettrists” (Coverley, M. 2010 p22) became more serious-minded under Debord’s guidance, and in 1957 he formed the Situationist International. Described as a “fluid group of revolutionaries, made up of artists and writers” (Richardson, T. 2015 p1), it was important to the SI that their walking not be a “journey or stroll” (Debord 1996 cited in Richardson 2015). Unlike his predecessors, who favoured more subjective approaches, he introduced new definitions for the terms dérive (i) and détournement (ii), adopting a "rigorous, scientific" tone (Coverley, M. 2010 p23). 

Situationists taking part in a dérive were playful, but “conscious of the environment, especially in the way it tied in with a critique of capitalism” (Richardson, T. 2015 p2). For Debord, psychogeography was “the point where psychology and geography collide”; and that by monitoring and recording the “emotional and behavioural impact upon individual consciousness” he could promote the construction of a new urban environment (Coverley, M. 2010 p89).

Despite Debords insistence on a scientific approach, perhaps he was realistic about the problems inherent to measuring such things as emotions, as he gave himself what Coverley calls "a useful get- out-clause" by his use of the term "pleasing vagueness" in the following:

“The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation…”

(Debord cited in Coverley, M. 2010 p89)

This vagueness is evident in the borrowed Surrealist collage techniques employed by Debord, such as following the cut up and randomised sections of a Paris map (Coverley, M. 2010 p91). Furthermore, Coverley also states that “it has been that vagueness that has allowed so many writers and movements to identify themselves and their work under this label” (Coverley, M. 2010 p89).

Although psychogeography was an important part of the Situationists practice, it became less so as the group moved toward the revolutionary politics they are now more closely associated with. Eventually, due to what has been described as Debords “dictatorial tendencies” (Coverley, M. 2010p82), and “comic” inability to acknowledge the debts his work paid to others before him, (Solnit, R. 2001 p212) the Situationist International devolved into infighting and by 1972 had disbanded (Tate.org.uk 2017)

Despite this fractured ending, they were and remain influential. Situationist slogans were painted on the walls during the 1968 Paris riots, and figures from the Punk movement, from Malcolm McLaren to Crass records, deployed Situationist techniques. (Britton, A. 2012) The ‘80s and ‘90s saw UK artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home, Will Self and Patrick Keiller also creating work based upon explorative walking.

Psychogeography covers a diverse range of practices, strategies, motivations and ideas, as befitting something so ‘vague’, and the outcomes vary from practitioner to practitioner. Currently, artist Laura Oldfield Ford combines punky depictions of urban areas with text.(iii) Academic Morag Rose, who describes herself as an “anarcho-flâneuse”, (Rose cited in Richardson, 2010) formed the Loiterers Resistance Movement and created CCTV Bingo (iv) (Rose to Clutterbuck 2016). Whilst they are more directly working in the Situationist tradition, others, such as Gareth Rees, who writes love poems to pylons (Rees 2013), are less overtly political. The crossovers between psychogeography, flânerie, travel-writing, cartography, protest, urban-exploration, and walking as a wider artistic practice, are such that its popularity continues.

In closing, I leave you with this statement from Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust:

“Walking itself has not changed the world, but walking together has been a rite, tool and reinforcement of the civil society that can stand up to violence, to fear, and to repression. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a viable civil society without the free-association and knowledge of the terrain that comes with walking…”

(Solnit, R. 2001 p2)

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NOTES:

i “Derive - A mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances” (Debord cited in Coverley 2010)

ii “Détournement - the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble" (Situationist
International 1959)

iii Laura OldField Ford (http://lauraoldfieldford.blogspot.co.uk/)

iv Morag Rose “CCTV Bingo Card” (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ddtv/4117827853)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

"BFI Screenonline: Keiller, Patrick (1950-) Biography". Screenonline.org.uk. N.p., 2017. Web. 8
Feb. 2017.

Britton, Amy. "Situationism Explained! And It’s Effect On Punk And Pop Culture - Louder Than War". Louder Than War. 2012. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.

Clutterbuck, Brenton. "Loitering With Intent". Now Then. 2017. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.

Coverley, Merlin. "The Art Of Wandering; Arthur Machen's London Science". Walking Inside Out; Contemporary British Psychogeography. Tina Richardson. 1st ed. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015. 103-113. Print.

Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. 1st ed. Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Print.

Debord, Guy. "M70 Situationist Manifesto". 100 Artists' Manifestos. Alex Danchev. 1st ed. London: Penguin, 2011. 347-350. Print.

Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse. 1st ed. london: Chatto & Windus, 2016. 3-23. Print.

"Flaneur - Definition of Flaneur in English | Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries | English. 
OED. 2017. Web. 26 Jan. 2017 ~

Ford, Laura Oldfield. Savage Messiah. 1st ed. London: Verso, 2011. Print.

International, Situationist. "The Situationist International Text Library/Détournement As Negation And Prelude". Library.nothingness.org. 2017. Web. 29 Jan. 2017.

MacFarlane, Robert. "A Road Of One’s Own | The Times". The Times. N.p., 2005. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.

"Psychogeography - Definition of Psychogeography In English | Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford
Dictionaries | English. OED. 2017. Web. 26 Jan. 2017.

"Psychogeography". Tate.org.uk. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.

Rees, Gareth. "Soundchronicities: Exploring The Hallucinatory Sounds Of London’s Wilderness | Marshman Chronicles". Marshmanchronicles.com. 2013. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.

Richardson, Tina. Walking Inside Out; Contemporary British Psychogeography. . 1st ed. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015. Print.

Rose, Morag. "About The LRM | The LRM - The Loiterers Resistance Movement". Thelrm.org. 2017. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.

Rose, Morag. "Confessions of An Anarcho-Flaneuse, Or Psychogeography The Mancunian Way". Walking Inside Out; Contemporary British Psychogeography. Tina Richardson. 1st ed. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015. 147-161. Print.

Self, Will. Essay On Psychogeography. 1st ed. London: Barbican, 2013. Web. 8 Feb. 2017.

Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk. 1st ed. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. Print.

"Situationist International". Tate.org.uk. 2017. Web. 29 Jan. 2017.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust. 3rd ed. London: Granta, 2001. Print.

"Stewart Home - Index". Stewart Home. Web. 8 Feb. 2017.

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LOITERING IN POSSESSION OF A LABIA; WOMEN WALKING THE STREETS

Women occupy diverse positions, so I am not going to generalise; I'm going to talk about specific experiences of my own. But I'm speaking out of an understanding that I am not alone in finding difficult the experience of walking in the city, finding space there - and not just physical space. (Scalway, 2002, p2)

I love walking the beautiful nitty gritty streets of New York City. But sometimes walking the beautiful nitty gritty streets as a woman can be, well, brutal.
(She's Gotta Have It Episode 1, 2017)

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It is necessary to consider gender when writing about walking as it so intrinsically informs how one experiences the public realm. Males undoubtedly have their obstacles to face on the streets; “Imprisoned in my postcode” (Thompson, 2010), “Gay men beaten and told they are ‘not welcome’ in East London” (McCormick, 2017). However, many agree that (cis-gender, heteronormative) men have traditionally had more access in this regard (Elkin 2016, Solnit 2001, Pollock 2003, Wilson 1992).

As Solnit notes in Wanderlust, female freedom of movement has been restricted by a combination of “legal measures, social mores subscribed to by men and women, (and) the threat implicit in sexual harassment, and rape itself…” (Solnit, 2001, p234). An account is given of one of the many working-class women who fell prey to prostitution laws in 19th century Britain, their presence on the street “in the wrong time or place” (Solnit, 2001, pp232-233) often leading to arrest and intrusive medical examinations.

“Public visibility and independence were still equated, as they had been a thousand years earlier, with sexual disreputability” (Solnit, 2001, p237) and ‘respectable’ women’s right to access public spaces were as heavily regulated as that of the lower classes, albeit by social convention rather than law. They had the privilege of some access – they were afforded leisure time in a way that women from the working classes were not. However, the locations open to them were still limited. Shopping, therefore, became one way to “legitimise their presence… proving that they were not for purchase by purchasing” (Solnit, 2001, p237).

Either way, a female in public was defined by her sexual availability. Solnit highlights how frequent within the English language it is to sexualise women’s presence on the street. Whereas phrases that describe men in relation to place, ‘Man about Town’ for example, is used in a positive sense, the female equivalents tend to be perjorative. Women who have “violated sexual conventions are said to be strolling, roaming, wandering, straying – all terms that imply that women’s travel is inevitably sexual or that their sexuality is transgressive when it travels” (Solnit, 2001, p234).

In Solnit’s research into the history of walkers the principal characters, or “peripatetic philosophers (and) flâneurs” (Solnit, 2001, p233) have been male. Indeed, a superficial view of psychogeography as it stands currently in the UK would suggest that the majority of ‘psychogeographers’ are white, middle class and male. The Tate give Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller as examples of UK based practitioners (PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, 2018), whilst Will Self has written extensively on the subject for publications such as The New Statesman and the Independent (Self, 2008, Self, 2016).

Despite the fact women occupying public spaces have been documented by countless artists and poets (Pollock, 2003), because of the ways in which our presence has been regulated, opportunities to “be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording” (Plath cited in Solnit, 2001, p233) have been reduced. When Lauren Elkin googled the word ‘Flâneuse,’ a feminisation of the male “idler, a dawdling observer, usually found it cities” the only recognisable female figure to come back was George Sand (Elkin, 2016, p70). Given she adopted male attire [Image 3] to enjoy her pastimes of smoking and drinking beer (Jack, 2000) her inclusion could be seen to reinforce the absence of women authors and artists within this tradition. It is also interesting to note that the term flâneur is not feminised within most French dictionaries. Elkin, a self-professed “good student of French,” tells of automatically doing it herself, having found only one actual example of the feminine noun, in the 1902 Littre (Elkin, 2016, p7). Another has it down as a type of lounge chair, something Elkin takes umbrage with: “Is that some kind of joke? The only curious idling a woman does is laying down?” (Elkin, 2016, p7).

Griselda Pollock, building on earlier works by Jane Wollf, claimed: “there is no female equivalent of the quintessential masculine figure, the flâneur, there is not and could not be a female flâneuse” (Pollock, 2003, p137). Denied positions as “normal occupants of the public realm” (Pollock, 2003, p137), women were not for looking, but for looking at. Baudelaire, so entwined with flâneuring he appears in definitions (FLÂNEUR, 2018), devoted many hours to the objectification of women, declaring: “Woman is for the artist in general…” (Baudelaire cited in Pollock, 2003, p137).

We have now come to understand and explain that observational privilege as the “male gaze” (Mulvey, 1975) and more recently we have seen the rise of respondent concept, the “female gaze” (Dirse, 2013, p15-29). However, even before we had these terms with which to frame things, there were women out walking, observing and making work about it - we just have to dig to find them. There was George Sand, as mentioned above, though she appears more famed for her bohemian lifestyle and relationship with Chopin than her output (Jack, 2000). Elkin also points to Virginia Woolf, and Amy Levy as examples of historical flâneuses (Elkin, 2016), and latterly, there are several women currently making work that could be said to be psychogeographic. Although the Tate doesn’t list her or indeed any women in their online entry for psychogeography, Sophie Calle found inspiration in the dérive when she sought to “reacquaint herself with the rhythms of (Paris) and the lives of its inhabitants “(Güner, 2009) and Susan Phillipz’ site-specific work has also been described as psychogeographic (Tate, 2015). Additionally, we have Laura Oldfield-Ford and Morag Rose, both of whom make work very firmly in the radical Situationist tradition [Image 4a-b], though the former baulks at being termed a psychogeographer, of which more later.

Academic Tina Richardson makes work in psychogeographic tradition, and her blog entry On Walking . . . and Women mentions the work of Dee Heddon and Cathy Turner, who discuss the absence of “the female psychogeographer in postmodern urban space” (Richardson, 2015). This notion was then challenged by Phil Smith in his 2014 book On Walking... and Stalking Sebald, citing Rose and Richardson herself as examples of the growing numbers of women working in the field. Richardson even goes on to mention the academic shift towards a feminist psychogeography, highlighting Bridger’s Psychogeography and feminist methodology (Richardson, 2015).

So, despite them not taking centre stage in the history of walking, women are there, bimbling about at the edges, recording what they find. Proving what anyone who has ever been a 15-year-old girl in a shopping centre already knows: of course we can bloody well see, as well as be seen. We devoted entire weekends to those very things.

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