Category: Reading

Merlin Coverley., (2007) Psychogeography, Pocket Essentials

pp. 111-139

People:

William Blake– Godfather of Psychogeography

Iain Sinclair (trek around M25); Lud Heat; Uses Psychogeogaphy as a way to write; author and film maker; “occult paranoia and historical investigation”

Peter Ackroyd– “invokes the visionary traditions of the nineteenth century in his writing”; has been described as a ‘historic-mystical psychogeographer’; author

Nicholas Hawksmoor– architect of many historical churches in London (including St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, and Christ Church in Spatialfields

“Through efforts of the imagination as much as through research, Hawksmoor’s work has been woven into a parallel history of London’s underworld, particularly his Christ Church Spitalfields, near which Jack the Ripper performed his grisly murders in the 1880s. Published in 1975, Iain Sinclair’s feverish poem Lud Heat suggests that the sites of Hawksmoor’s London churches form an invisible geometry of power lines in the city, corresponding to an Egyptian hieroglyph. Peter Ackroyd built on this myth a decade later with his murder thriller Hawksmoor” -The Guardian

JG Ballard– ‘Death of Affect’ – loss of emotional engagement with our surroundings;

Stewart Home– resurgence of psychogeography in the 1990s

Patrick Keiller– films London, Robinson in Space; 1994 film London

Definitions:

Situationists– Revolutionary alliance of European avant-garde artists, writers and poets formed at a conference in Italy in 1957 (as Internationale Situationiste or IS).

The IS developed a critique of capitalism based on a mixture of Marxism and surrealism. Leading figure of the movement Guy Debord identified consumer society as the Society of the Spectacle in his influential 1967 book of that title. In the field of culture situationists wanted to break down the division between artists and consumers and make cultural production a part of everyday life.

Situationist ideas played an important role in the revolutionary Paris events of 1968. The IS was dissolved in 1972.

avant-garde |ˌaväntˈɡärd| noun (usually the avant-garde) new and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them: works by artists of the Russian avant-garde.

surrealism |səˈrēəˌlizəm| noun a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Memorable Quotes

…Modern life in advanced industrial societies as characterized by a loss of emotional sensitivity. Amidst the barrage of media imagery to which we are subjected, our emotional response is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our surroundings without the mediated images television and advertising.” (116)

… I think the suburbs are more interesting than people will let on . IN the suburbs you find uncenred lives… so that people have more freedom to explore their own imaginations, their own obsessions” (118)

• earlier he says essentially that people are so overstimulated by imagery that their boredom will mirror the violent and sexualized imagery surrounding them. But i guess in the suburbs what is there to mirror?

“xxx zones within the city which display chronological resonance with earlier events, activities, and inhabitants” (124)

“Ackroyd’s detective muses upon the tendency of murderers and their victims to return repeatedly through the generations to similar locations as if drawn by some malevolent force, noting that ‘certain streets or patches ground provoked a malevolence which generally seemed to be quite without motive'” (124)