Coverley (2006) - Psychogeography
From Inventiopedia
Coverley, Merlin (2006) Psychogeography, Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. [Kindle edition]
This book is an easyily read, but nevertheless quite comprehensive history of psychogeography. For Coverley, this term refers not just to a specific practice (or theory) promoted by Guy Debord and the Situationists in Paris in the 1950s, but rather a long tradition with roots in the literary histories of both Paris and London, back to Daniel Defoe and some of the earliest British novels. Coverley traces this history, via Defoe, Blake and other early British literature, via Charles Baudelaire's translation of Edgar Allan Poe and introduction of the flâneur, Walter Benjamin's scholarly treatment of the same, through surrealism and a french literary tradition of "mental travels" (Robinsonner), to Debord.
Debord does not seem to acknowledge any of these earlier roots, and posits his introduction of the concept in opposition to aesthetics and to André Bretons surrealism. According to Coverley, Debord conceives of psychogeography as a methodology for rigorous, scientific study of the urban geography and its effects on human behaviour and emotions. However, since Debord and his colleagues appear to not actually have carried out much psychogeographical activity themselves, but rather just presented theories and manifestoes, psychogeography as a methodology must be considered "an abject failure".
"...one cannot help but notice that, while the theoretical and instructive elements of psychogeography are manifest, the actual results of all these experiments are strangely absent. Trawling through the extensive literature on psychogeography and situationism, one is hard pressed to find any concrete evidence of clear instances of psychogeographic activity." (Loc. 1516-1525)
"...situationism is today much better known for its emphasis on revolutionary politics than for its cultural component. Considered solely on its merits as a practical tool at the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, psychogeography must be considered an abject failure. The meagre results of prolonged theorising reveal such a paucity of useful material that it is barely surprising that psychogeography fell from favour. In this respect, as indeed so many others, the fate of psychogeography resembles that of automatism in the surrealist movement, where a prominent theoretical position at the outset was quickly followed by a realisation of its obvious limitations and its quiet demotion." (Loc. 1554-1561)
Coverley instead chooses to focus on two different extensions of the psychogeographical project. First, de certeau's analysis of "Walking in the city" (in The Practice of Everyday Life). Coverley recaps de certeau's analysis of the different perspectives of the 'voyeur' (seeing the city from above, from the perspective of authority, without comprehension for the life on the streets) and that of the 'walker' on street level.
"This is the distinction that governs modern urban life, that between walker and voyeur, and it is one which emphasises the democratic importance of the street-level perspective to be gained from walking the city and reconnecting with individual life. This is the return to the street promoted by the situationists who railed against the systematic and totalising perspective of the governing authorities. In the light of this distinction it is clear how the simple act of walking can take on a subversive hue, abolishing the distancing and voyeuristic perspective of those who view the city from above. This dual perspective is built-in within the structure of the modern city and is what psychogeography seeks to overturn, restoring the primacy of the street.
For the totalising gaze of the voyeur sees the city as a homogenous whole, an anonymous urban space that sees no place for individual or separate identities and which erases or suppresses the personal and the local: 'Stories are becoming private and sink into the secluded places in neighbourhoods, families, or individuals, while the rumours propagated by the media cover everything and, gathered under the figure of the City, the masterword of an anonymous law, the substitute for all proper names, they wipe out or combat any superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure.'[ref to de certeau] Only by resisting this overview can the individual re-establish the emotional engagement with his surroundings that psychogeography promotes. For 'their story begins on ground level, with footsteps,' writes de Certeau, and it is here, not up above, that the history of the city is written.
However, de Certeau also exposes the contradiction between the objective methods of recording these journeys across the city and the subjective nature of the individual histories they reflect. [...] Thus, as the situationists found to their cost, a rigorous sociological or geographical attempt to map the city and to categorise regions according to the results of such surveys simply reveals the contradiction between the objectivity of the method and the subjectivity of that which is to be catalogued." (Loc 1621-1645)
Coverley concludes: "de Certeau's theory of walking highlights the limitations of all systematic theoretical systems, psychogeography included, in accurately capturing the relationship between the city and the individual. [...] in our modern technological landscape, increasingly homogenous and regulated, dominated by surveillance and hostile to the pedestrian, it is now the novelist and the poet, not the theorist, who are uncovering and celebrating these overlooked and forgotten corners of the city." (Loc 1645-1668)
Therefore Coverley moves on to outline a second extension of psychogeography into modern thought, in the works of a series of contemporary English novelists and writers who seem to write, either explicitly or implicity, in the 'spirit' of psychogeography - from JG Ballard (Crash) to Ian Sinclair (Lud Heat), Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home (of the London Psychogeographical Association), to filmmaker Patrick Keiller (London and Robinson in Space).
Coverley is clearly a london patriot (one of his other books is titled "London Literature"), and the lack of any attempt on his part to define the concept of psychogeography makes it easy to suspect that he is focusing so much on a specific literary tradition from London not so much because this is central to the concept, as that it is central to his literary interests. However, it is certainly interesting to see this way of redirecting the concept away from a radical political practice which certainly seems to have been quite fruitless, into a literary (or broader artistic) field where it clearly seems very fruitful indeed.
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 15:57, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
