I've got myself a lovely niche book to write about called Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. I'm reading it for my dissertation but since I actually got to choose my dissertation topic I'm happy to be sat looking through it and I am also keen to blog about it here.
If I were to try and explain psychogeography to you all the post would be too long to be worth reading. In fact, the entire dissertation aims to define the increasingly abstract term. What I am going to do is to pick out some intriguing points of interest in some of the chapters. It will help me with my work because said chapters enter into a discussion about one of the works that I am analysing for the essay... And it's not a well known piece of writing so I am very lucky to have found a fairly academic text that discusses its contents. It cost me twenty pounds second-hand but that's all well and good because I feel like a massive book hipster when I look down at this thing. There's a certain charm to owning a thick tome with the phrase "Contemporary British Psychogeography" written across it.
You could oversimplify psychogeography by describing it as a literary movement whose adherents aim to document how the urban landscape affects the psyche. This ignores the political aspect of psychogeography but it's not a bad definition for the uninitiated. In the introduction Tina Richardson (the editor) addresses the problem of defining the genre. She says that the book does not aim to answer all of the questions that the term psychogeography can bring up. What Walking Inside Out does aim to do, she says, is to "open up the space that can be defined as psychogeography, providing examples and encouraging debate." So essentially, psychogeography can mean a lot of things and Tina's book gives us a wide array of theories to ponder regarding what the genre means to different people.
I'm going to extract as much wisdom as I can from the book that relates to "Scarp" by Nick Papadimitriou. I bought Walking Inside Out knowing that it would help me to analyse this text for my dissertation. I couldn't believe my luck when I found out that someone had published a book which mentioned this title.
What is intriguing about Nick is that, as a writer, he does not like the term psychogeography. He calls himself a "deep topographer"... But let's see what Tina thinks of him. Tina begins by using the term "urban walking" as if it were a synonym for psychogeography, but she then goes onto admit that at the present time, some authors are venturing past the city's outer limits in search of inspiration from less populated environments. "Some psychogeographers do countertourist activities" she explains. Walks that "stray into more rural areas". Nick's book attempts to explore the county that used to be called Middlesex - a place which actually contains both urban and suburban spaces as well as "Greater London's green belt," so it ought to be obvious why Nick's writing confuses the situation regarding psychogeography's parameters. A genre which largely seeks to document the human experience of walking around our cities now seems to include works from authors that go beyond the metropolitan. The whole point of Scarp is that the former county of Middlesex used to be much more rural than it was at the time that Nick started writing about it. Nick feels that the countryside is being swallowed up by the city. In this sense he, like other psychogeographers, is still critiquing the city as a physical phenomenon... But instead of exploring its effects on our psyche from within, he is bemoaning its physical takeover of the landscape without. Which brings up the question as to whether Nick is concerned with psychology at all? Is he still doing the same thing as all the other writers, or is it something different?
What can be said of Scarp is that it is still political. The removal of green space is a political concern. I need to find out whether Scarp is more than that though. How does Nick document his own cognitive experience of the lost county, if at all? Time to skip ahead a few pages.
Oo ayup, I've gone from page six to page eleven and Tina is talking not just about Nick again (thanks glossary!) but also about one of the other authors whose work I will be analysing for my dissertation- Will Self! Glad I bought this thing. Anyway... Here Tina goes on to describe what deep topography is. She takes a quotation from Scarp where it is described as "land's very structure and memory unfurling in the mind". Bingo. There's the connection. Scarp is concerned with how landscapes affect the mind. It's just that it is also concerned with memory. You could say that in a way, Nick's walking exploits and the writing that came of it stretch psychogeography as a genre by taking it into new areas. He's adding new ingredients, not taking any away. I'm not sure that it really matters whether or not an author likes the categories within which their works are placed because this ought to be subjective. Tina seems to acknowledge this on page 15. Despite Nick's protests, she continues to link him to the genre that he has distanced himself from so publicly. I'm beginning to wonder whether we can clearly define it at all. Maybe it's like how I've always thought of modern art i.e. if you think that something is art, then it must be art. Something that nobody can take away from you! Clearly, the power of the author isn't absolute. We take their writings and make of them what we will.
If I were to try and explain psychogeography to you all the post would be too long to be worth reading. In fact, the entire dissertation aims to define the increasingly abstract term. What I am going to do is to pick out some intriguing points of interest in some of the chapters. It will help me with my work because said chapters enter into a discussion about one of the works that I am analysing for the essay... And it's not a well known piece of writing so I am very lucky to have found a fairly academic text that discusses its contents. It cost me twenty pounds second-hand but that's all well and good because I feel like a massive book hipster when I look down at this thing. There's a certain charm to owning a thick tome with the phrase "Contemporary British Psychogeography" written across it.
You could oversimplify psychogeography by describing it as a literary movement whose adherents aim to document how the urban landscape affects the psyche. This ignores the political aspect of psychogeography but it's not a bad definition for the uninitiated. In the introduction Tina Richardson (the editor) addresses the problem of defining the genre. She says that the book does not aim to answer all of the questions that the term psychogeography can bring up. What Walking Inside Out does aim to do, she says, is to "open up the space that can be defined as psychogeography, providing examples and encouraging debate." So essentially, psychogeography can mean a lot of things and Tina's book gives us a wide array of theories to ponder regarding what the genre means to different people.
I'm going to extract as much wisdom as I can from the book that relates to "Scarp" by Nick Papadimitriou. I bought Walking Inside Out knowing that it would help me to analyse this text for my dissertation. I couldn't believe my luck when I found out that someone had published a book which mentioned this title.
What is intriguing about Nick is that, as a writer, he does not like the term psychogeography. He calls himself a "deep topographer"... But let's see what Tina thinks of him. Tina begins by using the term "urban walking" as if it were a synonym for psychogeography, but she then goes onto admit that at the present time, some authors are venturing past the city's outer limits in search of inspiration from less populated environments. "Some psychogeographers do countertourist activities" she explains. Walks that "stray into more rural areas". Nick's book attempts to explore the county that used to be called Middlesex - a place which actually contains both urban and suburban spaces as well as "Greater London's green belt," so it ought to be obvious why Nick's writing confuses the situation regarding psychogeography's parameters. A genre which largely seeks to document the human experience of walking around our cities now seems to include works from authors that go beyond the metropolitan. The whole point of Scarp is that the former county of Middlesex used to be much more rural than it was at the time that Nick started writing about it. Nick feels that the countryside is being swallowed up by the city. In this sense he, like other psychogeographers, is still critiquing the city as a physical phenomenon... But instead of exploring its effects on our psyche from within, he is bemoaning its physical takeover of the landscape without. Which brings up the question as to whether Nick is concerned with psychology at all? Is he still doing the same thing as all the other writers, or is it something different?
What can be said of Scarp is that it is still political. The removal of green space is a political concern. I need to find out whether Scarp is more than that though. How does Nick document his own cognitive experience of the lost county, if at all? Time to skip ahead a few pages.
Oo ayup, I've gone from page six to page eleven and Tina is talking not just about Nick again (thanks glossary!) but also about one of the other authors whose work I will be analysing for my dissertation- Will Self! Glad I bought this thing. Anyway... Here Tina goes on to describe what deep topography is. She takes a quotation from Scarp where it is described as "land's very structure and memory unfurling in the mind". Bingo. There's the connection. Scarp is concerned with how landscapes affect the mind. It's just that it is also concerned with memory. You could say that in a way, Nick's walking exploits and the writing that came of it stretch psychogeography as a genre by taking it into new areas. He's adding new ingredients, not taking any away. I'm not sure that it really matters whether or not an author likes the categories within which their works are placed because this ought to be subjective. Tina seems to acknowledge this on page 15. Despite Nick's protests, she continues to link him to the genre that he has distanced himself from so publicly. I'm beginning to wonder whether we can clearly define it at all. Maybe it's like how I've always thought of modern art i.e. if you think that something is art, then it must be art. Something that nobody can take away from you! Clearly, the power of the author isn't absolute. We take their writings and make of them what we will.
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