MA Week 46 - Psychogeography readings (3)

 “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography”

by Alastair Bonnett (2009).

 
This paper seeks to compare and contrast “the use of the past to critique industrial modernity”  and the “suppression of nostalgia” (p45). He explains that radical politics of either side doesn’t like nostalgia as it stands in the way of progress, and he links psychogeography with trying to understand the past; radicalism moves on, but psychogeography is of itself avant garde so it seizes on what’s not in fashion, i.e. nostalgia.

This is all interesting but not directly related to what I’m doing. Of more interest is that it gave quite a lot of useful information about Iain Sinclair and his influence causing British psychogeography to become nostalgic, which Richardson had mentioned; in the mid-1990s psychogeography had a “quixotic, love-hate relationship with the past” (p47). I think we all probably do, to be honest.  Bonnett also pinpoints the feelings of loss for place as society moves on and the everyday space changes: “within avant-garde praxis, it was at the level of everyday space, especially of the changing urban scene, that we find nostalgia most forcefully asserted”(p52). This is much more pertinent for me as I try to find traces of my heritage and identity within various places around Leeds. There is a definite sense of nostalgia, and possibly psychogeography has (is?) more concerned with nostalgia and the past than I had thought; I had found it to be more about connecting with the environment and allowing open-ness to new experience. But perhaps the fact that you are walking in a place that many people have walked before you means you are just part of an ongoing palimpsest of passersby.

Tellingly, Bonnett states that “Contemporary British psychogeography may be viewed as a creative space in which feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated”. This can be extrapolated to mean a physical space or a mental space (“headspace”), and possibly other types of space I haven’t thought of yet. But it is very much a creative space, a thinking space, a linking/connecting space. The visual outcomes that I’ve been producing for the past 9 months all depend on psychogeography of some kind, whether through an actual wandering or an item of interest seen on a car journey.

Bonnett also touches upon the idea of the power structures which bind us and whose disruption fuelled the original derive. These are easily forgotten as the walker takes the urban wandering with their own viewpoints, but if we stand back they too can reveal something of the hidden. One thing I never commented on during the seminal Armley walk was the fact that some workmen (they all seemed to be men) were building the new Bradford – Leeds cycle superhighway on Armley Road. Quite why we need to spend so much money and disruption on this (bus stops removed, 10 passengers waiting in the rain, whilst one cyclist goes past once in a while) is not for me to answer, but the answer must lie in some political power construct somewhere.

Possibly the most pertinent statement comes in Bonnett’s conclusion; “attachments to the past and feelings of loss becomes sites of repression and potent resources for resistance and technique”(p63). I believe he speaks here to (at least part of) what I am trying to do; to critique and resist the loss caused by the deindustrialisation of Yorkshire.

 

MA Week 43 - Psychogeography Readings (2)

Psychogeography readings (2)

Tina Richardson’s chapter A Wander through the scene of British Urban Walking in the book she edited, Walking Inside Out : Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015) gives a good overview of the current stated of psychogeography. I’ve summarised below a few key points.

Richardson quotes Situationist International member Abdelhafid Khatib’s definition of the dérive: “At the same time as being a form of action, it is a means of knowledge”. She further clarifies that the dérive cannot be just a stroll and that the wanderer must be conscious of the environment. Psychogeography concerns itself with crossing boundaries, whether logical or physical (p2). This is certainly something I’ve experienced in my own wanderings.

 

Richardson is very inclusive in her discussion of the urban walk, and certainly does not equate it only to the SI dérive. She considers that numerous factors are at play; the walker, the place, the method. Neither is she precious about the style of the outcomes, citing zines, blogs and academic papers as equally valid outputs. The walk necessarily causes a subjective and individual response. She encourages readers to define their own form of psychogeography if they wish or need to do so. (p3-5), urging the reader to name their own approach and formulate it into a more clearly defined methodology (p18). She suggests (p13) that “artists (both performance and visual), while not always describing themselves as psychogeographers, might call themselves ‘walking artists’.” Possibly the idea of walking as a way of challenging the traditional boundaries of art? It has certainly felt that I have pushed my practice forward through urban wandering.

Interesting is her mention of Iain Sinclair, a contemporary British psychogeographer who often takes a nostalgic view, and whose influence has led to British psychogeography taking a nostalgic bent. The nostalgia has a danger of leading to a type of repurposing the past, of revealing or perhaps inventing forgotten characters, a rose-tinted longing for a time that never really existed in the way that it’s presented. This I interpret as a veiled criticism of viewing history “at a distance”. (p10).However, the nostalgia connection is interesting as it also occurs in Harrison’s discussion of heritage (see this Week 16 blogpost). Richardson here comments on a connection that I’d already made by my own wanderings, namely that of  heritage and psychogeography.

She demands (p18) “if a psychogeographer is not revealing the hidden topographical layers of social history or questioning the physical manifestation of some capitalist edifice or other, is psychogeography actually taking place?” - good question. My wanderings revealed some layers of social history to me, at least, and in turn I tried to depict these visually for other people to view and critique. I suppose there was also some anger at the capitalist destruction of industry too.  So I must be doing psychogeography….?