World Famous Comics: Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place
Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place
By: Will Self Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Bloomsbury USA Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 256 Publication Date: October 30, 2007 Release Date: October 30, 2007
For those interested in the connection between people and place, the best of the decade long collaboration between literary brat packer Will Self and gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman.
Opening with a dazzling new 20,000-word essay on walking from London to New York, Psychogeography is a collection of 50 short pieces written over the last four years, together with 50 four-color illustrations by Ralph Steadman. In Psychogeography Self and Steadman explore the relationship between psyche and place in the contemporary world. Self thinks most people have a “wind-screen-based virtuality” on long- and short-distance travel. We drive, take buses and trains, fly. To combat this compromised reality, Will Self walks, relating intimately to place, as pedestrians do. Ranging in subject from swimming the Ganges to motorcycling across the Australian outback, shopping in an Iowa mall to surfing a tsunami, Psychogeography is at once a map of our world and the psychoanalysis of the way we inhabit it. The pieces are serious, humorous, facetious, and rambunctious. Psychogeography, the study of the effects of geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, has captivated other writers including W. G. Sebald and Peter Ackroyd, but Self and Steadman have their own unique spin on how place shapes people and vice versa.
Modern Situationist Psychogeography in its contemporary manifestation owes much to the 1950s situationists from the Left Bank of Paris believing (this was after several carafes of vin de table) that by traversing the city on foot they could bring down the micro climate structures of capitalism - the pod like enclaves of home, train and office and instigate the revolution.
They failed. But Guy Debord, a founder member of this group, with his seminal text 'The Society of the Spectacle' laid the foundations for a Marxist interpretation of modern life as a chimera, mediated through the lens of the media and technology, so nothing is real any more.
Will Self, himself a long time lancer of contemporary societal virtues and mores, tries to reorient himself eotechnically amongst the modern climate of car and aeroplane. (For an interesting exposition of this concept, check out his google lecture on the subject, available easily via, er, google). He walks, not in the standard fashion - rugged Appalachian trail, romantic sunset beach - but amongst the Ballardian structures of urban life - the motorways, industrial estates, retail boulevards and urban hinterlands, traditionally neglected by the visually snobbish flaneur.
Starting out, he details a walk he took aiming to fuse the twin parts of his psyche - his base in Vauxhall, South London, and his mother's homeland, New York. He walks from South London to Heathrow, flies business class to New York - giving opportunity for a delicious metaphor of forming a cupola with fellow traveller 'anonymous lovers spent by mercantile soixante-neuf' - and walks from JFK to the centre of Manhattan accompanied by several members of the great and good of New York literary society who become puzzlingly engaged in the walk (and cop quite a few blisters on the way).
The rest of the book consists of bite sized articles from Well Self's Independent newspaper 'Psychogeography' column. A vast array of points on the globe are covered: Morocco, Ohio, Barcelona, Dublin, Rio (though not so much east of Suez). Reading these pieces as a collection you pick up a sense of how the flow of the column works: Self visits a place, often in the context of a book tour, or a family trip, or sometimes - as in the case of a visit to the Buncefield oil depot leak - purely his own curiousity. Once there he puts out his imaginative and surrealist feelers to get a sense of how the architecture, landscape and people of a place rub him up and affect his sense of psyche. Hence the pieces in urban areas are written in a more boiler plated, grittier style, with appropriate metaphors than those in cleaner, sparsely populated areas. The resulting text is often far more surreal, and studded with more references to contemporary culture, architecture, politics (anything that fills Self's voluminous memory) than you could probably imagine.
Generally, the book is an entertaining coffee table work, full of well written, 'glib satires' as Self terms them. They are generally not his greatest journalistic performances. Sometimes he draws up a keen sense of psyche and place, at other times clearly nothing much is happening and Self draws on his vast memory reserves to regale us with a tale from his myriad past. The writing is always fresh and pungent and the illustrations by Ralph Steadman - engorged, satirical grotesques in the spirit of Dali - are ideal accompaniments.
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