Merlin Coverly: Psychogeography

The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’ And in broad terms, psychogeography is, as the name suggests, the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact of urban place.


My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude… it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or
method. I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be.
- Xavier De Maistre, A Journey Around My Room


So, here was the notion.What about a tale of a man who “lost his way" who became so entangled in some maze of imagination and speculation that the common, material ways of the world became of no significance to him?

...

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder,mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of
King’s Cross Station… I will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these things are… But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten… And all historical associations; they too must be laid aside… Of all this the
follower of the London Art must purge himself when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.
- Arthur Machen, The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering.


Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram. Secret staircases, frames from which the paintings
quickly slip aside and vanish (giving way to an archangel bearing a sword or to those who must forever advance), buttons which must be indirectly pressed to make an entire room move sideways or vertically, or immediately change its furnishings; we may imagine the mind’s greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls.
- Andre Breton, Nadja


Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a
different schooling.Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance,
like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying.
- Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle


The crowd was the veil behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur’s final coup.
- Walter Benjamin


We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
- Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism


Also written in 1956, but first published in the Internationale Situationniste #2 in December 1958, Guy
Debord’s Theory of the Dérive outlines the second tool at the psychogeographer’s disposal. Described as ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances,’ the dérive involves ‘playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.’27 Debord’s statement here is a highly contentious
one for it seems hard to think of the dérive in terms other than of those strolls undertaken by the surrealists a generation earlier. Yet, on closer inspection, although both appear to involve an element of chance and lack a preordained direction, the dérive does not demonstrate the pure submission to unconscious desire that characterised the surrealist wanderings and indeed the journeys of the
strolling flâneur.The dérive may lack a clear destination but it is not without purpose. On the contrary the dériveur is conducting a psychogeographical investigation and is expected to return home having noted the ways in which the areas traversed resonate with particular moods and ambiences. The results of this fieldwork form the basis for the situationist refashioning of the city.
- Guy Debord


Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself.

The concept of ‘strolling’, aimless urban wandering, the flâneur, had been superseded.We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent – sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role-model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for the Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey… The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how.

- Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory.