When I wrote my summary of Nick Papadimitriou’s Scarp: In Search of London’s Outer Limits, I suggested I might turn to this essay by Luke Bennett, which I ran across while I was reading Tina Richardson’s anthology Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. Back then, I skipped over Luke Bennett’s discussion of Scarp, because I generally prefer to read critical accounts of a text after I’ve read it at least once myself. But I’m glad I did turn to Bennett’s essay. He presents a close reading of two moments in Scarp that I skipped over, before suggesting that there are parallels between psychogeography and the law, and calling for something he describes as “legal psychogeography.” Bennett is a lawyer by training, a geographer by vocation, and a psychogeographer by avocation, and so his thinking on these issues is the product of his unique background and education. He’s also not a bad literary critic, if his readings of those two moments from Scarp are anything to go by.
Bennett begins by suggesting that Papadimitriou “conjures many dissonant ideas, images and registers” in Scarp, and that in this essay he intends to
dissect two of his strange conjunctions and, in doing so, consider through them the prospects for extending contemporary British psychogeography’s embrace of the incongruous—the out-of-place, the absurd and the out-of-keeping—beyond psychogeography’s usually aesthetically inclined preoccupation with liminality and into the mundane sphere of the law’s everyday manifestations within the built environment. (59)
The first of those “strange conjunctions” is Papadimitriou’s description of fatal car crashes at the “Suicide Corner” on the A41 in the 1950s. According to Bennett, Papadimitriou “draws forth isolated incidents from the pages of long-forgotten local newspapers and memory, activating these incidental archives in order to show a reverberation of these events within the landscape itself” (59). That’s an interesting reading; I thought Papadimitriou was imagining these accidents, that the reference to a local newspaper was part of the fantasy, but perhaps I was wrong. In any case, at one point, Papadimitriou has an anonymous civil engineer think about the highway and how to extend the M1 highway over the high ground above. For Bennett,
Papadimitriou captures in this passage how the task-orientated gaze of the engineer sees the topography as a set of logistical challenges, a puzzle to solve as he works through in his mind’s eye the most feasible path for his roadway. Papadimitriou’s description seeks to show how all other sensory inputs are blocked (or discarded) as irrelevant to this man’s purpose. He is standing there for a reason. He is harvesting the landscape for what he needs today. This applied gaze foregrounds certain features and backgrounds all else. (60)
At the same time, Papadimitriou “shows how even that focus is vulnerable to undermining the assault of the disregarded ‘background,’ as an irresistible reverie—or at least a momentary noticing of other things, takes hold,” when a bird chirps and he notices the woods and fields and ditches around him (60). “In showing the breaking of concentration caused by the bird’s proximate existence,” Bennett writes, “Papadimitriou keys into a number of trends (or ‘turns’) in contemporary sociocultural theory” (60). What Bennett wants to do in his essay is to map out those trends and show the affinity between contemporary British psychogeography and cultural geography, even though psychogeography “is currently regarded with considerable suspicion by academics” (60).
First, Papadimitriou’s fictional engineer is embodied; he is “embedded in life and place: his lifeworld” (60). He is, Bennett continues, “engaged in a moment-by-moment cocreation of his sense of place,” partly through “the mental (and disciplinary) constructs he brings (his gaze),” and partly because the place where he finds himself makes him,
through materially resisting certain options or actions, through presenting certain ‘givens’ (history, morphology, entropy) that he—this individual—cannot resist. He is entrained in a world, a traveller in time as well as space. This place, and ideas, memories and emotions that he or others associate with it, shapes his experience of it and experiences in it. (60-61)
This moment in Papadimitriou’s text is therefore aligned with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and with Kathleen Stewart’s “influential advocacy of consideration of the preconscious swirl of ‘ordinary affects’ (emotions, bodily dispositions, habits) that shape the performance of everyday life” (61), which can be in her 2007 book, Ordinary Affects. (Reading one text always leads to other texts; the research process sprawls in infinite directions.) Stewart, according to Bennett, is interested in how we experience, react, and then make sense of “where the embodied flow of life has swept us”; she also foregrounds the importance of studying everyday life, a concern she shared with Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, and the Surrealists (61). This connects her to contemporary psychogeography, according to Bennett, which
has an affinity with this scrutiny of the mundane in that it aspires to a restless multiplicity, to an epistemological promiscuity, to an open noticing of everything, to a renunciation of conventional filters that push certain elements centre stage and cause others to recede from view. All of these aims can be subsumed within the notion of psychogeography having an embrace of incongruity at the heart of its methodology, as it seeks out the complexity, colour, worth and drama of the seemingly ordinary through juxtaposition, playfulness, embodiment, allusion and heterodoxy. (61)
The engineer’s thoughts are also suggestive of Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materialism” theses: “she advocates giving greater attention to nonhuman actors and their potency within our human encounters with the world” in her 2010 book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (61).
Bennett sees a connection between psychogeography in general, and Papadimitriou’s text in particular, and “an ‘object-oriented’ pivot toward materialism” in a number of academic disciplines, from literary and cultural theory to archaeology and philosophy; he suggests that Scarp is linked to that materialist pivot, particularly for “those who foreground the coconstitutive role of human/matter entanglement” and “the mundane, event-forming ‘force of things,’” or “the cumulative effects of many tiny encounters with things, peole and rules that in aggregate make our daily experience and channel our actions” (61-62). Bennett also suggests that Papadimitriou’s engineer’s impression of that spot on the highway would not be the same as the impressions of other visitors: “This is a relational view of the construction of place,” he suggests, one that takes its cue from the work of Doreen Massey and others who apply the work of Gilles Deleuze to geography (62).“For such theorists,” he contends, “the sense of place is dynamic and constantly being re-created because it is only ever an unstable aggregate of the myriad orientations of users of that space” (62). However, “[w]hile the landscape poet can happily leave us with a romantic resurgence of ‘nature’ overwhelming an instrumentalist man, psychogeography’s embrace of incongruity can—and should—be taken further”: it ought to be able “to show how the workaday preoccupations of an instrumentalist science can invade a thought stream of more affective purpose, showing how the ‘straight’ world reasserts itself, barging itself back to the foreground—in short, how it recolonizes consciousness and gaze” (62). For that reason, Papadimitriou’s engineer’s reverie is brief, fleeting, “inevitably undermined by the ‘day job’ returning to his consciousness, the ‘real world’ bringing him back down to earth and back to the prosaic task in hand” (62).
For Bennett, psychogeography is all about juxtapositions of incongruent things, and he suggests that “[u]sing incongruence to tease out and vividly depict all aspects of the multiplicity of the experience of place could be psychogeography’s rich methodological contribution” (62). “Psychogeographers are not the only explorers (or researchers) who want to ‘weird’ the world,” Bennett suggests, referring to anthropologist James Clifford’s embrace of Surrealist practices of collage and assemblage in his 1981 essay “On Ethnographic Surrealism” (63). In addition, British psychogeography’s aspirations “to multipy the readings of any place,” is not dissimilar to Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (64).
Bennett suggests that psychogeography is focused on “the potentiality of place to avoid the closure (the narrowing down) inherent in instrumentalist meaning making” (64), and he argues that Papadimitriou demonstrates this in the second strange conjunction he wants to explore: an old woman’s death juxtaposed against the formula by which water utilities calculate sewerage charges (64). “Here Papadimitriou willfully brings together two entirely separate parts of the modern world and melds them simply in order to delight in their incongruence,” Bennett writes. “There is a playful surrealist strategem at work here—but also something unusual in psychogeography,” because that formula, known as the Mogden Formula, “is presented without explanation”; there is no reason to mention it, except that Papadimitriou finds it interesting, even occult, in the sense that it’s a part of daily life that remains hidden from most of us (64). (That’s a version of the occult that makes sense to me.) This passage is in the appendix of Papadimitriou’s book, which is the journal of Perry Kutland, one of Papadimitriou’s fictional characters. For Bennett,
[t]he appendix is both the high point of Papadimitriou’s embrace of contemporary psychogeography’s incongruent intent and the point at which the integrity of his literary text—its manifest point—becomes most unstable. The irruption of the Mogden Formula is only held within a vague semblance of narrative progression by the baseline riff provided by the juxtaposed glimpses of the final events of the old lady’s life. There is something humanist in this, perhaps an implication that we must always strive to find and foreground the real, modest and anonymous lives that play out alongside such systemic abstractions as waste water management. But whatever Papadimitriou’s intent is here, we are certainly left with an embrace of incongruent multiplicity—a simultaneous, parallel reading of multiple, seemingly unrelated fragments of the place under scrutiny, juxtaposing them surrealist collage-like, to see what conjunctions occur. And—for one—it is a juxtaposition that does not quite lapse into a romantic reverie. While the juxtaposition is humanist (perhaps) in overall effect, the reader is left with a glimpse of the strange complexity of the technical bureaucracy by which the most universal of human emissions are ‘managed,’ and perhaps also a sense of Papadimitriou’s fascination with this infrastructural hydrological cycle. (64)
In fact, Bennett continues, by foregrounding the Mogden Formula,
Papadimitriou gives us a glimpse of what a truly rebellious (and also academically valiant) psychogeography could be, a depictive writing that shows the irruption of technical realms into affective life, reversing the psychogeographer’s usual discovery of a quirky anecdote, a warm breeze, or a fragment of history to energize a mundane place. Through such bleeding back of technical, bureaucratic and regulatory fragments into psychogeography’s “literary” account forming (as a counter to the predominance of romantic reverie), those accounts would vividly reveal how the everyday world is made both of natural and (affective) human vibrancy and of matter, obstruction, systemic regularity, instrumentality and control. (65)
The kind of psychogeography Papadimitriou is engaged in, Bennett argues, would take psychogeography “back toward the original political reconnaissance envisaged by Guy Debord and the Situationist Internal to find in reconnaissance both the ways in which the built environment is experienced creatively by the individual and the strictures and structures by which the regularity and governability of the urban realm is routinely manifested” (65). There is scope in psychogeography “to start searching again for the built environment’s effects upon the emotions and behaviour of individuals and of the presence of specific laws and their related effects within the geographical environment,” the goals Debord advocated for the practice back in 1955 (65).
Here Bennett moves in an entirely new direction: towards something he calls “a legal psychogeography”(65). A legal psychogeography would be
a hybrid fusing of aspects of environmental psychology, institutional ethnography, all of the sociocultural ‘turns’ (material, affective, relational, everyday), and legal geography to attain—through psychogeography’s embrace of incongruence—insight into the cocreation of place, society and law through localized practices an experiences. (65-66)
“The law does not alone create the world, nor does it have unfettered ability even to shape people, things and places,” Bennett continues, suggesting that “even in the most controlling society, law’s generality must yield to aspects of the specificity of individuals, their actions and their environments—all as imbrications of unique situations and places formed by them” (66). Legal geographers, like himself, therefore “look to study law’s manifestations in (and the curbing of its power by) the social and material world” (66). According to Bennett, the law is defined modestly in legal geography: “modest in the sense that the limit of its writ—its ability to achieve things in the world—is contingent on both the ‘macro’ factors of politics and economics and the specificities of place, power, practices and material qualities” of, in the case of law regarding highways, “any particular road” (66). According to Bennett, that modest definition indicates that “we can achieve something novel with Guy Debord’s definition of psychogeography’s project”: an attention to the material effects and sociopolitical origins of the legal framework that saturates “the built environment” (66-67). “Thus,” he continues,
psychogeography could have a role to play in showing how the law is translated into seemingly incongruent flows of matter, affect, practices and the resulting assemblages of ideas, materials and actions that form buildings, roads and the urban landscape and—in particular—provide ways to reveal the as-lived effects that those flows have upon individuals, moment by moment. (67)
“[E]verywhere has a story to tell,” Bennett writes,
and . . . there is a concern for the everyday experiences of the everyday people caught up in the law’s spatial effects. And yet legal geography has struggled to find ways to write off the localized, affective and flux-like manifestations of the law and its moment-by-moment influence on the minds and orientations of those subject to it. Here—surely—is where psychogeography has something to offer. (67-68)
A legal psychogeography’s “special contribution” would be “its concern to understand the material-human corelationship, particularly as manifested in the emotional (i.e., affective) lives of individuals through their encounters with power and ordering as expressed in the arrangement of the built environment”—something legal geography is missing (68). Legal psychogeography would therefore be “an interpretive approach that would concern itself with enquiring into the role of sensation as a mediator between law and space—in short, how affect helps make the city, its strictures and its regularities and how they in turn make both the city and its individual citizens sentient,” which is, Bennett suggests, what Debord set as the mission of psychogeography in his 1955 definition (68).
The bringing together of law and psychogeography is not strange, Bennett contends. Both are practices that are drawn toward “fragments and the incongruous” (68). He notes that Papadimitriou’s text “displays a fondness for found, mundane artifacts and texts,” with “the promise that these might provide keys to countless otherwise lost stories” (68), and suggests that “[t]here is a parallel here to the meticulous concern of crime scene investigation, or indeed any attempt by law to understand an event that has occurred at a place, by searching for material traces and then piecing them together” (68). Both Papadimitriou and lawyers are concerned with “the close, forensic examination of fragments in order to explicate the codes, stories and events that lie beyond them,” Bennett argues (68), and like detectives, psychogeographers “pore over both the dusty archive and the dross—the fragments found in event spaces—and construct a narrative by stitching their disparate findings together in accordance with codes of assembly” (69). The only difference between them is their diametrically opposed purposes: a detective seeks to close the case, while the psychogeographer “seeks to open up the space and its things to am amplification—via an incongruent multiplication of meanings” (69). Nevertheless, Bennett argues that the law, like psychogeography,
actually lives and breathes incongruent multiplicity—it is part of the partisan process, albeit that court judgements ultimately . . . require a judge to select which version of events or interpretation of legal principles he or she prefers. Still, in all areas but the final scene, law’s practice is to directly multiply meanings in partisan fashion within disputes and to do so indirectly by summoning anxious images of contingencies, as future risks to be ironed out within partial contract negotiations, in each case within the scope of given frameworks. As played out day to day in offices, courtrooms and elsewhere across the built environment, the law more than matches psychogeography in its dwelling on darkness, excess, ghosts and incongruent multiplicity. (70)
Even though the law asserts a myth of its self-image, an image “of applied reason stripped of fancy, self-contained and truth-focused,” legal geography “takes issue with this faith in law’s closure,” because it “rests on an assumption that the law is not self-contained in this way—that it is in fact a cocreation of matter, meaning and pragmatic action” (70). For that reason, legal geography “has a natural affinity with the anticlosure sentiment of contemporary psychogeography, and a psychogeographically inclined reckoning of law’s incongruous traces, flows, eruptions, artifacts, loose ends, mess and symbolism is long overdue” (70).
Bennett concludes, “[t]he affective relationship between the arrangement of things in space and the experience of place remains a central trope of psychogeographical account writing,” and psychogeographic research “can present rich reflexive description fo the story-stacking processes by which instances of place are encountered and the terms (and sense) of that encounter negotiated between the creative agency of humans and the resistances and affordances of matter and of normative systems like law” (70). In addition, “[p]sychogeography’s embrace of incongruence can make toward the opening up (explication and potential transformation) of other sense-making strategies at large in the built environment” (70). However,
just as law’s closure is a myth, so is psychogeography’s aspiration to the propagation of boundless incongruent multiplicity, for it tends too often to multiply meaning only in the direction of an obsessive pleasure-pain poetic excitation. Psychogeography needs to challenge itself, to explicate all matter-text-affect intersections, not just those that lead to whimsy or romantic reverie. (70)
In any case, bringing psychogeography into “studies of law’s manifestations in the built environment” would be “a fruitful next step for both legal geography and psychogeography” (70-71).
What is valuable in Bennett’s essay is his close reading of Scarp—or at least two moments in that text—and the way he demonstrates psychogeography’s interest in “boundless incongruent multiplicity” (70). Perhaps I’ve been short-changing psychogeography’s possibilities, focusing on the wrong things: its play with occult or esoteric knowledge and its incorporation of myth and fiction into its representations of spaces and journeys. At the same time, I need to remember that I walk in an environment where there are boundaries and limits, where the history of colonialism is fraught and tangible. I’m thinking about the treaties, for instance, and the surrender clauses that, as Sheldon Krasowski suggests, were never mentioned during the negotiation of those treaties. Is there a way to bring together the “boundless incongruent multiplicity” that Bennett sees in the most successful versions of psychogeography and the grid roads and surrender clauses of Saskatchewan? I really don’t know. My sense of this is that I’m right to be cautious. But I need to keep thinking about these questions–and about the connection between psychogeography and the kind of walking I do here.
Works Cited
Bennett, Luke. “Incongruous Steps toward a Legal Psychogeography,” Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography, edited by Tina Richardson, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 59-72.
Krasowski, Sheldon. No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous, University of Regina Press, 2019.
Papadimitriou, Nick. Scarp: In Search of London’s Outer Limits, Sceptre, 2013.