While thinking and writing about Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital this week, I realized that I needed a firmer sense of exactly what psychogeography is. Good thing Merlin Coverley’s little book on the subject was on my shelf. It’s a brief but informative look at a variety of writers–Coverley is primarily concerned with literary manifestations of psychogeography, which isn’t surprising, since his 2012 book Ways of Wandering: The Writer as Walker, is also focused on literary texts. (I’ve read Ways of Wandering but because I didn’t taken notes on it, I’m going to have to read it again for this project.) I wouldn’t be surprised if, for that reason, Psychogeography were somewhat controversial among psychogeographers. That wouldn’t bother me if it were the case, because I’m not a psychogeographer and come at this subject without any preconceived ideas about what falls within the definition.

The book’s introduction rehearses Coverley’s argument in too much detail–I sense that the publisher asked for some padding to get the book to a desired length–but it does explain Coverley’s approach to psychogeography. He begins by noting that psychogeography is now a common term, frequently used, but that nobody knows exactly what it means (9). Is it a literary movement, a political strategy, a new age idea, or a set of avant-garde art practices? “The answer, of course, is that psychogeography is all of these things,” Coverley writes, “resisting definition through a shifting series of interwoven themes and constantly being reshaped by its practitioners” (10). The term originated in Paris, in the writings of the Lettrist Group, a forerunner of the Situationist International, but it was not defined clearly until 1955, when Guy Debord wrote a rather vague definition that suggested psychogeography was the effects of geographical environments on the emotions and behaviour of people (10). In other words, Coverley writes, psychogeography is “the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact of urban place” (10). Since the 1950s, however, “the term has become so widely appropriated and has been used in support of such a bewildering array of ideas that it has lost much of its original significance” (10).

Coverley’s account of psychogeography doesn’t begin with Debord or the Situationists, however. He has preferred, he writes, “to ignore the Situationists’ claims for the originality of their own ideas by placing them within the wider historical context that gave rise to them” (29). He reaches back, historically, to earlier writers: Daniel Defoe, William Blake, Thomas de Quincey on the city of London; Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin on the flâneur; writers of urban gothic tales, such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen; and the Surrealists. He also looks at the work of contemporary psychogeographers, including Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, and Stewart Home. Psychogeography, he argues, “may usefully be viewed less as the product of a particular time and place than as the meeting point of a number of ideas and traditions with interwoven histories,” Coverley writes (11). The predominant characteristics he sees within the “mélange of ideas, events and identities” he discusses in the book include the activity of walking, in cities that are increasingly hostile to pedestrians, so that walking becomes a subversive activity (12). “Walking is seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city with its promotion of swift circulation and the street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city by cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city’s inhabitants,” Coverley writes. “In this way the act of walking becomes bound up with psychogeography’s characteristic political opposition to authority” (12). Along with walking and political resistance, Coverley identifies “a playful sense of provocation and trickery,” “ironic humour,” a “search for new ways of apprehending our urban environment” and seeing it in a new way, a “perception of the city as a site of mystery,” and a desire “to reveal the true nature that lies beneath the flux of the everyday” as characteristics of psychogeography (13). The sense of urban life as mysterious and unknowable leads to gothic representations of the city, but it also gives rise to an obsession with the occult, which is often allied to an antiquarianism that focuses on the city’s past (14). “As a result, much contemporary psychogeography approximates more to a form of local history than to any geographical investigation,” Coverley writes.

In the next chapter, Coverley examines those writers whom contemporary psychogeographers identify as precursors: Daniel Defoe, “whose character Robinson is a recurrent figure within the literature of psychogeography; William Blake, described by Iain Sinclair as “the ‘Godfather of Psychogeography'”; Thomas de Quincy, who was recognized by the Situationists as an influence; Robert Louis Stevenson’s urban gothic novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Arthur Machen, another writer of the urban gothic; and Alfred Watkins, whose theory of ley lines became “a cornerstone of the new age ‘Earth Mysteries’ school that has since provided an esoteric counterbalance to the stern revolutionary proclamations of the Situationists” (32-33). Other than a shared interest in London, all of these writers demonstrate “a wider awareness of genius loci or ‘spirit of place’ through which landscape, whether urban or rural, can be imbued with a sense of the histories of previous inhabitants and the events that have been played out against them” (33); an interest in visionary or esoteric or occult or irrational resistance to rationalism (33-34); and a desire to “expose the essence of place obscured by the flux of the everyday and highlight the threat to the identity of the city posed by the banalisation of much urban redevelopment” (34).

First, because Coverley’s discussion is organized chronologically, is Daniel Defoe. “With his twin roles as political radical and father of the London novel, Defoe is the first writer to offer a vision of London shaped according to his own peculiar imaginary topography,” Coverley argues, “and in his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe introduces a character who has haunted both the novel and the literature of psychogeography ever since” (35). That novel’s “twin motifs of the imaginary voyage and isolation” is important, but even more so is its titular character, “who encapsulates the freedom and detachment of the wanderer, the resourcefulness of the adventurer and the amorality of the survivor”–all characteristics necessary for anyone walking unfamiliar urban streets, particularly in the seventeenth century.

However, it is in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year that he can be said “to provide what is, in essence, the first psychogeographical survey of the city” (36). Both in style and content, that book “portrays the city in a manner that shares almost all the preoccupations that have come to be termed psychogeographical” (36). It brings together statistical facts, topographical details, local testimonies, and these are presented in a non-linear, digressive way that recalls the Situationists’ dérive (36). In its blend of fiction, biography, local history, and personal reminiscence, Journal of the Plague Year forms “an imaginative reworking of the city,” in which its familiar layout “is shown to be transformed beyond recognition by the ravages of the plague” (36-37). For anyone travelling in the London of the 1660s, a city without street lights or house numbers, a “mental map established through trial and error and by reading the signs that the environment displayed to you” was essential. “This alertness to topographical detail and the construction of a mental overview of the city would later form the basis of psychogeographical technique,” Coverley suggests (37). During the plague, however, the city was reshaped, as streets were deserted or blocked and buildings were marked with red crosses, signifying the presence of the disease. These changes created “a map of contamination,” making the city alien to its residents, “who had previously prided themselves upon an intimate knowledge of its secrets” (38). “This sense of the ground shifting beneath one’s feet, as the plague advances and retreats,” Coverley writes,

is mirrored in Defoe’s prose style, as a series of digressions and narrative cul-de-sacs afford the reader, both spatially and temporally, that sense of dislocation experienced by the characters. In effect, the catastrophe of the plague creates the characteristic sense of disorientation that we find in all narratives of urban catastrophe. . . . In such moments the city is momentarily made strange, defamiliarised, as its inhabitants are granted a vision of the city as it might be, as heaven or hell. (38)

Defoe’s “image of the solitary walker navigating the city and recording his impressions of it . . . dominates the tradition which he inaugurates” (39). I wonder if those who study eighteenth-century literature would agree with Coverley’s suggestion that Defoe was the first psychogeographer. It would be interesting to find out.

The next figure Coverley discusses is the poet William Blake, whose emphasis on “the imaginative reconstruction of the city” makes him one of the forebears of contemporary psychogeographers. Blake was a walker, “a wanderer whose poems describe the reality of eighteenth-century street life,” but those poems are “overlaid by his own intensely individualistic vision to create a new topography of the city,” transforming familiar landscapes into “a transcendent image of the eternal city,” which was, for Blake, Jerusalem (40). Blake’s poetry features apocalyptic imagery, since to rebuild London as the New Jerusalem means it must be destroyed. For Coverley, Blake’s “revolutionary call for the destruction of the power structures of his day” is another way he prefigures psychogeography. “Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to psychogeography today,” Coverley writes:

the mental traveller who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by an awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging; and the use of antiquarian and occult symbolism reflects the precedence given to the subjective and the anti-rational over more systematic modes of thought. (41-42)

If Defoe and Blake were theorists of psychogeography, Thomas de Quincy may be described as its first practitioner: “The drug-fuelled journeys through London of de Quincey’s youth seem to capture exactly that state of aimless drift and detached observation which were to become the hallmarks of the situationist dérive 150 years later,” Coverley writes (42). De Quincy, he continues, “is a prototype for the obsessive drifter allowing his imagination to shape and direct the perception of his environment; his purposeless drifting at odds with the commercial traffic and allying him to the invisible underclass whose movements map the chaotic and labyrinthine aspects of the city” (43). The combination of walking and observing, along with a sense of the fantastic, was influential on Poe and Baudelaire, writers who helped establish the figure of the flâneur and, through that figure, “the tradition of French avant-garde writing and theorizing that was to continue via the Surrealists to the Situationists” (44).

Robert Louis Stevenson is another important precursor of psychogeography. Contemporary psychogeographers draw on Stevenson’s gothic imagery “to symbolise the mystery beneath the apparently banal surfaces of the everyday city” (45). The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is central in formulating an “occult division between appearance and reality” that is found in later psychogeographers (45). Coverley suggests that Stevenson’s London has a twofold nature, suggested by the duality between Jekyll and Hyde (46), and that his “imaginative topography” established “an unreal but eternal landscape that colours forever our experience of the city” (47).

Like Stevenson, novelist Arthur Machen applied his sense of the fantastic to the streets of London (47-48). “For Machen, the trained eye can reveal the eternal behind the commonplace,” Coverley contends, and London gave him a means of experiencing the strangeness of the urban environment: walking (48). Machen’s representations of London are both autobiographical and imaginative (48-49); “it is in these wanderings through the city that Machen becomes a prototype for both the flâneur and today’s breed of psychogeographer” (49). Machen was a prolific writer, but in this context his books Things Near and Far and The London Adventure are the most important: they are conscious attempts at ignoring the city’s known aspects in favour of aimless wandering, driven solely by the narrator’s imagination, and they suggest “the degree to which Machen is a hybrid figure in which walking and writing merge” (49). Machen’s version of the city was a discovery of the exotic within the commonplace, of the foreign close to home (49). He frees himself from historical or geographical markers, remapping the city as he moves through it, “establishing a trajectory away from the more well-trodden centre toward the overlooked suburban quarters of the city,” which makes him a forerunner of writers like J.G. Ballard and Iain Sinclair (50).

Another forebear of contemporary psychogeographers is Alfred Watkins, whose theory of ley lines shows the extent to which psychogeography has become caught up in occult, esoteric ideas, far from Debord’s original conception (51). A commercial traveller in Hertfordshire, in 1921 Watkins suddenly perceived the familiar landscape “to be covered by a vast network of straight tracks, aligned through the hills, mounds and other landmarks”–a network of lines connecting prehistoric sites (52-53). Watkins also suggested that these ley lines were connected to the locations of some London churches, making him an influence on Ackroyd and Sinclair (53). The books in which Watkins expressed these theories were rediscovered in the 1960s, and ley lines have become one of the staple ideas of New Age beliefs (I heard them discussed when I was walking in Spain) and an influence on psychogeographers interested in the occult.

The following chapter sees Coverley cross the English Channel and focus on Paris rather than London. In his telling, psychogeography is very much a tale of two cities (57). On the one hand is the dark gothic vision of London; on the other, the elegant arcades of Paris, the haunt of the flâneur. “Today the flâneur has become a somewhat overworked figure, beloved of academics and cultural commentators,” Coverley writes, “but while he (the flâneur is invariably seen as male) remains inseparable from the Paris of his day, his origins remain obscure” (57-58). Typically those origins are traced to Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” or Walter Benjamin, who analyzed the flâneur and his relationship to modernism in his (unfinished) The Arcades Project (58). But both writers took the flâneur from Poe’s short story, “The Man in the Crowd” (58). That story was the first appearance of a new urban type: “an isolated and estranged figure who is both a man of the crowd and a detached observer of it and, as such, the avatar of the modern city,” Coverley writes (60). This figure “heralds both the emergence of a new type of city and the passing of the old, his aimless wandering already at odds with his surroundings and his natural habitat threatened, in Paris at least, by the emergence of a more regimented topography,” as the city is redeveloped by Baron Haussmann (60-61).

In Baudelaire’s essay, the flâneur is an idealized figure in an idealized city–a figure that never actually existed, but one that is elusive, that cannot be located, although in searching for him, one begins to take on his characteristics (61-62). Like London, nineteenth-century Paris had expanded to the point where it could not be apprehended as a whole. Navigating the city thus became a skill, a secret form of knowledge available only to a few, “and in this environment the stroller is transformed into an explorer, or even a detective solving the mystery of the city streets” (62). As the city’s chaos was domesticated through redevelopment, however, the walker’s “arcane knowledge” becomes obsolete, and walking is reduced to window-shopping (62).

Benjamin, on the other hand, argues that London’s streets were too crowded for true flânerie, and that Paris and its arcades were a more suitable habitat for “the dandified stroller,” even though those sites were being destroyed by Haussmann’s redevelopment (63). Benjamin considered Poe’s character to be “a portrayal of the fate of the flâneur in the machine age,” a walker “reduced to little more than a cog in the machine, an automaton governed by the pressures of a barbaric crowd, not so much the hero of modernism as its victim” (64). The flâneur is thereby “inevitably caught up by the commercial forces that will inevitably destroy him,” and he becomes a window-shopper, which is “both the high point and the death knell for the flâneur” (64). Nevertheless, the figure of the flâneur retains its subversive age: “this insistence upon a walker’s pace questions the need for speed and circulation that the modern city promotes (yet seldom achieves). The wanderer remains essentially an outsider opposed to progress,” and “a non-paying customer” (64-65). “Ultimately, the flâneur is a composite figure,” Coverley contends: “vagrant, detective, explorer, dandy and stroller” (65). Yet, within these multiple and contradictory roles, “his predominant characteristic is the way in which he makes the street his home and this is his true legacy to psychogeography” (65).

As the flâneur found himself increasingly barred from the streets, he “devised new methods of travel that could be conducted from the safety of one’s armchair,” and his wandering became internalized (65-67). Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against Nature (Á Rebours), published in 1894, is one example; in that book, an aesthete discovers the advantages of mental or imaginary travel in the city (67). Other modern novels use Robinson Crusoe as a figure undertaking an imaginary journey–from Kafka’s America to Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night–and so Crusoe becomes an emblem for contemporary psychogeographers (68-70). “Robinson is a totemic figure mapping out his journey from text to text,” Coverley writes,

providing a parallel history of urban wandering as it moves from London to Paris and around the world. Here we see writ in miniature the development of psychogeography, as it mutates from detached observation to a more committed and involved practice engaged with its surroundings and increasingly determined to change them. (71-72)

The flâneur may be a male figure, but his female counterpart, the flâneuse, has a very specific role: a prostitute. Those women met their clients–including Baudelaire and Benjamin and the Surrealists–in the Paris arcades (72). “As we approach the avant-garde flowering of the inter-war period,” Coverley suggests, “the streets of Paris are increasingly characterised as an erotic location–a place to procure, seek out of simply think about sex” (72). This is where the Surrealists come into the picture: not because of their political theorizing or attempts at walking around Paris, but because in 1918 André Breton and Louis Aragorn, between them, produce a psychogeographical novel:

With their absence of plot and digressive style, Breton’s Nadja and Aragon’s Paris Peasant offer accounts of journeys conducted through the Paris streets which are governed, in varying degrees, by sexual desire, and in their aimless strolling, they provide not only a precursor to the situationist dérive but a blueprint for contemporary wanderers on the streets of London. (72-73)

Coverley doesn’t explain how two men wrote one novel with two titles–that’s a mystery that will have to be solved through research. Nevertheless, he points out that Surrealism was about the resolution of dream and reality, and that its goal was not just art, but a transformation of our experience of everyday life “with an appreciation of the marvellous” (73). Surrealism’s domain, he continues, “was the street and the stroll was a crucial practice in its attempt to subvert and change our perceptions” (73). The walker–a combination of the flâneur and Robinson Crusoe–becomes, for the Surrealists, “a figure whose journey through the streets is both directed and transformed by the dictates of these unconscious drives” (73). The Surrealist practice of automatism, giving the unconscious free reign, was used not only in automatic writing but also in walking: “The aimless drifting that was later to become the dérive was initiated here in a series of walks whose free-floating exploration of Paris” was intended to discover new places (74). However, the walks the Surrealists took together provided “rather tedious and uninspired results, and as far as walking was concerned, a lot of legwork was expended with little obvious result” (76). Coverley is therefore more interested in the writing of the Surrealists. In addition, their history as a group, including their engagement with Communism and their collapse amid infighting, suggests, to Coverley, that “the day of the apolitical and dispassionate stroller was at an end” (77). The flâneur would have to fight against the destruction of the city, and that radicalization, Coverley argues, was the birth of psychogeography (77).

Next Coverley turns to Guy Debord and the Situationist International. After the Second World War, the Surrealists had split up, and new groups began to take shape in the French avant-garde. Some of those groups came together, in 1957, as the Situationist International. Under the strict control of Debord, the Situationists produced a series of statements defining psychogeography, the dérive and the détournement, and those theoretical writings are important to contemporary psychogeography. However, it’s important to understand that psychogeography was only one of the Situationists’ tools, “one whose role was to become more oblique, as situationism moved away from the subversive practices of its unacknowledged forebears and towards the revolutionary politics with which it has since been associated” (82). Psychogeography isn’t mentioned, for example, in either of the group’s major theoretical statements, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (82-83).

The terms dérive and psychogeography were actually coined by one of the Situationists’ predecessors, the Lettrist International (85), although they made nothing of them, other than “adolescent humour” (87). In Debord’s article “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” he provided a more rigorous approach and the first real definition of psychogeography (88-89). That definition was rather vague, as Debord admitted, and that vagueness has “allowed so many writers and movements to identify themselves and their work under this label” (89). According to Coverley,

Psychogeography becomes for Debord the point where psychology and geography collide. Gone are the romantic notions of an artistic practice; here we have an experiment to be conducted under scientific conditions and whose results are to be rigorously analysed. (89)

The emotional zones of the city were to be identified “by following the aimless stroll (dérive), the results of which may then form the basis of a new cartography characterised by a complete disregard for the traditional and habitual practices of the tourist” (90). However, as the Situationists developed, the sense of playful creativity that informs the dérive was set aside, and overt political protest took priority (91). That meant that psychogeography, the dérive, and the détournement were subordinated to the group’s political critique (92). Nevertheless, before he abandoned them, Debord did define dérive and détournement. A détournement was a subversion of existing aesthetic elements–through parody or plagiarism, for example (94). A dérive, on the other hand, was a method of psychogeographical investigation, a form of fieldwork or a way to reconnoitre the city (96-97). “The dérive takes the wander out of the realm of the disinterested spectator or artistic practitioner and places him in a subversive position as a revolutionary following a political agenda,” Coverley writes, and the dériviste‘s aim is to identify currents, points, and vortexes of psychogeographical relief (97). Debord’s writing on the dérive provide a theoretical basis for the activity, along with practical suggestions (98), but “the actual results of all these experiments are strangely absent” from the Situationists’ writings; there is little “concrete evidence of clear instances of psychogeographical activity” (99). That is surprising, since the Scots writer Alexander Trocchi, a friend of Debord’s (until he was expelled from the Situationist International), recalled “long, wonderful psychogeographical walks” in London with Debord (101). According to Coverley, Debord ultimately “came to recognise the essentially personal nature of the relationship between the individual and the city, sensing that this subjective realm was always going to remain at odds with the objective mechanisms of the psychogeographical methodology that sought to expose it” (101). I find this very strange, because there seems to be little if anything objective about the dérive as a methodology; from what I understand, it is entirely subjective. Perhaps it was that subjective nature that led Debord to abandon psychogeography in favour of what was, for him, a more objective political theorizing?

In the final chapter, Coverley turns back to contemporary psychogeographers, all of whom are English writers. Psychogeography is very popular at the moment, he notes; it “remains alert to the increasing banalisation of our urban environment that preoccupied the Situationists, and it continues to provide a political response to the perceived failures of urban governance,” but it is also a literary form based around London (111). The first contemporary psychogeographer Coverley discusses is the novelist J.G. Ballard, whose books explore “the behavioural impact of urban space” (112). Ballard’s writing draws on surrealist imagery and techniques, but his fiction provides “a more detailed psychogeographical map of the modern urban hinterland than any situationist survey could ever hope to replicate” (116). Ballard believes that modern life leads to a loss of emotional sensitivity, but his fiction challenges the Situationists’ belief that this loss would lead to banality; instead, he presents the non-places of contemporary suburbia “as liable not merely to provoke boredom but to result in more extreme forms of behaviour that increasingly mirror the violent and sexualised imagery that surrounds us” (116-17). “In this sense the spectacular society”–Coverley is riffing on the title of Debord’s famous book–“will, of its own accord, produce that element of unpredictable and even revolutionary behaviour that Debord himself hoped to engineer,” but for Ballard, that behaviour “will constitute a full-scale descent into savagery, sexual perversity and complete breakdown as the brand of community living engineered by the tower block or executive village dissolves into a series of individual retreats into personal obsession” (117). Unlike other contemporary psychogeographers, though, Ballard has no interest in history or literary tradition, nor does he care about “occult connectivity” or walking (118). “By dispensing with these themes,” Coverley argues,

Ballard is able to pare down his prose into a simple allegory of modern urban life that focuses solely on the relationship between individual and environment. . . . This is psychogeography rendered in its most stark and unforgiving manner, and these texts have mapped, in advance of anyone else, the layout of a future city characterised by a transient population living lives of anonymous isolation. (118)

Next up is Iain Sinclair, who is, Coverley contends, more responsible than anyone else for the current popularity of psychogeography (119). Sinclair’s complex “London Project”–made up of poems, novels, documentary studies and films–sets out to restore that city “to its dominant psychogeographical position” (119). Sinclair’s work has little connection to the Situationists, but he is “heavily indebted both to the surrealist drift of Breton and Aragon and to the visionary tradition of London writers from William Blake to Arthur Machen,” but his greatest influence is Alfred Watkins and his theory of ley lines, especially in his early writing (119). In works like the 1975 book Lud Heat, Sinclair espouses a belief that lines of force mapped between architect Nicholas Hawksmoor’s remaining London churches can reveal “the true but hidden relationship between the city’s financial, political and religious institutions” (119). Sinclair’s writing is, Coverley suggests, a “delightful blend of paranoia, occult imagination and local London history” (120). Sinclair is a walker, too, but not a flâneur–his pedestrian activities are too directed, too focused on his task of challenging the modern city (120). Sinclair’s “peculiar form of historical and geographical research displays none of the rigour of psychogeographical theory”–as outlined by Debord, I think he means–“and is overlaid by a mixture of autobiography and literary eclecticism,” but it is politically engaged and furious about the legacy of Thatcherite redevelopment in London (121). That anger displays his debt to Aragon, Coverley suggests (121). London Orbital, which I have written about in this blog, offers Sinclair’s “own highly successful brand of psychogeography in which urban wanderer, local historian, avant-garde activist and political polemicist meet and coalesce” (122). Sinclair’s writing is so successful that “he appears to have inaugurated an entirely new genre of topographical writing centred upon London which has gone some way towards displacing Debord and situationism as the official psychogeographical brand” (122). This success “has inevitably blunted its impact, as what was once a marginal and underground activity is now offered mainstream recognition” (123). That complaint–it’s not cool any more because other people like it–is unworthy of Coverley, in my opinion, but then again, I’m a fan of Sinclair’s writing and of his psychogeographical methodology as well.

Peter Ackroyd moulds psychogeography “into a conservative and irrational model diametrically opposed in both spirit and practice to Debord’s conception,” Coverley argues. Ackroyd’s difference from Sinclair–both wrote about ley lines and Hawksmoor’s churches–is that he believes that the spatial correspondences he identifies in the city are “not only governed by historical resonances inherited from the past, but are also subject to temporal patterns through which the city may be subdivided once again,” an idea Ackroyd calls “chronological resonance” (124-25). He also believes that these resonances have “observable effects upon the behaviour of Londoners themselves” (125). Ackroyd “follows the implications of his theory to their logical, but unverifiable, conclusions, eventually moving from London to the country as a whole and identifying two opposing strands of national identity”: rational Protestantism and irrational or visionary Catholicism (125). The latter is able to reveal the city as it truly is, and enables us to recognize the magic beneath its mundane surface (126). Other Londoners who were “attuned to the revelatory vision of the city” are named “Cockney Visionaries” by Ackroyd, and among their number he includes Blake, Machen, and Sinclair (126). For Coverley, “Ackroyd’s theory grows ever more mystical and all-embracing, becoming a quest for the defining characteristics of English national identity in which the spirit of scientific inquiry is rebutted by Ackroyd’s irrational and wholly subjective sense of time and place” (126), and “his insistence that the city is eternal and illimitable,” “governed by a cyclical current that views the present merely as the past revisited,” is even more damaging to Ackroyd’s “psychogeographical credentials, at least in their situationist form” (126). That’s because Ackroyd’s cosmology obviates any call for revolutionary change; it leaves us “stranded within a kind of eternal recurrence in which the flux of the present is subsumed within a mystical sense of eternal stasis that renders all political engagement redundant” (126-27). “If psychogeography is the behavioural impact of place,” Coverley concludes, “then Ackroyd’s historic-mystical version is at odds not only with its revolutionary forbears but also, despite any superficial similarities, with the current brand favoured by Iain Sinclair and his acolytes” (127). I have little patience with mysticism, and had no idea that the author of London: The Biography, among other important books, held such–let me say it like I feel it–silly beliefs. That doesn’t mean, though, that I should ignore his writing; it could be important.

Stewart Home is the third contemporary psychogeographer Coverley discusses. Home was “a prime mover within the resurgence of psychogeographical and avant-garde groups in the 1990s but his relationship with those groups remains tangential and obscure,” Coverley writes, although I’m not sure what that would matter (128). Home is associated with the London Psychogeographical Association, and he is “responsible for a deluge of psychogeographical pamphlets, statements and events,” often humorous (128-29). Home “combines a peculiar blend of occultism, avant-garde theorising and radical left politics,” but he seems unable to take himself or his subject too seriously” (129). He is a provocateur, in other words, and yet, Coverley suggests, that should not obscure “the accuracy of his critical commentary upon the avant-garde movements that he has sought to revive” (131). (Coverley is clearly interested in these groups; I am not.) Because he combines humour with an awareness of psychogeography’s roots and its relationship to earlier traditions, Home “appears to have successfully wrong footed those critics unable to work out what he’s up to and unsure how to respond” (132). In other words, Coverley concludes, “Home has effectively liberated psychogeography from the constraints of any one set of practices or aims, creating a highly effective weapon in his assault upon the artistic establishment” (132-33). I’d never heard of Home before reading Coverley’s book, and I have no idea if his writing is available in North America, but I must say, after reading Coverley’s discussion, that it’s Sinclair’s work that interests me more than the others’.

“Instead of seeking to change their environment,” Coverley concludes,

psychogeographers in their contemporary incarnation seem satisfied merely to experience and record it. In this sense, psychogeography has overlooked its political and ideological roots in situationism in favour of a return to the primarily artistic concerns of earlier avant-garde and literary traditions. These authors certainly voice dissatisfaction with the political shortcomings of the present but are unable to supply any practical measures to alleviate their concerns. (136)

In that sense, they are not like Defoe, “in whom the figure of novelist, pamphleteer and radical combined to provide a lasting template for a future psychogeography in which literary endeavour and political activism are once again inseparable” (137). But what did Defoe actually accomplish politically? And what “practical measures” does Coverley think can address contemporary political problems? Why does he expect writers to provide the answers to political questions? The world is a complicated place, and who among us really understands how to address our collective challenges?

Despite Coverley’s disappointing conclusion, and his apparent belief that the Situationists accomplished something tangible, this is a useful book. I do wonder if other writers on psychogeography see historical antecedents in Defoe and Blake and de Quincey, or if they begin, simply, with the Situationists. I could find out. I also wonder if the kind of activity that falls under the rubric of psychogeography must take place in an urban environment. Couldn’t one walk and think and research the history of rural areas as well? Is that a possibility, despite the lack of attention to the world outside of Paris and London by psychogeographers? And, of course, Coverley’s list of references provides an excellent starting point for looking further into psychogeography–if that’s something I’m going to do. I’m not sure yet; I’ll need to think about it.

Work Cited

Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Pocket Essentials, 2010.

——. Ways of Wandering: The Writer As Walker. Oldcastle, 2012.