Psychogeography is the Adolescent Western Shamanism
George Manby
Time of Publication : 19:04 - 28/07/21
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The impact of the physical environment on the human psyche has been overlooked in global disillusionment. Our current world’s self sabotaging psychosomatic connection to the earth and it’s ‘accelarationist’(1) urban growth is nearing an irrevocable pain threshold. This essay will be exploring numerous Psychogeographical mappings in literature, theory, history and contemporary life to explore its communicative potential in the new age.
“...How we think about the world and—perhaps even more importantly—how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge. Today our problem lies—it seems—in the fact that we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world. We lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables. Yet we do see frequent attempts to harness rusty, anachronistic narratives that cannot fit the future to imaginaries of the future, no doubt on the assumption that an old something is better than a new nothing, or trying in this way to deal with the limitations of our own horizons. In a word, we lack new ways of telling the story of the world...” (Olga Tocarzcuk, Nobel Prize In Literature Speech 2018.)(2)
If we pay close attention to the statement, “We do not yet have the narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now.” We notice two prevailing themes; self sabotage and accelerationism, which are two constituent parts of contemporary climate and politics we’ve too quickly had to grapple with. Intrinsically linked to denial and catastrophe, one wonders if there is a remedy to all of this? Politicised climate summits and ecological humanitarian aids have so far achieved a murmur on the ‘accountability’ brakes we need to come to a screeching halt. Ian Sinclair observes in ‘The Last London’(3) that, “You are now wedded to a kind of instant dominant present tense of the electronic, digital world where people no longer move around in the city, but above the city, they are floating on their devices.” This ‘floating’ seems to undermine any pleasure and meaning derived from the city and echoes Olga Tocarzcuk’s point, “..we do not yet have ready narratives not only for the future, but even for a concrete now, for the ultra-rapid transformations of today’s world...” Both writers are touching on this principle connection that my writing intends to address, how does one see clearly at a sprinting speed? How does one develop a spatiotemporal connection whilst continuously blinded by the light of the future? “Popular anxieties about the uncertainties of the future procured by rapid change are not merely the issue of ignorance,” explains historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “rather they are symptoms of a world in the grip of future shock.”(4)
One can employ certain psychological lines of enquiry to destabilise our perception of the city, so that it becomes less instrumental, less automatic and habituated, laying new beginnings from which the city can be perceived as an overlapping mound of topographical streams and singularities. With 'psychogeography', Will Self outlines walking as “a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum”. The solitary walker is “an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller.”(5) This ’dissolving’ of a city with the intent of a greater, vaster understanding, mirrors an array of age old Shaman rituals.
Divulging the mind into simultaneous timelines, the shaman embarks on an ongoing drama of place and feeling. Akin to Will Self’s ‘ambulatory time traveller’ the shaman traverses their own cultural version of the “mechanised matrix”, through various regalia; like the headdress, denoting animals of assigned mystical powers. This multilateral perception of space is an evanescent mode of thinking, which now teeters on the cliff face of disappearance. A powerful dichotomy appears between Will Self yielding this idea of the ‘ambulatory time traveler’ and the Shaman figure traversing multiple realities, and it is crucial to understand both ideas and their diverse ways of seeing reality in their relation to the metaphysical and the cultural myopia (6) derived from their metaphysical overlap. Wade Davis maps out this theoretic term, ‘Cultural Myopia’ as the following:
“...We are all products of our own culture, the world into which we are born does not exist in some absolute sense, but as just one model of reality; the consequence of one set of adaptive choice that one cultural lineage makes for its own reasons. Every culture has something to say just as each deserves to be heard...”(7)
This mode of observation is enlightening, yet difficult to unpick. Its understanding of alternate cultural states as a ‘cultural lineage’, born through a singular ‘set of adaptive choices’, gestures a holistic, predetermined vision of worlds cultures. However to understand this on a metaphysical plane over a historical chronology one should not fail to mention the text, ‘We Have Never Been Modern’(8), by Latour. This text's primary method of investigation is the "the modern constitution", an implied set mental state that orders objects into a conceptual continuum. Objects being science and truth, power and nature, and so on. It aims to shed light on the false assumption that these ‘objects’ are separate entities, and that only through the upturning of this mode of observation will an anthropology of the modern world become a possibility. It is just that, an anthropology of the modern world, an archaeology of the future, which will destabilise our perception of the city, awarding us with more resolute convictions and spiritual understandings of our place in the history of culture. It will enable us to move away from the idea of a singular story of humanity history. As previously mentioned by Tocarzcuk, “a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge.”
In search of more answers I am drawn to a visionary remark in, ‘The Last London’.(9) : “London is an organic entity. It is a kind of prescient being, the whole city is interlinked.” To find out more I contacted the author, Ian Sinclair, and developed a correspondence with him by E-mail. An eloquent and potent response from him follows;
“Dear George Manby,
Good to hear about your walking/wandering/contemplating project. Especially when, just now, the City is in danger of losing its soul and its identity. Construction ('considerate' as ever) has continued unabated, throwing up towers, stealing light, and making smart cells for disembodied ghosts. The river, especially, has been dangerously over-colonised, as you move out towards the once-active reaches. I'm beginning to think the title of The Last London wasn't too far from the mark. But, as you have discovered, new seekers and scribes are always engaging with the forces of the past, plotting new routes to enlightenment. There are so many layers to be excavated, so many wonderful mistakes to make.
I can't answer your questions with anything more than what you'd find in my books. The motivations are more exposed, closer to the surface, in the early fugitive texts from the '70s. The job was to make the walks, chart the ground, report. To be open, always, to the voices of others. The whispers of those who did the job before us. 'The living can assist the imagination of the dead'. Yeats.
Life evolves. And methods evolve with it. For me that represented a shift from poetic close engagement to a broader, more socio-historic overview, to fragmented obituary. Fail better, as the man said. And beware of imposed 'accessibility' when such a quality is unavailable.
Life evolves. And methods evolve with it. For me that represented a shift from poetic close engagement to a broader, more socio-historic overview, to fragmented obituary. Fail better, as the man said. And beware of imposed 'accessibility' when such a quality is unavailable.
That's all.
Iain Sinclair” (10)
It is significant in my exploration for a remedy to this ongoing problem of ‘global disillusion’ that Sinclair remarks: “...new seekers and scribes are always engaging with the forces of the past, plotting new routes to enlightenment.” It stands in unknown yet unabated union with Tocarzcuk’s observation, “A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.”(11) Both insights entail a homegrown, humanistic method by which mankind can realign its ‘psychosomatic connection’. Such a definition of this method is up for debate, one can not fastidiously tie it to the act of writing and reading literature, to walking, to ritual, without providing vast amounts of evidence. However there lays a convergence between each of these ‘acts’, which is suggested rather quaintly by Sinclair, “To be open, always, to the voices of others. The whispers of those who did the job before us.” Both writers have echoed the same idea: that the answer lies in the past’s predilection in the present.
Both writers tap into this evading of 'the now’, for the present moment has become a momentary panopticon from which to experience all there has been, and all there will be. Simon Reynolds wrote in 2000, “What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but the future coming together.”(12) To revolt in concordance with such anastrophe is to witness the present in this spatiotemporal simultaneity, between time, between knowledge, between meaning, between these primary metaphysical states. Many of us are too quick to elope with the feeling that being alive is reticent in it’s nature. It’s as if something collapses the moment you try to articulate it in language; as if language is too heavy. It is this exact ailment, an overly protective devotion to the present that extinguishes any connection to what makes not just ‘us’ human, but all of us human; as previously mentioned by Sinclair, Yeats said, “The living can assist the imagination of the dead.”(13) I would state that and raise it further, the living can assist the imagination of the living.
Within the matrix of ‘psychogeographic’ time and ‘Shaman’ time, linear time loses it’s primary importance. But of what integral use is this to my line of enquiry? How can multilinear timelines unlock any ‘communicative potential’ in this ‘new age’? If one can only tentatively put a finger on this way of seeing due to our own bodily entrapment into contemporary linearity, how does one find answers to time(s) when only fluent in one?
“Every traveller’s time is a lot of times in one, quite a wide array. It is island time, archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos; it is the time produced by the clocks in the train stations, everywhere varying; unconventional time, mean time, which no one thought to take too seriously.”(14)
Here Tokarzcuk’s ‘time’ is painted as a spiderweb of continuous flux, it darts from systems to mechanised cogs, to remote land masses, it shows time to be an orchestra. If the sounding of this orchestra appears from all corners of the globe, the universe, of infinity, how is it that we are trapped in one flat plane of perception? We falsely believe linearity is merely a prerequisite to the experience of the human condition. Further into ‘Flights’ exploration’s of the narratives of time, Tocarzcuk writes
“... Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination...”(15)
This pleasure of circular time can be rotated back onto the theme of ‘accelarationism’.
Sassen, the sociologist who notably coined the term ‘global city’(16), gestures the idea that the complexity of the economic system emerges out of a simplistic belief in unlimited growth. If the current world’s cycles revolve solely around economic currents and financially climatized ‘hyper-objects’(17), then Tokarzcuk’s, Sinclair’s, and Self’s fiction would illustrate that the age old means of surviving time’s evanescent face has grown insidiously to sustain only one reality. It is a dangerous reality that promises an expiry date, whilst simultaneously propagating an endless means of self sustaining reproduction. Aldous Huxley discusses the transcendent qualities of experiencing timelessness in ‘The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell’(18). On intaking mescaline, he remarks,
“As mind at large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there maybe extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an ‘obscure knowledge’ that All is in all - that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to ‘perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”
It is important to note that whilst Huxley derived a psychological ecstasy unmet by reality, he noted that if one were to remain perpetually in this state, nothing would be achieved, as there would be no reason to remove oneself from the position of idle adoration of such a universe.
When time’s purpose and evolution is seen at its origin, an organised reconsideration of time can be offered. It is evident that our predisposition to the inexorable passage of time has been born from a conceptualisation of time, which painted it not as a metaphysical hyper event, but as a one way system of embryonic propulsion. Only through looking back and recognising the timelessness of fables can the shifting currents of energy come cascading through a city, awoken. Waiting for us is a reality "pregnant with the future.”(19) Such a reality is the vital pulse needed to ground oneself in the modern world, the city, the ‘Global City’.
Perhaps these convection currents of time and meaning, “the forces of the past, plotting new routes to enlightenment“(20), are immortally awoken by our conviction that ego-less self is deemed futile by the natural conditioning of survival. Literature, walking, ritual, and mescaline show us gaps in the meta-physical, emotional realm that exists not for us to go through, but to notice that we are also a passage through which they can wander. The remedy to our ‘pscyhosomatic’ global ulcer comes to fruition in the yielding of past, present and future.
Endnotes:
1 En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Accelerationism. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Accelerationism>.
2 Olga Tokarzcuk, N., 2019. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VvZAXL28K2E&feature=emb_logo> .
3 Sinclair, I., 2017. The Last London. Bloomsbury.
4 Fernandez-Armesto, F., 2014. Civilizations. New York: Free Press, p.461.
5 Self, W. and Steadman, R., 2007. Psychogeography. New York: Bloomsbury.
6 Davis, W., n.d. The wayfinders. House of Anansi Press.
7 Davis, W., 2021. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=A1E0p84VWXM>.
8 Latour, B., 2002. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
9 Sinclair, I., 2017. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=B05mdDG8k2s>.
10 Sinclair, I., 2021: Personal Correspondence
11 Tokarczuk, O. N., 2019. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VvZAXL28K2E&feature=emb_logo> .
12 Reynolds, S., 2021. Hyperstition - 0rphan Drift Archive. [online] 0rphan Drift Archive. Available at: <https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition.
13 Sinclair, I., 2021. Iain Sinclair’s farewell to London. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/16/iain-sinclairs-farewell-to-london.
14 Tokarczuk, O. and Croft, J., 2020. Flights. 1st ed. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
15Tokarczuk, O. and Croft, J., 2020. Flights. 1st ed. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
16Sassen, S., 1996. La Ville globale. Paris: Descartes & Cie.
17 Morton, T., 2017. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
17 Morton, T., 2017. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
18 Huxley, A., 1972. The doors of perception and heaven and hell. London: Chatto and Windus.
19 Voltaire, n.d. A quote by Voltaire. [online] Goodreads.com. Available at: <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/899184-it-is-said-that-the-present-is-pregnant-with-the>.
20 Sinclair, I., 2021: Personal Correspondence
Bibliography:
Davis, W., n.d. The wayfinders. House of Anansi Press.
Davis, W., 2021. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1E0p84VWXM>.En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Accelerationism. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Accelerationism>.Fernandez-Armesto, F., 2014. Civilizations. New York: Free Press, p.461.Huxley, A., 1972. The doors of perception and heaven and hell. London: Chatto and Windus.Latour, B., 2002. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Morton, T., 2017. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Reynolds, S., 2021. Hyperstition - 0rphan Drift Archive. [online] 0rphan Drift Archive. Available at: <https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition.Sinclair, I., 2017. The Last London. Bloomsbury.
Sinclair, I., 2017. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05mdDG8k2s>.
Sinclair, I., 2021: Personal CorrespondenceSinclair, I., 2021. Iain Sinclair’s farewell to London. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/16/iain-sinclairs-farewell-to-london.Self, W. and Steadman, R., 2007. Psychogeography. New York: Bloomsbury. Sassen, S., 1996. La Ville globale. Paris: Descartes & Cie.Tokarczuk, O. N., 2019. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VvZAXL28K2E&feature=emb_logo> .Tokarczuk, O. and Croft, J., 2020. Flights. 1st ed. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Voltaire, n.d. A quote by Voltaire. [online] Goodreads.com. Available at: <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/899184-it-is-said-that-the-present-is-pregnant-with-the>.
Bibliography:
Davis, W., n.d. The wayfinders. House of Anansi Press.
Davis, W., 2021. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1E0p84VWXM>.En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Accelerationism. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Accelerationism>.Fernandez-Armesto, F., 2014. Civilizations. New York: Free Press, p.461.Huxley, A., 1972. The doors of perception and heaven and hell. London: Chatto and Windus.Latour, B., 2002. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Morton, T., 2017. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Reynolds, S., 2021. Hyperstition - 0rphan Drift Archive. [online] 0rphan Drift Archive. Available at: <https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition.Sinclair, I., 2017. The Last London. Bloomsbury.
Sinclair, I., 2017. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B05mdDG8k2s>.
Sinclair, I., 2021: Personal CorrespondenceSinclair, I., 2021. Iain Sinclair’s farewell to London. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/16/iain-sinclairs-farewell-to-london.Self, W. and Steadman, R., 2007. Psychogeography. New York: Bloomsbury. Sassen, S., 1996. La Ville globale. Paris: Descartes & Cie.Tokarczuk, O. N., 2019. [online] Youtube. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VvZAXL28K2E&feature=emb_logo> .Tokarczuk, O. and Croft, J., 2020. Flights. 1st ed. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Voltaire, n.d. A quote by Voltaire. [online] Goodreads.com. Available at: <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/899184-it-is-said-that-the-present-is-pregnant-with-the>.