Psychogeography is the Adolescent Western Shamanism

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.”