I’ve been reading Will Wiles’ novel Plume which acknowledges the attractions of what we
might as well call psychogeography while also mocking it. Wiles puts the chief objections
into the mouth of a fictional writer, Oliver Pierce, who’s complaining about his career and
his lot, and says ‘I was lumped in with all that psychogeography lot, Iain Sinclair and Will Self
and so on, and I ... well, I didn’t like that. There are so many people doing that shit now.
All the fucking lost rivers, ghost Tube stations, all that shit … - I’m just so fucking sick of
that. It makes me want to puke. It was getting boring ten years ago, it’s just intolerable
now.’
It’s hard to tell from the novel whether Wiles completely agrees with his creation, but really, what’s to argue about?
Then, with the scent of psychogeography in my nostrils, I read an article online by Wiles, at Aeon.com titled ‘Walk the Lines’ which of course is also the title of a book by Mark Mason about walking the London Tube map above ground, in which I make a brief but honourable appearance.
Wiles doesn’t echo Pierce word for word but they obviously have a lot in common. A pull quote from the article runs, ‘You read Sinclair, Sebald and Self, and wanted to do the same? Get in line with the others, Mr. Original.’ Ouch all round.
And in the article itself Wiles writes, ‘Meanwhile, walking was being rediscovered as a tool useful to journalists writing about architecture and the city. There’s a similarly long tradition of this, in which the presiding saint of urban studies, Jane Jacobs, plays a prominent role. Her descriptions of pavement life in ‘unslumming’ parts of New York and Boston have become a ubiquitous model. Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (2009) and Sharon Zukin’s Naked City (2010) are both bound in shoe-leather.’ He also cites, approvingly, Owen Hatherley, Rowan Moore and Jonathan Meades, heirs of Ian Nairn.
He continues ‘Also, being necessarily introspective and subjective, the genre is equally prone to accusations of pretension. Assuming you are still reading (you are, aren’t you?) you might well have spent the last couple of paragraphs rolling your eyes at the conformist quality of my young non-conformism.’
Self-referential, self-hating ouch.
In the end, slightly more positively, he writes, ‘Walking is an aid to thought and will always be an aid to writing – all three happen at the same time. But in London, the dérive has come adrift. A form of writing that I once aspired to has expired.’
Is the psychogeographical party really over? I suspect so, and it wasn’t a party I was ever really invited to, and yet like many parties it kind of drags on. There are always a few lingerers who won’t go home.
I haven’t exactly gone home but I have left London. When a man’s tired of drifting round London, it’s time to drift to Essex.
