Psychogeography
So I probably ought to explain what this psychogeography thing is, since I've rambled about it before.
There's really like three parts to psychogeography, in my perspective: its history within theoretical context, its purpose as it was created, and what it's being used for now. I'll start with the beginning.
In the 60's in France there was a guy named Ivan Chtcheglov, who was a political theorist, radical activist, and writer/poet who had been heavily influenced by Charles Fourrier's ideas on cooperative living in urban environments and his emphasis on architectural organizations of living spaced and by a Christian European translation of an Arabic text on celestial magic which was known in Europe as the Picatrix, which was sort of the "sages almanac" of proto-scientific and philosophical/mystical thought from the 9th and 10th centuries. So, Chtcheglov wrote a big piece extolling the virtues of what he called Unitary Urbanism, which was basically a scathing critique of modern urbanism as it existed, blasting it essentially for being a restrictive, oppressive, limiting architectonic zoning of human endeavor; Chtcheglov demanded a fusion or art and technology that would turn cityscapes into liberating environments of play and exploration rather than restrictive boundary inducing canals for directing the flow of people. (I'm taking some liberty with the my explanation here... he was into the Bauhaus and there were ties back to Surrealist thought and practice, and he was also FUCKING CRR-AAZZZY to boot).
A great quote sums up his outlook:
"All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops - the geometry".
Another French political theorist and poet, Guy Debord, took Chtcheglov's ideas and ran with them, creating a variety of radical political and ideological responses to "The Enemy", which he, as best as I can tell, interpreted to be Capitalism, and the power structures of oppression which interlocked to create the space in which Capitalism could thrive. Debord described Unitary Urbanism as having two major layers:
* The rejection of standard Euclidean functionalist approaches to architectural design
* The reject of the location and presentation, even the formation, of art, along lines which create a boundary between art and it's surroundings, thereby preventing art from being interactive and life/living oriented, making it a detached thing which forces people into the role of observers, consumers of the art, or simply witnesses.
So Debord proposed a bunch of different methods by which an already present urban structure could be "reclaimed"... he and his friends would go on long walks, derives, which would completely ignore the "embedded" meanings and "flow directions" inherent to a cityscape, and instead went in and out of shops, down alleys, across rooftops... anyplace a member wanted to lead them. The goal was to create new perspectives, and new, more personalized uses of spaces which are supposed to be shared and public, but which have had their meaning and intent "calcified" via means of cultural indoctrination over time to where people see a large thin stretch of pavement and think "road", and then use that area for only those things "roads" are "supposed" to be used for. In essence, the goal was to recreate new desire lines, the original footpaths human and animals took over and over again which eventually came to be the established paths that lead to roads in the first place.
If you take the derive, with it's highly subjective reinterpretation of what the space in a city is to be used for and what it's structures are supposed to be symbolic of, and hoist it up out of the footborne explorer’s perspective, up instead to the bird's eye view of the cartographer, you start to get into psychogeography. If usual geography is a purely Cartesian deal, with multiple axes overlaying an area, and coordinates marking those places we think of as important... psychogeography takes that XYZ structure and explodes it, adding anywhere from a handful to potentially thousands of additional axes to the mix... instead of longitude, latitude, and altitude as the main concerns, you find axes describing time, describing significances of historical, political, social, criminal, mental, emotional, and mythical natures. The mapping becomes something of an archaeological dig into the past meanings, narratives, and histories of a given place, while at the same time becomes an imaginal reconstruction of the place... because each psychogeographer "builds" onto the meaning nexus of the map with their own selective choices about what details, stories, observations, and feelings to include. Connections between ideas, personalities, times, and stories become the building materials used.
Originally this was done as a critical method: there was a lot of empowerment that could be done by allowing a lone person to recreate the meanings of the city they were faced with, rather than just be subject to it's structures, always in the shadows of the architects, planners, builders, and ultimately states who were originally responsible for them. When a wall stopping you from moving North to South suddenly can become a thin, albeit dangerous, path leading East to West, there's something powerful going on there. Add to that sewers, forgotten spaces, hidden buildings, etc... you're really potentially on to something useful.
Now, psychogeography is being used by authors, artists, historians, and also mystics, as a method of reclaiming, reinterpreting, and remixing our cultural landscapes. A physical form of this has come, unsurprisingly, from France, called Parkour. Loosely translated into English as "Urban Free Running", Parkour is the "running up walls, jumping from buildings, using everything as a path" acrobatic running style you see in films like "Casino Royale" or "Live Free: Die Hard"... a method of derive so extreme that you aren't just figuratively ignoring the intended purpose of the urban landscape... you're ACTUALLY running up walls, balancing on ledges, leaping from rooftop to rooftop... making everything your road to the point where you're now only bounded by physics and material science in your pedestrian jaunts... completely unshackled by the social intentions of the people who filled up all the space with concrete and steel, fences and walls.
Additional to the Parkouri, you've got a whole generation of writers who are creating these lush narratives of place simply by digging up all the old forgotten lore and stories, and weaving their own threads of meaning into the mesh. Some of it is fiction, like Alan Moore's "From Hell", which is a possible history of White Chapel where the Jack the Ripper killings were... and some of it is non-fiction, like "London Orbital" by Iain Sinclair, who takes a group of friends and spends weeks walking the 125 mile long "orbital loop" that runs around London and is viewed by many as the "edge" of the city, recording what they see, having discussions about history, and trying to make the explorations meaningful to themselves.
So... that said... for me... a psychogeographic tour guide is a book or person who digs as deep as they can into the history, character, personalities, myths, stories, and skeleton filled closets of a place, tries to interpret the details as best they can to find the "story" of the place, and then brings all of those details from the past and from previous fictions (since lots of places have been used in fiction already) into the *present* geography... thereby constructing a new "map" of the place... hopefully a map other people can use to not only see the city with different eyes, but if friends of the psychogeographer, to get to know them better as well, since with a psychogeographic map, the map of the outside really is a map of the inside of the mapper.