Beyond Walking: British Psychogeography and the Art of Everyday Life, 1960s to Present

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Psychogeography' is currently a contentious term. Radio 4 calls it 'cool', radical bookshops devote it whole sections, it features prominently in university modules as well as popular and scholarly articles. Although overwhelmingly likely to connote Will Self and Iain Sinclair's old-boy's-club rambling contemporary creative non-fiction, Tina Richardson argues 'there are no rules to doing psychogeography' and 'anyone can do it' (Richardson, 2015: 1). By contrast, originally defined by the Situationist International (SI) in late-1950s Paris as 'the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals' (Debord, 2006: 39), psychogeography began as a highly specific avant-garde aesthetic and political practice - today, it has been appropriated and banalised by postmodern culture. My project both traces this process and recovers a more radical tradition persisting in British psychogeography into the c21st, beyond the Sinclair-Self 'walking-writing' paradigm. Disciplines unite to challenge British psychogeography's presently-anodyne status, but few studies examine its post-1960s manifestations as a rich 'late modernist literary project' (Cooper, 2017: 9) rooted in urgent interrogation of 'everyday life' (Sheringham, 2006: 158-174). Using literary-historicist methodologies - and drawing on critical theory's spatial, spectral, neurological, magical turns over the last half-century - I reattend to psychogeography's radical potential to interpret and transform structures of everyday life. This is important at a moment when Situationist interest resurges and psychogeographical arts enter new public spaces. My project will demonstrate wide-ranging avant-garde/mainstream psychogeographically-influenced political aesthetic production in late-c20th/21st Britain within wider discourse on the everyday, beyond the limited attention to creative non-fiction initiating my inquiry.