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Iain Sinclair and the Psychogeography of the Split City

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Iain Sinclair and the Psychogeography of the Split City ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Iain Sinclair and the psychogeography of the split city https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40164/ Version: Full Version Citation: Downing, Henderson (2015) Iain Sinclair and the psychogeog- raphy of the split city. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email 1 IAIN SINCLAIR AND THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF THE SPLIT CITY Henderson Downing Birkbeck, University of London PhD 2015 2 I, Henderson Downing, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract Iain Sinclair’s London is a labyrinthine city split by multiple forces deliriously replicated in the complexity and contradiction of his own hybrid texts. Sinclair played an integral role in the ‘psychogeographical turn’ of the 1990s, imaginatively mapping the secret histories and occulted alignments of urban space in a series of works that drift between the subject of topography and the topic of subjectivity. In the wake of Sinclair’s continued association with the spatial and textual practices from which such speculative theses derive, the trajectory of this variant psychogeography appears to swerve away from the revolutionary impulses of its initial formation within the radical milieu of the Lettrist International and Situationist International in 1950s Paris towards a more literary phenomenon. From this perspective, the return of psychogeography has been equated with a loss of political ambition within fin de millennium literature. However, the tangled contexts from which Sinclair’s variant psychogeography emerges have received only cursory scholarly attention. This study will unravel these contexts in order to clarify the literary and political ramifications of the seemingly incompatible strands that Sinclair interweaves around the term. Are Sinclair’s counter-narratives to the neoliberal consensus of the early twenty-first century comparable to the critique of capitalism and urbanism advanced by the Situationists? Or is his appropriation of psychogeography emblematic of a broader contemporary recuperation of the oppositional tactics and strategies associated with counter-cultural currents from a more politically adversarial era? Is Sinclair’s transition from the margins of experimental poetry to the literary mainstream correlative with urban gentrification? By examining these questions through the orientating device of a series of psychogeographical plaques tournantes with which Sinclair is preoccupied, this study facilitates a more nuanced evaluation of Sinclair’s compulsively associative use of psychogeography to navigate the split city of London. 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Esther Leslie, for her guidance, patience, and support during the prolonged dèrive of this thesis. I would also like to thank all of those staff and students actively involved in making the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck such a convivial intellectual environment in which to study. I would like to express particular thanks to Iain Sinclair for generously responding to my questions. Additional thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the majority of my research. More thanks are due to Simon Berkovitch, Kirk Lake, and the Pembridge Road counter-culture for numerous conversations on psychogeography and the city. Ultimate thanks to Sarah Franklin and Evie Downing for profanely illuminating the prolonged dèrive of this thesis with their love. 5 Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Contents 5 1) Introduction: London’s Plaques Tournantes and the Psychogeographical 6 Turn 2) Leaving the Twentieth Century: Iain Sinclair and the Forging of a 25 Psychogeographical Franchise 3) To the Roundhouse: A Veritable Split in Psychogeography 76 4) Mapping the Lines of Influence: Psychogeography and the Urban 137 Labyrinth 5) A Study in Scarlet Tracings: Psychogeography and London Gothic 202 6) Counter-Narratives in the City of Disappearances: Psychogeography in 261 an Expanded Field Bibliography 296 6 1) INTRODUCTION: LONDON’S PLAQUES TOURNANTES AND THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL TURN In the psychogeographical research primarily undertaken in Paris by the Lettrist International (LI) and subsequently the Situationist International (SI) during the 1950s and early 1960s, different zones of ambience within the urban landscape were observed to cluster around pivotal points of attraction or repulsion. These key psychogeographical points or hubs were designated as plaques tournantes (a term more commonly used to signify various kinds of ‘turning places’). By charting the distribution of plaques tournantes within the city, the LI and the SI argued that they could begin to detect the different ways in which the seemingly mundane geography of everyday urban experience generated specific modes of conscious and unconscious behaviour. A psychogeographer drifting through these shifting zones of ambience sought to become increasingly responsive to the subtle fluctuations in the production of emotions and sensations between one location and another in order to map the patterns of their interaction – the ‘psychogeographical relief’ of the territory with its ‘constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry or exit from certain zones’ – so that the ideological conditioning attached to the most prominent conjunction of psychological and geographical factors operative within a particular terrain at a particular time could be identified and exposed.1 The practice of psychogeography aimed to transform the banal observation that some areas of the city produced a generally pleasant atmosphere while others produced a more negative response into a radical critique of urbanism. Cultivating a playfully serious approach 1 See Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the dérive’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed and trans. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), pp. 50-54 (p. 50). 7 to the city, a combative strategy modulating between the disciplined rigour of scholarly solemnity and a more dissolute tone of bohemian excess, the psychogeographical data gathered by the LI and SI suggested that the affective qualities of the built environment assisted in the stimulation, or even simulation, of a constrictive band of desires and sensations that ultimately served the commercial imperatives of capitalism. While executing their urban drifts, collective walks designed to short circuit established social or economic motivations for moving through the city, the frequently penurious and often intoxicated Lettrists and Situationists attempted a synthesis between formulating the generalities of psychogeographical theory and documenting the psychogeographical particularities of place. One purpose of the drifts was to determine how certain plaques tournantes, in a kindred mode to the disorientating device of the drift itself, appeared to be capable of dismantling the ‘habitual reflexes’ usually produced in an individual or a group by the prevailing form of urbanism that functioned as a support structure for the increasingly dominant forces of capitalist production and consumption.2 In this context, psychogeography facilitated a heightened perceptual awareness of the provisional combination of psychological and geographical features that enabled such plaques tournantes to exhibit different degrees of resistance to the alienating techniques of contemporary planning and its carceral architecture. As features that could be replicated, these plaques tournantes contained the potential to awaken the slumbering city to its revolutionary history and to alternative visions of urban development, opening up pathways for rethinking urban space as an experimental site for a radical transformation of subjectivity and social relations. 2 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ in Knabb, SI Anthology, pp. 5-8 (p. 5). For examples of psychogeographical analyses of urban drifts, see Guy Debord, ‘Two accounts of the Dérive’; Michèle Bernstein, ‘Square de Mission Étrangères’; and Abdelhafid Khatib, ‘Attempt at a psychogeographical description of Les Halles’, in Theory of the Dérive and other situationist writings on the city, ed. by Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Actar, 1996), pp. 28-32; p. 52; pp. 72- 76. 8 However vague psychogeography remains as a theory (especially when considered in parallel with the scarce examples of Lettrist and Situationist practice), the concept of psychogeographical plaques tournantes provides a useful orientation device for navigating a series of texts by the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair that circulate around the focal point of London. Sinclair’s London is a labyrinthine city split by multiple forces deliriously replicated in the complexity and contradiction of his own compulsively associative work. This study will identify a series of sites that Sinclair repeatedly portrays as receptive to the turbulent flow of the city’s social, political, historical, cultural, economic, and emotional forces. Such sites are also emblematic of the complex internal divisions that interpenetrate the geography of the urban environment and the psychology of urban experience. Given Sinclair’s integral
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