The Context of Mythogeography
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While Mythogeography (the book) must speak for itself, it has a history that is far more significant and engaging than its authorship. It is not simply a book of now, but of the particular present that has been under construction since the fading of the late 20th century Psychogeographical Associations and Societies. It is also a part-product of the longer rhythms of production by artists, activists and theorists that peaked, as they peak again now, in the late 50s, late 60s, early 70s, and then in the middling conjunction of the mid 90s: Lettristes, Long and the Land Artists, Fluxus and, then, the Psychogeographical Associations.
The book has been written to celebrate a very loose weave of artists, teachers, activists and walkers. These efficaciously variegated groups and their practices have, in the last decade, both expanded and moved a little closer to each other. Fortuitously, important developments in a range of disciplines and activisms have been sufficiently tentative, frayed and incomplete to allow outsiders to cross their thresholds:
The Psychogeographical Societies and Associations of the 1990s oriented themselves to an occult version of situationist theory. They protested against the vagaries of urban redevelopment, exposed the geomancies of a ritualised ruling class - drifted, argued around the standard texts of dérive and spectacle, levitated landmarks (or attempted to) and produced small journals, echoes of an earlier Potlach. Often on the defensive, conservative (of the textures of industrial cities), pessimistic and steely – they had to be all these things as the ideas for their activity, the raison for their d’etre, was appropriated by literary genii loci and (more unexpectedly) by the officer corps of the Israeli military. It would be easy to satirise these Societies and Associations. Some (like Manchester’s) were of a reasonable size, while others may not have stretched much beyond an individual and a website. But in their playful actions and centred theory they have kept something important warm during a wintry political season.
Mythogeography has not been written to excoriate them, but to celebrate what has been growing up around, under, beside, above their legacy. And it is lighter, without a central or singular orientation, its genealogies are many; while thicker on the ground it is even more disparate in its texts and ideas. But it is rarely, and has no need to be, thrown by this. The multiplicities of spatio-psycho-philosophies like those of Deleuze and Guattari have inoculated many – mainly by hearsay – against fear in the face of dispersal. And for an embrace of vertigo. Ancient practices – the elegances of Fluxus, the compartmentalism of Happenings, the ranging rods of Land Artists, live artists moving out of studios and the dematerialisation of the art object – have revived and been matched by equivalences in parallel disciplines: nomadological and mobilties orientations in geography, the adoption of performance theory in tourism studies, the re-emergence of the procession, the cult of neo-pilgrimage among young performers and a return to a more confident site-specificity (more specific, and more confident in the beyond-specificity of those specifics).
Many of the walking groups, cults, artists, activists, societies, clubs, gangs and cells of the Mythogeography book are fictional ones. There is no “Wigan P.A.” or “Committee for Public Safety”. But for every fictional reference, there is a real equivalent. Of course, they do not constitute an organised ‘movement’ – just as there can be no “central committees” (the joke (hopefully) is that they cannot be plural and central) – and nor do they ever need to. But the unspoken argument of Mythogeography is that where there have been communications, meetings, joint wanders, crossed-lines, mutual recommendations, meetings at conferences, emails, shared inebriations, tips, sales and exchanges of maps and books and dvds… that all these connections and businesses and plans – the “and and and” - have benefited each and helped to swell, without limiting, all.
There is no point trying to summarise the virtues of a multiplicity (that rather defeats the object of the whole exercise): only to say that this is a very enjoyable time to feel the swirl of makings and representations and theories of space always under construction, embodiment, absurd gaits, nomadic architectures, new pilgrimages, fragmentations of self, the rustle of rhizomes and the trajectories of massive bodies. What a joy that there is nowhere to begin or end. But space to plan the fruits of a multitude of furies at unnecessary sufferings. In the face of apparent impossibility and (slightly less worse) irrelevance, then, what this website and the Mythogeography book attempt to do is something similar to the protagonist of Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus (with thanks to Sozita Goudouna for the spur to finally take it off the shelf and read the thing): to lure you into an exhibition of wild ideas and actions. In the hope that such a display may tempt you to produce some (more) of such unalike things of your own. But more importantly, if you do, that it will also encourage you to investigate suspiciously all the conditions of your makings, all the conspiracies against yours and others joys, and to share generously – even, my god, to organise - your findings with the mostly anonymous, but often excessively hospitable matrix that is that mythogeography which can never know itself, and must never let anyone tell it that it can.
Recommended MythoMusic: John Foxx - Skyscraper from Tiny Colour Movies (below)
While Mythogeography (the book) must speak for itself, it has a history that is far more significant and engaging than its authorship. It is not simply a book of now, but of the particular present that has been under construction since the fading of the late 20th century Psychogeographical Associations and Societies. It is also a part-product of the longer rhythms of production by artists, activists and theorists that peaked, as they peak again now, in the late 50s, late 60s, early 70s, and then in the middling conjunction of the mid 90s: Lettristes, Long and the Land Artists, Fluxus and, then, the Psychogeographical Associations.
The book has been written to celebrate a very loose weave of artists, teachers, activists and walkers. These efficaciously variegated groups and their practices have, in the last decade, both expanded and moved a little closer to each other. Fortuitously, important developments in a range of disciplines and activisms have been sufficiently tentative, frayed and incomplete to allow outsiders to cross their thresholds:
- Geographers have written of the performance of tourism
- Academics have repeated the autobiographical discretions of artists and challenged the hero-walkers
- Theory has been spatialised and space theorised
- Guided tours and live art have come a little closer together
- And clown armies have marched while the living dead have flashmobbed.
The Psychogeographical Societies and Associations of the 1990s oriented themselves to an occult version of situationist theory. They protested against the vagaries of urban redevelopment, exposed the geomancies of a ritualised ruling class - drifted, argued around the standard texts of dérive and spectacle, levitated landmarks (or attempted to) and produced small journals, echoes of an earlier Potlach. Often on the defensive, conservative (of the textures of industrial cities), pessimistic and steely – they had to be all these things as the ideas for their activity, the raison for their d’etre, was appropriated by literary genii loci and (more unexpectedly) by the officer corps of the Israeli military. It would be easy to satirise these Societies and Associations. Some (like Manchester’s) were of a reasonable size, while others may not have stretched much beyond an individual and a website. But in their playful actions and centred theory they have kept something important warm during a wintry political season.
Mythogeography has not been written to excoriate them, but to celebrate what has been growing up around, under, beside, above their legacy. And it is lighter, without a central or singular orientation, its genealogies are many; while thicker on the ground it is even more disparate in its texts and ideas. But it is rarely, and has no need to be, thrown by this. The multiplicities of spatio-psycho-philosophies like those of Deleuze and Guattari have inoculated many – mainly by hearsay – against fear in the face of dispersal. And for an embrace of vertigo. Ancient practices – the elegances of Fluxus, the compartmentalism of Happenings, the ranging rods of Land Artists, live artists moving out of studios and the dematerialisation of the art object – have revived and been matched by equivalences in parallel disciplines: nomadological and mobilties orientations in geography, the adoption of performance theory in tourism studies, the re-emergence of the procession, the cult of neo-pilgrimage among young performers and a return to a more confident site-specificity (more specific, and more confident in the beyond-specificity of those specifics).
Many of the walking groups, cults, artists, activists, societies, clubs, gangs and cells of the Mythogeography book are fictional ones. There is no “Wigan P.A.” or “Committee for Public Safety”. But for every fictional reference, there is a real equivalent. Of course, they do not constitute an organised ‘movement’ – just as there can be no “central committees” (the joke (hopefully) is that they cannot be plural and central) – and nor do they ever need to. But the unspoken argument of Mythogeography is that where there have been communications, meetings, joint wanders, crossed-lines, mutual recommendations, meetings at conferences, emails, shared inebriations, tips, sales and exchanges of maps and books and dvds… that all these connections and businesses and plans – the “and and and” - have benefited each and helped to swell, without limiting, all.
There is no point trying to summarise the virtues of a multiplicity (that rather defeats the object of the whole exercise): only to say that this is a very enjoyable time to feel the swirl of makings and representations and theories of space always under construction, embodiment, absurd gaits, nomadic architectures, new pilgrimages, fragmentations of self, the rustle of rhizomes and the trajectories of massive bodies. What a joy that there is nowhere to begin or end. But space to plan the fruits of a multitude of furies at unnecessary sufferings. In the face of apparent impossibility and (slightly less worse) irrelevance, then, what this website and the Mythogeography book attempt to do is something similar to the protagonist of Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus (with thanks to Sozita Goudouna for the spur to finally take it off the shelf and read the thing): to lure you into an exhibition of wild ideas and actions. In the hope that such a display may tempt you to produce some (more) of such unalike things of your own. But more importantly, if you do, that it will also encourage you to investigate suspiciously all the conditions of your makings, all the conspiracies against yours and others joys, and to share generously – even, my god, to organise - your findings with the mostly anonymous, but often excessively hospitable matrix that is that mythogeography which can never know itself, and must never let anyone tell it that it can.