Last year, Hari Kunzru took a walk around London. Or not quite a walk but a dérive, a French term appropriated by the Situationist International political group that is often translated to mean “drifting” or taking an “aimless stroll.” By drifting through the urban landscape, the Situationists hoped to attend to the often invisible ways in which the built environment can function as an instrument of control, of power. In Sixties London, Situationist thought fused with a native occult tradition—what Kunzru calls a “subterranean current of mysticism”—to regard the very architecture of the city as expressing esoteric truths or possessing spiritual power.

The term used to describe such an approach to the city, whose history Kunzru sets out to explore in his essay, “Another London,” is psychogeography. It is less a discrete discipline than a cast of mind, a way of experiencing the urban milieu that is alive to “strange atmospheres and hidden meanings,” as Kunzru puts it. I spoke to Kunzru about psychogeography’s history, its politics, and its relevance today.
 

Matthew Sherrill: Your piece is structured as a psychogeographically attuned walk around London. This is the city you grew up in, but it’s also the city that has been at the center of so much psychogeographical literature over the years. Why does London lend itself so well to this mode of thinking?

Hari Kunzru: Obviously, with London, there is a layer of history and pseudohistory that goes back thousands of years. There’s a kind of temporal depth, maybe, that lends itself to mystical thinking. London is a city of layers. There are lost streets and lost rivers, geographies that explain the modern city but that aren’t visible any more.

Sherrill: You’ve lived in New York City for a number of years, as you note in the piece. It’s an old city, certainly, but doesn’t have nearly the “temporal depth” of London. Is there also a psychogeography of New York?

Kunzru: There’s a psychogeographical practice available for every city. It might be easier to find in an old-world, mass-transit walking city like Paris or Amsterdam, but I’ve been surprised by how, in the eighteen years I’ve lived in New York, there wasn’t more of this practice around. You know, during the Revolutionary War, there were prison hulks in the East River where the British would lock up rebellious colonists. Thousands of them died of typhus, among other causes, and wound up buried in mud for a century. When the city developers began constructing the Navy Yard, they unearthed these bones, and had to do something with them. So they were placed in a massive ossuary in what is now Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn. An obelisk now marks the spot, and beneath it is a chamber filled with the remains of thousands of people. It always interests me that there are people running up the steps, or doing CrossFit, or walking their dogs and doing all kinds of normal park stuff over this extraordinarily macabre monument. It’s a layer of meaning that most people don’t know about. But once you’re aware of it, you can’t become unaware.

Sherrill: Psychogeography, in your telling, can be about constructing a personal sense of meaning in urban space. But it’s also something that can be communal and political. In what sense can an appreciation of the invisible geometries of urban spaces be an act of protest?

Kunzru: It is a political activity, though a very odd one. It has more the character of research than of activism. It is still straightforwardly concerned with control over the space of cities. During the French Revolution, for instance, when the Jacobins would disappear into the warrens of streets in various Parisian neighborhoods, the king’s troops couldn’t follow them. Eventually, the nervousness about controlling the mob led to Haussmannization, to the Grands Boulevards being driven through these spaces. And while they’re very beautiful and decorative and modern, they’re also very good for moving artillery into spaces you want to control. Look at New York: most of the armories in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens are located on avenues for the same reason. The state gives meaning to places that ordinary people don’t think about unless those places come to mean something to them. So I suppose having your personal network of meaning and your microgeographies of a space gives you a reason to feel ownership over it.

Sherrill: You write in the piece about a certain strain of radical politics in the United Kingdom that owed much to the Situationists and their sense that psychogeography was about discovering and then disrupting the way in which urban spaces are configured as a means of social control. I’m thinking specifically about the radical group King Mob, whose tactics seemed considerably more active than what is generally thought of as “research.”

Kunzru: In the days of the IRA’s bombing campaigns on the mainland, one of the British government’s responses was to erect the Ring of Steel, a network of barriers and video-surveillance tools. This was at a time when that wasn’t so common in city centers. So Britain was early in making a panopticon out of London. Now we imagine that more or less anything that happens on the street is going to be filmed by somebody’s Ring camera, or some other kind of recording device, but back then, the practice of walking, of understanding how you’re supposed to use spaces, and then deciding to transgress, felt very powerful. Back in the Nineties and early Aughts, when I was living in East London, I was friends with a number of anarchist-inflected people who were very into trespassing. Somebody ran climbing workshops, teaching others how to climb fences, how to throw a piece of carpet over barbed wire, that sort of thing. It was all about this experience of transgression as a means of leading you to realize that in some ways, at least, you are free.

Sherrill: Do you get the sense that psychogeography today still has the same political force? Or is it something of a relic of that earlier era of protest?

Kunzru: When I was writing “Another London,” I talked to one of my more uncompromisingly cool London friends and told him that I was writing about psychogeography and history. He said something like, “What do you want to do that for? That’s so Aughts of you!” I do think the Nineties was the moment when psychogeography felt most politically active. It came to a head with the Reclaim the Streets politics of Seattle in 1999 and then ran into the war on terror and got squashed. What happened to it later on, culturally, is that psychogeography became a kind of hipster heritage. It degenerated into a sort of history walk, which is interesting, but not necessarily radical. So the moment for psychogeography has passed, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer. For me, it remains a vital way of reconnecting with one’s past, of making personal meaning, of spiritually locating oneself.