In Praise of 'The London Perambulator' : On Deep Topography and Psychogeography
Vol. 1, Issue 11, August 15, 2022
Last week, I returned to a film I had not seen in several years: The London Perambulator (2009), directed by John Rogers (embedded and linked below, approx. 45 mins). The film is concerned with the practices of deep topography undertaken by Nick Papadimitriou, and features his collaborators in psychogeography, writers Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Papadimitriou conducted research for Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and is the author of Scarp (2012). Briefly, psychogeography is in the French tradition of the flâneur, the ‘saunterer’ (variously the Saint-Terrer or Holy-Lander, and/or one sans terrer, without a singular land), and is filtered through the disrupting influences of dadaism, surrealism, and anarchism. One of its key theorists is Guy Debord, a central figure in the 1968 student revolts in Paris, and in the Situationist movement. Like the wandering flâneur, the psychogeographer embarks on walks, or more specifically the dérive, the drift through the city, becoming exposed to both the city’s unconscious, and what the occupants of the city have become unconscious of, obscure places, perimeters, edge lands, liminal spaces.
The dérive, or drift, exposes the ways in which urban planning dictates our movements by going against those efficient flows, the urban channels that create areas of neglect, vacancy, and haunting. The result is a psychological mapping of space, opposed to a strictly rational or logistical mapping. All of this becomes clear in the film that follows Nick Papadimitriou, who has found his way beyond the Marxist inflections of psychogeography to his own more deliberative practice of deep topography. It’s an ‘eccentric’ film, and finally very moving as we learn the depth of Papadimitriou’s relationship to place, his bioregion, his willingness to enter the psyche and body of his place.
As I watched The London Perambulator, I was struck again by the tendency in some environmental writing to delineate too aggressively between nominally ‘urban’ and ‘natural’ bioregions, as if the former is the artificial seed of a malaise that can only be cured by the latter. I’ve always felt that ecopsychology can benefit from the visionary approaches to the ‘urban’ bio-psychic region that psychogeography or deep topography offer. The wilderness is not always accessible, but an understanding of the relationship between psyche and place, the ecological unconscious can be taken up anywhere. Certainly, the experience of liminality, of the sacred, of memorial space can be taken up within the city, or the suburbs.
I’d like to think you’ll agree that there is something inspirational in Nick Papadimitriou’s deep topographical walks. He speaks of his urban environment in the same terms that environmental writers speak of sacred landscapes in the wilder sense. He is what Jung, in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, called a “Gnostic intermediary”1 in and from whom new worlds emerge, when the psyche discloses the numinous content latent in the ruins or the apparent vacancy of a culture or a place. One might argue that a tree, hedgerow, plant, or stream encountered within an ‘urban’ environment has greater power to evoke the numinous qualities of that place, to be a liminal marker, breaking from the concrete.
As Gary Snyder puts it: “In all cultures, some places are recognized as numinous, loaded with meaning and power. These particular locales come to be recognized as important or sacred because of the repeated stories that are told about them. It is the remembered place that excites and directs the mythic imagination of an individual and a culture.”2 Yet, sometimes, those places are not obvious, and sometimes those places require rediscovery and recollection by the Gnostic intermediary who can tell the stories that have been forgotten and neglected, that are yet part of the unconscious content of the bioregion. This week’s column is shorter because of the intrusion of COVID-19 which finally ‘got’ me, and then with a rebound case 3 days after I thought I was well and testing negative for the virus. It was, however, the sickbed/couch downtime that allowed me to return to the film, so there is that. So, this week, a call to the edge lands, to the overlap, the hybrid.
Here’s the film (if the embedded version does not work for you, please click here…).
Thanks for reading, as ever, and I hope this gives you some ideas.
Regards from New Mexico,
James Reich
Jung, C.G. (1971). Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. R.F.C. Hull (trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 60
Snyder, G. (1990). The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press.