Mythogeography

An Interview with Phil Smith, author of ‘Mythogeography – A Guide to Walking Sideways’

First of all, can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your research at the
University of Plymouth?
My background is in theatre – writing, directing – and I’m still involved in conventional theatre-based
work. I have come to a wider kind of ‘performance’ (in the broadest sense), first through making site-
specific theatre with Wrights & Sites and then through walking and the opportunities to make
interventions in the everyday. My research concerns performance interventions in places that are
usually designated as touristic or heritage places.

What is the difference between mythogeography and psychogeography?

Well, partly the difference is one of history and partly one of substance. The two differences are, of
course, intertwined.

Psychogeography arises as one of a set of ideas and practices developed by the International
Lettristes (a small groups of artists and revolutionaries) in Paris in the 1950s (some of whom then
establish the Situationist International, taking these ideas and tactics with them). For them
psychogeography was a study of how places effect the psychological states of those who pass
through them. With a reciprocal meaning: that the places might be changed in order to change the
experiences and mental states of the residents and visitors.

The idea was closely wedded to the practice of ‘drifting’ which was a destinationless wander through
the city, the drifters self-consciously making their senses ‘vulnerable’ to the atmospheres of the places
they pass through and collecting and recording these ‘psychogeographical’ effects. The main point of
this (along with its pleasures) was as part of the material-gathering for a planning of ‘situations’
(experiments in living, events and constructions that would prefigure a revolutionary city, a utopian
city) – the idea was to create a city based on play rather than work or consumption or social control.
Although never a situationist (very close to them but refused membership), Gilles Ivain’s ‘Formulary
For A new Urbanism’ (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm) suggests a simple plan for such
a city with different atmospheric quarters: Dark, Sinister, Bizarre, Happy, etc.

In the UK the concept of psychogeography was detached from activist meaning and reconfigured as a
literary practice in the work of writers like Iain Sinclair and (though he denies the term) Peter Ackroyd.
Where the situationists used the drift and psychogeography as a means to an end, these writers used
the drift and its recording as a (literary) end in itself. (Anglo-)Psychogeography also gathered some
occult trappings during this time from both Sinclair and Ackroyd, but also from Alan Moore the comic
maker and the London Psychogeographical Associations (among others) who referenced arcane
knowledge and esoteric conspiracies. More recently this ‘passivity’ or literariness has been reacted
against by artists and activists who have begun to use the term (and the practice of drifting) in political-
aesthetic ventures and adventures.

Mythogeography arose from the work of Wrights & Sites (site-specific performance makers) as a term
to describe their approach and tactics to sites where multiple meaning had been forced into a single
and restricted one (or example, heritage, touristic or leisure sites) – mythogeography emphasises the
multiple nature of places and ways of celebrating, expressing and weaving them. I have probably been
most active among the members of Wrights & Sites in developing this particular aspect of our work,
theoretically (hence the book and website). In the way that I have developed an understanding of (and
set of tactics for) mythogeography, it can draw upon the older traditions of the 1950s, but also upon
subsequent developments (including the literary, occultist and more recent activist, site-specific,
performative and interventional activities). For me, the key to mythogeography is the setting in motion
of multiple approaches (so, I am not an occultist, but I see some useful metaphorical resonance about
space in some occultist psychogeography; equally, quite conventional disciplines – geology, zoology –
might be applied to a mythogeographical end).

http://www.invisibleparis.net/
One of the key reasons that Wrights & Sites did not use the term “psychogeography” is that it wanted
to put some distance between itself and the organisational ‘discipline’ of the situationists with their
endless expulsions. The situationists were overtly anti-Stalinist and yet sometimes their behaviour
towards members seemed rather Stalinist. I have to say that more recent reading has made me more
sympathetic to the problems faced by the situationists, but not any more convinced by their ‘solutions’
to the problems of organisation. I have begun to think about that question more recently and there are
some tentative suggestions in the book.

The book has no named author. Why did you choose this approach?
I don’t pretend that I’m not the author. The publicity for the book and the website make clear that I am
the author. The absence of one name on the book is a provocation – I hope that others will adopt the
book as a handbook rather than consume it as an autobiographical travel piece. The walking that
‘Mythogeography’ describes is sometimes solitary, but mostly it is social, collective and uses the
dynamics of a group: conversation, planning, sharing, learning from each other, conspiracy,
adventure, etc. I hope that people will read the book as the beginnings of what they might do, rather
than as the expression of what I did.

In the book you are named simply the 'crab man'. Are you therefore simply a character
in a story or is the crab man an essential part of your own personality?
The ‘Crab Man’ began accidentally – to make some publicity for a solo performance called ‘The Crab
Walks’ I had myself photographed wearing a crab claw prosthesis. The image became far better
known than my name, so people would come up and say “excuse me, are you the crab man?” So I
adopted the name. Clearly it suggests a tangential walking, a walking sideways, off the obvious track.
In the book I deal with the uses of non-Marvelesque mythic characters/names adopted by walkers, but
they only really work when they arise by accident or through convention – like Pierrots who are always
called “uncle” – and not when people adopt one to flatter themselves. They are useful for the walker,
helping them walk in more than one character, and they can be convenient when anonymity (some
feint or dodge) is required.

Can you elaborate a little on a mis-guide? What would a mis-guide to Paris entail for
example?
A ‘mis-guide’ can take the form of a subverted guidebook or a mis-guided tour or the person ‘leading’ a
mis-guided tour. Examples of the first are Wrights & Sites’ ‘An Exeter Mis-Guide’ and ‘A Mis-Guide to
Anywhere’. A mis-guided tour is a play upon the conventions of the conventional guided tour, but
using mythogeographical principles – using the tour to set in motion multiple narratives of meaning
and deploying (demonstratively) different senses. In defiance of the official narratives of a site or route
a mis-guided tour will draw out hidden or suppressed narratives, but also anomalous (Fortean,
cryptozoological, etc.), unrespectable (ghosts, superstitions, etc. – the standard fare of trash tours)
and subjective ones (drawing on the dreams and subjective feelings of the mis-guide or others in, of or
towards the site). These various narratives are then set in motion about each other, the whole set in
motion by the impetus of the walking of the tour, and as themes and stories return, the various skeins
are interwoven to create a matrix, a complex of meaning, rendering a site doubtful, questionable,
difficult, multiplicitous.

I’ve ‘drifted’ but never mis-guided in Paris, so I can’t draw from the personal experience of creating a
mis-guide there, but making a mis-guide usually involves repeated walking of a site or route, talking to
people, reading and researching, responding to accidents, connections and coincidences, finding and
sometimes fabricating (shh!) connections (and then admitting one’s dishonesty), collecting things and
trying things out (which often renders up stories or things for those walking on the mis-guided tour to
try themselves). The ‘drift’ that I made in Paris with some actors and a local academic was a wander
that began at the Palais des Glaces (le temple de l’humour) and wended through private courtyards
where we could see changes in the buildings like geological layers, some strange dead ends inside
stylish modern buildings in which our intrusions abruptly ended in piles of debris or unwrapped
equipment, a chic laundrette-café kitted out in red and black and a bakery where the orange light on
the cakes had something of the demonic about it.

http://www.invisibleparis.net/
Do you need to have an emotional link with a place before attempting a drift or
mythogeographic walk or could anybody do one in any city?
Anyone can do one in any city – but different places will have different conditions. While on exploratory
walks I have been mistaken for a burglar, a traffic warden (!), a social worker, etc. – but no one has
ever pointed a gun at me. But in some places even the most innocent of trespasses would place you
in danger, and this would be a different kind of pressure on the freedom to explore. Having said that,
sometimes it is the restrictions and barriers that shape a ‘drift’ and these apparent obstacles become
the content of the learning of the drift, the material that can be turned into activism or performance or
mapping. Generally it is best to begin by drifting in places you do not know, and then use what you
learn to see familiar places in a new and unfamiliar light.

You insist on the artistic nature of your walks. How is this expressed and is it a
personal thing or something that can be performed to an audience either directly or
retrospectively?
The walks are artistic because art is what I do and undo. But for others, the ‘drift’ might be the
beginnings of research or a prompt to political subversion or something much nearer to leisure. I enjoy
these ambiguities, and in strained and repressive circumstances they may be useful for carving out
spaces for free or discrete actions.

Paris is the home of Guy Debord and the Situationists, as well as the original 'flaneur',
Baudelaire. What do you think there is about the place that encouraged these people?
I should only speak of what I know, and that only a little, but from Jean-Michel Mension’s ‘The Tribe’ it
is clear that Debord and his fellow International Lettristes were able to create informal structures that
could substitute for work, study, etc. across the café tables and barrooms of particular (very limited)
areas of Paris, a kind of Paris-within-Paris, a Paris folded inside itself. They created a diaphanous
world of everyday preparations for siege against the relentless post-Haussmannisation of Paris, not in
the form of conservative conservation/preservation campaigns, but something more apocalyptic,
preparing for a seizure in the organisation of images. Their organisation and their strategies were
thoroughly inadequate to their situation (ironically so, and they knew it), but that does not mean that
their failures cannot be useful for our better failures; as Zizek never tires of repeating from Samuel
Beckett (muttering from under his stone in Montparnasse): “try again, fail again, fail better”.

Through their ‘occupations’ of very limited localities, and even bars, the International
Lettristes/situationists created a kind of mobile and virtual siege. Their ‘drifts’ shifted the disputed
territory about Paris, as if the ‘castle’ under attack could be moved about like a siege-machine on
wheels. The map ‘The Naked City’ made by Debord and Asgar Jorn gave expression to this tactical
fluidity. On their drifts this military-like manoeuvring appeared as the ghosting into unfamiliar bars, the
interweaving with criminal gangs. The drifters were connecting things up, into a kind of war map, a
choice of selected grounds on which to fight. In this respect their tactics matched their aspirations,
though they lacked so much else that they could put nothing on the fields they chose so well. They
rejected work, and the kind of discipline it enforced upon journeying. In place of product they mapped
the atmospheres, loved and inebriated space of the city, accumulations of texture and abject
structures. But the rest is unfinished business.

The phrase 'birth is the first step on the road to death' appears often in the book.
However, you also suggest that places themselves never die as they are constantly
being reinvented (or reborn). Is this contrast between human frailty and a wider
immortality one of the features of mythogeography?
I like the question. It is a very mythogeographical question, resisting the temptation to collapse one
way or the other, suspended between belief and pessimism, deferring the dialectic. And so it is best
praised and left unanswered.

http://www.invisibleparis.net/
You criticise the National Trust for using ghosts for marketing properties, but a
psychogeographer may look at a place as being 'haunted', perhaps in a way
associated more with the books of Peter Ackroyd. In what way then is the occult part
of mythogeography?
I would criticise the National Trust for its cynicism in using ‘ghosts’ for the purpose of marketing, and
then keeping them hermetically sealed within that category, disconnected with their historical relations
to rationality. It is a kind of lazy theatricality on the Trust’s part. It fits snugly with other sentimental and
romanticised narratives that do not do justice to the complexity and eruptive character of many of their
properties. Their particular packaging of haunting homogenises the past in a compartment of gothic
mush. The specificities of ghosts, the roots of spiritualism in the origins of modern science and the
development of modern technologies like photography; these are worth pursuing, worming out the
relations of superstition and positivism. For me, the role of the occult in mythogeography is as a
connector among connectors, not an irrational force, so in Paris I enjoy the fakery of Nicholas Flamel’s
house, its uneasy and unquiet reincarnation as a restaurant and the strange link to Devon, where J. K.
Rowling has Flamel expiring, in his retirement, at the age of 666.

What role does the fictional or the myth play in a city?

It depends on the quality of the fictions and the myths. If we follow the myth of the scapegoat then
what collectivity we have in the city ‘we’ have at the expense of an ‘other’. If we accept the fictions of
the liberal economy in our own working life then we must ignore the immoveable reality of it in those of
others and the parts of the city must not look at each other. If we accept a myth of shared
precariousness, if we follow fictions of ‘rough’ social heroism, of the value of the narrative of
trajectories (quests and pilgrimages) over that of boundaries (identity and property) then maybe we
don’t need to keep repeating the same tedious urban spectacles.

Buy the Book

Phil Smith’s book, Mythogeography – A Guide to Walking Sideways, is published by Triachy Press in
the UK. More information here:
http://www.triarchypress.com/pages/Mythogeography_Guide_to_Walking_Sideways.htm

Learn More
If you inspired to find out more about mythogeography, visit these resources:

Mythogeography: http://www.mythogeography.com/

Wrights & Sites: http://www.mis-guide.com/

http://www.invisibleparis.net/