The essay and psychogeography: Negotiating Marxism in the essays of Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Issue 1 (1st July 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brown, Will
• Is Part Of: Art & the public sphere. Volume 8:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 83
• Page End: 96
• Publication Date: 2019-07-01
• Subjects: Art -- Political aspects -- Periodicals; Art and society -- Periodicals; Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Periodicals; Art museums -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Public art -- Periodicals; 306.47
• DOI: 10.1386/aps_00007_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2042-793X

Abstract

AbstractIn their essays for the London Review of Books (LRB), Iain Sinclair and Will Self draw on two legacies in particular ‐ that of the essays of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and that of Psychogeography and the work of the Situationist International. This article reviews a selection of these LRB essays ‐ appearing between 2002 and 2015. It traces and analyses a dialectical tension within them ‐ inherited from Benjamin and Adorno ‐ as to the commensurability of 'the essayistic' with the delivery of serious, effective Marxist criticism; whether (as Self himself says, noting an analogous tension in the films of Patrick Keiller) they are to see their own work 'as part of a strategy of resistance to the spatial forms of late capitalism, or only as incorporations of the everyday into a bourgeois calculus of the arty-factual'. It is argued that this tension is itself not only characteristic of, but in some way fundamental to their work and its impetus, concluding with a consideration of how the essay form might offer a means of moving beyond ideology (which is the constraint of both capitalism and Marxism alike) ‐ to find a literary analogue to, and vehicle for, the imaginative spatial possibilities and practices that the psychogeographic legacy represents.