This is a great introduction by Will Self to a ‘practice’ or ‘discipline’ with deep roots in cannabis culture: psychogeography.
Those roots are so deep that they ultimately reach far back into the phenomenon of the band — both the hunter–gatherer band of prehistory and the more recent premodern bands of wandering qalandar dervishes and sadhus.
But in the immediate modern European context — per Self’s talk — the crucial text is Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.
The genesis myth of psychogeography has Debord so stoned in a park one day that he can’t find his way out. Disoriented, in an instant of realization, the place and the moment reveal themselves to him afresh in all their fullness and immediacy. Pure potentiality. Ontic vitality. Cannabis kensho!
High on kif, Debord wanders the city without plan or purpose. Through sheer aimlessness, he experiences its boulevards and alleyways as a spontaneous, coemergent liberation of person and place, city and subjectivity freed together, streets and self reclaimed. He calls this practice the dérive (‘drift’). As for the name ‘psychogeography’, he would later state this was proposed to him by a Moroccan dervish.
Dervish or no dervish, for cannabis counterculture, two essential sources that inspired Debord are De Quincey’s first (i.e., 1821) version of his Confessions and Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises. The image above is ‘Self-Portrait under the Influence of Hashish’ by Baudelaire, c. 1844.
Debord’s urban dérive draws upon De Quincey and Baudelaire’s literary realizations of intoxicated flânerie. Although for Debord the drug of choice was more often than not wine, his drunken way to ‘the drift’ followed in Walter Benjamin’s stoned footsteps through the Paris arcades and the waterfront slums of 1920s Marseilles. You can find Benjamin’s accounts of his experiences in On Hashish.
The flâneur is the ‘stroller’, ‘drifter’, or ‘loafer’ of the modern city. The name is of course French — above all, Parisian — but ultimately derives from the Normans and the Old Norse flana: ‘to wander with no purpose’.
‘The first effect of hashish is a sort of exhilaration, a singular happiness, as if all the cares of life had vanished, leaving a clear and radiant horizon’, writes Baudelaire in Artificial Paradises. ‘The external world assumes a strange splendour, and the most trivial objects become endowed with an inexplicable significance.’
So the flâneur wanders the city….
For an anarchist–mystic fusion that draws on all these ideas and works, check out Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam.
Will Self’s books — Psychogeography and Psycho Too — are still in print and are illustrated by none other than Ralph Steadman.
A condensed ‘teaser’ intro to the talk linked to at the top is available below:
