Walking and talking: Will Self

Carfree chooser Will Self was on Saturday’s Today programme on BBC Radio 4, talking about psychogeography. He described it as “the idea of purposeless transit across the urban context in order to deconstruct the commercial and political imperatives of contemporary space.” Obvious, really. And something to consider next time you’re on a walk. Or a purposeless transit.

On a related theme, he described airports as being designed “to make people bored and make them move forward, like cattle moving toward the bolts that will be fired into their skulls....in an airport you are basically a cow with a credit card.”   Next time you want to avoid the plane and go by train,  the guys at Loco2  can help.
Photo: The Guardian.

“Walking is Political” says Will Self

Will Self, again (see post on 29.3.12), this time in his guise as professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University. A mite too long to be a Quote of the Week, but worth reproducing here, is an extract from an edited version of his inaugural lecture, subheaded by the Guardian as being about the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control.
“….deprived of mechanised means of locomotion – the car, the bus, the train - and without the aid of technology, the majority of urbanites, who constitute the vast majority of Britons, neither know where they are, nor are capable of getting somewhere else under their own power…..to walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control.”

Carfree: Will Self

The lugubrious sesquipedalian writer and psychogeographer wrote about how he switched from being a petrolhead to carfreedom in an article in ES magazine a while back. (Final proof I’ve cracked my addiction to motoring, Will Self, Evening Standard, 29 April 2008). He wrote, “When I contemplated a life without a car of my own I feared not simply that I would be unable to do everything I wanted to do in the city, but that, like an amputee, I would still find myself trying to flex - or drive - a muscular appendage that was no longer there. Not a bit of it.” He has also covered the same topic, on how he now prefers a walk to a drive, in Walk, the magazine of the Ramblers Association. Appropriately, Self’s book Psychogeography provides a walking-related definition, cited by Dictionary.com, for the word anoesis, a state of being without conscious thinking. “Normally, on my long-distance walks, anoesis descends within a few miles: the mental tape loop of infuriating resentments, or inane pop lyrics, or nonce phrases gives way to the greeny-beige noise of the outdoors.” Probably not such a good idea for the urban walker.