Page - 172 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

172 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page Introduction Psychogeography in its current state is multifaceted and dispersed across demographics and disciplines. Although as a concept it has existed much longer, it was first theoretically described in the 1950s as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geograph- ical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (Debord 2006a: 8). Designed as a practice-oriented approach to urban life, psychogeography was particularly incarnated in the form of the walk, as this activity can afford a subjective, street-level perspective, and a slowness that grants its practitioners the possibility to ponder the influence of place on the individual, and vice versa.1 While some practitioners and artists habitually hail the demise of psychogeography, citing sound reasons such as the phenomenon’s historical privileging of male identity, it seems evident that radical walking has all but gone away (Smith 2014: 3).2 Today, psychogeography is understood as a tool to explore the relationship between the self and one’s surroundings through walking and has numerous ties to similar spatial and environmental concepts.3 Importantly, psychogeog- raphy has found its way into ephemeral media that provide an infrastructure for experiential storytelling. Inviting the juxtaposition and assemblage of different media, genres and texts, one of psychogeographers’ media of choice is the zine, a home-made and self-published print medium. Subversive in both their mode of travel and the chosen medium of recording and articulation, contemporary psychogeographers seek to align the experiences of travel and reading. As the article will show, they do so by combining word and image into a narrative form that foregrounds the situatedness of the individual’s experience as well as the multiplic- ity of perspectives and voices involved in the production of place-related meaning.4 Initially, the article will shed light on both the characteristics of contemporary psychogeography and the zine as a medium, and will closely examine the ways in which this medium (re-)con- structs meaning in two recent travel zines, Emma Charleston’s Personal Geography (2019) and John Molesworth’s A Long Walk (2016). ‘New Psychogeography’ During at least the last decade there have been palpable shifts and frictions within the poly- phonic field of psychogeography, prompted by changes in social self-perceptions and political life. British-based writer Justin Hopper muses on today’s renewed and renegotiated interest in landscape, explicating that: 1 Thus, the mode of the “derive” emerged as one of the main psychogeographical methods (Debord 2006b). Dérive, which can be translated as ‘drifting,’ is a walking technique through which the individual is able to come into touch with his or her own ‘authentic’ self, by letting the environment trigger an exploration of both the terrain and one’s own mind. 2 As it is focusing on walking, this article will use Phil Smith’s term of ‘radical walking’ (Smith 2014) alongside psychogeography, as it highlights the aspects of practice and embodiment. 3 Similar concepts include, for example, schizocartography, mythogeography, deep topography, deep mapping, landscape punk, and hauntology. 4 This article does not suppose that psychogeography is a monolithic circle whose membership must be claimed; rather, it wants to view psychogeography as a dynamic and heterogeneous phenomenon that comes into being through a number of individual practices.