Page - 173 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page 173 some of the biggest stories of today relate back to that idea of landscape. The most obvious are climate/environmental change — which stems largely from the way we see ourselves in relation- ship with the places we inhabit and exploit. And, of course, nationalism and in particular Brexit. (Qtd. in Tromans, Hornsby and Nicholls 2019: 16–18)5 Hopper examines landscape’s use as a battleground to come to terms with personal or collec- tive anxieties. Yet, rather than positioning landscape as an empty container or vehicle without agency, he acknowledges that these contemporary socio-political struggles that increasingly usher walkers out onto the land often originate from phenomena within which landscape plays a crucial role. In other words, space and nature prompt us to explore our relationship with them precisely because they are inextricably linked with our identity and being in the world. Current political tendencies such as environmentalism and neo-nationalism are inherently tied to how we view ourselves in relation to spaces, triggering uncertainties about identity, embodiment and causation. Hopper asserts furthermore that technological improvements in communication and transportation have resulted in new ways to live and use spaces (qtd. 2019: 18). It is crucial to understand hereby how these technological changes do not merely fasten or simplify our means of communication and transportation, but that they fundamentally influence our social and cognitive existence. They have enabled processes of globalization, which in turn impact nearly every aspect of our private and professional lives. Anxious about these fundamental changes, humans make use of both walking and writing as methods to ponder and reimagine ourselves and our places in the world. It may be argued that psychogeography has endured through time because of its universal applicability, which makes it easy to be recontextualized. Considering the positive and negative effects of that inherent vagueness, Tina Richardson stresses that ‘it is [psychogeography’s] unde- finable quality that has led to its endurance’ (Richardson 2015: 7). To walk psychogeographi- cally is to come to terms with how individual identity or culture is enmeshed in the physical world, providing a means to distil the real and imagined strata of one’s surroundings. Psycho- geography must not be considered only through the term’s common usage, which especially in the past was associated exclusively with (white male) privilege, but must be understood more generally through the notion of walking as a means to disassemble the psychological impact of place.6 Such a view allows for an extended history of psychogeography, accounting for radical walking’s significance throughout the history of travel and travel writing. Yet, it is important to note that psychogeography should not be envisioned as a genealogy of coherent development, but rather as a conceptual lens through which a wide range of phenomena, related or unrelated, can be viewed (Coverley 2018: 15). Crucially, Richardson highlights the ‘bricolage nature of psychogeography’, and links this to the historical impact of alternative walking acting ‘as a kind of toolbox for contemporary psychogeographers’, rather than a fixed set of ideas from which to follow (Richardson 2015: 3). 5 The turn towards landscape indicated by the rise of nature writing in the UK is often read as a result of surging isolationism and patriotism. However, psychogeography and its travelogues are inherently concerned with, on the one hand, thinking about individual experience, and, on the other, to extract multiple non-hegemonic discourses attached to a specific place. Hopper further explains that it is the nature of today’s psychogeographical practice to include the wide-ranging ‘polyphony’ of unheard voices (qtd. in Tromans, Hornsby and Nicholls 2019: 18). 6 Walking in itself remains a highly debated subject of contestation, since the publicness of the act highlights the identity politics of spaces, especially within urban spheres.