by Matthew Everett
[Note: This article first appeared in The Agenda #15]
Psychic geography is a psychic ability to examine the interaction between spaces and people, and also a way of thinking about those spaces and people, in which it is assumed that the space has the upper hand and a desire to confound, betray, or destroy the people who inhabit it. Thus, the culprit of any crime is the space in which it took place (and possibly, by association, the people who designed that space).
The psychic geographer specializes in spotting that place where humans and their environment meld and we can no longer speak of individual will as such, but only communal or sometimes corporate imperatives, the desires of the space as it speaks through the body politic that inhabits it.
When we speak of pretentious or insupportable movements in the arts and the social sciences, we often make the mistake of focusing on the issue of intent. If, for example, we find a windowless block of housing projects every bit as deplorable, in its own way, as the fascist architecture of Albert Speer, we may be inclined to more venomously condemn the latter, simply because it was commissioned by Adolf Hitler to serve the interests of the Third Reich—Le Corbusier at least imagined that he had the best interests of humanity at heart when he designed his "machines for living." But this way of thinking is wrong, for the simple reason that in neither case did the human beings responsible really have control over what they were doing.
Shortly after physicists discovered that space is never truly empty, but is in fact teeming with virtual particles waiting to be called into existence, psychic geographers discovered "virtual architectural particles" which flit about in space waiting for a human host to make them into a gazebo, or a council flat, or a parking garage. These particles, like their cousins from the realm of physics, exist independently of the passage of time, and it is not possible to know both their momentum and their location at the same time. Psychic geographers, who are also called architects, have devised secret probabilistic methods of "guessing" what the particles will do.
Are psychic geographers uniquely qualified to be rulers of the city? Probably. Will their rule, when they eventually take over, necessarily make everything function smoothly? Definitely not. Sometimes the space requires that, as some things are built, other things are burned to the ground. Sometimes the achingly beautiful light of the winter moon on a stand of pine trees requires that a hideous fountain be placed nearby. Human notions of aesthetics rarely enter into it. Sometimes a blood sacrifice is required, as brother turns upon brother to satisfy the ineffable needs of the space.
Will we ever be free of the earth and the spaces it creates, and their capricious desires? Will there come a time when we can outwit them, not make a condominium when all we really wanted was a shed for our garden tools, refrain from razing a shantytown to the ground even though we found it rather picturesque? No, we cannot hope to outsmart space or predict the actions of the virtual architectural particles. We should not imagine that we have a choice; but with the help of the psychic geographers, we can at least interpret what the space wants, and exist in harmony with its destructive tendencies.