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.
