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The Mythogeography Of Things To Be
󰁐󰁨󰁩󰁬 󰁓󰁭󰁩󰁴󰁨
 We come to a T junction. Never go back. And the two otheroptions are roughly similar. Each one appetising, neithereccentrically so. We’re on a group “drift”
Taxi To Westwood and  Featureless
. Setting of at 4am in a taxi, blindfolded, Walkmans on, we’ve asked to be driven to somewhere without signs of where we might be (our version of asituationist ‘catapult’). The driver named it “featureless”.On my own, at such junctions, I usually take a step in onedirection, and jump back, worried at missing things in theother. I take a step along the other route and, once more,recoil. Making a Burdidan’s ass of myself. The anxiety is aneconomic one, a fear of loss.On
 Taxi To Westwood and Featureless
 we threw a stick inthe air and followed the sharpened end. Coming to the junction afunctionally, already following irrational ambience we felt little need to weigh the possibilities.I’ve been participating in and initiating such “drifts” foralmost 10 years now. For me, they emerged from the site-specific theatre and performances of the Exeter, UK-basedgroup
Wrights & Sites
. Dissatisfied by some of theimpositions of theatre on the sites it was supposed to bespecific to,
Wrights & Sites
 began to explore otherperformative options: informed by the psychogeography of the situationists (at first negatively, defining ourselves inopposition to them), by English neo-romantics like ArthurMachen, by the meshing with the ‘everyday’ of Fluxus, and
 
 by more recent explorers of the urban like Anna Best and theStalker group of Rome, we began to take ‘drifts’ with no‘where’ to get to, without fear of what we might be missingelsewhere. We were arriving at junctions afunctionally.I want to explore this ‘break’ in walking as something morethan a simple opposing of function, but as something morelike a delayed moment just before a synthesising of patternsin the physical sciences,something more than adisruption in leisure studies.Before the situationistspopularised and theorised this break (following, knowingly, inthe footsteps of Dadaist anti-guided walks and Surrealist jaunts), it had been prefiguredin walking of which thesituationists were not aware:occasional experiments withinthe more extreme ranges of recreational walking andtramping, like Stephen Graham’s zig zag walk (in
 
The Gentle Art of 
 
Tramping),
and among an esoteric few who saw  walking as an irrational journey, like the Prague writers whose street wanderings became labyrinthine fictions:Gustav Meyrink, Paul Leppin, Alfred Kubin, or, in London, Arthur Machen.
 
But these were still bound in the polaroppositions of function and pleasure, a sort of ambulatory ‘art for art’s sake’. Now a break from this binary oppositionhas been made increasingly possible by long rhythms of 
 
critical-theoretical change, by recent crests in neuroscience, by the popularisation of non-classical physics and aresurgent interest in neo-Platonism, morphology andmathematical biology. Where reviews of walking were once referenced mostly toliterature (and this still continues, influentially, in RebeccaSolnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s very recent‘Psychogeography’), then visual arts, architecture andpolitics (Guy Debord being the obvious example, andFrancesco Careri’s ‘Walkscapes’), and more recently geography, archaeology and anthropology (see Mike Pearsonand Michael Shanks’s ‘Theatre/Archaeology’), I amproposing here a pedestrian pseudo-science of limitedmotion, crucially ‘simple’ in the sense of using a smallnumber of invariants by which to navigate ideological flows. A ‘science’ that slides through its influences, taking gratefully from them, but abandoning that repetition of origins thatsets up colony within all disruptions; for want of a betterterm: mythogeography.Mythogeography is active on the border between the respectable and the non-respectable. Like “researchers” inconspiracy, it mimics the nomenclature of science without the obligation to alwaysmaintain its disciplines, (and withoutfunding or laboratories it is, by necessity,a borrowed and borrowing practice, it isnot original). Given its few resources itmust deploy its findings in a strategicgame of peaceful conspiring, hopefully placing itself within the liquid cloisters of a self-organising enthusiasm
 for
self-organisation and within the ambiguities

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