Psychogeography | Will Self | Talks at Google

hi everyone and welcome to today's authors at Google event it's my great pleasure to have will self with us today my first question when I found out we're having will self was was was going to walk to Google from London evidently he didn't he is the author of four collections of short stories five novels and also four works of nonfiction and he's here today to speak about his most recent collection of nonfiction psychogeography which hopefully you all have in your hands now he'll be speaking for a bit taking questions from the audience if you do have a question during the Q&A session please wait for the microphone to arrive and then he'll be signing books after his talk and if I could I'd like to ask you with your laptops to to close your laptop's during the talk if at all possible I know that's a tough thing to do here at Google but it would be nice and respectful if we could please join me in welcoming will self to Google a frozen moment at u.s. immigration JFK Airport New York my British passport is scanned the official scrutinizes the computer screen with a worried expression and then politely asks me to go into a back room I join what looked like a hundred Koreans and a miscellany of other potential persona non-grata a Frenchman is being noisily grilled by an immigration officer at a high desk the officer looks like an ugly acne scarred version of Jim Carrey the Frenchman looks preposterous fur-trimmed jeans a leather patchwork shoulder bag collar length hair frankly I wouldn't try to get into Legoland looking like that let alone post 9/11 America you say you're a philosophy teacher the officer insinuates in Grenoble but you seem to spend an awful amount of time here yes like I'd say I have Zee girlfriend yeah yeah I know that in Manhattan and you're in and out of here like a yo-yo there are stamps in here he riffles the French passport for every month of the last goddamn year the Frenchman shrugs she is my girlfriend hey whatever the officer is suddenly bored he stamps the passport and beckons me up now mr. self oh there are some little things you maybe aren't telling us about yourself well my voice drawls from deep in clubland there are perhaps one or two trifling drug offenses ancient history really we're gonna have to deport you you cannot come in on a Visa Waiver form with prior narcotics convictions you'll have to go back to London and apply for a visa there my heart sinks then steadies look officer I say would it make any difference if I told you that I was an American citizen the Jim Carrey alike scrutinizes me intently what makes you think that I tell him that my mother was a citizen born in 1922 in Columbus Ohio and that she registered me at the US Embassy in London when I was born Kerry says he will check this information out and shoes me back to the bolt down seats over the next two hours all the Koreans and some Africans with impressive cyclisation scars are admitted to the land of the free the only people left are me and a silently weeping German family comprising late middle-aged parents and a grown-up daughter apparently the paterfamilias failed to get an exit stamp in his passport when he departed in 1987 Jim Carrey and I have struck up an acquaintance ship we suck mints together and listen to Miles Davis's kind of blue played on the cd-rom drive of his computer terminal finally he beckons for me to follow him and leads me back through a warren of offices I'm taking you back here he confides because we've decided to admit you but we're going to deport the Germans and he pauses significantly I don't want to upset them any more than necessary in the back office sits an older heavier set man with a strictness - and I'm filing here the Stars and Stripes limps on the flagpole by his desk he looks up from studying my passport when Jim and I enter so mr. self he asks without preamble what exactly do you think you are well a dual citizen I suppose he breathes heavily mr. self I have been an immigration officer for 35 years and let me tell you something you are either an apple or a pear he pauses allowing this fractious moment to dangle between us I don't care if you choose to live in London I don't even mind if you travel on a British passport when you're abroad but let me tell you this his voice begins to quaver with emotion when you come here to the United States of America you are an American citizen I snap to attention the Battle Hymn of the Republic swells in my inner ear as I deftly circled my covered wagon in front of the Lincoln Memorial leap out and march forward to receive the Pulitzer sir yes sir I barked on the way out Jim Carrey passes me my British passport I don't even want to hold this his voice is also choked with patriotism because it offends me to see you travelling on such a document now a few months later I am the proud possessor of an American passport and to begin with I felt pretty strange about it to tell the truth I've never felt my nationality defined me any more than my shoe size actually since my shoe size is 12 a good deal less but since actualizing my Americanists i've given a good deal of thought to whether I feel American or British or European or anything am I in fact a citizen of a vast Oceania which stretches from brest-litovsk to Honolulu but on consideration weighing up all the geopolitical historical and cultural factors it's dawned on me that the possession of two passports means one thing and one thing alone shorter cues on embarkation either side of the Atlantic are not an apple or a pear I'm a banana skin glissading through immigration so that's a little all of this book consists of little pieces except for the opening essay which is about 25,000 words along which is called walking to New York and that's about how I walked to New York about a year ago from my home which is in South London in England how can you walk to New York there is the Atlantic in between I walked from my house in South London to Heathrow airport's Terminal four I then flew to JFK and walked from JFK into Manhattan why I hear you think or maybe not because I can't hear anything what would be the point of doing something so ridiculous isn't that the most boring and pointless thing anybody's ever done I think not and in fact I found it one of the most liberating experiences probably of my life which has been although not as long as some people's perfectly eventful so far the strangest thing is that in terms of space the body is still attuned after tens hundreds of thousands of years to register perception of space at a physical not a mental level I would argue and my experience of walking to New York seems to confirm that if you walk to the airport then fly and then walk to your destination at the other end your body tells you that you have traversed a continuous landmass the plane flight is kind of irrelevant to your body your body doesn't register it particularly if you fly club and manage as I did to sleep most of the way so my impression as I walked into my hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was that I had walked all the way from England that's what my legs were telling me my legs were telling me I'd walked 17 miles the first day and about 15 or 16 the second day I'd been walking for two days and I got to Manhattan and the body kind of never lies about that sort of thing you have to consider the fact that barring ships there was no non a Oh technical transport in the world I just write that up for the hell of it until when does anybody know what a Oh technical means nobody but if you're like techies and it's a word with tech in it hmm no give me no good try good try it just means deriving from the body it means physical forms of transport so when was the first non physical form of transport anybody what was the first time that human beings traveled not through the agency I'm excluding ships from this wind power either not through the agency of their own bodies or the bodies of animals anybody hmm 1860s any any refinement ah now you're about you you're out anybody no sir okay that's none nan-oh hang gliding and god that's wind that's we're not going there no I mean machines machines machine transport I I think it's about eighteen forty two in fact I think you're about eighteen years out I think Stephenson's rocket is about eighteen forty two so we have mitochondrial Eve to 1842 everything is the body you go somewhere you ride a horse if you travel your muscles feel the experience it's only with the arrival of the steam engine a mere 160 odd years ago that we start to have this phenomenon of machine mediated travels so our sense of place has always been defined by our bodies you would need so far the whole idea of place no longer being defined by the exertion of muscular power it takes anybody who's ever done horseback riding will tell you that it it's tiring right your body feels it it's only in 1840 that we begin to get the modern world begins to create itself around forms of transport that don't involve muscular power that don't involve a sense of the capability of the body in its range now we live in a world that is mediated by the tentacle you guys live in a world that is so mediated by the technical that it makes me who is a relative Luddite feel really queasy to be honest but even the world I live in is strange now I've been coming to San Francisco since for about 17 years I first came to San Francisco in 1991 sometime around then I would fly in to the airport get a cab into the center of town do a do a reading of one of my books get drunk and up fall asleep maybe get up the next day and do the same and then fly out usually to Seattle because that's always the book tour rude okay so I've been in and out of San Francisco over the over you know nearly a decade and a half doing that and I never knew where Marin County was I never knew were Sausalito was I never knew I think I went over and did a reading in Berkeley once I didn't really know where Berkeley was I got in a cab downtown in San Francisco it drove me over the bay bridge I looked out either side the bridge buddy know where North was and know where South was I got to Berkeley what I remember about visiting Berkeley was the a lot of people were begging that year in Berkeley and that there the streets of this prosperous liberal you know left liberal American you know campus town were full of beggars that was the abiding image but you know where it was I didn't know where Berkeley was I didn't really know where San Francisco was and I certainly couldn't orient myself within it does this chime with anybody does anybody have this experience of the world or am i mad because I'm prepared to accept that I'm mad I'm very open-minded but my experience of the world is that it now consists of micro environments like here's my San Francisco micro environment always stay in the Prescott hotel on Post Street and and I remember vaguely there was Union Square there and I remember Market Street because again it was for the crackheads and and beggars and I remember that I remember really being struck by that because it basically my mother was American like basically an English guy and for us the image of San Francisco in California is of a prosperous open-hearted liberal environment of caring so to get to this city is the Prescott and walk a couple of hundred yards down the street and see people shooting up in their groins was kind of a bizarre experience for me a this is going back 15 years but hey you know what it's still happening what a surprise okay so that was that's my Mike my San Francisco micro world it's like a little island and it's connected via plane flights with my micro world in Seattle and my micro world you know actually my micro world in Delhi I've only been to Delhi a couple of times my life but hey what do you know both times I stayed at the Oberoi Palace Hotel so I got a micro world in derry Delhi I got these micro world scattered around the place that have no connection between them at all and our internally disorient disoriented in my San Francisco micro world I don't know where North is it doesn't have any points of the compass I don't know where the sea is you know the key psycho Geographic epiphany for me that got me thinking about this stuff was I live in London in England quite a big city it's a unified conurbation it's not like this conurbation which is really an edge city I was driven here up there El Camino Real Highway and I had it explained to me a bit of the history that you've now got continuous build-up from San Francisco all the way up to San Jose an entire 50 mile edge city a million people London's just a blob with eight million people in it and through it runs a river called the Thames okay and the Thames goes like this squiggles through the city it goes into the sea here which is about 35 miles away okay now I was born here and I live here and I've lived all my life here virtually I lived a year in the States when I was a kid I lived about a year in Australia in my 20s but basically that's where I've lived my entire life okay now one morning in about 1988 I was standing I went into work I was working at a publishing company in Mayfair in London I got into work and somebody had lost the key to the office so we couldn't get into the office and I had this kind of unexpected day off and I had this weird Epiphany I was standing in Mayfair and I thought to myself I have never seen the mouth of this river I have never seen where it meets the sea came to me out of nowhere I don't know where this came from this thought that I'd never seen the sea the point where the thames reaches i thought about if i went to the Amazonian rainforest and i met a peasant an Amazonian peasant on the banks of the Amazon 30 miles from the mouth of the Amazon and I said to him or her have you ever seen the mouth of the Great River and they said no no we never go there it's too far away I would think you are a very very ignorant and territorially confined peasant and yet it occurred to me that I was exactly that peasant that's who I was I had no more understanding of the physical geography of where I lived then this person now whether you know an evolutionary psychologist might explain this by saying as we've been talking about you know a Oh technical means of transport we're not actually hardwired to you know we're hunter-gatherers we live in small groups we have a restricted range we're not meant to see the mouth of the river maybe that's an argument I don't know I got in my car and I drove to the mouth of the Thames I thought I need to know this I need to know where I am in some sense I need to know where I am outside of this kind of world that I'm living in I need to know how physical and Human Geography really marry up because there are an awful lot of forces in my life that are encouraging me to live in a different kind of spatial awareness to live in a spatial awareness ters defined in europe this is particularly true it's not so true here in North America but in Europe because of fierce competition between Airlines I can fly I to almost any European city more cheaply than I can take a cab across town so the encouragement for me to live in these microcosm environments that are linked by air travel is enormous as an enormous commercial inducement for me to continue living in this micro environment okay everybody's keen for me to do that in where I live where there are 60 million people living in an area far far less than that of California about maybe about six the size land area of California the car is not a means of freedom the car is not a means of freedom the fact that I can turn the steering wheel or activate the accelerator gives me an illusion that I can choose where to go because I can't choose where to go because there is too much traffic okay there is too much traffic if I did see I simply cannot go to the places I want to go if you wanted to conceive of England England is very comparable to California we basically deal in retail services as an economy okay we don't have any industry anymore we provide maths and we provide mass entertainment advertising retail services merchandising we do all of that for Europe with this kind of California Mourdock the coast of Europe and like California southern England is like la in the valley now it's that crowded my parents-in-law live in Scotland which is empty for obvious reasons you know for me to drive from London to Scotland etre I don't know it's about a 400 mile drive I had to for family reasons do it in the day the other day in the evening and it took me I traveled like at an average speed of about 30 or 35 miles an hour across the entire country it's that crowded on the freeway system so the idea that the car is destructive of these micro environments is of course meaningless now you guys who work a lot with virtuality of course have an even more you know a world with many many more micro environments it seems to me you are going places when you look at a screen part of your psyche is traveling even if your body remains firmly here I was saying to somebody over lunch that it's interesting that the setup of what you see is what you get which goes back to the old hyper card system is still an analogue system the way you interface with the computer is an analogue system you know this goes back to evolutionary psychology if you read Steven Pinker on language acquisition most of the way are the way our language has grown up is to do with putting things in things is to do with wrapping seen you around arrow arrowheads that's what we need to be able to describe the way we interface with the inside of a computer which of course isn't an analog system it's via analogs the desktop is arranged like an old office it's a spatial form of awareness there's no real necessity is there for that to be an analog digital interface or is there I don't know anyway you've got lots more micro worlds which are the internet sites or whatever it is you visit which of course have no internal orientation at all do they I mean if you spend all your day looking at a webcam that is positioned in st. Mark's Square in the Vatican in Rome there's no necessity for you to know where they're the Vatican lies in relation to the Tiber or any of that and yet in a very important sense your mind is spending time in the Vatican you could have an audience with the Pope via your computer so all of my practices as a psycho geographer are to do with not living in that kind of atomized world all right now on this North American book tour I've started to reclaim some of these cities that I've been visiting for years and years and not really being in it's really simple to do it's really easy to do all you got to do is walk you've got to get back to an AO technical form of travel in order to do it trust me I'm an evangelist for this I am an evangelist I believe in this because it works yesterday I've destroyed my San Francisco micro world I just blew it apart in fact I started blowing it apart when I came in from the airport one of the biggest enemies of the psycho geographer is the cab driver we hate cab drivers we hate them big time why do we hate them so much when you buy a cab when you rent a cab for a period of time you're not just renting the engine and the car you're renting the brain of the driver now a halfway decent cab driver is going to know way more about the town that you're in than you do and you trust that knowledge you don't bother you don't get into the cab and say which ways north or how are you sure that's the right road to take because you don't have a clue you've rented their ability although interestingly in London nowadays which we have a very very you know we have a burgeoning immigrant community and we also that the cab drivers not the licensed cab drivers but the mini cab drivers drive using sat-nav entirely so you get into a cab so they unless you have a zip code they won't carry you they can't carry you in fact because they don't know where they are at all they are more familiar with Lagos than they are with London so if you get into a cab they plug yours the zip code of your destination into the Sat Nav and then they drive solely on the sat-nav they do not know where they are anymore so that's an exception maybe we're evolving entirely into this micro world where nobody's going to know where the hell they are but in the meantime when you get out of the airport terminal and you rent a taxi in a strange town you're hiring that guy or girls ability to drive you to your destination and you forget about where you are now just the act when I arrived at San Francisco Airport on Saturday afternoon I took the bus into the center of town now just the act of bothering to take the bus and needing to know that it had a prescribed route and wherever it's going to drop me in the center of town and walking to my hotel only four bucks incidentally and it's perfectly fast it takes half an hour started to destroy the san francisco micro will because in my san francisco micro world I'm always just arriving at the Prescott okay I don't really know where Union Square which is about 200 yards away and Market Street that's my micro world the bus dropped me down here on first Street so immediately I came up this way I've never done that before in 15 years of coming from San Francisco and then yesterday I blew it apart because I came out of my hotel and I walked right clear across town to the Golden Gate I walked over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and I took the ferry back that's it my San Francisco and Bay Area world is now fully oriented it took me a mere six or seven hours to do it it's never going to be the same place for me again and it wouldn't have worked any other way but by using my feet because the act of using your feet in the act of navigating with a map forces you to constantly orient yourself within physical geography of course the street plan I've got a San Francisco doesn't include the hills although a big clue should have been that it said Knob Hill or Russian Hill that should have got through to me but it didn't so I'm following the grid pattern I'm going up and down like this and I could have probably taken a more picturesque route had I had a topographical map which nobody sees fit to print but it really didn't matter because the fact the matter is it's never going to be the same place for me again the other strange thing I'm going to just tell you a few more now this whole idea of psychogeography goes back to a guy called guida bored I don't know if anybody here has ever heard of him yeah you have okay he ran he ran a group called the Situationists who were a French group of Marxist intellectuals Marxist communist revolutionaries in 1950s France and they believed he wrote a book which I urge you to read a fascinating book it was published in the early 1960s it's called the Society of the spectacle I'll tell you afterwards because you can't read that I can't read that either it's just the Society of the spectacle now he believed that our kind of societies what he called late capitalist society because he believed that it was like over how wrong he was he thought late capitalist society created a spectacle it created an illusion within which we live and he saw this kind of micro and micro world that I'm talking about as evidence of that the way in which we don't know where we are he thought that the powers that be loved us to be disoriented in that way he felt the powers that be loved our world to be comprised of work home and consumerism those were all the things we needed to know that was anything we only needed to know where those things were we didn't need to know where we were and indeed to know where we were would be a dangerous and revolutionary and rebellious act now you've got a bear in mind that his field of operations was Paris which is a fascinating City not least because under Napoleon Napoleon's Town Planner the Baron von Houseman constructed the Grand Boulevard of Paris does anybody know why they're so long and so straight it's a famous fact about town planning partly yes it's for moving troops at speed you're right and also firing artillery to put down the Parisian mob okay so he was living in a city in which the road structure had been devised in part for civil oppression so the Situationists idea was if you take a path across a city that is aimless you're destroying the city in a way you're destroying the way in which the city is set up for reasons of hierarchy and power just by that fact of how you move across it so he and his pals would get hopelessly drunk on red wine and totter across town to the Eurodollar city by not Saddam where they'd lie drunkenly in the park confident that by this act alone they would soon bring all of capitalist society crashing to its knees sadly they were wrong about that or or happily they were wrong about that depending on which way you look at it I think I've given myself away but they did give birth or new life to this idea of the psycho geographer in French society has a longer lineage d'abord was only really picking up on the idea of the flaner of the yeah you know about this okay which goes back and back and back in Peru Xion it's really seeking an experience of the world usually on foot unmediated by technical means okay now I think decide have I said enough I think I probably have shall I take some questions if you have any questions it's a good idea shall I do that is anybody had me sorry use the microphone please do you get to hike in London anywhere do I hike in London yeah well I mean it I think that what surprises people a lot about the airport walks is everybody says you know this is about people not knowing where they are so if I tell you I walk in central London to London Airport the native Londoners who've lived there all their life will say what did you have to walk along the m4 along the freeway and you're like though excuse me that would be a legal be really dangerous and see really dull like why would anybody want to do that you can walk from central London to London Airport only which is 17 miles only walking two miles on the public road you know London you can walk along the River Thames for a lot of the way and then there's another little river that takes you almost all the way into the airport I walk from Pearson and outside Toronto Airport into Toronto when I arrived in North America a few days ago and again I hardly walked on a public road it can be done in a kind of countryside that's within the city so immediately you're starting to view the city in a different way but as it happens even walking on public roads London is a very pedestrian friendly City and there's a lot to look at I mean it's been there 2000 years so it's got quite a lot of history anybody else gentlemen here when our stationed in Europe one of the things I had it opportunity to do is just to travel all over and I kind of echo what you mentioned by walking around town you know walking around Paris walking around Copenhagen Stockholm Vienna really gave me a sense of the town but one of the things that I would used to do that that I seemed to disagree with the way your point is about driving and that I found it very it gave me a different sense of where I was going and just getting to that destination and I just would kind of like to get your thoughts about you know is it the traffic that that's an issue or is it the fact that you just feel like you're locked in your car because when I travel to a destination I would often take up a brake or I would go off the beaten path to give me a better sense of where I was I'm just kind of curious as to why you think that hate driving isn't okay I think that's fascinating and you may be a good driver because you're right if you brake the journey if you negotiate a different route if you make an effort I mean these things sound trivial but I don't think they're trivial at all but if you make an effort to get out of the car you know then that helps but in practice because our paradigm for using the car you're going back to Debord and the society of the spectacle you know what a lot of us use the car for is functionality you know it's a functional means of transport for us it's not a recreation means of transport so we start thinking about the car as an A to B means of travel it's also and I think this is a non-trivial point what do you look through at the world in a car you look through a windshield which is well it's shaped like an old 70 millimeter film it's kind of a widescreen it might be curved a little bit at the edges but basically it's a screen you know so your perception of the world it's not you know I can see up here I can move my head round I'm in the world in a 360-degree way which you're kind of not in the car and I think that's an but the most conditioning Li the paradigm of the a to be journey gets in the way of your good driving you know I applaud you for staying true to the idea of the car which should be a device for freedom can still be employed that way but I think for too many of us and particularly those of us who are living in high-density conurbations it's hard to hang on to that idea you know it's hard if you're you know stuck on the freeway and stop go traffic to think hey I could pull off here and open the door of the car and spread out a little rug maybe take a little stove and brew myself some coffee or tea I've started to do all of this you may laugh and smile about it but in order to make it remotely bearable to drive you're right you've got to do that you've got to start creating discontinuities in car travel because otherwise it's just too deranging I think yes oh you gotta wait for the mind it's very we're all very mic oriented round here okay got it now um has psychogeography changed your approach to writing or your style I don't think it's necessary mean I'm principally a novelist that's what I mostly write is fiction and actually you know it has in some ways but I think that's more to do with age than the particular practice of psychogeography the great thing for a writer about travel of any kind is that it supplies it's in its own narrative you know I decide to go somewhere and just the journey you know in a novel you know a well-constructed novel is a world it's a virtual world yeah it when you read Dickens or Tolstoy or flow Barre you don't question the furniture of that world do you you don't think you don't think others a continuity error in this world it doesn't add though actually there are some astonishing continuity errors in some of the great novels but you take it on trust the brilliance of the writer is that he or she with their words creates a totally believable multi-dimensional world in which the narrative the story works its way through ok here's the world and here's the line of it well a walk or any kind of journey is just the same thing it's a timeline of narrative going through it so it's a natural for a writer it's also a form of story that has a great deal of historical validity I mean the Canterbury Tales the pilgrims progress Don Quixote these are all what are called picaresque s' there are a series of events strung out along a narrative line so this kind of practice of psychogeography is kind of natural for a writer it fits perfectly with what one would want to do so I don't think it's changed me in that way as a writer I think this business of which I've been passionate about about kind of reclaiming our position in the world free of technology I'd be honest is it kind of it's a bit middle-aged you know kind of young people are really concerned with that concerns unusual to find somebody young who's that much concerned with this because they're too busy having sex and you know falling in love with people and you know they want the micro world you try and talk to a young person about this stuff and their eyes film over and they start looking really bored because that they're interested in sensation in an immediacy and the micro world promises that in abundance okay okay like in a counter example as you know I just came from India visiting my 20 year old son who's been there since July okay and one of the things he said that's been very disturbing is he hasn't been able to get to know Delhi because he can't walk it because it's very difficult to walk and not get hit by a bus so in fact he finds that extremely disturbing because he feels like he doesn't know the place and where he is okay but he's falling in love too but that he is pulling enough but I mean I would say he's in Delhi so for a start he's obviously a you know a guy who's interested in different places yeah well but no this is placing himself in that we can't places we can't place himself well I mean no one northern India is a fascinating culture in all sorts of ways but one of the most I mean we were talking about this over lunch but one of the most interesting I mean one of the strengths culture shock key things for a westerner going to North India is that you kind of have no privacy as a person you know as a westerner in India so you're you're that it's true you know I'm sure that's right I mean I think you'd be a tough tough prospect indeed to walk across Delhi though I'm considering doing it sir so my brother gets out a lot more than I do he's a biker bicyclist and he insists that the the bad weather days are part of the the journey so as has walking changed your view of how you relate to the weather well I've never understood why the the pathetic fallacy is so cold in that way I mean it you know for me rainy dark cold days kind of our depressing actually and you know if you're out a lot I think they're more depressing and I think your brother is not really talking I think I mean is he like a toughy is he like a kind of sporty toughy guy yeah well that's what he's talking about it's like a body builder saying going for the crunch or the burn or whatever they call it let's let's call a spade a spade here he is a masochist yes of course you know it's dull as ditchwater if weather is just the same all day every day for weeks and months on stretch you want weather variation that's one of the exciting things about being in a natural environment but to say you actually like as we English say getting pissed on I know he's wrong it's just wrong he has he has issues he needs help I can't provide it oh maybe I can't I don't know interesting I'm a cyclist too but and I cycle that's my main means of personal transport in London but it's not it is an a Oh technical form and it's not an a Oh technical form it's an interesting hybrid form of transport because its motion is like any other you know it's like a machine vehicle but you kind of are the machine but I I really stick to the idea this is best done on the foot if you're going to do it seriously anybody else yes sure it is um seems to me that this whole idea is kind of it's part of a larger picture kind of like you said that guy debord he saw it as part of societal control you see a lot of the writing of the romantics maybe I don't know return to nature is kind of it's a similar parallel idea of psychogeography so it seems to me that by just like kind of like you said he just went out we got drunk they ran around and you know it kind of didn't really achieve anything or didn't achieve its ultimate purpose so in a similar modern sense you know if you just kind of walk around the cities but then you kind of go back to your cubicle or whatever I mean what do you see this is part of kind of a larger idea a larger purpose and kind of what's the ultimate goal yeah I do see it as a larger purpose and I don't think it's futile I think it's about I'm anything about psycho geographies it's not really a field in its own right it's a discipline that transects other fields and those fields are the built environment so anything connected with architecture and city planning the environment you know literature moves through all of these and you know the romantics succeeded only too well in my view the romantics succeeded really well because what the romantics did is they said there are certain things that we define as beauty in the natural world and they were really kind of hard line about that about what was to be considered beautiful the notion of the sublime is a very precise idea about how you approach the natural world you know in the in the early 19th century when you're romantics went out to look at nature they would take an empty picture frame with them to frame what they were seeing because they wanted it to appear as a pictorial scene in that way they succeeded because that's what we've inherited you're laughing about that but that's what we are doing when we get on a plane and we go we're taking a frame with us that is the frame the plane journey provides the frame the tour company provides the frame I love hiking somebody says I love hiking I just live for it I get in my car and I Drive 50 or 100 miles into the mountains to a place of designated natural beauty where somebody's already held up a frame in advance of me and despite the fact that I'm fit and healthy I got all these good accessories all this good gear to do it in I'm still accepting that romantic definition of what is to be considered as the beautiful I can't do it here I can't walk down the El Camino that would be deranged there's no beauty to be found there that is an area of designated non natural beauty you know but what I'm saying is that this method is about reappropriation what is beautiful why shouldn't we live in a world that if we can't consider it as being beautiful the whole time we can at least consider that we're actually in it we can at least give it that much respect and I think that isn't important and a revolutionary thing because I think it makes us less inclined to despoil what we have and to ignore what we have and to condemn other people who don't have our purchasing power to live in the okay I think it's about that too I think it is a socially leveling thing to do as well so you know I do think it's important I don't happen to go the whole Situationist way and think that inevitably will bring down capitalistic M&E but I think it is an important new way of viewing those things yes anybody else I have to go early sadly but I have to go early sadly but I did have one question there's this there's this phenomenon in Japan where people are actually not coming out of their rooms they stay in there for years and years on end yeah I've heard about and there was like some French I think it was a French book where someone was he fell sick and so he was sitting in his room for 30 days and he described his room as though it was a journey yeah are you would that be the opposite of what you're talking about it's very interesting what you said is it poor is that like a micro version no I I think the two are related very very strongly I mean in as much as we have an impulse to get out we also have an impulse to get in and arguably where those impulses are strong you get creativity at both ends I mean it's fascinating if you look at the history of the English language novel you have Laurence Sterne wrote a wrote a book called sentimental journey through France and Italy which was very early on very early on in the history of the novel and the travelogue in which he spends an entire chapter getting from the door of the coach to the door of the inn so you know that idea of intense interior 'ti as an aspect of a journey is present very early on or to go back to the Flanders the French you have the textbook of the decadent movement aqua bore against nature which is entirely about that about a guy who rejects the natural world Shores himself up in his house at one point in the book I urge you all to read it if you never had it's a very funny very dark book he decides that he has to break out this French aristocracy of his mention in Paris where he's been isolated and go to England but he gets to the guards you know where you get the train and then the boat for England and he is so repelled by the Englishness of the people in the bar at the guard you Nord they're so beefy with their big red faces eating beef and drinking beer that he goes right back home again and shuts himself away for the rest of his life and so so you know maybe that's what's going on with these people in Japan you know maybe that you know and people that that enclosure has made them hypersensitive to the external world in that way to this kind of micro environment we have time for perhaps one more question anyone okay what can I ask you guys one question how do I get back to San Francisco because I don't have time to walk I don't have time to walk does any has anybody ever taken public transport from the Google campus from here fantastic or train there's a country that goes under San Francisco get a good view along the side have you done that I just did a 3d model and did you enjoy enjoy enjoy fully enjoy okay I knew why you were being so quiet you know all of this stuff thank you and then where do I get the train from Basel it was probably finalization is a process done so I could take the shuttle to Mountain View and then get the train from there i practical you know what they're doing 45 minute walk to man to do okay thank you thank you I hope you enjoyed your time with me

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 68,015

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Will Self, Psychogeography, guy debord, lettirsm, situationalism, psychogeography lecture

Id: zVEgOiB7Bo8

Length: 54min 2sec (3242 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2007

Reddit Comments

[u/scrimsims]

I love Will Self. Thanks for posting this.

[u/Iongler]

Enjoyed it a lot and made me realize I forgot about google talks. Thanks!