Thursday 15 September 2011

Your opinion sought

I'm thinking about using some of Iain Sinclair's work on a module which discusses the ways in which we conceptualise the city. Beyond ethnography and anthropology, there's a movement (largely French) which stresses the subjective and almost unanalysable experience of urban existence.

The British wing consists of the psychogeographers, and Sinclair is the foremost of the them all. He looks underneath the 'regenerations' and rebrandings to highlight the psychological aspects of public and private policy. He spots the occult or unconscious motives and expressions manifested by architecture, policing, redevelopments. He cares for the alternative narratives and histories of the city's shifting inhabitants, the kind of stories and discourses entirely obliterated by the oppressive fantasies of the property developers and bureaucrats - his new book, Ghost Milk deconstructs the Olympic Project's determination to obliterate the messy, scruffy, badly-behaved but real communities of Hackney and the other boroughs on which this global fantasy has landed. Let me know what you think.

1 comment:

unluckydip said...

Personally I'd say go for it, really interested me when I first heard about it at around 18/19.

Incidentally I heard about the idea from Will Self on a interview with him on Sky Arts and as a result of your post I'm now watching Will Self videos on youtube.