The essay and psychogeography: Negotiating Marxism in the essays of Iain Sinclair and Will Self

Abstract

Abstract In their essays for the London Review of Books (LRB), Iain Sinclair and Will Self draw on two legacies in particular ‐ that of the essays of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and that of Psychogeography and the work of the Situationist International. This article reviews a selection of these LRB essays ‐ appearing between 2002 and 2015. It traces and analyses a dialectical tension within them ‐ inherited from Benjamin and Adorno ‐ as to the commensurability of 'the essayistic' with the delivery of serious, effective Marxist criticism; whether (as Self himself says, noting an analogous tension in the films of Patrick Keiller) they are to see their own work 'as part of a strategy of resistance to the spatial forms of late capitalism, or only as incorporations of the everyday into a bourgeois calculus of the arty-factual'. It is argued that this tension is itself not only characteristic of, but in some way fundamental to their work and its impetus, concluding with a consideration of how the essay form might offer a means of moving beyond ideology (which is the constraint of both capitalism and Marxism alike) ‐ to find a literary analogue to, and vehicle for, the imaginative spatial possibilities and practices that the psychogeographic legacy represents.