Nehemiah Blake

This answer to the question posed below comes from Will Self:

Could you explain the principles of pyschogeography and do you think it’s something that can only be applied to urban spaces?
Ooh, big question. I take my lead on matters psycho-geo from the Situationist fons et origio. It’s part of the tearing down of the Society of the Spectacle mandated by late capitalism; unstructured dérives or drifts across the urban landscape cut across the predetermined routes of commercial necessity which were best defined by a graffito I once saw on a supermarket wall outside Yate in Somerset: ‘Work, Consume, Die’. What I think of as ‘the man-machine matrix’ wants you tramelled on EasyJet watching a six-inch screen implanted in the back of another human’s head, wants you stuck in a car coughing out lead particulates, wants you staring at a VDU, doesn’t want you on foot, transgressing.

This version of psychogeography (very neatly defined I think) sets itself in opposition to the society of spectacle of late capitalism.  Nehemiah Blake has been forging a third path, one that sits triangulated to the two opposites above (just as John Bunyan lies triangulated with Daniel Defoe and William Blake in Bunhill Fields): walking neither the paths of commercial necessity nor the transgressive paths of psychogeography, but a path of pilgrimage; not a stance for capital or of activist protest, but the stance of a watchman.  I’ll be blogging his visions and watchman reports from this April at www.nehemiahblake.co.uk.