Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

First, I should like to note that, although as with Keiller I have apparently rubbished the concerns of Sinclair several times, I hold him no actual malice. On the contrary, I actually like him quite a lot both for his qualities as a writer and for his qualities as a person that appear to be revealed through his writing. In fact, I haven't really got anything bad to say about any of the London psychogeographers, except Stewart Home, who I have disliked for years for reasons unrelated to his work as a psychogeographer. My verbal assaults against London are largely a rhetorical device, and, in fact, many of them are echoed in Sinclair's work. What I have objected to, mainly, is the focus on London as if it is the most interesting thing in the UK. Sinclair's take on this is interesting, simultaneously defining London as a microcosm and as something special and apart from the rest of the world (suggesting several times that everywhere beyond the M25 is 'nowhere') whilst simultaneously acknowledging that the road he is studying is an engine that drives this solipsism. He says of the motorway:

"By the time you've driven it...you should be way out in another eco-system, another culture: Newport (Mon.), or Nottingham, or Yeovil. The journey must mean something. Not a wearied return, hobbled, to the point of origin."

Do You Think Culture is Order?

There is a tendency in western thought towards categorisation as the default mode for understanding reality that is, I think, inescapable. I certainly know I'm guilty of it; in fact, I greatly enjoy categorising and sorting things; making playlists of songs based on genre, for example, or identifying and discussing movements in art, which inevitably becomes a discussion, at least in part, of which artists should be included under a certain heading, which typify it, and so on. What is not as often acknowledged is that this mania for classification grows out of, and is related to, a more sinister fetish for dualism.

This may seem to be a bit absurd. After all, dualism is by definition the idea that if something is either one of two things, so how does it relate to situations where we have a whole range of choices about how to categorise something? What it is key to remember here is that an object or an idea isn't merely affected by one dualism. Deconstructing a categorisation choice into a range of binary dualisms is pretty easy. Say we have a ball that can be either red, blue or yellow. What we have to remember is that we can also say that the ball is not red, not blue or not yellow. That is to say, rather than think of a triple choice, we can also choose to say that it is affected by three dualisms, that of red/not red, blue/not blue, yellow/not yellow.

Of course, in the real world, things are a little more difficult. For a start, real world dualisms are generally not constructed logically. They impose a structure on the world, rather than arising out of the existing structure of the world. In a mathemetical or logical model, our above example works, but in reality there are an astonishing range of percievable colours, and perception of colour is bounded by different cultural and scientific models, not to mention differences in human biology. To call a certain range of hues 'red' or 'yellow' is a social construction, nothing more. This is the danger of categories. At their best, they can give us a linguistic or scientific model for discussing the world. At their worst, they offer a form of pantomime rationality, an attempt to crudely hammer the fabulous complexity of world into a preconcieved model. Dualisms, with their starkness, are particularly terrible at this.