Toward an American psychogeography (3): Zothique and the Zodiac Killer

Jean Baudrillard, in his philosophical travelogue America (1986), writes that “America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.” But we have only to turn to an American psychogeography to… Continue Reading Toward an American psychogeography (3): Zothique and the Zodiac Killer

Toward an American psychogeography (2): displacing Exham Priory

Necessarily, any American psychogeography will form a webwork of displacements. In such a psychogeography, there are displacements on top of displacements on top of displacements. This is because the formal structure of displacement is necessarily recursive. A structure is recursive when the shape of the whole structure recurs in the shape of its parts (e.g.,… Continue Reading Toward an American psychogeography (2): displacing Exham Priory

On causal strangeways

Think of it like this. A causal strangeway describes the crooked or disjointed path by means of which causal effects spiral outward tumultuously from their plural points of origin, traversing ontological modes and orders without regard to adequation or proportion. Examples are endless. Seriously attempt to backtrace almost anything at all, and you’ll rapidly find… Continue Reading On causal strangeways

Toward an American psychogeography (1): Hawksmoor/Winchester

Like the Hawksmoor churches serve as privileged reference points for a uniquely British psychogeography, so the Winchester House will be the first such reference point for us. It’s the first, not the earliest, because the fundamental structure of American psychogeography consists of displacement. Of course, I mean displacement in every sense the word implies –… Continue Reading Toward an American psychogeography (1): Hawksmoor/Winchester