Towards a Legal Psychogeography: pragmatism, affective-materialism and the spatio-legal.

In The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Braverman et al., 2014), the editors urge legal geographers to range more widely, and to seek out helpfully provocative interactions with less frequently encountered fields, such as architecture, the humanities and post humanities, physical geography, psychology and psychoanalysis and material and visual culture. This article takes up that call by interrogating law’s relationship with affective materiality (the instinctive influence of things upon us) and also with the pragmatism that lies at the heart of actors’ engagement with their purposive framing of any situation. It does this via an examination of two passages found within contemporary British psychogeographer Nick Papadimitiou’s novel Scarp (2012). Papadimitriou’s passages are used to generate productive pointers towards the need for greater investigation of law’s affective realm, and greater acknowledgement of law’s relative lack of influence over some spatial situations. A case is made for development of a hybrid, legal psychogeography to bridge the current limits of both legal geography and psychogeography in addressing these dimensions of the spatio-legal, both in terms of research methodologies and the aims of the analysis.