Thanks for your generous remarks, Edmund.
Yes, Lisa Robertson's Vancouver walks/investigations I find real intriguing.
Her tone is curious for me - maybe glib, or the glib tone is a funny cover
for an obviously deeply intelligent and unique, imaginative way of look at
urban habitat. Her essay on scaffolding - as a kind of temporary
installation art -  as her  takes on topiary (plants) -  are wonderful. The
kind of seamless sense of relationship and interpretative possibilities for
all objects in an environment. It's quite rich.

I can't really define the 'theory' in my "Walking Theory" works - it was
given to me by Chris Sullivan as a 'commissioned project' - probably a bit
of a joke. (I always suggest looking at Chris' current viz-lang blog work in
New Orleans as somebody who is deeply embraced by the pathos of interpreting
urban landscape: 
http://www.slightpublications.com/dust-in-translation-machine.html
Go there in the archive. )

But I have an intuitive sense that the 'theory' in the walks has something
to with 'theology' - in the sense that the closer look at things the closer
one is to some larger whole (empirical, Blakian?) tho things are
persistently transitional, any stasis, provisional.

How this process a yields into political formation, in the sense here of
participating in the City, beyond being, at best, a joyous flaneur, I am not
sure - though the closer I look I know need to join the local org that might
keep the dog folks from tearing up the soccer field in the local park (where
the Latino players exercise no political force - yet - over events there)
and 'we' (oh oh) need the City to pump in 200,000 dollars to repair the
water system under the park to keep it green in the summer).

So there is a point - beyond publishing the writing for whatever may be its
public worth -  where the walk becomes political - rather than just an exile
from that terrible lot called 'us'! But will I 'dare' do it says the voice
of the Eliotic wimp?

And well with predictions that oceans may now rise 20 feet in the next
decades, a politics may be mandatory or mayhem will ensue!!

Stephen V





> Hi Stephen, Rebecca,
> 
> Very interesting posts on this topic –
> 
> I think Stephen puts it clear and succinct here -
> 
>> These themes of exile in contradistinction to communal notions of utopia,
>> or, alternatively, feet to the ground pragmatic group approaches to a
>> perpetually provisional/changing 'fragmented' reality.
> 
> The Objectivists in poetry, their projects, often seem to be moving towards
> newly invented forms of description, I think, a description which is utopic
> because it’s life’s reflection or inverse (E.g.,  The Book of the Dead,
> Testimony etc,), with the movement to description theme highlighted when
> Zukofsky chooses Reznikoff’s “ceaseless weaving of the uneven water” in his
> Test. As time goes on I like these writers & admire them more and more.
> 
> The contradistinction pointed to runs all over the place – in politics,
> theory, literature, anthropology. I recognise it as something I keep trying
> to think out of myself. One way out for many writers seems to be to latch
> onto Merleau-Ponty et al, and say “We are outside from the start” and thus
> open to the world. The further problem is what kind of writing then results
> from this perception.
> 
> What are your takes on walking, Stephen? I’ve read some of your ‘walking
> theories’ – is it that every walk writes a theory?
> 
> Just recently I read Lisa Robertson’s ‘Occasional work and seven walks from
> the office for soft architecture’ – perambulatory work appeals to me – and
> Lisa also, in a pamphlet Rousseau’s Boat, writes a kind of ambient-poetry
> utopia, Rousseau in a boat while the villagers sack his house, lying on his
> back, letting it drift round a lake.
> 
> Rebecca wrote:
>> for instance that whole bit about finding "Friday," the less than other by
>> virtue of being black which can be heard in the language itself by the
>> cliche "girl Friday" to refer to whomever has to get the coffee.
> 
> I think you’re right about Defoe’s Friday – what you focus on is a theme in
> romance, that of the other – un-languaged Caliban; newly named Friday;
> Camoes’ Africans etc.(tho not in Ibn Tufail, whose Hai bin Yaqzan was
> spontaneously created and raised by a doe; Defoe switches this round, but
> it’s also why Yaqzan has an instructively different influence in Arabic lit,
> as I mentioned before, where Yaqzan is un-sexed, and has significance as
> such for contemporary Arab writers) - there’s a brilliant book by Bruce
> Robbins which traces servants in Western writing – how they come to
> represent “the people”, lower classes, different races, other sexes.
> Domesticated outsiders of the bourgeois imagination, they provide
> epiphanies, recognition scenes, happy endings, utopic & distopic
> transcendencies. It’s a theme still there as strongly in WCW in his “pure
> products of A go crazy” bit, where he somehow sees “Elsie” as representing
> this going crazy, and your critique would rightly underline WCW descriptions
> such as equating “where we are” with Elsie’s “great/ungainly hips and
> flopping breasts”.
> 
> But I’d agree with Stephen that the Robinson of Kees has lost that element
> completely – to me, the Robinson here, and in Patrick Keiller’s films, is
> now more invisible, prone to disappear, and if faced with Robinson Crusoe
> (as in Keiller) gets very depressed at the idea.
> 
>> but these terms to me, as a woman, seem almost nonsensical, what is the
>> communal notion of a utopia?
> 
> Not really arguing against you, but just to note that I’d say that every
> society has several of these notions, some achieving dominance – that at the
> simplest the ideas of “how things ought to be” or “where they ought to go”
> is a  communal idea of utopia, that shared ideas of utopia (more than one
> person) is one of the structuring forces of a group – but of course in any
> large grouping these ideas clash, interpellation is haphazard across
> individuals & groups, and the sources of interpellation are plural. So
> gender & sex differences are part of this, more dominant in some societies,
> less so in others. The “fixed point” Rebecca reads as postulated I’d see as
> the opposite – that communal means mutable. Static points are a part of
> human experience – but in enormous variation, in memory, circles, nostalgia,
> spiritual experiences – but not so much in the here where everything shifts.
> The communal aspirations of some politics of the Sixties which Stephen
> mentioned earlier is different, a specific case.
> 
> 
> Robinson in Kees is the third person, as Jack in R.F. Langley; and this
> makes me think (Stephen has already mentioned the link) of Eliot and his
> “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” (Wasteland, V) – his note
> pointing to one of the Antarctic expeditions where the constant delusion
> that there was one more member of the group than could actually be counted
> was experienced by everyone. Which maybe opens up a new line – that Robinson
> is “extra”, this extra person, always with us, the exception who, excluded,
> is also included by being excluded…
> 
> There’s a whole feast of thought in these areas, it seems!
> 
> Edmund