The Art of Misdirection

The Art of Misdirection:
Anti-guides and Aimless Wandering

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal ... but to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling.¹

Lucy Harrison Canvey Guides, 2006-2007

Satellite navigation, surveillance technologies, route finders and A-Zs have increasingly organised the way in which the physical world is encountered according to the logic of a grid or network, in an attempt to render even the prospect of not finding one's way in the city a thing of the past. Such tagging or tracking technologies reflect a cultural context in which the desire to locate an individual's whereabouts with precision and certainty has become both a private and political preoccupation. Thinly veiled as a protective or preventative gesture through which to shield us from harm: we are conditioned to resist the temptation of the aimless wander or idle daydream. Warned against straying too far from tried-and-tested paths; we are relentlessly taught how to avoid the ambiguous shadows and darkened alleyways; we are carefully instructed how to safely bypass all the grey or threshold areas of existence.

The public realm - both as a physical and virtual space - has increasingly and insidiously become a privately owned and managed environment where under watchful and anonymous eyes, the activities and behaviours of the public are both monitored and controlled. Loitering or meandering generates a suspicious glance; the gathering of groups is perceived as a threat; desire lines must be hastily overwritten with pathways that tow the agreed and official line. It is perhaps the tension or discrepancy between the controlling desires of government, cartography or surveillance and the actual lived or temporal experience of inhabiting or dwelling in a place that draws artists into the public realm as a site for creative misbehaviour or subversion, for both playful and political interventions.² The resurgence of interest in the act of walking or 'wandering' within contemporary artistic practice can be viewed as a critical tool or operation through which to challenge or subvert the logic of the system, for it carries the possibility of rupture by reintroducing a temporal pulse or form of narration (itinerary) back into the abstract spatial nexus of the grid or map.³ A peripatetic revival can thus be understood as an attempt to disrupt the normative patterns or ritual behaviours that structure and underpin the logic of the public realm. It is a tactic of recuperation through which a contingent and relational notion of the public realm might be retrieved from the grip of civic bureaucracy and corporate branding; or where unauthorised versions of reality - emerging at the interstice between memory, anecdote and lived experience - might elude the controlling panoptic gaze of ever-present surveillance technologies.⁴ Wandering asserts the cultural value of getting lost: where guidebooks are used and produced by artists as a means for determined disorientation, de-familiarisation and misdirection as much as for finding one's way.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006) Rebecca Solnit draws from diverse literary and cultural references including Thoreau's Walden (1845) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), in order to suggest that the desire to lose oneself is marked by a giving over to or immersion in the present. She argues that 'to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of 'being' in uncertainty and mystery'.⁵ Less a journey of empirical discovery, the digressive or tangential operation of wandering proposes an alternative, heuristic register for experiencing the world that values the subjective experience of place; and questions the validity or authority of more established, accepted methods of spatial inscription. Performed according to a forever temporal, unfolding logic; wandering is a method of research whose findings emerge through constant (r)evolution where observations remain in transitional flux or interminable disarray. This might suggest a wilful counter imperative to dominant teleological models of knowledge, for wandering privileges the journey above the destination, the performative process before any resultant outcome.

From a historical perspective the act of wandering as a form of 'practice' can be plotted through a genealogy of drifting, endless or irresolvable journeys, which abandon or challenge deterministic or teleological motives, in favour of more uncertain, irrational or illogical outcomes.⁶ Whilst the predominance of theory informed by psychogeography serves perhaps to assert and privilege the relationship between contemporary wandering and the Situationists' deployment of drive as a means to reflect the everyday user or pedestrians' experience of the city;⁷ earlier models of ambulant digression or deviance might also be retrieved from the past and invited into dialogue with the actions of the present. In this sense contemporary practices (at times inadvertently but still implicitly) conjure the ghosts of (and are haunted by) earlier forms of pedestrianism: each inescapably retrace or reiterate (or else resist or repress) some element of the flaneur's saunter or the surrealist's practice of errance; or alternatively might reverberate as a legacy or the lost steps of both the literary tradition of the picaresque or road story.⁸

Lucy Harrison Guided Tour: Riga, 2005

Whilst other artists have equally developed (often through collaboration) a critical language or vocabulary for their acts of wandering, Lucy Harrison's practice presents a particularly interesting model because of the diversity of alternative methods of mapping and navigation that have been explored and tested out; often fusing or replaying elements of the past alongside those of the present, or blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction in order to challenge or question dominant cartographic and spatial representations of the public realm.⁹ In 'Fantastic Cities: Guides to Unvisited Cities' (2004), Harrison invites artists to offer imaginative descriptions of places never visited, whilst in 'Detour' (2004) and 'Guided Tour: Riga' (2005) existing (though obsolete) maps become a tool for misunderstanding and misuse. 'Reclaim the Night' (2006), resuscitates an existing historical route or itinerary whilst 'Canvey Guides' (2006-7), explores a process of collective mapping and the creation of subjective guides which are based around the development of 'mental maps' in response to themes such as Nostalgia, Rumour, or Private Property.

Wandering itself is a concept that is interpreted loosely in Harrison's practice, for it appears to articulate both a form of physical or spatial activity as well as the drift of the imagination or the skim of text which takes place during the act of reading. In 'Art School Marginalia' (2003) Harrison takes the scribbled notations of students in the margins of books and gives them the appearance of a more academic text, or in other work asks how it is possible to differentiate between a lecturer's emphatic words of 'knowledge' and the phatic words that fill the gaps.¹⁰ Similarly her acts of spatial wandering invite speculation upon how knowledge about the public realm is constructed, classified and authorised; how value is inscribed and encoded. This articulation of wandering as both a pedestrian and textual activity encourages a specific discussion through the theoretical positions offered by Michel de Certeau who in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984),¹¹ describes both walking and reading according to a model of enunciation or 'speech act'; a performative operation through which the individual might appropriate, reuse or even misuse the vocabulary of the authoritative 'text' in the construction of highly subjective 'readings' or detours.¹² Wandering is considered as a form of spatial syntax which interprets the 'text' or map according to the way that the individual punctures (or punctuates) the structure through their own personal 'speech patterns': the deployment of rhythm and spacing, pauses and hesitations, omissions and notations.¹³ Using de Certeau's analysis it is possible to suggest that artistic practices such as Harrison's describe or represent the public realm as it is shaped by temporal and relational operations (or as it is performed), where contrary to the map they refute 'something that lasts, [in favour of] something that happens: a limited experience hemmed in by temporal limits'.¹⁴ Acts of wandering reinstate the primacy of the index (the mark of an imprint or trace) over the icon (signs that stand as substitution for the reference). Harrison attempts to reassert an experiential and negotiated idea of space by recuperating a sense of the subjective and performative itinerary or tour, the lost narrative that has been historically eclipsed by the idea of an objective and static map.¹⁵

At times Harrison challenges the official published descriptions of a place in order to reveal something of their contingency and impermanence; to draw attention to their arbitrary construction and to ask whether they are any more valid than partially remembered descriptions of a place which might be sourced from any number of individuals.¹⁶ Her journeys mimic a form of experiment through which to test received ideas and descriptions of the public realm, or to question the notion of, 'an accepted truth through the use of obsolete or disregarded texts'.¹⁷ 'Detour' (2004) and 'Guided Tour: Riga' (2005), for example, present 'a deliberate misunderstanding of the instructions in the old [Communist] guidebook which leads [the artist] on walks which never find what is presented in the book'.¹⁸ 'Detour' (2004) documented a series of walks taken in Tallinn, Estonia, using two Soviet era guidebooks, one from 1971 (in Russian) and one from 1980 (in English). Following their tours to the landmarks and tourist sites of the city, the monuments were then photographed as closely as possible to the images in the books. Where the original had disappeared, or where the locations could not be found from the descriptions in the guidebooks, the most suitable positions in the vicinity were chosen. 'Guided Tour; Riga' (2005) extended this practice and involved a series of walks in Riga, Latvia as outlined in a Soviet era guidebook to the city. In these works, the map or guidebook are revealed as markers of a specific moment of history, which soon becomes redundant. Similar 'lost spaces' might be seen to emerge in innumerable post-industrial cities as spaces are reclaimed or return to ruin; or where a local understanding of no-go areas and danger spots psychologically splits a place into visible and invisible spaces or zones. Whilst on the one hand the work functions to sabotage and question the ways in which accepted descriptions of place are packaged and disseminated, and to mock, 'those quests or journeys which purport to discover a complete picture of a place';¹⁹ it also attempts to discover something 'more meaningful about a place by the act of using a different set of rules to what may have been expected'.²⁰ Echoing the Situationists' use of maps of other cities to find their way around Paris, Harrison allows for 'a (perhaps slightly romantic) belief in chance and how it can present the 'right' direction, and the true sense of a place, in the most unexpected ways.' ²¹

Lucy Harrison Detour, 2004

The retracing of another's steps or appropriation of an existing route as a guide or 'found set of instructions',²² can be seen as a way to create the conditions for detour or depaysement where the journey becomes less about tracking the original telos as about getting lost and abandoning ownership of one's direction. ²³ The act of following can be seen as part of a tradition of perambulant practices that borrow the motive or form of the journey from another source in order to challenge, subvert, or test out the logic of the original narrative, or to 'insinuate' a space or 'distance' for reflection and critique in the gap between the primary iteration and its subsequent echo.²⁴ For Harrison the borrowing of the steps or traces of another might also be seen as a way of 'mocking a male idea of an expedition or tour' by, 'declaring that there is a different, perhaps non-existent, goal to the 'quest''.²⁵ Alternatively, the repeated, reiterated action is performed through a form of mimesis or simulation which can be viewed as analogous to a form of role-play adopted in the context of a game, where 'acting out' demands a form of genuine investment or immersion. The form of mimesis or repetition made possible by play forms a site where meaningful questions or dilemmas might be (for fixed period of time and for a fixed duration) momentarily inhabited or embodied, or where events from the past might be replayed or re-negotiated.²⁶ This model of meaningful inhabitation or ethical possession (of and by events of the past) is evident in the project, 'Reclaim the Night' (2006), where Harrison stages the retracing of the original 'Reclaim the Night' women's march of 1977, which called for safer streets and an end to 'curfew mentality' in response to police advice during the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders that women should stay indoors after dark.²⁷ Here, Harrison draws attention to the ongoing and 'complicated relationship that women, walking and the streets have had through history',²⁸where the female nightwalker has been traditionally cast as either an unwitting victim of male predatory desires or as a fallen angel, recklessly complicit in the illicit sexual exchanges of the street.²⁹

A dialogue between the present and the past is also invited in Harrison's more recent project 'Canvey Guides' (2006-7) that returns to the guidebook, 'Captivating Canvey' published between 1927 and 1974, as a starting point for work that questions how much a place is made by the acts and movements of its inhabitants.³⁰ The interest in and production of alternative guides by artists and writers is a way of disrupting any objective reading of a place, and enabling a subjective register to redefine meanings, where ' 'the place' becomes 'the place where''.³¹ According to historian Ian Walker, in this form of interpretation, 'Sites are not chosen because they are the sites 'one must see'; rather they are included because of what happened in these places ... A private (space) has been created within the public space, occupying the same space, but differently, more intensely'.³² The 'Canvey Guides' project has included the formation of the Rendezvous Club, a walking group who have been meeting on the first Sunday of every month to participate in a peripatetic form of discussion. Exploring the notion of Private Property and drawing a conceptual parallel to the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932, the group's wander of January 2007 encouraged reflection, perhaps, on the status of the public realm as a historically inconsistent and amorphous zone, whose boundaries and borders have functioned as a threshold site of perpetual conjecture and trespass, of reclamation and resistance. During the February hike, the route was punctuated by the introduction of Rumours that were both dispelled and instigated along the way. Here the journey became a space for myth and legend as much as for factual observations and actual occurrences.

For Michel de Certeau, the act of walking is capable of opening up temporal and imaginative gaps in the way that the world is encountered, for wandering can be understood as a, 'Substitute for exits, for going away and coming back, which were formerly made available by a body of legends that places nowadays lack' ³³ where 'physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday's or today's 'superstitions'.³⁴ Wandering itself can be argued to perform a resuscitative function, as a means to reinvest the public realm with a sense of mystery and the incomprehensible, the unknown or the unknowable. It functions at the interstice between fact and fiction, actuality and the imagination, where operationally it is intrinsically connected to a novelistic or essayistic process of narration and storytelling, of perpetual improvisation and invention that reshapes and redefines an understanding of its environment through each step taken.³⁵ This is a space of contingency, for stories about places are, according to de Certeau, 'makeshift things. They are composed with the world's debris ... where things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order ...The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.'³⁶

Guides and testimony that emerge out of the process of wandering acknowledge their own contingency or subjectivity, unlike the reportage of the cartographer whose maps make (at times dubious) claims to objectivity and critical distance. During acts of wandering the idea of irresolution or incompletion emerges as a condition of both the performance and its subsequent articulation. Rather than trying to present a substitute for the performative event, the documentation or guides produced from acts of wandering offer a form of partial inscription where the traces and relics that linger on beyond the duration of the event serve as the ghostly itinerary that might be inhabited, reiterated, or reconstructed (if only imaginatively) by an audience each time that it is encountered. The photographic image is a marker of both historic and prophetic actions, where it functions to both record a past and indicate a possible future: 'time is suspended: we are between times'.³⁷

Unlike the map or grid then which is 'impervious both to time and to incident',³⁸ the production of the artists' guide or use of mapping through wandering is often unresolved and fragmentary thus encouraging each new audience to bring their own 'reading' and to insert themselves into the gaps in narration. The public realm is offered as a temporal site of rehearsal or potentiality where nothing has been fixed but where infinite interpretations might yet be within the realm of possibility. In Harrison's work the notion of the map is revealed as only a partial representation, which is subject to revision, revocation and relativism in the same way that a memory of a place might be: its contours are traced as a means of misdirection, its guidebooks emerge as tools for getting lost.

More information on Lucy Harrison

Notes:

1. Walter Benjamin, 'On some motifs in Baudelaire' in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) p.156.
2. The notion of artists working in the public realm reflects the descriptions of the 'shift from studio to situation' presented in Claire Doherty (ed.) Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation, (Black Dog Publishing, 2004) where the 'public realm' (in its radically different manifestations) becomes a site of making and action (as well as of display).
3. According to art historian Rosalind Krauss, the grid is the 'domain of the visual', a zone of 'absolute stasis' and silence, which is not only 'impervious both to time and to incident' but is also 'hostil(e) to narrative'. See Rosalind Krauss, 'The Originality of the avant-garde: A postmodernist repetition', October, Vol.18 (Autumn, 1981), p.54.
4. Some artists deploy the same contemporary surveillance or mapping technologies that have attempted to control and legislate the public realm, subverting their function in the production of anti-guides or through acts of delinquency or play which overwrite or weave a more idiosyncratic and individual experience over the fabric of the authorized map. See for example, Adele Prince's project 'Meander Map' (2006) (See Adele Prince on Axis), or Layla Curtis's project 'Polar Wandering' (2006) both of which make use of personal GPS tracking devices.
5. Rebecca Solnit, A field guide to getting lost, (Canongate Books, 2006), p.6.
6. See the exhibition Mapping the City at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (16 February - 2 May 2007) for one account of the relationship between artists and the city from around 1960 to the present day. There is also a separate though at times overlapping history of inventive and imaginative map-making by artists that are not directly connected to any performative action. See Katharine Harmon's You are here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination, (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2004), or Map (inIVA1996), a publication which accompanied the exhibition Maps Elsewhere at Beaconsfield, London in the same year.
7. See Guy Debord's essay Theory of the Derive that can be accessed in the library at nothingness.org and was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Levres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two derives. By abandoning the spatial approximations and distances of the map, Guy Debord's illustration, The Naked City (1957), provided a visual diagram of the dynamic of the drive. It focused on zones and pockets of interaction or 'hubs' of social activity, which were linked together by what Debord described as 'turntables' that facilitated a range of potential direction and possibility.
8. Thoreau also notes a tradition of 'sauntering' emerging in the Middle Ages where individuals pretended to be undertaking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land but were instead, 'mere idlers and vagabonds'. See Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862), Walking, (Harper Collins, 1994), p.2. For notes on the picaresque tradition see Gustavo Pellon and Julio Rodriguez-Luis, (eds.) Upstarts, wanderers or swindlers: anatomy of the picaro, (Rodopi Publishing, 1986); Claudio Guillen, The anatomies of roguery: The origins and the nature of picaresque literature (Garland Publishing, 1987), or Stuart Miller, The picaresque novel, (Cleveland, 1967). For further accounts of flanerie see Keith Tester, (ed.), The Flaneur, (Routledge, London and New York, 1994); and Chris Jenks, 'Watching your step: the history and practice of the flaneur', in Chris Jenks, (ed.), Visual Culture. (Routledge, London, 1995); or Michael Sheringham, Parisian Fields, (Reaktion,1996). The practice of Surrealist errance has been returned to and discussed by many historians, notably by Rosalind Krauss in connection to photography's relationship to Surrealism, for example in 'Nightwalkers', Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1 Photography and the Scholar/critic (Spring 1981), pp.33-38; Ian Walker in City gorged with dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris, (Manchester, 2002); Susan Laxton in Paris as gameboard, Man Ray's Atgets, (Columbia University, New York, 2002).
9. See Simon Pope's Wellcome Trust research project 'Walking Here and There' (see Simon Pope on Axis), which is a collaboration with neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell that aims to investigate the interaction of place and memory, and also Pope's concept of 'ambulant science' which relates to both the practice of walking as a research methodology, and also to a broader interpretation of 'ambulant science' as 'an informal, heuristic approach to investigation, the results of which may be revised or revoked at any time'. Tim Brennan has also developed a critical framework through which he describes his method of walking as a 'manoeuvre' - See essays by Geoff Cox, Chris Jenks and Damian Brennan in Guidebook: Three manoeuvres by Tim Brennan, in London E1/E2, (Camerawork, 1999) and also Janet Hand's essay 'Follow Me' in John Gange (ed.) Monograph: Tim Brennan, (information as material, 2002). See also the writing of cultural theorists such as Rebecca Solnit whose recent texts, Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006) and Wanderlust: a Short History of Walking (2006) attempt to locate an historical context, and a critical or resistant function for the act of errant footfall. For more information about Lucy Harrison's practice see lucy-harrison.co.uk and Lucy Harrison on Axis.
10. 'Art School Marginalia' (2003) was a collection of notes made in the margins of books in the Kent Institute of Art & Design library. The resulting text was given to a group of students at the college to read out in the form of a lecture. The book Good Quote containing the full text was published in 2003. 'Shadows' (1999) was a slide projection work consisting of words spoken in a lecture that were not part of the script.
11. See Part III Spatial Practices and especially Chapter VII Walking in the City.
12. Michel de Certeau argues that, 'The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At its most elementary level, it has a triple 'enunciative' function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates or takes on language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting out of language); and implies relations among differentiated positions'. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, (University of California Press, 1984), p.98.
13. The rupturing of the continuity of the map (text) by presenting only fragments and partial references which are separated by gaps and blank areas, is described by de Certeau as the procedure of 'asyndeton': a process of 'opening gaps in the spatial continuum' and 'retaining only selected parts of it'. See Michel de Certeau, 1984, p.101.
14. Claudio Guillen, The anatomies of roguery: the origins and the nature of picaresque literature, 1987, p.17. In fact, walking performs a dual operation which, on the one hand, reveals the temporality of the public realm contrary to the dominant static and panoptic perspective offered by the map; whilst on the other reasserts the possibility of a slower experiential or embodied encounter with the world as a foil to the dematerialized and ethereal representations of virtual realities.
15. The idea of the itinerary or tour describes a form of navigation prior to the emergence of the map as a fixed and panoptic concept where spatial or temporal descriptors and drawn routes were used by pilgrims, where according to de Certeau the 'drawing was not the 'route' (there wasn't one) but the 'log' of their journey on foot ... not a 'geographical map' but a 'history book'. See Michel de Certeau, 1984, p.120.
16. Michel de Certeau differentiates between the notion of place and space, where the former is determined by the stability and fixity of the map, whilst the latter, 'is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities ... In short, space is a practiced place', 1984, p.117.
17. Unpublished interview between the author and Lucy Harrison, 2006.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid. Harrison makes a connection to the importance of 'instructions' in Conceptual Art, citing the influence of an essay by Mike Sperlinger, 'Orders! Conceptual Art's Imperatives' in Afterthought; new writing on conceptual art, Rachmaninoff, 2005.
23. Tom McDonough notes how the term depaysement is often found in early Situationist writings on the derive, where he suggests, it means 'taken out of one's element' or 'misled'. See McDonough, 'Situationist space', October, Vol. 67 (Winter, 1994), p.73.
24. Examples of performative following might include Vito Acconci's performative work 'Following Piece', (1969); Sophie Calle's 'Suite Venitienne' (1980); Heather and Ivan Morison's 'Chinese Arboretum and Global Survey' (2003) (see Heather and Ivan Morison on Axis) where they follow the guidance of tree fanatics as they search of rare trees or in more recent work where the route of migrating storks presents a path for them to follow; Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie's A Hypertext Journal (1996) which retraces the steps of Johnson and Boswell's eighteenth-century tour of Scotland; whilst Tacita Dean initiates a filmic following in the footsteps, a meticulous re-treading of amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst's fated journey in works such as 'Disappearance at Sea I and II' (1996 and 1997) and 'Teignmouth Electron' (1999).
25. Unpublished interview with Harrison, 2006.
26. I am specifically thinking about the idea of mimesis or simulation as it is described in Roger Caillois' analysis of play in Man, Play and Games, (1958) trans. Meyer Barash, (University of Illinois Press, 2001), in terms of how play might allow for the idea 'meaningful inhabitation' and not just empty appropriation. I am also interested in the implications of a model of borrowing or appropriation developed by film theorist Alison Landsberg in Prosthetic memory: the transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Landsberg develops the concept that 'prosthetic memory' is not a lifeless appendage or mask that can be simply borrowed, but is invested with its own agency or urgency: it is not simply talked through but also wishes to talk back. It is the possibility of this discursive encounter, based upon, rather than assimilating the difference between past and present that may offer grounds for empathetic connection. As Landsberg suggests, prosthetic memories are 'not capsules of meaning that spectators swallow wholesale but are the grounds on which social meanings are negotiated, contested and sometimes constructed'. See Landsberg, 2004, p.21.
27. Extending her research for a project for the catalogue of the exhibition, Something of the Night at Leeds City Art Gallery, Harrison became interested in various newspaper reports documenting marches in Leeds in the 1970s, where night-walking was planned in order to change attitudes to women's use of the nocturnal city. Following conversations with the original participants and working closely with Al Garthwaite, one of the original organisers of the 1977 march and Katy Rochester, curator at Leeds City Art Gallery, Harrison revisited the various sites that were remembered as being part of the original march, thus re-staging the protest as it was mediated by collective memory.
28. Unpublished interview with Harrison, 2006.
29. It might be possible to argue that wandering itself can be seen as a particularly feminine mode of investigation analogous to a mode of speaking. I am thinking about this in relation to a quote by Luce Irigaray (which seems to invert de Certeau's argument and uses the metaphor of wandering to describe a form of 'speech act') when she says, 'Contradictory words seem a little crazy to the logic of reason, and inaudible to him who listens with ready-made grids, a code prepared in advance. In her statements - at least when she dares to speak out - woman retouches herself constantly. She just barely separates from herself some chatter, an exclamation, a half-secret, a sentence left in suspense - When she returns to it, it is only to set out again from another point of pleasure or pain. One must listen to her differently in order to hear the 'other meaning' which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized ... (Her statements) are never identical to what she means ... Their distinguishing feature is one of contiguity. They touch (upon). And when they wander too far from this nearness, she stops and begins again from 'zero'.' See Luce Irigaray, 'This Sex which is Not One', in Elaine Marks and Isabella de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms (Harvester, 1980) p.101. For wider cultural accounts of a female form of flanerie or accounts of the flaneuse see Susan Buck-Morss, 'The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering', New German Critique, No. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn, 1986); Janet Wolf, 'The Invisible flaneuse: women and the literature of modernity', Theory, Culture and Society, II-III, 1985, pp.37-46; Alex Hughes, 'The City and the female autograph' in Michael Sheringham (ed) Parisian Fields, pp.115-132; and Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, (Princeton University Press, 1999), especially Part Four: 'Female Flanerie', pp.171-213.
30 See canveyguides.com for further information.
31. Ian Walker, A City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris, (Manchester, 2002) p.55. Walker is referring specifically to Andre Breton's text Nadja (1928), although the reference offers a useful point of illumination and also a sense of historical anchoring. The idea of an anti-guide might then be traced back to Surrealist practices where the textual inscription in novels such as Andre Breton's Nadja or Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant, often appears anchored to a reality which we are led to believe took place and the writing frequently possesses the instructive and at times banal specificities of a tour or itinerary that might be literally as well as literarily followed.
32. Walker, 2002, p.53. I am interested in how this quote echoes the sentiment of Michel de Certeau's analysis of the act of walking when he says, 'A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city'. De Certeau, 1984, p.93.
33. Michel de Certeau, 1984, p.107. Again the connections to Surrealist writing is interesting where de Certeau perhaps can be seen to echo Louis Aragon's assertions: 'New myths spring up beneath each step we take. Legend begins where man has lives, where he lives'. See Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, (1926) trans. Simon Watson Taylor, (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), p.11.
34. Michel de Certeau, 1984, p.107.
35. Referring to the genre of the picaresque novel, Claudio Guillen, argues that: 'There seems to be something novelistic about every work of art which suscitates the sharing of a process rather than the observation of a conclusion ... the contact with a novel escapes us when we finish it ... the substance of a novel lies only in the gradual experience of it.' 1987, p.435.
36. Michel de Certeau, 1984, p.107.
37. Annette Michelson, 'Dr. Crause and Mr.Claire', October Vol.11 (Winter 1979), p.42. Although applied here in relation to the documentation produced during acts of wandering, the actual quote refers to a description of Eugene Atget's photographic oeuvre which she argues contain a 'sense of imminence of occurrences past or still to come'.
38. Rosalind Krauss, 1981, p.54.