>This is indeed an important issue. One area of work is to see the space
>of public transport as urban -- the urban as a conduit, whose very
>condition is movement, transport, vehicularity. A system of mobilizing,
>converting, and in/habiting vectors. But then what remains? -- what is
>'outside' of this? What is 'resistant'?
William Burroughs was a connoisseur of the urban (St. Louis, New York,
Paris, London, Tangier) and he often wrote as if where ever he lived the
doors opened onto some other place. When he finally moved to Lawrence,
Kansas he urged Brion Gysin to move with him from Paris:
"I know you think Kansas is Nowheresville and think I am caught up
in nostaligia. Really it is the other way around. The whole concept
of place is dead and it's nostalgia to cling to it. . . .All this
prattle
from John and Felicity about me being an urban person. . . .Neither
of them hit on the important fact about urban living: the continual
stream of *second attention awareness*. Every license plate,
street sign, passing strangers, are saying something to *you*."
Burroughs' extreme paranoia and belief that everything was some kind of
"agent" was a form of nostalgia, I suppose. His utopia. It was comforting
to him to turn every place into the same place -- him self -- using his
"second attention awareness" activated by drugs, people, routines and
esoteric mysticism to navigate. I would say this "self" was outside and
resistant yet dependent upon a prosthetic navigational device that he
packaged and sold in the literary marketplace.
Robbin Murphy
murph@artnetweb.com
<i> i o l a </i> http://artnetweb.com/iola/
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