>Michel DeCerteau's observation (via the situationists) of walking as a
>potential critical tactic is ... within the grasp of anyone able to walk
>...To walk away from something, to choose one's path, to interact
>unhindered -- >these are the means people define their freedoms in space.
i'd be careful of conflating Debord's 'derive' (cf. Internationale
Situationiniste #2, DEC '58) with deCerteau's theory of the pedestrian
'speech-act' (The Practice of Everyday Life)... while both refer to the act
of walking in the city, each construes the walking-subject differently, are
deployed within entirely different contexts, in service of markedly
different agendas... in brief: the derive was a program of action proposed
in reaction to a post war urbanism (primarily formulated through the CIAM
conventions), while formulation of the speech-act more an attempt to
reflect a 'language' by which walking occurs within more contemporary (yet
by now dated) urban circuits...
>What these parallel tactics are for the realm of the image however is
>>unclear...
one could start by examining the films of Debord or early Goddard in
relation to attempts at the jugular of nascent forms of the global
spectacle, but i'm sure how relevant or fruitful this might be given the
present tense... the veracity-image has indeed already been taken apart and
fragmented, only to become multiplied and redistributed across ever
broadening aggregations, some urban, some not; you are currently living
(literally, you write) in the midst of one of them. but what if we for a
moment broaden (not blur) our conception of the image to incorporate it's
multiple manifestations and extensions within contemporary cultures? where
do these images reside? how do we inhabit them? within what kind of space
would a taxonomy of contemporary image-types reside? what (different kinds
of) movements between evidence, memory and the imagination are provoked
within processes of image formation, recollection and response? how to
describe - in terms of both subject AND world - the mutations that arise
out of these complex negotiations and interplay between 'internal' and
'external'...?
>This realm of the image clearly requires a more skillful mechanism of
>navigation. The discovery of this is what I am finding next to
>impossible.
i share with you the frustration in the wake of all this... but i think
that a rethinking of the relation between images, imagination-activation,
and world might loosen the knots a bit... vision may become blurred at
times, but i wouldn't necessarily oppose the blurred with the clear when
speaking of images... for some images, all we need is our ears...
and/
department of public works
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