Errant Paths: The Poetics and Politics of Walking

Abstract

Walking has moved into increasing visibility in social, cultural, and geographical studies as well as art and cultural practice in recent times. Walking practices are often mobilised as a means for sensing and learning about spaces, for enabling reflection on the mutual constitution of bodies and landscapes, and for finding meaning within and potentially re-enchanting environments. Through the influence of Michel de Certeau in particular, the idea that walking ‘encunciates’ spaces and is a creative, elusive, and resistive everyday practice, counterpoised to the ‘solar eye’, has become commonplace. This paper focuses on projects by the artist Francis Alÿs that are based on walking in London and other cities, to consider their engagements with the politics of urban space. Attention is paid to walking as his method of unfolding stories, and to its potential to unsettle and bring into question current realities, especially in the context of the regulated, fortified, and surveilled zones of London. Addressing the poetics and politics of his spatial practices, however, reveals the inadequacy of undifferentiated models of creative resistance, nomadism, and subversion beloved of much recent theory, and often endorsed through a partial reading of Certeau. Instead, the openness and ambivalence of these practices suggest a need for a more nuanced approach to the multiple rhythms, trajectories, and narratives that constitute urban spaces as well as to their contested (in)visibilities.

“Follow That Car!” Mobilities of Enthusiasm in a Rare Car's Restoration

“…Following a thing, then, might reasonably lead to linkages with the widely heralded "mobilities turn"-work in the humanities and social sciences that shifts emphasis away from source or destination to the movements themselves and their meanings; work that shifts focus from shared spaces like city, region, or nation to reveal how "sociality and identity are produced through networks of people, ideas and things moving" in interconnected ways (Cresswell 2010, 551;see also Cresswell 2006;Cresswell and Merriman 2011;Söderström et al 2013). Yet much of the mobilities literature has focused on movements of people (Pfaff 2010)-migrants and refugees (Mountz 2010;Hyndman 2012), travelers andcommuters (Merriman 2007;Laurier et al 2008;Bissell 2010;Vannini 2011;Davidson 2012), walkers and cyclists (Spinney 2006;Pinder 2011), airline passengers and pilots (Cwerner, Kesserling, and Urry 2009;Adey 2010;DeLyser 2010). And of that, a good deal of emphasis has been on automobility-how people move with cars in social-material systems (Featherstone 2004;Featherstone, Thrift, and Urry 2005;Merriman 2007;Laurier et al 2008;Davidson 2012).…”

Performance and urban space: An ambivalent affair

“…In present contexts of urban upheaval, performance, defined as specific actions and events that often constitutes content and experience in relations to forms of politics, has often come to be seen as a crucial creative means of empowerment in the midst of urban transformation. This paper provides a neo‐Marxist framework for analyzing the relation between performance and urban space in order to address “the varied abilities of [performance] practices to challenge—or not—prevailing norms and power relations” (Pinder, , p. 688) and, this way, act as an agent for change. The new wave of critical urban theory, relating to more‐than‐human geographies, assemblage thinking and nonrepresentational theory, is often considered as being more apt to discuss the relation between performance and urban space as it focuses explicitly on central aspects of performance such as embodiment, affect and processuality.…”

The enchanted path: magic and modernism in psychogeographical walking

“…A wide range of extra‐ordinary phenomena, including haunting, ‘occulture’ and ‘enchantment’, have been shown to be a resilient part of modern cities and societies (Edensor ; Holloway ; Maddern and Adey ; Pile ). A parallel debate has emerged on how the ‘ghostly’ and ‘errant’ pathways found in contemporary walking‐based art works are woven into and against the rhythms of the metropolis (Pinder ). This paper connects and develops these research themes through a particular example, namely the use of magic in psychogeographical walking.…”