Johndan-

If I didn't think it could change the world, I wouldn't really care that much about it. And what I mean is exactly what Steve talks about: this ability for reading-as-drift. We've never really had it in such a way. It's mostly access, certainly, and yes, let's definitely use the textual space metaphor.

Let me borrow from the situationists. Their thesis: the modernist urban program was an architecture of "right angles" and "cadaverous rigidity" (sleek rectangular boxes, arranged in neatly laid-out street-grids; each area of the city having an articulated function-this is residential, this is commercial, this is leisure) which gave people an impoverished context for life; they preferred an "environment suitable to the unlimited deployement of new passions." Their solution: re-using (détourning) the extant urban material, re-arranging it into more exciting situations (e.g., replacing street signs with lines of poetry, rehanging the masterpieces from museums in neighborhood bars); wandering around even decrepit parts of the city in search of interesting drama; and designing dream-like new urban play-spaces as sources of poetic sensation to re-tune the spirit with sublime intensity. (This is why, for example, we can read The Matrix as a film version of Debord's Society of the! Spectacle: the cool stuff happens in the decayed, baroque, mysterious spaces; the terror in the beautiful, clean skyscrapers.)

So say we're in this textual city, and what we'd love to do (what we think could change the world) is drift through it, tracing (which become de facto changing) the passional terrain of this text-scape. Not just dutifully visiting the official landmarks and the government- or corporate-sponsored spaces, but going on the basis of our emotional instincts, access far less restricted now. Even the typical urbanist flaneur in Paris was restricted by the fixed forms of architecture, now we can decide to re-route streets, re-write the city constantly. So maybe it's first drifting into Davey D's hip-hop website, for the latest news on police harrassment of rappers, and then maybe some earlier archived thing he wrote, and then being struck by the title of something that Adissa, the Bishop of Hip-Hop wrote, and then checking out what the fans write in (usually the best theorists, now so much more available). That might make me want to explore some lyrics in depth, so I click over an! d get busy with words transcribed from OutKast's new CD, which reminds me that I also want to get all the words of that latest joint by Tupac they released. For some reason, maybe it's Pac's line about "all I see is racist faces" or something, I decide to see what's been happening lately in Malcolm X sites.

I could go on, but you know what I mean. We have access to materials for deployment that were never so available before. That's the text I'm intersted in, the one Steve describes.

The building design/plan the situationsist favored was the labyrinth, because it seemed to correspond to this drift-pattern. The drifter could wander through and encounter an endless series of constructed situations, all designed to intensify consciousness and re-attune one with the poetic. Whether it was those Charles Fourier plans in the nineteenth century for the weird, winding palais sociétaire or Constant's ongoing project for New Babylon, the idea was to make architecture correspond to human emotions, rather than make human emotions straight-jacketed by architecture. Here's Sadler on Constant: "New Babylon would be a global phalanstery for the twentieth century, its sectors joined 'in all directions,' a 'comprehensive metropolis girding the earth like a network,' a unitary urbanism of hallucinatory dimensions. The fantastic spaces and vistas of New Babylon would be truly reminiscent of the sublime visions of Piranesi."

I'm always interested to watch my students' writing as they spend a quarter drifting through sites, some (like Davey D) I clue them in on, most they clue me in on. We both grow as a result of the reading,