Dwelling in intervals: A speculative walk eastward Lisbon

Abstract

The academic gaze, often, seems unable not to look directly at places, as if transfixed, unable not to fix them into all-constraining definitions that exclude all that remains blurred or unclear as redundant noise. How to engage with this excess without putting it into focus – that is, by keeping it blurry? This is the question this paper seeks to address. Simone’s recent reflection on ‘the surrounds’, and Tsing’s well-known work on ‘friction’, are the conceptual levers deployed to do so. Walking and writing are the practices mobilised for this purpose. First, I draw from Critical Walking Studies, and particularly psychogeography. The goal, here, is that of unpacking walking’s potential to enact an embodied and non-representational engagement with place by attending simultaneously to the phenomenological here-and-now and its ecological prolongations into other spacetimes. Second, I take writing seriously, as a methodological necessity to relate with, and translate, the surrounds qua surrounds – the blur qua blur, that is. Recent reflections on ‘writing place’ in the field of geography and anthropology are helpful here, as is Masciandaro’s provocative reading of the commentary as geophilosophy. The result is a proposition for a writing that is able to walk, that is to evoke the embodied, non-representational experience of walking the urban surrounds ‘without assassinating’ it (Les Back). The main body of the paper, comprised by seven self-sustaining sections, seeks to perform this proposition, by mimetically re-presenting the several walks I carried out through the East Side of Lisbon, Portugal, in the last 10 years. This is done by juxtaposing text, titles, images, theoretical reflection, archival research and psychogeographical perambulation. The conclusion reflects on the implications of this approach to walking-writing place, finding resonance with Kathleen Stewart’s concept of immanent critique.