ABSTRACT

A comparison with the speech act will allow people to go further and not limit themselves to the critique of graphic representations alone, looking from the shores of legibility toward an inaccessible beyond. The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. The modalities of pedestrian enunciation which a plane representation on a map brings out could be analyzed. They include the kinds of relationship this enunciation entertains with particular paths by according them a truth value, an epistemological value or finally an ethical or legal value. Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etcetera., the trajectories it “speaks.” The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them nor in conformity with them. It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them.