Keynote ASAL Conference: Talking From The Streets

This lecture begins on the street and takes the street, in all its ordinariness, as the primary site of meaning-making in our lives. The street is a starting point for thinking and writing about aesthetics, materiality, narrative, performance, our values and our politics. The street is a metaphor. It’s cliché. It’s an archive. The street gathers and disperses people, stories and practices but also ideas. Local theory involves connecting and contesting what is here on our streets, to what lies beyond, the national and the transnational narrative. In this lecture I will present an account of place, from the street level. I will explore a constellation of stories from the western suburbs of Sydney that engage the same location from different perspectives. Such a strategy, I believe, can allow us to get productively lost. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, a psychic state only achievable through geography. The stories of this area argue that we need to see the street for what it is – a complex system of relationships between different actors, each with different priorities, motivations, distractions, and skills. Despite the particularity of the content of this lecture to a specific place, the street I live on, the stories of the streets in the suburbs around me, I maintain the paradox of the universal and particular. In reading the street, we can inform the way we look at our own place. We recognise the universality of the experience of the particular – the experience of place.