Paul Stephens
What would the utopian land look like if it were not fenced in by the violence of Liberty and the nation? How would my desire for a homeland read if I were to represent it with the moral promiscuity of any plant? These spores and seeds and bits of invasive root are the treasures I fling backward, over my shoulder, into the hokey loam of an old genre.
—Lisa Robertson, “How Pastoral”
“I needed a genre,” begins Lisa Robertson’s XEclogue. The phrase is resonant for a critic attempting to survey her eclectic body of work. Like much of her writing, the 2003 Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture defies simple description. The book might be best categorized as a series of prose-poetic essays related to the urban geography of Vancouver, Canada—but this would be reductive at best: it contains photographs, a manifesto, meditations on botany and architecture, as well as a “Value Village Lyric.” The book emerges from a local context—and, more specifically, from the context of a particular influential Vancouver-based not-for-profit writers’ collective, the Kootenay School of Writing.1
In part, it stands as a product of the workshops that the school ran and, arguably, as a result of the school’s funding struggles as well.2 The book describes itself as “an experiment in collaboration with the forms and concerns of my community.” Those concerns have largely to do with Vancouver’s rapid growth over two decades. Like much Kootenay School writing, Robertson’s poetry is deeply cosmopolitan, and yet rooted in the local. Though utopian in its aspirations, her poetry recognizes the failure of an un-self-critical utopianism; though innovative in its use of avant-garde forms, her poetry is frequently concerned with nostalgia.
Problems of genre are frequently transposed onto problems of identity in Robertson’s writing. Obsolescent modes (such as the eclogue and the epic) become means by which to counter the inexorable progress of global capitalism. Nostalgia allows Robertson to personalize, as well as to reimagine, historical experience. “Consider your homeland, like all utopias, obsolete,” she writes in her introduction to XEclogue. Her work refers only obliquely to questions of Canadian nationalism, but is nonetheless strongly concerned with the complexities of Canadian self-identification. Her prose intertwines issues of domestic space, nationalism, and historical injustice: “The horizon pulled me close. It was trying to fulfill a space I thought of as my body. Through the bosco a fleecy blackness revealed the nation as its vapid twin. Yet nostalgia can locate those structured faults our embraces also seek” (n.p.). Having become the “vapid twin” to the space of what is not even precisely the body of the poet, the nation exists at several removes from reality. For Robertson, to engage in practices of nostalgia, or practices of the obsolescent, is to refuse to be useful, particularly to “the old bolstering narratives” of the nation. The angel of history must be assisted by “history’s dystopian ghosts” in order to rewrite the past. Such a rewriting refuses to have economic value and challenges our very notion of utility:
A system is ecological when it consumes its own waste products. But within the capitalist narrative, the utopia of the new asserts itself as the only productive teleology. Therefore, I find it preferable to choose the dystopia of the obsolete. As a tactically uprooted use, deployment of the obsolete could cut short the feckless plot of productivity. When capital marks women as the abject and monstrous ciphers of both reproduction and consumption, our choice can only be to choke out the project of renovation. We must become history’s dystopian ghosts, inserting our inconsistencies, demands, misinterpretations, and weedy appetites into the old bolstering narratives: We shall refuse to be useful. (“How Pastoral” 25)
If capitalist societies for most of their histories could be extraordinarily productive while excluding women from full participation in their institutions, then perhaps there is something inherently wrong not only with the political mechanisms of capitalist society, but also with its goals of maximizing production and utility. It is only by challenging the ends, as well as the means, of capitalist production that women can resituate themselves historically. As Robertson writes: “Through gluttony we become historical” (Office 145). “Nice girls don’t make history,” as the bumper sticker would have it. Women’s quotidian productive labour is ahistorical; only ruptures within the narrative of production can be registered as meaningful events.
To historicize is in some sense to bring back to life the obsolete—that which is no longer useful. In the following passage from a dream sequence in XEclogue, she describes the nation as artifact:
In deep sleep my ancestress tells me a story:
“Ontology is the luxury of the landed. Let’s pretend you ‘had’ a land. Then you ‘lost’ it. Now fondly describe it. That is pastoral. Consider your homeland, like all utopias, obsolete. Your pining rhetoric points to obsolescence. The garden gate shuts firmly. Yet Liberty must remain throned in her posh gazebo. What can the poor Lady do? Beauty, Pride, Envy, the Bounteous Land, The Romance of Citizenship: these mawkish paradigms flesh out the nation, fard its empty gaze. What if, for your new suit, you chose to parade obsolescence? Make a parallel nation, an anagram of the Land. Annex Liberty, absorb her, and recode her: infuse her with your nasty optics. The anagram will surpass and delete the first world, yet, in all its elements, remain identical. Who can afford sincerity? It’s an expensive monocle.” (“How Pastoral” 22)
This passage typifies Robertson’s prose in its compression and complexity. Several arguments are going on at once. “Sincere” nationalism must be recoded—the emptiness of national mythologies must be exposed. Citizenship, in Robertson’s terms, is a kind of romance: personal, idealistic, transient. All nations are in some direct or indirect fashion the products of imperial divisions of the world. Robertson’s redeployment of Virgil suggests that imperialism must be excavated and reversed through parodic imitation. This would be an imaginative form of decolonization, where no one could take for granted his or her “landed”-ness. “First world” nations “remain identical” to one another in the histories that they exclude, but parallel histories can and must be created. Lady Liberty is a monarch in luxurious surroundings but she is also a monarch in isolation. Lady Liberty cannot help but refer to Canada’s southern neighbour, which Robertson seems to suggest cannot simply be ignored, but must be engaged, “recoded,” and “absorbed”—made, perhaps, to live up to her self-professed values of freedom and tolerance.
Robertson’s critique of nationalism is particularly apparent in her first two full-length books, XEclogue and Debbie: An Epic, both of which reformulate Virgilian themes in the context of a postmodern feminism that defies any strong sense of region. “The hoaky loam of an old genre” animates her eclogic and epic work, but not in the service of any specific nation, government, location, or party. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, although firmly rooted in Vancouver, represents the North American city as something of a global bricolage—a product of conflicting, and often incommensurate, historical influences. Composed in lyrical prose, the book is strongly influenced by Situationism and by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The city functions as protagonist, with its suburbs as important supporting characters. The suburb of Burnaby, located east of Vancouver, for example, is brought out of its blandness and made a foil to larger socio-cultural issues surrounding Vancouver’s urban development. Nostalgia is central to The Office for Soft Architecture’s challenge to Vancouver’s growth; the book immediately questions the capitalist processes responsible for that growth:
The Office for Soft Architecture came into being as I watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money…. Here and there money had tarried. The result seemed emotional. I wanted to document this process. I began to research the history of surfaces. I included my own desires in the research. In this way, I became multiple. I became money. (1)
Like the title of Robertson’s book The Weather, this passage alludes to Walter Benjamin’s “Money and rain belong together. The weather is itself an index of the state of this world. Bliss is cloudless, knows no weather. There also comes a cloudless realm of perfect goods, on which no money falls” (481). Robertson makes herself an implicated character within the landscape (or the weatherscape). The old Vancouver may have tragically dissolved in a rain of money but that does not mean that the old Vancouver can be reclaimed through the removal of the corroding influence of money. On the contrary, to understand money’s influence on the city, the author must become “money,” so as to be able to think from the perspective of capital, rather than to simply dismiss capital’s effects. Robertson again personalizes the experience of Vancouver’s growth, unashamedly incorporating her “desires in the research.” Historical research, the book suggests, cannot be a disinterested undertaking. Desires animate otherwise forgotten histories; desires cannot be dismissed as irrational or feminine. The writer cannot be separated from the metropolis that she inhabits. Vancouver’s many changing landscapes (economic, architectural, ethnographic, geographic) must be particularized and experienced rather than pathologized and mourned.
Like Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, The Office for Soft Architecture is a “retroactive manifesto.” Inspired by Koolhaas, Robertson performs a détournement on the name of his company, “The Office for Metropolitan Architecture.” Soft Architecture is deliberately autodidactic and non-professional, characterized by the casual walk rather than by the survey and the blueprint. The Office for Soft Architecture is to the Office for Metropolitan Architecture what the Kootenay School is to a conventional M.F.A. program in creative writing. Robertson’s architectural writing is proudly improvisatory, and restlessly moves from location to location without any kind of master plan: “This improvisatory ethos is modern. It is proportioned by the utopia of improvised necessity rather than by tradition” (178). Vancouver becomes emblematic of the attempt to create a provisional utopia out of the wilderness.
On the surface, eminently modern in its lack of a long-standing cultural tradition, Vancouver is shown in fact to harbour multiple histories that remain repressed within the city’s popular historiography. Vancouver is seen to have been under the influence of globalizing forces since its inception; the city’s attempts to present itself to the world come under particular scrutiny:
The essays … reflect Vancouver’s changing urban texture during a period of its development roughly bracketed by the sale of the Expo ’86 site by the provincial government, and the 2003 acquisition by the province of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In this period of accelerated growth and increasingly globalizing economies, much of what I loved about this city seemed to be disappearing. I thought I should document the physical transitions I was witnessing in my daily life, and in this way question my own nostalgia for the minor, the local, the ruinous; for decay. It was efficient to become an architect, since the city’s economic and aesthetic discourses were increasingly framed in architectural vocabularies. In writing I wanted to make alternative spaces and contexts for the visual culture of this city, sites that could also provide a vigorously idiosyncratic history of surfaces as they fluctuate. (“Acknowledgements”)
Documentation provides a means both to preserve and to question Vancouver’s past. The book is a loosely organized dérive through Vancouver and its environs. Soft Architecture opts for the contemplative walk and the meticulous record of historical events as opposed to the more aggressive détournement. In his classic formulation “Theory of the Dérive,” Guy Debord writes:
Among the various Situationist methods is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of transient passage through various ambiances. The dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychological effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll. (50)
In “psychogeographical” terms, the activity of the dérive is more proactive than the activity of the flâneur, although in her uncertain drifting, the dériviste does not presume to reimagine the city programmatically on the scale of a Baron Haussman or a Le Corbusier. As Joshua Clover points out in his essay on Robertson, “soft architecture” can also be understood “as the body, or as being” (81). As such, “soft architecture” is embodied and receptive—modest in its ambitions to remake the landscape, but immodest in its ambitions to describe the desires and lived histories of the city’s inhabitants.
The dérive involves an open-ended passivity—which is perhaps also in keeping with the absence of large-scale conflicts or upheavals (attacks, natural disasters) in Vancouver’s recent past. The dérive may also be well suited to describing the city’s perceived historical isolation:
[O]ur city is persistently soft. We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks, a camp for a navy vying to return to a place that has disappeared. So the camp is a permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents—tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper, and various claddings—tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers. (15)
More like a navy base than a battlefield, the city is typified by the transient careers of its inhabitants. It is a navy base without much of a navy—a nuclear-free zone in a world armed to the teeth. The static wilderness has given way to dynamic urban space. Somehow the specificities of this landscape must be reimagined. This imagining is political:
The problem of the shape of choice is mainly retrospective. That wild nostalgia leans into the sheer volubility of incompetence. This nostalgia musters symbols with no relation to necessity—civic sequins, apertures that record and tend the fickleness of social gifts. Containing only supple space, nostalgia feeds our imagination’s strategic ineptitude. Forget the journals, conferences, salons, textbooks, and media of dissemination. We say thought’s object is not knowledge but living. We do not like it elsewhere.
The truly utopian act is to manifest current conditions and dialects. Practice description. Description is mystical. It is afterlife because it is life’s reflection or reverse. Place is accident posing as politics. (16)
Robertson offers no pre-lapsarian past for Vancouver, as for instance when she “détourns” the Situationist slogan of May 1968, “Sous les pavés, la plage,” into “Under the pavement, pavement.” “Under the pavement, the beach” might suit Vancouver’s False Creek—site of Expo 86 and formerly a highly contaminated industrial space—even better than it would a wall near the Seine. The nostalgia for nature, however, is a form of nostalgia Robertson treats with considerable suspicion. She consistently treats the pastoral not as a genuine form of access to the natural world, but rather as “a nation-making genre” which naturalizes political and social inequality:
I begin with the premise that pastoral, as a literary genre, is obsolete—originally obsolete. Once a hokey territory sussed by hayseed diction, now the mawkish artificiality of the pastoral poem’s constructed surface has settled down to a backyard expressivity…. Translate backyard utopia as mythology…. I’d call pastoral the nation-making genre: within a hothouse language we force the myth of the Land to act as both political resource and mystic origin. (“How Pastoral” 22–23)
Despite its postmodern attempts to create myths of self-importance—in events like Expo 86 and the 2010 Winter Olympics—Vancouver seems unable to create a singular nation-building pastoral mythology. Expo and the Olympics are emblematic of Vancouver boosterism; they are international events, but it is an internationalism of tourism and spectacle, not an internationalism based on cultural uniqueness. Vancouver may lack a nation-building myth of origin, but Robertson is not arguing that Vancouver needs any such myth of origin. Soft Architecture is practical, and its idealism resides in its senses of possible outcomes, rather than in direct militant action based on a utopian vision of an originary pastoral state or a definitive future identity. The sentence “We say thought’s object is not knowledge but living” (16) is a succinct definition of Pragmatism that could have been written by James or Dewey. There is no divine city on a hill, or even a divine city beneath the hills. Myths of origin are implicitly utopian in that they presume a world view; the examination of lived history is not utopian, but pragmatic. Robertson consistently denies the possibility of utopia in Vancouver or elsewhere: “Nothing is utopian. Everything wants to be. Soft Architects face the reaching middle” (17).
In what I take to be one of the book’s most important chapters, “Playing House: A Brief Account of the Idea of the Shack,” Vancouver is symbolically portrayed as shack-like in terms of its architectural ambitions. Surrounded by wilderness, the city is a haphazard work-in-progress, built from the materials of its own past:
The landscape includes the material detritus of previous inhabitations and economies. Typically the shack reuses or regroups things with humour and frugality. The boughs of a tree might become a roof. A shack almost always reuses windows, so that looking into or out of the shack is already part of a series, or an ecology, of looking. In this sense a shack is itself a theory: it sees through other eyes. This aspect of the shack’s politics prevents shack nostalgia from becoming mere inert propaganda. The layering or abutment of historically contingent economies frames a diction or pressure that is political, political in the sense that the shack dweller is never a pure product of the independent present. He sees himself through other eyes. (177–78)
Most important in this process of reusing is the reuse of windows. The shack must see itself through the glass of others. Not only is ontology a “luxury of the landed,” so, too, is epistemology. Vancouver can know itself only through the eyes of others. As a city of immigration, it is a city of borrowed windows and eyes, and cannot be reduced to a simple notion of placeness. Its only authenticity consists in its lack of authenticity. In Rousseau’s Boat, Robertson offers another vision of flawed utopia:
I discover a tenuous utopia made from steel, wooden chairs, glass, stone, metal bed frames, tapestry, bones, prosthetic legs, hair, shirt-cuffs, nylon, plaster figurines, perfume bottles and keys. I am confusing art and decay. (21)
Robertson’s litany is dominated by the detritus of consumer society but there are also elements like stone, hair, and bones, which remain unaltered features of nature. Utopia is tenuous: a mix, a living being subject to decay. Art may be utopian, but it cannot by itself create everlasting utopia. Like Robertson’s other writings, The Office for Soft Architecture celebrates the death of the utopian ideal. In Debbie: An Epic, she writes: “I celebrate the death of method: the flirting woods call it, the glittering rocks call it—utopia is dead. High Loveliness was born here to cut back prim sublimity. She’s a member of the lily tribe whose materials follow themselves. She’s a bitch of the inauthentic; her ego’s in drag” (n.p.). Utopia, like gender, is a performative erasure of complexity. Power is not a fixed attribute of the just and the good; instead, power is an effect. One can see the deep influence of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in Debbie: An Epic when Robertson writes: “We invented power. Power is a pink prosthesis hidden in the forest. Between black pines we strap it on and dip our pink prosthesis in the pool” (n.p.). Nature is nothing but a pool of abstraction. It is up to humans to fuck in their fashion, and the strap-on prosthesis is inherently no better or worse than the purportedly normative phallus.
Citizenship, class affiliation, and gender roles are all likened to obsolete genres by Robertson—and yet to ignore the role of nation, class, and gender is perhaps to partake of another, more insidious form of nostalgia. Feminism in particular must continually be suspicious of nostalgia:
I must risk censure and speak of my shimmering girlhood—for the politics of girls cannot refuse nostalgia.
To be raised as a girl was a language, a system of dreaming fake dreams. In the prickling grass in the afternoon in August, I kept trying to find a place where my blood could rush. That was the obsolete experience of hope. But yield to the evidence. And do not decline to interpret. A smooth span of nostalgia dissects the crackling gazebo. (n.p.)
The “gazebo” of power, the official residence of Lady Liberty, reappears as an ambivalent symbol—feminized, vulnerable, unnecessary, open, luxurious. The gazebo is both preserved and demolished by the agency of nostalgia. One must return to “fake dreams”—(a pleonasm?)—before one can dream new dreams. The final chapter of Debbie: An Epic, titled “Utopia,” is conscious of its own limitations in creating any kind of collective political agenda that would not be constructed out of the failures of the past:
Now it is necessary to catalogue what, in sadness and tranquility, we have failed to describe in our supple rendering of these tableaux—those objects which stand between our ardent, political address and a new, plural pronoun (inky, dubious, prolix and deluxe): the shining lure of tenderness; the stain of ruddy wildings in a grove; the oblique and quivering kite of eros; history diffused as romance; a genre’s camouflaged violence. (n.p.)
The refusal to choose a genre becomes a refusal to camouflage violence. Societies do not function, perhaps, without organizing and limiting violence—but that violence can perhaps be mitigated if it is transparent in structure, or genre.
Seen through the lens of Robertson’s Vancouver writings, both urban and suburban development are inescapably violent. In The Office for Soft Architecture, Vancouver becomes a kind of failed petit-bourgeois paradise, emblematized by “Vancouver Specials” and “leaky condos.” The term “Vancouver Special”—well known to Vancouverites—refers to a boxy, plain, lot-maximizing, two-storey house. Vancouver’s “leaky condo” scandal of the 1990s involved lax construction regulation and oversight during a period of spectacular growth. Such localized references serve as regionally specific symbols of the adverse effects of Vancouver’s stratospheric postwar building boom. In “The Pure Surface” chapter of the book, four pages are taken up by thumbnail photos of one hundred nearly identical Vancouver Specials. The leaky condos and Vancouver Specials are juxtaposed with a chapter on a turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts mansion in the suburb, Burnaby. Once the site of profitable strawberry farms and wealthy estates, Burnaby is now a seemingly unremarkable middle-class locale. The mansion represents “an idea of nature as democratic and populist metaphor, the universal paradigm of sincerity and authenticity” (98). As egalitarian and utopian as Arts and Crafts designs might be, they still find their realization in antiquated and elitist methods of construction. The mansion represents the ideal of a suburban development that might have been individualized and artistic—everything the Vancouver Special and the leaky condo are not—and yet the mansion is beyond the grasp of the working-class Debbies who populate Vancouver’s less glamorous suburbs.
Debbie herself loves to revel in the nostalgia of times when people of her class would have been servile in ways more apparent than in contemporary society:
I have loved history’s premonitions
urgencies these parts lovingly I speak
in the dialect of servility
and current conditions arms of terror
and grammar that went into the forest
motors (n.p.)
Nostalgia enables a false return to paradise, an escape, but it can also permit a reconsideration of the grammar of contemporary social conditions. One must speak “the dialect of servility” in order to understand servitude. History is a kind of mimicking activity for Debbie. Transparency can only be sought, never attained. As she writes: “First all belief was paradise. So pliable a medium. A time not very long. A transparency caused” (n.p.). Instead of seeking paradise, we ought to seek other possible outcomes to the histories that have already taken place. Robertson seems to be speaking about Canadian society as a whole when she uses the word “this” ambiguously: “This was made from Europe, formed from Europe, rant and roar. Fine and grand. Fresh and bright.” The ambivalence of the phrases “fine and grand” and “fresh and bright” demonstrates a clear discomfort with an oversimplified Canadian identity “made from Europe” (n.p.).
Debbie is described as “a moot person in a moot place,” yet what makes her an epic character is her interaction with world history and with modern empire:
… I will discuss perfidy
with scholars as if spurning kisses, I
will sip the marble marrow of empire.
Debbie can be a scholar through self-willing; her interactions with historical knowledge take place as erotic experience. She precedes empire just as she perseveres past its demise:
… we were half made when the empire
died in orgy. Because we are not free
my work shall be obscure
as Love! unlinguistic! I
bludgeon the poem with desire and
stupidity in the wonderful autumn
season as
rosy cars
ascend (n.p).
Debbie’s “Because we are not free / my work shall be obscure / as Love!” is a targeted defence of an avant-garde writing practice. An eroticized language, as in the writing of Gertrude Stein, becomes an effective tool in resisting dominant societal roles. Debbie may be “moot” in the terms of empire, but in her mootness she is better able to observe the operations of empire. From her shack or her “Vancouver Special” or her leaky condo she is able to observe that “Utopia’s torn plastic shanties are / moot shells of oscillation.” The shack is a spinoff from the continuous movement of empire and of utopia, which—given the dominant coding of language, gender, and economics—amount to nearly the same things from Debbie’s perspective.
Robertson’s interest in nostalgia shows itself even in her earliest book, The Apothecary. The kind of nostalgia that Robertson is thinking of here is sociopolitical but also sexual, and does not necessarily liberate the individual from repression:
The extreme anxiety of self-disclosure displaces the fantasy of politics with clots of phrase, yet the phantasie gives rise to a curiously useful desperation in the sense that “a house,” “a car,” or “a field” compensate metonymically. I remember how a house falling reveals an observable structure for an instant, then, through a sexual process, becomes nostalgia. (28)
The house becomes a collective space, the space that feminism has attempted to recover from the patriarchal erasure of domestic labour. Isolation may be necessary for the female to overcome the conditioning of a patriarchal society but isolation is only a strategy along the way to a fuller, more historical socialization. As Robertson writes in The Apothecary, memory must be surmounted and rewritten:
A dexterous genre was available to my thighs only through an aesthetic of scrupulous isolation: aggregative though tentatively emphatic, apt to somatize, dedicated to garnering yet ordinarily engorged—in the burgeoning jargon I surmount memory as if a coppery cigarette toughly sewed the shape of an inclusive object to modulate among luxuries yet I am heard not physical but erring and further inversions clog a kind of nosegay showing how only the systematic is lacking before copula translate as “to cure.” (19)
The cure the titular “apothecary” seeks is an inclusive new system. The new system requires new genres able to eroticize and to bring pleasure—as well as to somatize and to represent pain. The new system, represented through embodied metaphors, requires the “conspicuous inutility” called for in Debbie: An Epic. The adventurous and varied typography of Debbie: An Epic could itself be recognized as a conspicuous inutility. Large type and overlaid type make their own semantic arguments, but the book’s typography can also be read as a purposeful rejection of the most economical means of conveying a poem. People must travel “vast / itineraries of error” (25) as she writes in The Weather. Error is a kind of luxury; revisiting the “errors” of history is a colossal form of luxury that is necessary to resist the depredations of empire. Robertson’s epic (or mock epic) is like a palimpsest in reverse. Rather than reusing scarce and expensive paper or vellum out of necessity, Robertson deliberately overwrites what there is no economic need to overwrite. Obsolescence must be sought, not repressed. There is a retrospective joy in understanding the errors of history. In The Weather, Robertson writes: “We are watching ourselves being torn. It’s gorgeous; we accept the dispersal. It’s just beginning; we establish an obsolescence” (33).
Establishing “an obsolescence” is an ongoing process meant in part to counteract the anti-historical pressures of modernity. “The tendency of the age is to forget disturbance,” she writes in Debbie: An Epic. In other words, as “The Argument” of Debbie: An Epic runs, “Slick lyric blocks history” (n.p). Rewriting the pastoral and the epic traditions is a gesture of remembering disturbance. Given the conditions of postmodern life, the only epic possible is an anti-epic. Such an epic, simultaneously materialist and anti-materialist, argues for reorienting social expenditure in a more just manner; it also denies that individuals are merely the products of their material conditions. It preserves some sort of philosophical idealism for poetic subjects: “I want an ingenious fibre to be treated as funny tragedy expressing a classic argument against materialism which runs like this: which changes of costume are bound to be dangerous? what code is honest and practical yet marginally corporate?” (3). To find a “fibre” may not be as ambitious as finding a new method or a new narrative of progress; finding a fibre may be the most “honest and practical” activity under the circumstances. In my epigraph to this essay, Robertson speaks of “The moral promiscuity of any plant” as an alternative to the violence of Liberty and the nation. The “moral promiscuity of any plant” is a call to a non-instrumentalized, non-utilitarian morality; hence, the importance of the echoes of Georges Bataille that run through Robertson’s work. The luxury of leisure time or the luxury of the unquantified time spent within the domestic space must not be feminized. Geography, gender, and economics are alike in their performative natures:
Nostalgia, like hysteria, once commonly treated as a feminine pathology, must now be claimed as a method of reading or of critiquing history—a pointer indicating a potential node of entry…. Rather than diagnosing this nostalgia as a symptom of loss (which would only buttress the capitalist fiction of possession), I deploy it as an almanac, planning a tentative landscape in which my inappropriate and disgraceful thoughts may circulate. Nostalgia will locate precisely those gaps or absences in a system we may now redefine as openings, freshly turned plots. (“How Pastoral” 25)
The Soft Architectural approach emphasizes collectivity, as does the urban eclogue. By defining nostalgia as a collective repossession of the past, rather than as an individual loss of the past, Robertson is able to cultivate new cultural possibilities. Not uncoincidentally, she employs agricultural metaphors to describe this reclamation. The collective imaginary she calls upon rejects the possessiveness of the individual lyric ego: “I deplore the enclosure staked out by a poetics of ‘place’ in which the field of man’s discrete ontological geography stands as a wilful displacement, an emptying of a specifically peopled history” (“How Pastoral” 25). Robertson alludes to a time before the Enclosure Movement—to an idyllic pre-capitalist stage, but once again she is skeptical of indulging in Rousseauian fantasies. “Eclogue Three: Liberty” of XEclogue is a direct response to Rousseau, and it too plays upon the agrarian origins of the term culture:
What follows is the interminable journal of culture. This neutral and emotive little word seems, in the operatic dark green woods, so harmless and legal but it’s liberty totalized, an incommensurable crime against the girls. To question privilege I’m going to shame this word. I will begin by gathering around my body all the facts…. I embody the problem of the free-rider, inconveniencing, the leaf-built, the simple-hearted, the phobic, with the unctuous display of my grief. (n.p.)
To an eighteenth-century audience, The Social Contract represented a complete and total assault upon civilization; to a twenty-first-century audience, The Social Contract, like Émile, cannot help but be a total assault upon civilization that refuses to inquire deeply into the category of gender as a social construct. “Liberty totalized” likewise embodies an oxymoronic contradiction. Even under Rousseau’s scathing gaze, culture remains a “crime against the girls.” No amount of primitivism, it would seem, can result in full-fledged feminism when mixed with the slightest degree of culture. To return to the problem of utility, if the labour of women goes unrecognized, as it usually does in the pastoral tradition, then women are merely “free-riders.” To be a stock pastoral character, a beautiful milkmaid, for instance, is to be the victim of an acculturated nature or of a naturalized culture. Robertson is not content with merely demonstrating that the utility of the milkmaid’s labour has been fetishized out of existence—instead Robertson is challenging the definitions of utility both within culture and within language. Consider again Debbie’s lines: “Because we are not free / my work shall be obscure / as Love!” The “work” can be writing, but it can also more generally be any kind of labour. In obscurity can be joy, can be meaning, can be the impulse toward liberation.
Although she repeatedly stresses the importance of community in her work, Robertson is wary of utopianism on a grand scale, and she articulates distinct limits and responsibilities for her work. In an email interview with Steve McCaffery, she writes:
There are traces of unbuildable or unbuilt architectures folded into the texture of the city and our bodies are already moving among them. Therefore the exploitation of complicity as a critical trope, an economy of scale. My outlook is not liberatory except by the most minor means, but these tiny, flickering inflections are the only agency I believe—the inflections complicating the crux of a complicity. More and more poetry is becoming for me the urgent description of complicity and delusional space. The description squats within a grammar because there is no other site. Therefore the need for the urgent and incommensurate hopes of accomplices. (Robertson and McCaffery 38)
The impulse is again toward collective action and creation and away from individual imaginative compartmentalization. Just as she reclaims the word “nostalgia,” with its pejorative connotations, so too she reclaims the word “complicity.” The accomplice is not a criminal but an agent in the creative process, a squatter in the midst of wealth. The “unbuildable” remains as important as what has been built. Room must be set aside for “delusional space,” and this space must remain counter-normative within larger shared visions. “A specifically peopled history” must be continually (re)imagined by Robertson and her accomplices.
In the most thoroughly researched chapter of The Office for Soft Architecture, “Site Report: New Brighton Park,” Robertson attempts to create such “a specifically peopled history.” An obscure park in East Vancouver, traditionally one of the city’s poorest areas, becomes another kind of palimpsest of lost history.3 Like Susan Howe’s writings on Buffalo, the New Brighton chapter places micro-history in the service of a larger theoretical inquiry. Robertson describes the park as “an inverted utopia” (37), again invoking the Situationist slogan, this time in reverse, “sous la plage, le pavé” (37). The park is surrounded by heavy industry, and yet, in a somewhat challenged form, it offers beach access. Staked out as a town site at the planned terminus of the CPR railway, the park is the site of the first recorded real estate transaction in the city. From this inglorious myth of origin, Robertson goes on to describe the park’s many other former uses: site of a hotel, a resort, a prospective steam power facility, and a community pool. The pool is particularly significant in that it was the site of the first racial exclusion policy in a Vancouver park; Japanese Canadians interned nearby during the Second World War were forbidden entry. For Robertson, “the spatio-economic system … functions as a mutating lens: never a settlement, always already a zone of leisured flows and their minor intensifications, a zone of racialization and morphogenesis” (41).
The park retains traces of many of the major events of Western Canadian history. The settlement colony becomes an industrial producer and a war economy, and then a diversified economy highly reliant on leisure activities. The substitutions imposed on the landscape are not systematic or evolutionary—they are practical and unambitious adaptations to existing conditions. The landscape is unpoetic in the terms of traditional lyric: “Structure here is anti-metaphoric: it disperses convention” (41). Part of the park’s unrealized potential is its sheer uselessness in economic terms: “Soft Architects believe that this site demonstrates the best possible use of an urban origin: Change its name repeatedly. Burn it down. From the rubble confect a prosthetic pleasureground; with fluent obviousness, picnic there” (41). New Brighton Park has had its name changed; the New Brighton Hotel did burn down; in comparison to other Vancouver parks, New Brighton is a rubble-filled locale. In a sense, Robertson is creating a kind of urban theodicy out of the park. The best of all possible results has occurred, though hardly by design. Out of a certain degree of randomness has emerged the chaotic celebration of a staccato Steinianism: “picnic there.” The park has no reason to be ashamed, nor do those who might go there for pleasure—as opposed to visiting cleaner, larger, better-known parks like the marquee Stanley Park. New Brighton Park is no longer a destination park; it is a neighbourhood park. Robertson’s own interest in the park was piqued by its proximity to her home, and its usefulness as a place to walk her dog. New Brighton Park is a perfect subject for the Soft Architectural approach because it is uncategorizable, underappreciated, and diverse. It is a sometime pleasure ground of the lower middle class and of the young artists and writers who have moved to the neighbourhood in the past two decades. Depending on one’s perspective, New Brighton is a good example of the reclamation of urban space or it is a spectre of gentrification. It points the way toward a post-industrial, non-discriminatory, transnational Western Canada, but it also points the way to a Western Canada subject to the whims of development—hardly a dystopia and hardly a utopia. As Jennifer Scappetone asks, “Is an inverted Utopia dystopian? Likely not. In describing the capsizing of plots, Lisa Robertson tracks the critical distortion in erecting a multiple pronoun, midway through the condemned hold” (75).
Robertson’s work makes her readers intensely conscious of space and of location, and yet, as I have suggested, Robertson herself is not easy to situate. Lytle Shaw observes that she is a “writer whose site specificity exceeds the literal or phenomenological and enters the discursive domain” (44). No location, and no identification with a place, can be taken for granted in her writing. Like much of the work that emerged from the circle of writers involved in the Kootenay School in the 1980s and ’90s, Robertson’s vision is internationalist in its scope. She maintains strong connections to the American avant-garde. But her writing—like that of other Vancouver poets of her generation such as Kevin Davies, Peter Culley, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, and Jeff Derksen—is more uncomfortable in its sense of place than that of the 1960s generation of Vancouver poets. Like the pastoral tradition in general, Vancouver may have once been “a hokey territory sussed by a hayseed diction” (Office 22), but it is no longer such a territory. Profoundly polyglot and multi-ethnic, Vancouver has outpaced traditional politics of place and identity. Its many identities are overlayed and transient, its histories only partially visible—like New Brighton Park in Robertson’s description. Robertson does not disavow a traditional Canadian identity; instead, she encourages us to think of it as a genre among genres. Canada may be a comparatively benign embodiment of the genre of the nation-state—but the nation-state is still a genre that threatens to absorb all genres. The nation-state is an economic, legal, and military construction that subsumes the local and the global. Robertson is suggesting, in other words, that Vancouver encompasses all nostalgias. Vancouver is not a world city in the sense of being a megalopolis—but it is a city of the world, subject both to the benefits and to the costs of globalization.
In effect, Robertson—who has lived in Cambridge, Paris, and Oakland—has written her native city a series of extraordinary love letters, the latest of which, Magenta Soul Whip, notes, “This work was completed in Roman Vancouver” (66), and ends with the colophon, “Vancouver—Paris—Oakland 1995–2007.” The postscript of the 2006 The Men: A Lyric Book reads:
(In Vancouver as the dark winter tapered into spring
I undertook to sing
My life my body these words
The men from a perspective.
For all those who confuse
Flirtation with monogamy
I drain the golden glass
They exit and glance upwards
Adjust their little caps) (69)
Although perhaps less “located” than her earlier work, the postscript gives a kind of performative grounding to an otherwise non–site specific text. The poem is a product of a vitalist body: “My life my body.” To confuse flirtation with monogamy is to upset convention, to recognize play among rigorous distinctions, to add nuance to degrees of affiliation. Perhaps one can flirt with identities without losing one’s grounding. Robertson has lived in at least three cultural capitals, and yet her writing remains tied to Vancouver. Perhaps her exilic writings should remind us that Vancouver is a site not just of immigration but also of emigration—not simply to the traditional Canadian urban hubs of Toronto and Montreal but to the world as a whole. Utopia is based upon regional exclusion; Vancouver, at its best, is not. As Robertson puts it so well: “we must recognize Utopia as an accretion of nostalgias with no object other than the historiography of the imaginary” (“How Pastoral” 23). The Office for Soft Architecture is such an accretion of nostalgias. Perhaps it takes the distance of an expatriate to create such an accretion. Nostalgias cannot be possessed, but they can be shared. Nostalgias show that every project of renovation entails a loss, as does every project of emigration. Likewise, every project of nationalistic self-identification entails a simplification of complex identities and histories. As Robertson writes, “It is too late to be simple” (Office 76). Robertson’s soft architectural writings show that things were never simple in Vancouver. In the psychogeography of Vancouverites, the “dystopia of the obsolete” and the utopia of the imaginary may never have been all that far apart—somewhere between Surrey to the east and Wreck Beach to the west.
1 The Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) was founded in 1994 after the forced closure of David Thompson University Centre and its Writing Program in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. KSW moved to Vancouver with the mandate of providing inexpensive courses, sponsoring critical talks, hosting reading series, and continuing to publish a writing magazine.
2 The seven walks of the book’s title emerged from workshops Robertson led at the Kootenay School in 2001. Robertson’s 1998 article “Visitations: City of Ziggurats,” which provides an account of the Kootenay School’s struggle to maintain its funding from the City of Vancouver, in many ways reads like a template for the book as a whole.
3 In recent years East Vancouver has been the centre of more controversy over urban land use than any other neighbourhood in Canada. The Vancouver poetry community and the Kootenay School of Writing have been extensively involved in advocating for affordable housing and in resisting gentrification. See in particular Woodsquat: A Special Issue of West Coast Line and “Urban Regeneration: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy,” by Neil Smith, and Jeff Derksen in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings.
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