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http://www.thestate.ae/vol-II-speculative-geographies/
[Freedom is what you do with whats been
done to you.]
Jean Paul Sartre
November, 2010. My body was jammed in a
heaving mass of people climbing through a
large ground floor window at Londons Millbank
Tower. Terrified workers fled the Conservative
party headquarters as angry students flooded
in to temporarily occupy the building. Next to
me, a line of severely outnumbered riot police
were having their Alamo momentholding their
ground whilst being pelted with signs from
the rabid throng. Some looked scared, and
others like they were loving the action. Voices
cracking, protesters bounced office furniture out
of the remaining windows; papers and rocks,
and then a fire extinguisher, flew off the roof. It
was all pretty dramatic, as England goes.
The process of nudging my way into what felt
like a progressively unstable situationwalking
the edge of my personal chaotic capacitywas
enticingly liberating. It had a visceral effect that
registered, slightly erogenously, in an undulating
energy flow between my heart and bowels.
It was my first encounter with a new kind of
urban edgeworka lusty, breathless clutch that
left me itching to feel it again. In the months
after Millbank, I folded that neural dawn into
my everyday life as an ethnographer amongst
urban explorersgroups of people sneaking into
places they are not supposed to. I fell in love
with London all over again, with the community
we had there, and with the rush of working the
edges of fear and desire.
Edgework was first coined by gonzo journalist
Hunter S. Thompson. In Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas, he uses it to describe peoples
need to push boundaries in their search for
personal fulfilment.
1
The idea is to work as
close to the edge as one can, without getting
cutor at least not too deeply. The sociologist
Steven Lyng later appropriated edgework in
the 1990s as a blanket term for anyone who
actively seek[s] experiences that involve a high
potential for personal injury or death.
2
Lyng
went on to explain edgework as a negotiation
between life and death, consciousness and
unconsciousness, and sanity and insanity.
3
Thing is, edges are like rainbows. As you
approach them, they put the moves on you
and shimmer away to a new location. And as
urban explorers, we have put a lot of effort into
getting cut over the last few yearsrunning
down Tube tunnels after the trains have retired
to their yards, and scaling skyscrapers in the
middle of the night to teeter over the glowing,
throbbing city partying below. While these
tendencies to embrace terror may, from a
societal perspective, reveal a deep personal
dysfunctionor simply mark us out as the
geeks we always wereour taunts with death
also induce an unhinged euphoria. The ability to
create situations of controlled chaos hones the
edges of life experience, and the everyday is
shifted into previously impossible formulations.
It demonstrates that what we make history with
is the matter of a becoming, not the subject
matter of a story.
4
The human body undertaking edgework is a
becoming body, a body on the verge of interior
supersapienism. Through time, this has been
the allure of exploration, from the prehistoric
nomad striking out into the unknown to find new
food sources, to the polar trekker confronting
a lonely, shitty, icy death to be the first to
stand on a peak, to the modern urban citizen
wiggling through a grate on a side street to
abseil down an airshaft into a transportation
network, because no one else had ever tried.
This becoming bodythe exploratory bodyis
a vulnerable body. It is under constant threat
of capsization through sensory overindulgence
and instantaneous evolutionary cognitive
capsule bursts that create new situations, new
awarenesses, and new places.
Take a moment to consider the ens. It
is, in Western terms, an imperfect circle,
and suggests a lifetime of contemplation,
exploration, encounter and ingestion; a perfect
embodiment of subjectivity. The perfect circle,
in contrast, is a deeply inscribed spacea
space of order, cleanliness, rectilinear stasis
and geometric certainty. Together, these figures
represent being and becoming. The ens also
embodies the beauty of decay, the wonder of
overflowing emotion, the terror of a cracking
social faade, the messiness and impossible
imaginations of childhood. In other words, the
ens contains far more edges than the perfect
circle, and the inscription of the form is a
process of actualising a fracture, rather than a
result of completing a composition.
Since that day at Millbank, I have decided
to embrace ens; I have learned to fracture
the inscribed circle of London to create
approachable edges. Every fracture point
rewires conditioned flow into a rouge urban
circuitry, as we risk taking temporary control of
proprietary spaces and off-limits architecture
to create new neurological pathways that are
manifested right in that kundalini hum zone.
Weve got allies, past and present, fighting
the battle to slip the net on the streets and in
cyberspace.
In 1982, we could jam a screwdriver
into the circuits because we faced no
retribution. We could trip the computer
and watch it fall, because it couldnt
respond in kind. Now, in 2012, we can
be bullied and controlled. We awake to
news of drones laying waste to those
on our terror watchlist. We are virtually
stripped naked at airport security. We
are witness to car accidents, prostitution,
and murder on Google Earth. We are
denied a loan because the formula says
no. In short, the noose of technology
has become tighter. Were developing a
grudge. And when we dislike, we mock.
We photobomb the system. We parody.
We use code to avoid the encoded.
Our current power politics are built on
technology, which is why many clap
with glee when masked jokesters hack
corporate Web sites, when mustachioed
avatars front takedowns of intelligence
agencies, when former Russian spies
do lad-mag shoots, and hackers get
talk shows. We get a chance to see
these tools of power corrupted against
the system. Power structures: 932,
people: 5. Its an unfair fight, but we
can sleep at night knowing that the
machine has a flaw, somewhere. Its
vision is faulty, its logic not watertight.
5
Anthony Giddens notes that if we mostly seem
less fragile than we really are it is because
of long-term learning processes whereby
potential threats are avoided or immobilised.
6

In other words, the neoliberal, privatised city
suppresses embodied potential; its making
us weaker, and easier to control. And now, in
the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, geographer
Stephen Graham cautions us that London will
enter into a new state of military urbanism.
7

Surface-to-air missile systems will be installed
on apartment complexes. Drones will dominate
the skyline, and electric fences the eyeline.
An aircraft carrier will dock in the Thames;
snipers will scope us out. Whether or not these
securitisation features make us any safer is
debatable. But the point of this mobilisation is
rather to instil terror in us and them, to push
the one clean, clear, (dare we say circular?)
plot found on every train: Do not take any risks.
Cheers for the concern, but Ill take the plunge.
The twin aural tropes of mind the gap and
please stand behind the yellow line are a
hand on the collar of the knowledgeable, willing
edgeworker. What I want to argue is that done
artfully and wisely, living dangerously engages
our intellect, advances society and makes us
happier.
8
Short-term loss of safety, allowing
room for people to undertake life-affirming risks
on their own terms, cultivates the creative city
that the Olympic Delivery Authority wishes it
could purchase.
This is our new circuitry. When we splice self
and place, we invoke an uninvited meld of
bodies into the urban bodywhether through
a headless, throbbing mass penetrating a
politicised tower block, or through small teams
of subversionists slipping through gaps and
cracks, and gliding through the arteries of the
city. We create new, vibrant urbanisms, the
likes of which may never have existed, had we
remained behind the yellow line. The creative
city always resides at the edge defined by those
honing it; pull the thread, and watch it unravel.
Processes of exploration dont just spawn
affective desire; they also reveal urban
abortions, mistakes, aberrations, and omissions.
Rather than being embarrassedas Transport
for London seems to be about those faultlines
we might see these moments as opportunities
to make mistakes while going into, getting out
of, and dealing with those discoveries. Death
chases us, and we fight back. We win until
we dont anymore, life bubbling over the brim
until the last dash. When Dan Osman, the
edgeworker who jumped off cliffs on homemade
rope swings, was asked if he had a deathwish,
he responded, no, I have a lifewish. As
Lyng rightly points out, risk taking [is]
necessary for the well-being of some people,
as individuals work to develop capacities for
competent control over environmental objects.
Edgeworkers are thus inspired to sometimes
speak of a feeling of oneness with the object
or environment while undertaking these risks.
9

Thats why everytime I leave my house, London
winks at me.
Indeed, the places with which many of us feel
we have inscribed the deepest relationships
with are where risks have been taken, social
codes broken, new templates drawn up from
desire and the fear has been transcended, or
a suppressed passion discovered. I want a
margin for error. I want to make mistakes. I
want to learn on my own terms. I want to fuck
it up sometimes. I want to die trying someday.
I want to encounter this world, and my city,
through this body I have on my own terms; I
want the London direct feed pumped straight
into my central nervous system when I am cut
and for the meld to begin, where bodies and
minds are neither substances nor subjects,
but modes of becoming. Urban subversion
will always be more valuable than security,
shopping opportunities, and smooth space to
the edgeworker.
Urban explorers enrich collective capacity for
sparkling pandemonium and, at the same time,
foreground relationships to place and create
geographies of affective desire. We are coercive
emotion machines that produce breaks and
mobilise flows, nude in sewers, hanging from
cranes, in love with the endless accelerations
of material layering that keep cracking open
underneath the weight of seven billion human
bodies. The city moves with us, constantly
challenging us through its ceaseless mutations,
sometimes cutting sweetly when we make a
wrong move, and other times slapping us with
the flat edgeback across the line to reassess
our motives. I continue to wake up twisted
in the sheets, panting, until our next bit of
edgework is complete and the edge has been
relocated. Edges, like rainbows, dont reappear,
and the the city knows only departures, not
returns.
10
See you out there on the whirling
brink.
Everytime I leave my
house, London winks
at me