The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Keiller
27.1 | Robinson in Space. Sign to Toyota plant, Burnaston, Derbyshire.
repression, homophobia, and the frequent advocacy of child beating. At the
same time, he is dimly aware that the United Kingdom is still the fifthlargest
trading economy in the world and that British, even English people,
particularly women and the young, are probably neither as sexually unemancipated,
as sadistic, or as miserable as he thinks the look of the United
Kingdom suggests. The film’s narrative is based on a series of journeys in
which his prejudices are examined, and some of them are disposed of.
Robinson’s interest in manufacturing, however, is rooted in his
quasi-surrealist practice. Whereas London set out to transform appearances
through a more-or-less radical subjectivity, Robinson in Space addresses the
production of actual space: the manufacture of artifacts and the development
of sites, the physical production of the visible. Both films attempt to
change reality with a heightened awareness in which “I can always see how
beautiful anything could be if only I could change it”—the words of the Situationist
text quoted in the opening sequence of Robinson in Space 5 —but in
the second film, the initial interest is in the production of (at least some of)
this anything. In the history of the modernist avant-gardes, the transformation
of appearances by the poetic imagination preceded the design and construction
of new things, and the identification of modernity was the bridge