“Finding shelter” is: living under an overhang, a rock. “Finding shelter” happens by chance: you’re walking – it’s raining, suddenly – you walk faster, you look around, there’s a rock, it was there all the time – you crawl in under out of the rain. “Finding shelter” is an act of adaptation; you take your hat off to nature, no “self” is asserted in nature’s face. “Making shelter” (as we know it in Western culture) is, by contrast, the act of taking over nature, placing something on top of nature. “Making shelter” is male. 

Sooner or later the child has to leave home. The way to leave that home is through sex: sex means leaving home, leaving the family. But, whereas the European home is embedded in the ground, embedded in the past, the American home is built on top of the ground, a house with a basement, a house with a history of its own, a house that can only put on the faces of different styles imported from the lands of various ancestors. The American house has a tenuous existence: the American fear is : if you leave the house, the house might disappear into thin air. So the American is in a double-bind: in order to save the house, the American has to stay home – but, in order to save the self, in order to grow up, the American has to leave home. The resolution of this contradiction is incest; incest is sex without having to leave home. The American version of incest (Melville, Faulkner) is restricted to brother-sister; mother-son sex, or father-daughter sex would satisfy the need to maintain the home by staying at home; it would deny the male-myth need to be outside. Brother-sister sex, on the other hand, keeps the show on the road: it allows the children to leave home as they have to, in order to grow up, while all the while carrying their own home with them (in the form of each other) as they go. Brother-sister sex is the prototype of the American mobile home. 

The public gathers in two kinds of spaces. The first is a space that is public, a place where the public gathers because it has aright to the place; the second is a place that is made public, a place where the public gathers precisely because it doesn’t have the right – a place made public by force. 

In the space that is public, the public, whose space this is, has agreed to be a public, these are people “in the form of a city”, they are public when they act “in the name of the city”. They “own” the city only in quotes. The establishment of certain space in the city as “public” is are minder, a warning, that the rest of the city isn’t public. New York doesn’t belong to us, and neither does Paris, and neither does Des Moines. 

The space that is made public began as its own opposite, This was a space that was never meant to be public at all: a royal space, or a presidential space, or a corporate space. This private and privileged space had inherent in it, from its beginning, the seeds of public space: the fact of its existence provoked desire, its privacy functioned as a taunt to the public that felt left out. Once that space has been taken over by force and made public, it has inherent in it, in turn, the seeds of private place, the seeds of re-defined and re-inhabited privacy: the public that takes it over is working its way up to the royalty or the presidency or the corporate office. Private space becomes public when the public wants it; the public space becomes private when the public that has it won’t give it up. 

“I wasn’t myself”. “Who were you then? Who are you now? Where are you? When are you who you might be? What are you anyway?”

The body is public when it crosses the boundary of the body. The public body crosses genders and mixes races; the public body is neither one nor the other, neither here nor there – it’s all bodies at once. The body made public is the body that keeps making itself public: it grows, out of itself, another body, which in turn grows another body, which grows another body, etc. The root of the word “public” – the Latin public us – is influenced by the Latin puber, pubes: grown up, adult, puberty. “Public”, with just one letter missing (the letter of the law), becomes “pubic” (the spirit of the law). Public space is construction, an addition to pubic space; the pubic space is deconstruction, a subtraction from public space. “Public” contains “pubic”: the public body carries the pubic body within itself– the pubic body resides, like an alien presence, inside the public body. “Pubic”is extended to “public”: the pubic body is latched on to, by the public body –the public body clings to the pubic body, like a leech. The pubic body, adding to itself to become the public body, “comes out” and will never be himself/herself again; the public body, subtracting from itself to become the pubic body, is a man/woman without a country, and can’t go home again. The body drifts into space; space drives the body out of the body. 

“Landscape” is an attempt to keep the land in place, to keep land in one piece, lest it be fragmented and blown to bits by “landmines” – (def.) cavities in the earth that contain explosive charges, just below ground surface, and that are designed to go off from the weight of persons passing over them. On a “landscape”, you’re in the world of science-fiction: passing over the earth in a space-ship, you have a vantagepoint from which to explore the earth, map the earth. On a “land mine” you’re in the world of detective-fiction, film noir: you don’t have the luxury of looking around you and looking ahead, you have to keep looking exactly where you are – one look to the side or to the front takes your mind off the earth at your feet, one look away and the earth takes over, the ground comes up from under you and blows you up off the ground. 

Public space, in an electronic age, is space on the run. Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas, but roads and bridges. Publicspace is leaving home, and giving up all the comforts of the cluster-places that substitute for the home. Space on the run is life on the loose. There’s not time to talk; there’s no need to talk, since you have all the information you need on the radio you carry with you. There’s no need for a person-to-person relationship, since you already have multiple relationships with the voices on your radio, with images of persons in store windows and on billboards; there’s no time to stop and have a relationship, which would be a denial of all those other bodies you’re side-by-side with on the street, one different body after another, one body replacing another. There’s no time and no need and no way to have “deep sex”: in a plague year, in a time of AIDS, bodies mix while dressed in condoms and armored with vaginal shields – the body takes its own housing with it wherever it goes, it doesn’t come out of its shell. The electronic age and the age of AIDS come intermixed in an age of virus, whether that virus is information or disease. Each person becomes too infected, either with information or with disease, to be with another. You come to visit, not to stay.