So far we have argued that centric perspectives on urban space have their own poetics, or formal means of operating, and their own politics – a relation, therefore, with social space that invests these perspectives in networks of power. We now move to connect the ethics of this power – its relative exclusions and hierarchies that work at the cognitive, aesthetic and affective levels within social space – to the performance of legibility in literary form, a move that allows us to obtain a view of travel discourse as a means of producing social space. It is time now to ask whether a dominant regime of representation of such discursive appropriations can be challenged, contested or changed and what the poetics of such a counterstrategy might look like. If the paradigms holding together the hegemonic site are order and reduction, then it would seem that what is called for is a ‘tactics’ (Certeau [1980] 1990, I) of language that destabilizes such a system, a form of mobility that might counter such reductionism. Smethurst puts the question another way when he suggests that ‘if we were somehow able to reinstall a proper sense of mobility, and use this against the imposed imperial (and narrative) form in European travel writing, it might help to deconstruct that form’ (Kuehn and Smethurst 2008, 2). Such a language could not simply reposition the poles of hierarchy, however, for this, as Henrietta Lidchi (1997) has demonstrated, is to rest within the logic of stereotypical association and fails to get beyond the idealized unified striations of the discursive site.

The question then becomes how to instil ‘a proper sense of mobility’ into the travel text – a mobility that would, in a negative movement, threaten the discrete components of the legislative mode while also opening out the space of otherness without seeking its closure through legibility.