walking in the city
In part III, Walking in the City the reader begins with an ocular position above the city (the top of the World Trade Center), sinks 'down below' as a blind poet, and then back above as proper names float over the city.
de Certeau begins atop the World Trade Center, fulfilling our 'lust to be a viewpoint'. (p. 93) From this panoptic seat, the city is texture and the practitioners of the city are below the thresholds of visibility. This leads de Certeau to propose an inversion of Foucauldian power.
"Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the 'geometrical' or 'geographical' space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ('ways of operating'), to 'another spatiality' (an 'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city." (p. 93)
Spatial practices secretly structure the determining condition of social life, collectively as administration and individually as appropriation. (p. 96)
In the sixteenth century, the fact of the city is transformed to the concept of the city. This city, defined by utopian and urban discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation:
1. The production of its own space
2. The substitution of a nowhen for the resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientific strategies replace the tactics of users, which reproduce the opacities of history everywhere.
3. The creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself. (p. 94)
Its functionalist organization privileges progress (time), forgetting the condition of its own possibility (space). Space is the blind spot in the scientific and political technology of the city, and de Certeau wants to look at the multiform and 'tricky' practices that elude discipline while inside it to lead to a theory of everyday 'practices of lived space.' (p. 97)
The space of the city is defined by the 'chorus of footsteps' of those operating within it. While this is something that can be represented visually (traces on a map), this misses its temporality or the 'act of passing by'. (p. 97) This aspect can be captured if the act of walking is viewed as a speech act in language, having three 'enunciative' functions:
1. the appropriation of the topographical system
2. it is a spatial acting out of the place
3. it implies relations among differentiated positions (contracts)
de Certeau extends this to the act of writing and the written text, or in a more general form the difference between the forms used in a system and the ways of using a system. Pedestrian speech acts are distinguished from the spatial system by:
1. the present - action
2. the discrete - it is only one
3. the "phatic" - it is conversational, it creates an "I"
He then goes on to discuss a rhetorics of walking composed of asyndeton (omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses) and synecdoche (a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole). (p. 100-1) This pedestrian rhetoric creates a space which is both analogical(composed of juxtaposed citations) and elliptical (made of gaps). (p. 101)
more notes that did not end up getting structured
"To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper." (p. 103)
Names and Symbols
Proper names "make sense" and provide an impetus for movement. "These names (street names) create a nowhere in places; they change them into passages."
Street numbers and numbered streets orient the magnetic field of trajectories. (p. 104)
Habitability
proper names -exist over the city - direct and decorate travelers - walking 'wears away their primary role' and liberates them to become spaces of poetic geography (104-5) "Things that amount to nothing symbolize and orient walkers steps: names that have ceased precisely to be proper." (p.105) In this there are three functions relating spatial and signifying practices: the believable, the memorable, and the primitive. They designate what authorizes spatial appropriations, what is repeated in them from memory, and what is structured in them.
Totalitarianism attacks "superstition" (supererogatory semantic overlays). For example, since proper names are already 'local authorities' they are replaced with numbers, thus leaving 'no place special' except the home. (p.106)
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