Michel de Certeau The - Summary The Practice of Everyday Life PDF

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Michel de Certeau / The Practice of Everyday Life. Pt. 3: Spatial Practices. (1984) Notes/Summary General Introduction o o o

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Penetrating the obscurity of everyday practices - Situationist heritage, see Debord Conscious Changes in Everyday Life. Second orientation: Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Technologies of the self/microphysics of power. "Pushed to their ideal limits, these (clandestine, makeshift, tactical, and dispersed) procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline which is the subject of this book." Tactics vs Strategies: "I call 'strategy' the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an "environment." A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper, and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, clientèles, targets, or objects of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. I call a "tactic," on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other...Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time -- it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized "on the wing." "Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many "ways of operating": victories of the ''weak'' over the ''strong'' (whether that strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, "hunter's cunning," maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. The Greeks called these "ways of operating" mētis..." (xix)

Chapter VII: Walking in the City New York: "A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts..." 91 Voyeur: "erotics of knowledge." a voluptuous pleasure in "seeing the whole" or totalization; "the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more." (voyeurism - already in birds' eye renaissance paintings). "The panorama-city is a theoretical (that is, visual) simulacrum." (93) o Walker: ordinary citizens, Wandersmänner, flâneurs..."whose bodies read the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it...the networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author o

nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of space: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other." (93) -> polarity: the geographical/geometrical space of panoptic constructions, vs. the anthropological/mythical/poetic spatiality of the walker. "A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and unreadable city." "The city is a huge monastery." (Erasmus) The urban fact -> the concept of the city. (16th C) inaugurated by panoptic vision. The city as an operational concept depends on a threefold operation (94): 1.

the production of its own space, rational organization that represses all the physical, mental, and political pollutions that would compromise it; 2. the city must break traditions and substitute everyday temporality for a synchronous system of nowhen, a permanent now. 3. the city itself must be turned into a universal and anonymous subject, to which qualities and identities can be attributed. -> This "concept city" is decaying: 1.

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rejection and marginalization of "waste products" that cannot be rationally administrated (death, illness, deviance, abnormality) generates a loss which, in the multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into expenditure." Functionalist organization privileges progress (i.e. time) and forgets the condition of its own possibility (space) - space becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. The city becomes an object of mythification; a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies. It creates, however, the conditions of possibility for its own subversion, through methods outside the realm of panoptic power: "The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate..." -> Deleuze, Agamben (95) So the goal: "one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay...I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistant, tricky, and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field where it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city." Footsteps as "swarming mass", giving shape to spaces, "weaving places together". They are not localized; it is rather that they spatialize. "It is true that the operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or "window-shopping," that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible

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line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten." (97) "The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to the language or to the statements uttered." (97) -> triple "enunciative function": 1. appropriation of the topographical system; 2. a spatial acting out of the place; 3. implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements. o -> It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation. The pedestrian speech act (street act?) is distinct at the outset from the spatial system (cf. difference between forms used in a system and the ways of using the system - the act of writing and the text - the brushstroke and the painting.): o "the user of a city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret" (Barthes) - the walker transforms spatial signifiers, expanding and contracting the possibilities and prohibitions. -> discreteness: [the walker] condemns certain places to inertia or disappearance and composes with others spatial "turns of phrase" that are "rare," "accidental," or illegitimate. But that already leads into a rhetoric of walking. o walking's "phatic" (referring to phrases that initiate, maintain, or interrupt contact, like "hello" or "well, well") purpose - the spatial modulation of language's primary purpose. Walking brings bodies together, "creates a mobile organicity in the environment." "Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it "speaks." All the modalities [epistemic, alethic, deontic - p.99] sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken, and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail." Walking rhetorics, p.100: the pedestrian's series of turns as turns of phrase or stylistic figures, implying and combining styles (individual - symbolics) and uses (collective code). "The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them. It creates shadows and ambiguities within them." (101) Synecdoche and asyndeton as spatial stylistic figures (101), ways of shrinking, swelling, and fragmenting space. "Figures are the acts of this stylistic metamorphosis of space. Or rather, as Rilke puts it, they are moving "trees of gestures."...they transform the scene, but cannot be fixed in place by images. If in spite of that an illustration were required, we could mention..."embroideries" composed of letters and numbers, perfect gestures of violence painted with a pistol, dancing graphics whose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the rumble of subway trains: New York graffiti."

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Walking's inability to be captured in an image: "the wandering of the semantic" (Derrida, Marges 287) "To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place - an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the heart of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City." the magical power of proper names: 103-105. Three functions: the believable, the memorable, and the primitive. "They make habitable or believable the place that they clothe with a word (by emptying themselves of their classifying power, they acquire that of "permitting" something else); they recall or suggest phantoms (the dead who are supposed to have disappeared) that still move about, concealed in gestures and in bodies in motion; and, by naming, that is, by imposing an injunction proceeding from the other (a story) and by altering functionalist identity by detaching themselves from it, they create in the place itself that erosion or nowhere that the law of the other carves out within it." (105) NYC grid - why all the fun stuff is downtown... street numbers as a witch hunt of the poetic, symbolic. "the habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, here "there isn't any place special, except from my home, that's all... There isn't anything." -> A map of New York with restored street names? Stories vs. rumors as spatial functions (107-108) a Freudian origin tale of spatial practices (109-110)

Chapter IX: Spatial Stories o

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"in modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a "metaphor" - a bus or a train." -> stories fulfill the same role, traversing and organizing places. (115) see also: 129 Semantics of space: 116 Space (vectors of direction, velocities, time variables, intersection of mobile elements) vs place ("the order in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence...it implies an indication of stability." (117) -> in short, space is a practiced place. (117) Heideggerian. Merleau-Ponty: geometrical space vs anthropological space. Spatial stories: "a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead, the law of a "place" (from the pebble to the cadaver, an inert body always seems, in the West, to found a place and give it the appearance of a tomb); the second, a determination through operations which, when they are attributed to a stone, tree, or human being, specify "spaces" by the actions of historical subjects (a movement always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history." - space/place functions through the poetic and the political... Two forms of spatial descriptions: maps (indifferent geographical descriptions) and tours. (you enter through the living room and turn right...) (119) two languages of

space: the symbolic and the anthropological. "It seems that in passing from "ordinary" culture to scientific discourse, one passes from one pole to the other." (>Heidegger) o Stories as marking boundaries, often made explicit through juridical discourse. Genealogies of places, legends about territories. -> Spatial legislation. Zoning!...