michel de certeau, the practice of everyday life.pdf
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Michel de CerteauTRANSCRIPT
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Berkele.t' Los Angeles Lotulott
THE
PR
AC
TICE
OF'
E,V
ER
YD
AY
LIFE
Michel de C
erteau
Tianslated by Steven Rendall
It_
l
rarrer ls arready at work. Thus it is exem
prary that D6tienne and vernant
should have made them
selves the storytlllers of this ,,labyrinthine
intel-ligence" ("inrelligen('e en elddales"),
as Frangoise Frontisi so well term
slr.J?:discursive
practice of the story (l,histoire) is both its arr and itsA
t bottom, this is ail a very ord story. w
hen he grew ord, Aristotre,
who is not generaily consiaerea
exactly a tightrope dancer, liked to rosehim
self in the most rabyrinthine
and subtle of discourses. H
e had thenarrived at the age of nt?tis: "Th.,.m
ore solitary and isolated I become,
the more I conre to like stories.,,r5
He h;;;;p1^ined the reason adm
ir_ably: as in the order Freud, it w
as a connoisseur,s adm
iration for the tactthat com
posed harmonies and for its art of doing it by surprise:
..The
f]|:Jr: Tyth is in a sense a lover of w
isdom, for m
yth is composed of
Part III
Spatial Practices
Chapter VII
Walkirg in the C
ity
EE
ING
Manhattan from the llO
th floor of the world
-l-radecenter. B
eneath the haz-e stirred up by the winds, the urban
'\-, island, a sea in the m
iddle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers overw
all Street, sinks dow
n at Greenw
ich, then rises again to the crests ofM
idtown, quietly passes over C
entral Park and finally undulates off intothe distance beyond H
arlem. A
w
ave of verticals. Its agitation ism
omentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic m
ass is imm
obilized beforethe eyes. lt is transform
ed into a texturology in which extrem
escoincide-extrem
es of ambition and degradation, brutar oppositions of
races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already trans_
formed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its
space. unlike Rom
e, New
york has never learned the art of growing old
by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour,
in the act of throwing aw
ay its previous accomplishm
ehts and challenging
the future' A city com
posed of paroxysmal places in m
onumental reliefs.
The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it
are inscribed the architectural figures of the coinc,iclario opltr,t.sirsrunrform
erly drawn in m
iniatures and mysticar textures. on this stage of
concrete, steel and glass, cut out between tw
o oceans (the Atlantic and
the Am
erican) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the w
orldcom
pose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and pro_duction.r
9l
92W
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IvA
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ITI,93
V ct.yt g11 v.v o r w
a I k e r'
To w
hat erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a
cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I w
onder whatis the source of this pleasure of "seeing the w
hole," of looking down on,
totaliz-ing the most im
moderate of hum
an texts.To be lifted to the sum
mit of the W
orld Trade Center is to be lifted
out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets
th;i iuil'and
return it according ro an anonymous larv; nor is it pos-
sessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so m
any differencesand by the nervousness of N
ew Y
ork traffic. When one goes up there, he
leaves behind the mass that carries off and m
ixes up in itself any identityof authors or spectators. An lcarus flying above these w
aters, he canignore the devices of D
aedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far
below. H
is elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. lt puts him
at adistance. It transform
s the bewitching w
orld by which one w
as "pos-seised" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allow
s one to read it, tobe a solar E
ye, looking down like a god. T
he exaltation of a scopic andgnostic drive: the fiction o[ know
ledge is related to this lust to be aview
point and noining more.
Must one finally fall back into the dark space w
here crowds m
oveback and forth, crow
ds that, though visible from on high, are them
selvesunable to see dow
n below? An lcarian fall. O
n the ltOth floor, a poster,
sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for
an instant transformed into a visionarv: It's hard to be dow
,n when
.l,ou're up.The desire to see the city preceded the m
eans of satisfying it. Medieval
or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that
no eye had yet enjoyed.2 This fiction already made the m
edieval spec-tator into a celestial eye. lt created gods. H
ave things changed sincetechnical procedures have organiz-ed an "all-seeing pow
er"?l The totaliz-ing eye im
agined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achieve-
ments. The sam
e scopic drive haunts users of architectural productionsby m
aterializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The1370 foot high tow
er that serves as a prow for M
arfhattan continues toconstruct the fiction that creates readers, m
akes the complexity of the
city readable, ind imm
obiliz-es its opaque mobility in a transparent text.
Is the imm
ense texturology spread out before one's eyes anythingm
ore than a representation, an optical artifact? lt is the analogue of't.he facsim
ile nrorl'-'ced throrrgh a. projection that is a way of keeping
aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. Thepanoram
a-city is a "theoretical" (that is, visual) simulacrum
, in shoit apicture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a m
isunder-t""dltr_9{_prag!i9es. The voyeur-god created by this fiction, w
ho, likeS
chreber's God, knows only cadavers.u must disentangle him
self fromthe m
urky intertwining daily behaviors and m
ake himself alien to them
.The ordinary practitioners of the city live "dow
n below," below
thethresholds at w
hich visibility begins. They walk-an
elementary form
ofthis experience of the city: they are w
alkers. ll/andersrniinner, whosebodies follow
the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write rvithout
being able to rtudlt- fitese practitioners make use of spaces that cannotbe seen; their know
ledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each
other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertw
ining. unrecog-nized poem
s in which each body is an elem
ent signed by many others.
elud_g legib_ility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling cityw
ere characterized by their blindness.' The networks of these m
oving,r1te11gcting
writings com
pose a manifold story that has neither author
nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of
spaces: in relation to representations. it remains daily and indefinitely
other.E
scaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye. the everyday
hai a iertalnTtrari-fe-ni:si itrat does not surface, or whose surface is only
its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. W
ithin 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 practicbs-6f space refer to a specific form
of operariorrs ("ways of
operating"), to "another spatiality"u (un "anthropological." poetic andm
ythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind nrobility char-acteristic of the bustling,city, A nrigrational, or m
etaphorical. city thusslips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.
l. Front the concept of the citt' to urban pra(tircs
The World Trade C
enter is only the most m
onumental figure of W
esternurban developm
ent. The atopiq-utopia of optical knowledge has long
had the ambition of surm
ounting and articulating the contradictionsarising from
urban agglomeration, lt is a question of m
anaging a growth
of human agglom
eration or accumulation. "The city is a huge m
onas-ter!,." said E
rasmus. Perspective
vision and prospective vision constitute
9594
WA
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G IN
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surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth cen-
tury?) the transformation of the urban .fact into the concepr of a city.
Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history.it assum
es that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determ
ined by anurballstrc- ry1io. Linking the city to the concept iievei rnakts-themidentical, but it plays on their progressive sym
biosis: to plan a city isboth to think the very plurality of the real and to m
ake that way of
tlrinking the plural e.ffective; it is to know how
to articulate it and beable to do it.
An operational concept?
The "city" founded by utopian and urbanistic discourset is defined bythe possibility of a threefold operation:
l. The production of its own space (un espace propre): rational
organization must thus repress all the physical, m
ental and politicalpollutions that w
ould comprom
ise it;2. the substitution or a iibw
hen, oi of a synchronic system, for the
indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal
scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data ina plane projection, m
ust replace the tactics of users who take advantageof "opportunities" and w
ho, through these trap-events, these lapses invisibility, reproduce the opacities of history everyw
here;3. finally, the creation of a universal and anonym
ous subiecl which isthe city itself: it gradually becom
es possible to attribute to it, as to itspolitical m
odel, Hobbes'S
tate, all the functions and predicates that were
previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects-
, groups, associations, or individuals. "The city," like a proper nam
e, thus' provides a w
ay of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of afinite num
ber of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.A
dministration is com
bined with a process of elim
ination in this placeorganized by "speculative" and classificatory operations.t O
n the onehand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and func-tions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacem
ents, accumulations,
etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable ofbeing dealt w
ith in this way and so constitutes the "w
aste products" of afunctionalist adm
inistration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.).
To G s;re,-progi6ss attow
s anincreasing number of these waste pioau.tt
WA
LKIN
G IN
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CITY
to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transform
s evendeficiencies (in health, security, etc.) into w
ays of making the netw
orksof order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary rothose at w
hich it aims: the profit system
generates a loss which, in rhe
multiple form
s of wretchedness and poverty outside the system
and ofw
aste inside it, constantly turns production into "expenditure." More-
over, the rationalization of the city leads to its rnythification in strategicdiscourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the neces-sity of its destruction in order to arrive at a final decision.e Finally, thefunctionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e.. tim
e), causes thecondition of its ow
n possibility-space itself-to be forgotten. space
thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This
is the way in w
hich the Concept-city functions; a place of transform
a-tions and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference butalso a subject that is constantly enriched by new
attributes, it is simul-
taneously,the machinery and the hero of modernity.
Today, whatever the avatars of this concept m
ay have been, we have
to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and
almost m
ythical landmark for socioeconom
ic and political strategies,urban life increasingly perm
its the re-emergence of the elem
ent that theurbanistic project excluded. The language of pow
er is in itself "urbaniz-ing," but the city is left prey to contradictory m
ovements that counter-
balance and combine them
selves outside the reach of panoptic power.
The city becomes the dom
inant theme in political legends, but it is no
longer a field of programm
ed and regulated operations. Beneath thediscourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and com
binations of powers
that have no readable identity proliferate: without points where one can
take hold of them, w
ithout rational transparency. they are impossible to
administer.
The return of practices
Tlg Qgl.gpj:gilY
is decaying. Does that m
ean that the illness afflictingboth the rationality ttrai founded it and its professionals afflicts theurban populations as w
ell? Perhaps cities are deteriorating along w
iththe procedures that organized them
. But w
e must be careful here. T[e
ministers of know
ledge have always assum
ed that the whole universe
96W
'A LK
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E CITY
was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and
their positions. They transmute the m
isfortune of their theories intotheories of m
isfortune. When they transform
their bewilderm
ent into"catastrophes," when.they seek to enclose the people in the "panic" oftheir discourses, are they once m
ore necessarily right?R
ather than remaining w
ithin the field of a discourse that upholds itsprivilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longerof progress), one can try another path: one can try another path: onecan analyze the m
icrobe-like, singular and plural practices which anurbanistic system
was supposed to adm
inister or suppress, but which
have outlived its decay; one can follow the sw
arming activity of these
procedures that, far from being regulated or elim
inated by panopticadm
inistration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitim
acy,developed and insinuated them
selves into the networks of surveillance,
and combined in accord w
ith unreadable but stable tactics to the pointof constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities thatare m
erely concealed by the frantic mechanism
s and discourses of theobservational organization.
This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but also as the
reciprocal, of .Foucault's analysis of the structures of power. H
. moved
it in the direction of mechanism
s and technical procedures, "minor
instrumentalities" capable, m
erely by their organization of "details," oftransform
ing a human m
ultiplicity into a "disciplinary" society and ofm
anaging, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviancesconcerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the arm
y, or work.to "T
heseI often m
iniscule ruses of discipline," these "minor but flaw
less" mecha-
nisms, draw
their efficacy from a relationship betw
een procedures andthe space that they redistribute in order to m
ake an "operator"out of it.B
ut what spatial prat'tices correspond, in the area w
here discipline ism
anipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? Inthe present conjuncture, which is m
arked by a contradiction between the
collective mode of adm
inistration and an individual mode of reappro-
priation, this question is no less important, if one adm
its that spatialpractices in fact secretly structure the determ
ining conditions of sociallife. I w
ould like to follow out a few
of these multiform
. resistance.tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being out-side the field in w
hich it is exercised, and which should lead us to a
i theory o[ everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity
' of the citv.
WA
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2. The chorus of idle.footsteps
"The goddess can be recognized by her step"V
irgil, Aeneid,l, 405
Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but
do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has
a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinestheticappropriation. Their sw
arming m
ass is an innumerable collection of
singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They
weave places together. In that respect. pedestrian movem
ents form one'
of these "real systems whose existence in fact m
akes up the city."" Tl't.yaii
not toiaiized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more
inserted within a container than those Chinese characters speakers sketch
out on their hands with their fingettips.
It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city m
apsin such a w
ay as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very
faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). B
ut these thickor thin curves only'refer, like w
ords, to the absence of what has'passed
by. Surveys of routes m
iss what w
as: the act itself of passing by. Theoperation of w
alking, wandering, or "w
indow shopping." that is. the
activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw
a totalizingand reversible line on the m
ap. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in
the nowhen of a surface of projection. ltself visible, it has the effect of
making invisible the operation that m
ade it possible. These fixationsconstitute procedures for forgetting, The trace left behind is substitutedfor the practice. [t exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographicalsystem
has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing
so it causes a way of being in the w
orld to be forgotten.
Pedestrian speech acts
A com
parison with the speech act will allow
us to go furtherr2 and notlim
it ourselves to the critique of graphic representations alone, lookingfrom
the shores of legibility toward an inaccessible beyond. The act of
walking is to the urban system
what the speech act is to language or tothe statem
ents uttered.13 At the most elem
entary level, it has a ffiiple"enunciative" function: it is a process of appropriation of the topo-graphical system
on the part of the pedestrian (ust as the speaker
91
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ITY
appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of theplace fiust as the speech act is an acousticiC
iinfonTitT iarigu@); and it
implies relations am
ong differentiated positions, that is, among prag-
matic "contracts" in the form
of movem
ents (ust as verbal enunciationis an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts con-tracts betw
een interlocutors into action).ro It thus seems possible to give
a preliminary definition of w
alking as a space of enunciation.W
e could moreover extend this problem
atic to the relations between
the act of writing and the w
ritten text, and even transpose it to therelitionships betw
een the "hand'; lthe touch and the tale of the paint-brush lte er la ge.ste A;"i;";raul)
and the finished painting (forms,
colors, etc.). At first isolated in the area-of vG
ibil-comiirtiriibation, the
speech act turns out to find only one of its applications there, and its lin-guistic m
odality is merely the first determ
ination of a much m
ore general,
distinction between the form
s used in a system and itre w
ayJ of using'I"',
this system (i.e., rules), that is, betw
een two "different w
orlds," since"the sam
e things" are considered from tw
o opposite formal view
points.C
onsidered from this angle, the pedestrian speech act has three char-
acteristics which distinguish it at the outset from the spatial Eystem
: thepresent, the discrete, the "phatic."
First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possi-
bilities (e.g., by a place in which one can m
ove) and interdictions (e.g.,by a w
all that prevents one from going further), then the w
ii[er actual-
izes some of these possibilities. ln that w
ay, he makes them
exist as well
as emerge. B
ut he also moves them
about and he invents others, sincethe crossing, drifting aw
ay, or improvisation of w
alking privilege, trans-form
or abandon spatial elements. Thus C
harlie Chaplin m
ritlipiies thepossibilities of his cane: he does other things w
ith the same thing and he
goes beyond the limits that the determ
inants of the object set on itsutilization. In the sam
e way, the lvafkel 1g1s[orm
s each spatial signifierinto som
ething else. And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of
the possibilities fixed by the constructed order (he goes only here andnot there), on the other he increases the num
ber of possibilities (forexam
ple, by creating shortcuts and detours) and prohibitions (for ex-am
ple, he forbids himself to take paths generally considered accessible
I or euen obligatory). He thus m
akes a selection. "The user of a city picksi out certain fragm
ents of the statement in order to actualize them
inise
cret."l5
.. , ..
i.H
e thus creates a discreteness, w
hether by making choices am
ong the
WA
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signifiers 9f .t_h.. spatial "language" or by displacing them
through the usehe m
akes of them. H
e condemns certain places to inertia or disappear-
ance and composes *itt't others spatial "turns of phrase" that are "rare,"
"accidental" or illegitimate. But that already leads into a rhetoric of
walking.-Iii Th-e fram
ework of enunciation, the w
alker constitutes. in relation tohis position, both a near and a far, a here and a there. To the fact thatthe adverbs here and ihere are the indicators of the locutionary seat inverbal com
munication'u-a coincidence that reinforces the parallelism
between linguistic and pedestrian enunciation-w
e must add that this
location (here-there) (necessarily implied by walking and indicative of
a present appropriation of space by an "l") also has the function ofintroducing an other in relation to this "1" and of thus establishing aconjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places. I w
ould stress particu-larly the "phatic-" aspect, by w
hich I mean the function, isolated by
Malinow
ski and Jakobson, of terms that initiate, m
aintain, or interruptcontact, such as "hello," "w
ell, well." etc.lt W
alking. which alternately
foitows a path and has follow
ers, creates a mobile organicity in the
environment, a sequence of phatic toysoi. And if it is true that the phatic
function, whichli an effort to ensure com
munication. is already charac-
teristic of the language of talking birds, just as it constitutes the "firstverbal function acquired by children," it is not surprising that it alsogam
bols, goes on, all fours, dances. and walks about, w
ith a light orheavy step, like a series of "hellos" in an echoing labyrinth, anterior orparallel touip{o.rm
ative speech.
The moiialities of pedestrian enunciation which a plane representatiott
on a map brings out could be analyzed. They include the kinds of
relationship this enunciation entertains with particular paths (or "state-m
ents") by according them a truth value ("alethic" m
odalities of thenecessary,
the impossible, the'possible, or the contingent), an epistem
o-logical value ("epistem
ic" modalities of the certain, the excluded. the
flausible, or the questionable) or finally an ethical or legal value ("de-ontic" m
odalities of the obligatory, the forbidden, the permitted, or the
optional).'t Walking affirm
s, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects.
etc., the trajdctciiies ii "speaks." All the m
odalities sing a part in thisE
hriius, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions.
sequences, .,nd intensities which vary according to the time, the path
taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlim
iteddiversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail.
9899
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Walking rhetorics
FThe w
alking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detoursthat can be com
pared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There isa rhetoric of w
alking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent inan art of com
posing a path (tourner un parcours). Like ordinary lan-guage,'e this art im
plies and combines styles and uses._t4-p.cifies
"alinguistic structure that m
anifests on the symbolic level . . . an individ-
ual's fundamental w
ay of being in the world";zo it connotes a singular.
Use defines the social phenom
enon through which a system
of com-
fiiinication m
anifests itself in actual fact; it refers to a norm. S
tyle anduse both have to do w
ith a "way of operating" (of speaking, walking,
etc.), but style involves a peculiar processing of the symbolic, while use
refers to elements of a code. They intersect to form
a style of use, a way
of being and a way of operating.2r
In introducing the notion of a "residing rhetoric" ("rhetorique habi-tante"\, the fertile pathw
ay opened up by n. Meciain22
and systematized
by S. O
strowetrky" and J.-F. A
ugoyard,2' we assume that the "tropes"
catalogued by rhetoric furnish models and hypotheses for the analysis of
ways of appropriating places. Tw
o postulates seem to m
e to underlie thevalidity of this application: l) it is assum
ed that practices of space alsocorrespond to m
anipulations of the basic elements of a constructed order;
2) it is assumed that they are, like the tropes in rhetoric, deviations
relative to a sort of "literal meaning" defined by the urbanistic system
.There w
ould thus be a homology betw
een verbal figures and the figuresof w
alking (a stylized selection among the latter is already found in the
figures of dancing) insofar as both consist in "treatments" or operations
bearing on isolatable units,25 and in "ambiguous dispositions" that divert
and displace meaning in the direction of equivocalness26
in the way a
tremulous im
age confuses and multiplies the photographed object. In
these two m
odes, the analogy can be accepted. I would add that the
geometrical space of urbanists and architects seem
s to have the status ofthe "proper m
eaning" constructed by gramm
arians and linguists in orderto have a norm
al and normative level to w
hich they can compare the
drifting of "figurative" languagb. In reality, this faceless "proper" mean-
ing (c'e "propre" sans.figure\ cannot be found in current use, whetherverbal or pedestrian, it is m
erely the fiction produced by a use that isalso particular, the m
eialinguistic use of sciefice
that distinguishes itself
by that very distinction.2T
WA
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The long p_oem
of walking m
anipulates spatial organizations, nom
atter how panoptic they m
ay be: it is neither foreign to them (it can
take place only within them
) nor in conformity w
ith them (it does not
receive its idintity from them
). It creates shadows and am
biguities withinthem
. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them
(social models, cultural m
ores, personal factors). Within them
it is itselfthe effect of successive
encounters and occasions that constantly alter itand m
ake it the other's blazon: in other rvords. it is like ^ -d.8aiei.'
,carrying som
ething surprising, transverse or attractive compared w
iththe usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric.They can even be said to define it.
By analyzing this "m
odern art of everyday expression" as it appears inaccounts of spatial practices,t* J.-F. A
ugoyard discerns in it trvo espe-cially fundam
ental stylistic figures: synecdoche and asyndeton. The pre-dom
inance of these two figures seem
s to me to indicate. in relation to
two com
plementary poles, a form
al structure of these practices. S.t'ner'-doche consists in "using a w
ord in a sense which is part of anotherm
eaning of the same w
ord."2e In essence. it names a part instead of the
whole w
hich includes it. Thus "sail" is taken for "ship" in the expression"a flbet of fifty sails"; in the sam
e way, a brick shelter or a hill is taken
for the park in the narration of a trajectory. As.t'ndeton is the suppres-sion of linking w
ords such as conjunctions and adverbs, either within a
sentence or between sentences. In the sam
e way, in walking it selects and
fragments the space traversed; it skips over links and w
hole parts that itom
its. From this point of view
, every walk constantly leaps, or skips likea child, hopping on one foot. It practices the ellipsis of conjunctive /oci.
In reality, these two pedestrian figures are related. S
ynecdoche ex-pands a spatial elem
ent in order to make it play the role of a "m
ore" (atotality) and take its place (the bicycle or the piece of furniture in a storew
indow stands for a w
hole street or neighborhood). Asyndeton, byelision, creates a "less," opens gaps in the spatial continuum
, and retainsonly selected parts of it that am
ount almost to relics. S
ynecdoche re-places totalities by fragm
ents (a /ess in the place of a ntore); asyndetondisconnects them
by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive
(nothing in place of something). Synecdoche makes m
ore dense: it am-
plifies the detail and miniaturizes the w
hole. Asyndeton cuts out: it
undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. A space treated in thisw
ay and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singulari-
ties and separate islands.s0 Through these swellings, shrinkings, and
l0l
t02IY
ALK
ING
IN TH
E C
ITY
fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial
phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citationsl anaiitiptical
(made of gaps, iipses, and allusions) type is created. For the technil
logical system of a coherent and totalizing space that is "linked" and
simultaneous, the figures of pedestrian rhetoric substitute trajectories'
that have a mythical structure, at least if one understands by 'lm
yth" adiscourse relative to the place/ now
here (or origin) of concrete existence,a story jerry-built out of elem
ents taken from com
mon sayings, an allu-
sive and fragmentary story w
hose gaps mesh w
ith the social practices itsym
bolizes.Flg-greq are the acts of this stylistic m
etamorphosis of space. Or rather,
as Rilke puts it, they are m
oving "trees of gestures." They move even the
rigid and contrived territories of the medico-pedagogical institute in
which retarded children find a place to play and dance their "spatial
stories."3r These "trees of gestures" are in movem
ent everywhere. Their
forests walk through the streets. They transform
the scene, but theycannot be fixed in a certain place by im
ages. lf in spite of that an illus-tration w
ere required, we could m
ention the fleeting images, yellow
ish-green and m
etallic blue calligraphies that howl w
ithout raising theirvoices and em
blaz-on themselves on the subterranean passages of the
city, "embroideries" com
posed of letters and numbers, perfect gestures
of violence painted with a pistol, S
hivas made of w
ritten characters,dancing graphics w
hose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the
rumble of subw
ay trains: New
York graffiti.
If it is true that .fore.st'i- of-lrsrures ^r. manifest in the streets, their
movem
ent cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their
movem
ents be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation
carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper m
eanings ofurbanism
; it constitutes a "wandering of the sem
antic"r2 produced bym
asses that make som
e parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others,, distorting it, fragm
enting it, and diverting it from its im
mobile order.
3. Myths: w
hat "mokes lhings go"
The figures of these movem
ents (synecdoches, ellipses, etc.) characterize
both a "symbolic order of the unconscious" and "certain typical processes
of subjectivity manifested in discourse."rr The sim
ilarity between "dis-
,, course"so and dream
sls has to do with theiiuse-oittt.
simL "itylistic
---*..*proi.au.es"; it therefore includes pedestrian praitices as w
ell. The "an-,
cient .uiiiog of i;;;;;;'
that fiom Freud to B
enveniste has furnished an
appropriate inventory for the rhetoric of the first trvo registers of expres-sion is equally valid for the third. lf there is a parallelism
, it is not onlybecause enunciation is dom
inant in these three areas, but also becauseits discursive (verbalized, dream
ed. or walked) developm
ent is organizedas a relation betw
een the place from w
hich it proceeds (an origin) andthe now
here it produces (a way of "going by").
From
this point of view, after having com
pared pedestrian processesto linguistic form
ations, we can bring them back dow
n in the directionof oneiric figuration, or at least discover on that other side w
hat, in aspatial practice, is inseparable from
the dreamed place. To w
alk is tolack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search ofa proper.-T
he moving about that the city m
ultiplies and concentratesm
akei the city itself an imm
ense social experience of lacking a place-anexperienoe that is,-io b. ,ur., broken up into countless tiny deportations(displacem
ents and walks), com
pensated for by the relationships andintersections of these exoduses that intertw
ine and create an urbanfabric, and placed under the sign of w
hat ought to be, ultimately. the
place but is only a name, the C
ity. The identity furnished by this place is
all the more sym
bolic (named) because. in spite of the inequality of its
citizens' positions and profits. there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a
network of residences
temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a
shuffling among pretenses of the proper. a universe of rented spaces
haunted by a nowhere or by dream
ed-of places.
Nam
es and symbols
An indication of the relationship that spatial practices entertain with
that alsglrg is furnished precisely by their manipulations of and w
ith"proper" nam
es. The relationships between the direction of a w
alk (/esens de Ia ntarche) and ,the m
eaning of words (_le sens c!1 lno1l situate
twJiorti
of uppurently contrary movem
ents. one extrovert (to walk is to
go outside), the other introvert (a mobility under the stability of the
signifier). Walking is in fact determ
ined by semantic tropism
s; it isattracted and repelled by nom
inations wltose m
eaning is not clear,w
hereas the city, for its part, is transformed for m
any people into a"desert" in w
hich the meaningless, indeed the terrifying, no longer takes
the form of shadow
s but becomes, as in G
enet's plays, an implacable
light that produces this urban text without obscurities, which is created
by a technocratic power everyw
here and which puts the city-dw
ellerunder control (under the control of w
hat? No one know
s): "The city
WA
LKIN
G IN
THE
CITI'
r03
r)-r
r05t04
VV
A I.K
ING
IN TH
E CITY
'
keeps us under its gaze, which one cannot bear w
ithout feeling dizzy,"says a resident of R
ouen.'o In the spaces brutally lit by an alien reason,proper nam
es carve out pockets of hidden and familiar m
eanings. They"m
aGT
erise"; in oiher words, they are the im
petus of movem
ents, likevocations and calls that turn or divert an itinerary by giving it a m
eaning'(or a direction) (.ren.r)
that was previously unforeseen. These nam
es createa now
here in places; they change them into passages.
A friend w
ho lives in the city of Sdvres drifts, w
hen he is in Paris,
toward the rue des S
aints-Pire.r and the rue de S
?r'res, even though he isgoing to see his m
other in another part of town: these nam
es articulate asentence that his steps com
pose without his know
ing it. Num
beredstreets and street num
bers (ll2th St., or 9 rue S
aint-Charles)
orient them
agnetic field of trajectories just as they can haunt dreams. Another
friend unconsciously represses the streets which have nam
es and, by thisfact, transm
it her-orders or identities in the same w
ay as summ
onsesand classification.s;
she goes instead along paths that have no name or
signature. But her walking is thus still controlled negatively by proper
names.
What is it then that they spell out? D
isposed in constellations that
hierarchiz-e and semantically order the surface of the city, operating
chronological arrangements and historical justifications, these w
ords(B
orrdgc.t, Ilotzari.r, Bougaint,ille... ) slowly lose, like w
orn coins, they3!9 _ery11ygd on th9m
, but their ability to signify outlives its first defi-nitiorr. S
rrin/.1'- P
ire:;, Corentin Celton, R
ecl Square... these names make
\ themselves available to the diverse m
eanings given them by passerr-by:
', they detach themselves from
the places they were supposed to define and
\i sert'e as lmaglnary m
eeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors,
i they determine for reasons that are foreign to their origin'al value brjt
I rnoy be recogniz-ed or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that is
detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy
geography of "meanings" held in suspension, directing the physical
deambulations below
: Pla<'e de l'E
toile, Conc'orde, P
oissonniire . . .These constellations of nam
es provide traffic patterns: they are starsair-.cti;g ifineraries. "The
Place de la C
oncorde does not exist,"M
alaparte said, "it is an idea."lt lt is much m
ore than an "idea." Aw
hole series of comparisons w
ould be necessary to account for theI m
agical powers proper nam
es enjoy. They seem to be carried as em
blems
: by the travellers they direct and simultaneously
decorate.
WA
LKIN
G IN
THE
CITI'
Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these l
words operate in the nam
e of an emptying-out and w
earing-away of i
their primary role. T
hey become liberated spaces that can be occupied.
A rich indeterm
ination gives them. by m
earrs of a semantic rarefaction,
the function of articulating a second. poetic geography on top of thegeography of the literal, forbidden or perm
itted meaning. They insinuateother routes into the functionalist and historical order of m
ovetnent.W
alking follows them
: "l fill this great enrpty space with a beautiful
name."38 People are put in m
otion by the rernaining relics of mean- i
ing, and sometim
es by their waste products, the inverted rem
ainders iof great am
bitions.'n Things that amount to nothing. or alm
ost nothing, ;sym
-bolize and orient walkers'steps:
nanles that have ceased precisely tobe "proper."
In these symbolizing kernels three distinct (but connected) functions
of the relations between spatial and signifying practices are indicated
(and perhaps founded): the heliet'ahle. the nrerttorahle, and the prirrritile.T
hey designate what "authorizes" (or nrakes possible or credible) spatialappropriations. what is repeated in them
(or is recalled in them) from
asilent and w
ithdrawn m
emory. and w
hat is structured in them and con-
tinues to be signed by an in-fantile (in-lan.r) origin. These three symbolic
mechanism
s organize the topoi of a discourse on/of the city.(!qgq*..nory, "nd dream
) in a way that also eludes urbanistic system
aticity.Tfri!-f irn
atrei.f-6e recognized in the functions of proper names: they
make habitable or believable the place that they clothe w
ith a rvord (byem
ptying themselves of their classifying pow
er, they acqtrirc that of"perm
itting" something else); they recall or suggest phantonrs (the dead
who a're supposed to have disappeared)
that still nrove about. concealedin gestures and in bodies in m
otion; and. by namirrg. that is. by irrtposing
an injunction proceeding from the other (a story) arrd by altering func-
tionalist identity by detaching themselves fronr it. they create in the
place itsetf that erosion or nowhere that the law
of the other carves out
within it.
Credible things and m
emorable things: habitability
By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that m
akes peoplebelieve is the one that takes aw
ay what it urges them
to believe in. or
never delivers what it promises. Far from
expressing a void or describing
a
r06W
A LK
ING
IN TH
E CITY
a lack, it creates such. It makes room
for a void. In that way, it opens up
clearings; it "allows" a certain pray w
ithin a system of defined places. It
"authorizes" the production of an area of free play (spielraum\ on a
checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. It makes places
habitable. On these grounds, I call such discourse a "local authoritv." Itis a crack in the system
that saturates places witt--srgnificitlon anO
indeed so reduces them to this signification that it is "im
possible tobreathe in them
." It is a symptom
atic tendency of functionalist totali-tarianism
(including its programm
ing of games and celebrations) that it
seeks precisely to eliminate these local authorities, because they com
-prom
ise the univocity of the system. Totalitarianism
attacks what it
quite correctly calls .superstitions: supererogatory sem
antic overlays thatinsert them
selves "over and above" and "in excess,"oo and annex to a
past or poetic realm a part of the land the prom
oters of technicalrationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for them
selves.ultim
ately, since proper names are already ..local authorities" or
"superstitions," they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no
longer dials Opera, but 073. The sam
e is true of the stories and legendsthat haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. Theyare the object of a w
itch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure.B
ut their extermination (like the exterm
ination of trees, forests, andhidden places in w
hich such legends live)ar makes the city a..suspendedsym
bolic order."ot The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a
wom
an from R
ouen put it, no, here "there isn't any place special, exceptfor m
y own hom
e, that's all. . . . There isn't anything." Nothing.'special":
nothing that is marked, opened up by a m
emory or a story, signed by
something or som
eone else. Only the cave of the hom
e remains believ-
able, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadow
s. Exceptfor that, according to another city-dw
eller, there are only ..places inw
hich one can no longer believe in anything."o'It is through the opportunity they offer to store up rich silences and
wordless stories, or rather through their capacity to create cellars and
garrets everywhere, that local legends (legenda: what \s to be read, but
also what tan be read) perm
it exits, ways of going out and_gom
ing back
in, and thus habitable spaces. Certainly walking about and traveling
substitute for exits, for going away and com
ing back, which w
ere for-m
erly made available by a body of legends that places now
adays lack.P
hysical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday's or today's
"superstitions." Travel_.(like walking) is a substitute for the legends that
WA
LKIN
G IN
THE
CITY
lt.djg 9E
l__up*spag9-to- .somethlng different. W
hat does travel ulti-m
ateTt produce if it is not, by a sort ol reversal, "an exploration of thedeserted places of m
y mem
ory," the return to nearby exoticism by w
ayof a detour through distant places, and the "discovery" of relics andlegends: "fleeting visions of the French countryside." "fragm
ents of music
and poetry,"oo in short, something like an "uprooting in one's origins
(Heidegger)? What this w
alking exile produces is precisely the body oflegends that is currently lacking in one's orvn vicinity: it is a fiction,w
hich moreover has the double characteristic,
like dreams or pedestrian
rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations.ot
As a
corollary, one can measure the im
portance of these signifying practices(to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.
. From
this point of view, their contents rem
ain revelatory, and stillm
ore so is the principle that organizes them. S
tories about places arem
akeshift things. They dre composed with the w
orld;s debris. Even if theliterary form
and the actantial schema'of "superstitions"tott.rpond to
stable models w
hose sttuctures and combinations have often been ana-
lyzed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of
their "manifestation") are furnished by the leftovers from
nominations,
taxonomies, heroic or com
ic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of
scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary ele-
ments fill the hom
ogeneous form of the story. Things extra and other
(details and excesses coming from
elsewhere) insert them
selves into theaccepted fram
ework, the im
posed order. One thus has the very relation-
ship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of
this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and
leaks of meaning: it is a tfidui-ota.t.
The verbal relics of which the story is com
posed, being tied to loststories and opaque acts, are juxtaposed in a collage where their relationsare not thought, and for this reason they form
a symbolic w
hole.ou Theyare articulated by lacunae. W
ithin the structured space of the text, theythus produce anti-texts, effects of dissim
ulation and escape, possibilitiesof m
oving into other landscapes, like cellars and bushes: "d ntassif's, 6
pluriels."ot Because of the process of dissemination that they open up,
stories differ from .lum
ors in that the latter are always injunctions,
initiators and results of a levelling of space, creators of comm
on move-
ments that reinforce an order by adding an activity of m
aking people. believe things to that of m
aking people do things. Stories diversify,
rumors totalize. If there is still a certain oscillation betw
een them, it
t07
IiI
i;,,IIIirtl,i,lrlI
.trlll;lII
rlilil!'ll't:ttl'iii)
l
lf,i
l0ttW
ALK
ING
IN TH
E C
ITY
seems that today there is rather a stratification: stories are becom
ingprivate and sink into the secluded places in neighborhoods,
families, or
individuals, while the rumors propagated by the m
edia cover everythingand, gathered under the figure of the C
ity, the masterw
oici oT an anony- .m
ous law, the substitute for all proper nam
es, they wipe out or com
batany superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure
The dispersion of stories points to the dispersion of the m
emorable as
well. A
nd in fact mem
ory is a sort of anti-museum
: it is not localizable.Fragm
ents of it come out in legends. Objects and w
ords aiiij fiave hollowplaces in w
hich a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating,
going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slum
ber. A mem
ory is only aP
rince Charm
ing who stays just long enough to aw
aken the Sleeping
Bcauties of our w
ordless stories. "_!!_t.f-u, there used to be a bakery."
"That'.r w
here old lady Dupuis used to live." It is striking here that the
places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences.
What can
be seen designates what is no longer there: "you see, here there used tobe . . . ," but it can no longer be seen. D
emonstratives indicate the in-
visible identities of the visible: it is the very definition of a place, in fact,that it is com
posed by these series of displacements and effects am
ongthe fragm
ented strata that form it and that it plays on these m
ovingIaye rs.
"Mem
ories tie us to that place. . . . It's personal, not interesting toanyone else, but after all that's w
hat gives a neighborhood its char-acter."48 There is no place that is not haunted by m
any different spiritshidden there in silence, spirits one can "invoke" or not. H
aunted placesare the only ones people can live in-and
this inverts the schema of the
Panopti<'on. But like the gothic sculptures of kings and queens that once
adorned Notre-D
ame and have been buried for tw
o centuries in thebasem
ent of ^ building in the rue de la Chauss6e-d'A
ntin,a' these"spirits," them
selves broken into pieces in like manner, do not speak any
more than they .ree. This is a sort of know
ledge that remains silent. O
nlyhints of w
hat is known but unrevealed are passed on 'Just betw
een youand m
e."P
laces are fragmentary and inw
ard-turning histories, pasts that othersuri n"t ullow
ed to read. accumulated tim
es that can be unfolded but likestories held in reserve, rem
aining in an enigmatic state, sym
bolizationsencysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. ':l feel good hiie"'ro thew
ell-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleetingglim
mer is a spatial practice.
I+'ALK
ING
IN TH
E C
ITI'
Childhood and m
etaphors of placesMetaphor consists in giving the thing
a nanre that belongs to something
else.I
: A
ristotle. poerics 1457b
Tlgg:gggbl_. tS
tha! which can be drearned about a place. In this
place that is a palimpsest, subjectivity is already linked to the absence
that structures it ut-.*iri.nce and makes it "be there," L)aseirt. But as w
ehave seen, this being-t!9re acts only in spatial practices. that is, in x,a.l,.tof nroving inro tornrt'iiirig'dffirent (ntanibres cle passet. d l'aule). Itm
tiit-uitimately be seen as the repetition, in diverse rnetaphors. of a
decisive and originary experience, that of the child's differentiation from
the mothA
'S-bbdir. lt is through that experience that the possibility of
space-A;a-of a localization (a "not everything") of the subject is in-
augurated. We need not return to the fanrous analysis F19ud nrade of
this matrix-experience by follow
ing the game played by his eighteen-
month-old grandson, who threw
a reel away fronr him
self, crying oh-oh-oh in pleasure,
.fortl. (i.e., "over there." "gone," or "no nrore") and thenpulled it back w
ith the piece of string attached to it rvith a delighreddat (i.e., "here," "back again");51 it suffices here to rem
ember tliis
(perilous and satisfied) process of detachment frorn indifferenriarion in
the mother's body, w
hose substitute is the spool: this departure of them
other (sometim
es she disappears by herself, sometim
es the child nrakesher disappear) constitutes localization and exteriority against the back-ground of an absence. There is a joyful m
anipulation that can make the
rnaternal object "go away" and m
ake oneself' disappear (insofar as oneconsiders ofieself identical with that object). m
aking it possible to bethere (because) v'ithout the other but in a necessary relation to w
liat hasdisappeared;
this manipulation is an "original spatial structure."
No doubt one could trace this differentiation further back. as f-ar as
the naming that separates the foetus identified as m
asculine from his
mother-but how
about the female foetus. who is from
this very mom
entintroduced into another relationship to space'l ln the initiatory gam
e,just as in the "joyful activity" of the child w
ho, standing before a mirror,
sees itself as one (it is slre or he, seen as a whole) but onorher (rhat,-A
nim
age with which the child identifies itself;.s2
what counts is the process
of this "spatial captation" that inscribes the passage toward the other as
r09
III
t,l,l'lII;\
,rr\
il0the law of being and the law
of.y
the joyful and silent experienceond to m
ove toward the other.
IYA
LKIN
G IN
THE
CITY
place. To practice space is thus to repeatof childhooO
; it is, in a place;o 6e otheri
-- l
.' .r \
T\
'1
LT
'-'
,'K
ailway l\avlgauon
Thus begins the walk that Freud com
pares to the trampling underfoot
of the mother-land.53 This relationship of oneself to oneself governs the
internal alterations of the place (the relations among its strata) or the
pedestrian unfolding of the stories accumulated in a place (m
oving aboutt6e city ind
travelling). The childhood experience that determines spatial
practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and publicspaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the plannedcity a "m
etaphorical" or mobile city, like the one K
andinsky dreamed of:
"a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and thensuddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation."5a
Chapter VIII
and Incarceration
TR
AV
ELLIN
G
INC
AR
CE
RA
TIon-.
Imnrobile inside tlie train. seeing
imm
obile things slip by. What is happerring?
Nothing is nroving
inside or outside the train.T
he unchanging traveller is pigeonholed. numbered. and regulated in
the grid of the railway car, w
hich is a perfect actualizatiorr ol'the rational
utopia. Control and food m
ove from pigeonhole to pigeorrhole: "Tickets,
please . . . " "sandwiches? Beer'? Coffee'? . . . "' O
nly the restrooms of'fer
an escape from the closed system
. They are a lovers' phantarsm. a w
llyout for the ill, an escapade for children ("W
ee-wee!")-a little space of
irrationality, like love affairs and sewers irr the Lltctpias of earlier tinres.
Except for this lapse given over to excesses.
everything has its place in a igridw
ork. Only a rationalized cell travels. A bubble of panoptic and r
classifying power, a m
odule of inrprisonnrent that makes possible the '
production of an order, a closed and autononrous insularity-that is iw
hat can traverse space and make itself independent of local roots.
Inside, there is the imm
obility of an order. Here rest and dreanrs reign
supreme. There is notfilng to do, one is in the stote of reason. Everythirrg
is in its place, as in Hegel's Philosoph.t'ct.l'
Right. E
very being is placedthere like a piece of printer's type on a page arranged in m
ilitary order.This order, an organizational system
, the quietude of a certatin reason, isthe condition of both a railw
ay car's and a text's movem
ent from one
place to another.O
utside, there is another imm
obility, that of things. towering m
oun-tains, stretches of green field and forest. arrested villages, colonnades ofbuildings, black urban silhouettes against the pink evening sky. thetw
inkling of nocturnal lights on a sea that precedes or succeeds ourhistories. The train generalizes Di.irer's M
elancholia, a speculative ex-perience of the w
orld: being outside of these things that stay there,detached and absolute, that leave us w
ithout having anything to do rvith