2. For today, I had you read a piece by French theorist
Michel de Certeau. De Certeau is famous for the
concepts of “strategies” and “tactics,” but this
particular piece looks at something I think he dwells on
that is far, far more important to our lives : practicing
things into being. To understand precisely what he
means, however, you have to relax your own sense of
what “being” or “reality” means and you likewise have
to nuance your sense of what “practice” means.
3. Michel de Certeau isn’t really someone we’d
place in game studies. He’s a theorist, with
methods drawing from philosophy, social
sciences, and history.
His interests focus on how we operate in our
daily lives. He’s also very, very French, and
French scholars loooove to think around a
central point.
7. “First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an
ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which
one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that
prevents one from going further), than the walked
actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he
makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also
moves them about and he invents others, since the
crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking
privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.”
8. “The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like
superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by
the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place
names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which
such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable
city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there
isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't
anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory
or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home
remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of
shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only
'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.”
9. “Far from being writers—founders of their own place,
heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the
soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—
readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging
to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across
fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt
to enjoy it themselves.”
10. So what’s de Certeau trying to tell us?
Here’s my tl;dr version:
Places exist because we practice them into being, we
know they should be there and hence we, through the
use of space, insure their existence. This leaves us to
ponder the question: is anyplace anything if we don’t
USE it?
