my report in Anthro 273: Seminar in Urban Anthropology at the Anthropology Department, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines Diliman - elective for the PhD Media Studies program at the College of Mass Communication

1. Michel De Certeau’s
“Walking in the City”
Chona Rita R. Cruz (CINDY) 86-16518
PhD Media Studies
Anthropology 273 Urban Anthropology Report
Dr. Hector Guazon

2. Michel de Certeau
• Born 1925, died 1985
• Degrees in classics and philosophy at the
universities of Grenoble, Lyon, Sorbonne
• Religious training in Lyon, ordained 1956 (SJ)
• Institutions and structures of power - “producers”
• Individuals – “consumers”
• “Everyday life is distinctive from other practices
of daily existence because it is repetitive and
unconscious.”
• Strategies and Tactics
• Everyday practices are tactical.

3. • Strategies
– require a subject (an enterprise or city and so on)
separated from an environment.
– require a 'proper' place (regularized, rule governed,
institutionalized location) from which to generate
relations with an exterior (their competitors or clients
and so on).
– Strategies lie behind political and economic
rationality.
• Tactics
– have no 'proper' localization
– are not strongly separated from the other - they often
take place in the territory of the other.
– They are opportunistic, always on the watch, and
involve combining disparate elements to gain a
momentary advantage.

4. “Walking in the City”
Chapter VII, under Part III: Spatial Practices
from The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel De Certeau

5. Manhattan in Popular Culture
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Manhattan Skyline
Spiderman
Avengers
Watchmen
Independence Day
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
The Devil Wears Prada
Sex and the City

6. “Manhattan” - WallSave Wallpapers
http://www.wallsave.com/wallpapers/1920x1080/paisajes/363046/paisajes-resolution-manhattan-363046.jpg

7. “Manhattan Reflections Skyline” – FunWallz
http://www.funwallz.com/manhattan-reflections-skyline-wallp-tlg-6290.html

8. “Stylish and Cheap: The Best Way to Visit Manhattan” - Stranded Passengers
http://strandedpassengers.org/stylish-and-cheap-the-best-way-to-see-manhattan/

9. “Eyewitness: Manhattan, New York” – The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/picture/2013/aug/08/eyewitness-manhattan-new-york

10. “Downtown Manhattan” –Data Wallpaper
http://hdw.datawallpaper.com/architecture/downtown-manhattan-311643.jpg

11. “Oitava Avenida (Eighth Avenue)” – Wikipedia (Portuguese)
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oitava_Avenida_(Manhattan)

12. De Certeau views Manhattan
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Breathtaking description of the view
Manhattan from the World Trade Center
Compares New York with Rome
Coincidatio oppositorum
Voyeur / Icarus / a god
Medieval and Renaissance painters

13. Voyeurs or Walkers
• De Certeau, p. 92: It transforms the
bewitching world by which one was
"possessed" into a text that lies before
one's eyes.
• P.93: The panorama-city is a "theoretical"
(that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a
picture, whose condition of possibility is an
oblivion and a misunderstanding of
practices.

14. • The voyeur and the ordinary practitioner /
walker / pedestrian
• Walkers, whose bodies follow the thicks
and thins of an urban text they write
without being able to read it. (p.93)
• Make use of spaces that cannot be seen
(p.93)
• As though the practices organizing a
bustling city were characterized by their
blindness (p.93)

15. Concerns
• Locate the practices that are foreign to the
"geometrical" or "geographical" space of
visual, panoptic, or theoretical
constructions
• Practices of Space
– Specific forms of operations
– Another spatiality
– opaque and blind mobility
• A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus
slips into the clear text of the planned and
readable city. (p.93)

16. From the concept of the city to
urban practices

17. • Perspective vision and prospective vision
constitute the twofold projection of an
opaque past and an uncertain future onto a
surface that can be dealt with.
• The city defined by threefold operation: (p.94)
– The production of its own space (un espace
propre): rational organization must thus repress
all the physical, mental and political pollutions
that would compromise it
– The substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic
system, for the indeterminable and stubborn
resistances offered by traditions
– Finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous
subject which is the city itself

18. • Administration is combined with a process
of elimination in this place organized by
"speculative" and classificatory
operations.
• Effects:
– It repeatedly produces effects contrary to
those at which it aims.“
– The rationalization of the city leads to its
mythification in strategic discourses.
– The functionalist organization, by privileging
progress (i.e., time), causes the condition of
its own possibility— space itself—to be
forgotten.

19. • Concept-city functions:
– a place of transformations and appropriations
– the object of various kinds of interference
– a subject that is constantly enriched by new
attributes
– simultaneously the machinery and the hero of
modernity.
• If in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and
almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic
and political strategies, urban life increasingly
permits the re-emergence of the element that
the urbanistic project excluded.

20. • It is no longer a field of programmed and
regulated operations.
• Does that mean that the illness afflicting both
the rationality that founded it and its
professionals afflicts the urban populations as
well? Perhaps cities are deteriorating along
with the procedures that organized them.
• 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.

21. • Marked by a contradiction between the
collective mode of administration and an
individual mode of reappropriation, spatial
practices in fact secretly structure the
determining conditions of social life.
• These multiform, resistance, tricky and
stubborn procedures that elude discipline
without being outside the field in which it is
exercised lead to a theory of everyday
practices, of lived space, of the disquieting
familiarity of the city.

22. The chorus of idle footsteps

23. • Pedestrian movements form one of these
"real systems whose existence in fact makes
up the city.“
• They are not localized; it is rather they that
“spatialize”.
• Operations of walking (can be traced on a
map) vs. the act of passing by
• Itself visible, it has the effect of making
invisible the operation that made it possible.
(p.97)

24. Pedestrian speech acts
• The act of walking is to the urban system what
the speech act is to language or to the
statements uttered.
• Triple “enunciative” function:
– Process of appropriation of the topographical
system on the part of the pedestrian
– Spatial acting-out of the place
– Implies relations among differentiated positions,
that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form
of movements

25. • Pedestrian speech act has three characteristics
which distinguish it at the outset from the spatial
system:
– the present
– the discrete
– the "phatic.“
• Modalities of pedestrian enunciation include:
– Kinds of relationships with particular paths
– Which they accord
• A truth value
• An epistemological value
• An ethical or legal value
• These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited
diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their
graphic trail.

26. Walking rhetorics
• There is a rhetoric of walking: the art of "turning“
phrases finds an equivalent in an art of
composing a path (tourner un parcours).
• Combines styles and uses (“ways of operating”)
– Use – elements of a code
– Style – peculiar processing of the symbolic
• Analogy of prescriptive and descriptive grammar
– Prescriptive grammar – proper, prescribed use
accepted by canon and academe
– Descriptive grammar – the way people actually use
the language
• Pedestrian figures in spatial practices:
synecdoche and asyndeton

27. Synechdoche
• sail” for “ship”
• Expands a spatial element in order to make it play
the role of a "more" (a totality) and take its place
(the bicycle or the piece of furniture in a store
window stands for a whole street or
neighborhood).
• Re-places totalities by fragments (a less in the
place of a more); asyndeton disconnects them by
eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive
(nothing in place of something).
• Makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and
miniaturizes the whole.

28. Asyndeton
• “He has provided the poor with opportunities,
with jobs, with self-respect.”
• Creates a "less," opens gaps in the spatial
continuum, and retains only selected parts of it
that amount almost to relics.
• Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and
undercuts its plausibility.
• A space treated in this way and shaped by
practices is transformed into enlarged
singularities and separate islands.

29. What “makes things go”

30. • To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite
process of being absent and in search of a
proper.
• Moving about the city itself is an immense
social experience of lacking a place—an
experience that is broken up into countless
tiny deportations (displacements and walks),
compensated for by the relationships and
intersections.
• Names and symbols – repression of names vs.
what makes sense. “These names create a
nowhere in places; they change them into
passages.” (UP)

31. • Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings
and directions... names of an emptying-out
and wearing-away of their primary role. They
become liberated spaces that can be occupied.
• Three distinct (but connected) functions of the
relations between spatial and signifying
practices: the believable, the memorable, and
the primitive.

32. • "Memories tie us to that place. It's personal, not
interesting to anyone else. That's what gives a
neighborhood its character.“
• To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and
silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to
be other and to move toward the other.
• The childhood experience that determines spatial
practices later develops its effects, proliferates,
floods private and public spaces, undoes their
readable surfaces, and creates within the planned
city a "metaphorical" or mobile city : "a great city
built according to all the rules of architecture and
then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all
calculation.”