Theorising Discourse, Subjectivity And Ideology MA Psychosocial Studies and Education

Pepper, S.

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Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday life (1984) and the 21st Century

City

Introduction

This paper considers Michel de Certeau’s account of “everyday practices” as a means of

escaping the totalising forces of social governance and ideological apparatuses, which he

believes are deficient of the necessary spatial orientation to daily activity, and thus unable to

comprehend the full complexity of lived experience, particularly in regards to the life of a city.

The extent to which resistance is possible will be evaluated in light of the totalising threat of

computerised surveilliance and digital architecture, where they are considered to

overdetermine and stratify public space. As such, a “rhetorical of walking” will be assessed

for its potential in revealing the everyday stories and spaces that are unseen from ‘above’.

Particular reference is made to the potential impact and uses of nascent digital cartographic

tools in shaping encounters at street level in the contemporary city.

A (mis)representation of practices: strategists and tacticians, voyeurs and walkers

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau argues that those whose voyeuristic

perspective conforms to that of the “concept city” (95) – architects, urban planners,

politicians, the security services – are guilty of a “misunderstanding of practices” (93). In their

strategic efforts to regulate and oversee its operation, they cannot fully comprehend the

unfolding reality in the hugger-mugger of street life below. Put simply, “de Certeau’s

objection to totalising models, in short, is that they arrive at their functional pictures of

society at the expense of the very people who inhabit it” (Buchanan, 2000: 45). This wide field

of view constitutes an inaccurate gaze – “a theoretical (that is, visual) simulacrum” (de

Certeau, 1984: 93), lacking insight into the spatial stories articulated on the ground, yet which

are accessible from the vantage point of the (mobile) pedestrian.

In contrast to the strategists’ aim to administer a rational and transparent vision, de Certeau

claims that tacticians engage instead in “practices that are foreign to the “geometrical” or

“geographical” space of visual, panoptic or theoretical constructions” (93). Gristwood

discusses what this vying for supremacy would look like between strategists and tacticians,

voyeurs and walkers, in a 21st century urban environment:

… the point of view of urban planners, surveyors, architects; the God’s eyeview; or that provided by the new

technologies of Google Earth… regulate urban spaces and populations, imposing order, the people of the city

reduced to quantities and categories… [d]e Certeau then elucidates the perspectives of what he calls the ‘urban

tacticians’ – at street level – down in the traffic flow, the chaos of pedestrian movement, constantly reworking

or subverting the strategists’ plans – reclaiming spaces or neighborhoods; breaking rules and regulations; using

Theorising Discourse, Subjectivity And Ideology MA Psychosocial Studies and Education

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urban spaces in creative and unintended ways: this is the city of street art, homelessness, mass protest and the

flashmob (Gristwood, 2012: 64, emphasis added).

The idea of reworking or subverting strategic plans speaks to the contigent nature of tactics,

which operate simultaneously within and beyond the clutches of the dominant order.

Nevertheless, it is important to note the dialectical nature of this relationship; Napolitano and

Pratten (2007: 9) argue that whilst tactics are “the heterogeneous practices through which

ordinary people survive by wit and improvisation, practices that are necessarily obscured

from the glare of repressive governmental apparatus… they must [also] play on and within a

terrain imposed upon them”.

Ian Sinclair’s Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2012), in which the use of

photography in British shopping malls is discussed, illustrates well the adaptability and

shifting priorities of panoptic apparatus in response to uncoded tactics; how a once

subversive practice is recuperated by “an almost mythical landmark for socio-economic and

political strategies” (de Certeau, 1984: 95) so as to become permitted practice:

Retail parks of the old school, Lakeside or Bluewater, are defined by a total prohibition on freelance imnagery.

When they allow you to photograph anything that takes your fancy, you know something is out of kilter. You’ve

accessed a whole new game. When there is nothing to hide, you are in the wrong place (Sinclair, 2011: 134,

emphasis added).

The change in protocol Sinclair refers to here relates to his experience of the Westfield

shopping centre in East London, adjoining the Olympic Park and an integral feature of the

London 2012 project. Unlike other retail parks, shopping is not the central purpose of a visit

so much as the experience of being involved in the grand narrative of ‘The Games’, as if

somehow one’s mere presence or desire to capture a visual image of the mall lends support

to the political commitment to bid for and ultimately host the event (appendix 1).

A rhetoric of walking (Web 2.0?) and the urban daydreamer

Kalin (2009: 57) explains how mobile web-assisted navigation of the streets with discreet

positioning in mind is likely to mean that “the desired location becomes visible whereas the

social interactions of these spaces become obscured… [T]his new cartography, though a

useful resource, cannot replicate the “actual contours of the city” because walkers produce

the latter by speaking the language of the streets. He argues that the potential for a

computerised projection of panopticism is the result of

The immediacy of hyperlinking… [which] encourages users to look through rather than to look at city space.

These mobile technologies interpellate users not as walkers, but rather as linkers… [W]eb 2.0 mapping resources

may draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map, but in so doing, they substitute this line, this graphic trail,

for the actual practice of walking (59, emphasis in original).

Theorising Discourse, Subjectivity And Ideology MA Psychosocial Studies and Education

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Kalin goes on to offer the following anecdote derived from Nitrozac, & Snoggy’s comic strip

the Joy of Tech from 2008 (appendix 2), which makes clear the socio-cultural and

psychogeographic impact of street-users as linkers, not walkers:

The [iPhone] user requests Google to search for a toy store, and soon he arrives... All goes well until he requests

a “Fruitcake” just as a burly biker strolls past. The biker takes offense and leaves the iPhone user searching for a

medic. The iPhone user is tied to location; however, because he favors location at the expense of space, he no

longer shares the same practiced place with the biker… (2009: 57).

The question then, is whether Web 2.0 amounts only to a graphic trail with a trace and is

totalising and panoptic in scope, or can it in fact lend support to a “rhetoric of walking” (de

Certeau, 1984: 99). The technological advances outlined above might be consistent with

everyday practice if they encourage de Certeau’s “enunciatory operations of an unlimited

diversity” (99). For example, a nascent shopper utilising GPS software might ‘jay-walk’,

attempt shortcuts, accelerate, slow down or change direction according the feedback gleaned

from such navigational technology.

Thus, use (linking) and style (precise movements, utterances) are not mutually exclusive; both

having a part to play in the “rhetoric of walking”. Indeed, de Certeau (100) states that “both

have to do with 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”.

The act of daydreaming might be considered one such “style of use”; by its very nature eluding

capture through its opaque functioning and purpose. Indeed, de Certeau invokes dreaming

as a vital feature of the spatial practices which subvert attempts to impose uniformity on the

life of the city: “having compared pedestrian processes to linguistic formations, we can bring

them back down in the direction of onieric figuration, or at least discover… what, in spatial

practice is inseparable from the dreamed place’ (103).

Refering to this dream-like state, Buchanan (2000: 114) draws upon Lacanian psychoanalysis

by suggesting that to practice place is to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood

and, citing de Certeau, “to be other and to move toward the other” (1984: 109-110). From a

Lacanian perspective, Buchanan argues (Ibid: 117), this process of reflecting on the everyday

can be traced back to the movement from the imaginary to the mirror stage in childhood –

from misrecognition that the mirror and child are one and the same, to “spatial captation”

(Lacan, 1977), the establishment of the Symbolic Order and an appreciation of the existence

of external objects extending beyond the ego, central to the establishment of identity.

Theorising Discourse, Subjectivity And Ideology MA Psychosocial Studies and Education

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Representational space, the making of archive and hi-tech flâneurie

Although walking is discussed by de Certeau as a rhetorical device to escape discursive

overcoding, crucially, it is the spatial relationality to the street and other pedestrians which is

significant, as opposed to trodden patterns or particular direction(s) of travel per se. The

subsequent narratives that emerge from these representations of ‘spatial practices’ confer a

particular set of cultural, economic and social characteristics on the observed surroundings.

Lefebvre (1991: 38-39), writing ten years prior to de Certeau, contrasts the way in which

artists and writers appropriate space relative to those involved in “representations of space”

and whose emphasis is on the panoptic, the theoretical and include

“scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers… all of whom identify what is lived

and what is perceived with what is conceived [whilst] Representational space is space as directly lived through

its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of inhabitants and users, but also of… a few writers and

philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – and hence passively

experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (1991: 38-39, emphasis in original).

In de Certeau’s later work, The Writing of History (1988), he argues that “the transformation

of archival activity is the point of departure and the condition of a new history” (75). The

everydayness of city life which is central to de Certeau’s account of practiced place points to

an “an invitation to explore new terrain and imagine the sorts of situated knowledge that

have produced historical sources and their locations in historiographic practice leads us to

study not archives and artefacts, but the making of them. (Napolitano & Pratten, 2007: 7,

emphasis added).

In conceiving of archival activity as a recurring effort to document the life of the city “in its

materiality, its layeredness, its endless transformations” (Sheringham, 2010: 14) there is a

need to clarify the role of the pedestrian in this capacity according to de Certeau’s view of

everyday practices. The flâneur, Baudelaire’s “gentleman stroller” and “botanist of the

[Parisian] sidewalk” (Baudelaire, 1964: 9) - an affluent member of the bourgeoise who came

to prominence in Second Empire France - might be deemed just the sort of character for this

task, an individual. However, the notion of the flâneur is likely to prove inconsistent with de

Certeau’s notion of pedestrian movements and footsteps as a “swarming mass.. an

innumerable collection of singularities” (97); indeed, Buchanan (2000: 113) is quick to critique

cultural theorists who have drawn a direct parallel between the flâneur in mid-19th century

Paris and the textual-spatial activity of city-users in de Certeau’s account:

[d]e Certeau is not – by focusing on spatialising – attempting to romanticise the pedestrian, or reconceive

commuting by foot across the city as a revolutionary act… Although by disposition he is a ‘man of the crowd’,

because of his special [bourgeois] qualities the flâneur is actually a man apart from the crowd. In contrast, the

person de Certeau has in mind is entirely without qualities and therefore indistinguishable from the crowd.

Theorising Discourse, Subjectivity And Ideology MA Psychosocial Studies and Education

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Similarly, Rodriguez and Rink entertain the possibility that Baudelaire’s bourgeoise flaneur is

ill-placed to overcome the totalising forces of social governance or ideology and have

reservations regarding the agency of de Certeau’s Wandersmänner (93) or walker:

The flâneur of Baudelaire could be accused of not quite cutting it interculturally, as his desire to consume the

city at a turtle’s pace left him detached in many ways from his surroundings. Even de Certeau’s wanderer may

or may not engage, despite his critical [tactical] perspective. (2011: 116-117)

Rodriguez and Rink are, however, optimistic about a contemporary city-user, or “hi-tech

flanuer” who is able to harness digital cartography and electronic tools for archival ends,

extolling the possibilities of a

mapping [which] shifts the view from me-in-a-space to we-together-in-a-place informed by affective and social

meaning… [t]echnology could be used to operationalize and materialize (in virtual form!) all of these

explorations, and there is ample information on the web about cell phone mapping, mobile portraits, audio

collages of place…Technology could also be used to… [r]ecord, map, and document linguistic differences across

population groups, ethnic communities, regional affiliation, nationality, or other markers of identity (Ibid: 116).

Peter Cusack’s Favourite Sounds Project in Birmingham (appendix 3), London and Manchester

operates in this spirit, linking places through digital cartography – Google Maps – alongside

the heterogeneous voices of a city captured through audio recordings. One particular

recording documents a Congolese immigrant’s experience of riding on buses in his home

country compared to being on those which pass through Birmingham city centre, noting the

distinct lack of silence – mobile phones and music played on loudspeaker the chief offenders.

The interviewer promptly investigates these claims by recording the sounds aboard the top

deck of the ‘74’ bus. The two recordings play in sequence, whilst the map zooms out and pans

from the immigrant’s location to that of the city centre bus, hinting at the veracity of the

claims whilst uncovering the tension between two very different functional and subjective

interpretations of spatial practice; giving lie to the notion of a unitary, panoptic vision of social

protocols across urban spaces.

Conclusion

Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, read alongside de Certeau’s emphasis on the

enunciative acts of the pedestrian offers a compelling account as to how urban narratives

might be pursued more attentively. Given its reflexive character and culturally-situated

positioning, this perspective is better equipped at orientating itself to spatial conditions,

compared to the ill-defined attempts at realising the panorama-city. However, in pursuit of

these representational readings of space, it would appear that the (growth of) pedestrian-as-

linker, the Baudelarian flâneur and even de Certeau’s Wandersmänner lack the critical power

of the pedestrian engaged in the archiving of spatial experience. Moreover, in view of de

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Certeau’s linkage of spatial practices to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the question of agency is a

problematic one. Nevertheless, de Certeau’s emphasis on the plurality of city-dwellers’

subjective experiences raises some hope as to efficacy of everday practices in combating

metanarratives, which for Lefebvre restrict urban experience to the calculated demands and

practices of the panoptic marketplace. As to whether developments in digital cartography

usher in a new period of critical everydayness capable of transcending a repressive and

totalising discourse governing urban spaces, much will depend upon the way, and extent to

which, city-users come to be to mediated by emerging technologies.

References

Baudelaire, C. (1964) The painter of modern life. New York: Da Capo Press. Originally published in Le

Figaro, 1863.

Buchanan, I. (2000) Michel de Certeau. London: Sage.

Cusack, P. (2010) Favourite sounds: Birmingham. Bibliographical note:

http://favouritesounds.org/map.php?projectid= accessed 27 Aug 2012.

De Certeau, M. (1984) The practice of everyday life. Translation by Steven Rendall. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

De Certeau, M. (1988) The writing of history. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gristwood, A. (2012) ‘Engaging the self and the city: theory and method in urban studies’, in A.

Gristwood and M. Woolf, The city as text: urban environments as the classroom in education abroad.

CAPA International Education, 1, 60-70.

Kalin, J. (2010) Towards a rhetoric of hybrid space walking. The Media Ecology Assocation, 10.

Bibliographical note: http://www.media-

ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v10/6_Hybrid_space_walking.pdf. Accessed 28 Aug

2012.

Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: a selection. Translation by A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.

Lefebvre, H. (1991) The production of space. Translation by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil

Blackwell. Originally published 1974.

Napolitano, V. & Pratten, D. (2007) Michel de Certeau: Ethnography and the challenge of plurality.

Social Anthropology, 15:1, 1-12.

Nitrozac & Snoggy (2008) Joy of tech. Bibliographical note

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1179.html. Accessed 24 Aug 2012.

Theorising Discourse, Subjectivity And Ideology MA Psychosocial Studies and Education

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Rodriguez K. & Rink, B. (2011) Performing cities: engaging the hi-tech flaneur. Frontiers: The

Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. 20. 103-119.

Sheringham, M. (2010) ‘Archiving’, in M. Beaumont & G. Dart (eds) Restless cities. London: Verso.

Sinclair, I. (2012) Ghost milk: calling time on the grand project. London: Penguin.

Appendix 1

Centre of shot: Westfield shopping centre visitor photographing the food concourse from the

Olympic Park gallery. Image: Simon Pepper.

Left: Menu screen for the Westfield wireless mobile phone application. Right: Google™ photo booths

advertised, featuring the Olympic Park background. Image: Simon Pepper.

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Appendix 2

Nitrozac & Snoggy (2008) Joy of Tech.

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Appendix 3

Favourite Sounds Project: Birmingham http://favouritesounds.org/map.php?projectid=.