Practices of Space

I don’t understand half of Michel de Certeau’s essay “Practices of Space,” published in On Signs, but there were some passages that I liked. Here they are:

The desire to see the city preceded the means of fulfilling the desire. Medieval and Renaissance painting showed the city seen in perspective by an eye that did not yet exist. They both invented flying over the city and the type of representation that made it possible. The panorama transformed the spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Since technical processes created an “omnivisual power,” things are different. The fiction invented by the painters of the past slowly became fact. The same scopic drive haunts the architectural (and no longer pictorial) productions that give materiality to Utopia today. The 1350-foot tower [of the World Trade Center], Manhattan’s prow, continues the construction of a fiction that creates its readers, that transforms the city’s complexity into readability [my emphasis] and that freezes its opaque mobility into a crystal-clear text. […]

[I]t is below—”down”—on the threshold where visibility ends that the city’s common practitioners dwell. The raw material of this experiment are the walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the cursives and strokes of an urban “text” they write without reading [emphasis mine]. These practictioners employ spaces that are not self-aware [my emphasis]; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of one body for another, beloved, body. The paths that interconnect in this network, strange poems of which each body is an element down by and among many others, elude being read. Everything happens as though some blindness were the hallmark of the processes by which the inhabited city is organized. [Emphasis mine.] The networks of these forward-moving, intercrossed writings form a multiple history, are without creator or spectator [my emphasis], made up of fragments of trajectories [my emphasis] and alterations of spaces […]

Speaking of things as being “texts” is common in semiotics, but I think this essay draws that parallel farther than usual. de Certeau even compares the movements of pedestrians within a city to “the act of speaking.”

History begins at ground level, with footsteps. They are the number, but a number that does not form a series. They cannot be counted because each unit is qualitative in nature: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesic appropriation. They are replete with innumerable anomalies. The motions of walking are spatial creations. They link sites one to the other. Pedestrian motor functions thus create one of those “true systems whose existence actually makes the city,” but which “have no physical receivability.” [My emphasis.]

Here he quotes, I think, Christopher Alexander’s interesting essay A City is not a Tree. (See my two posts about this essay.)

A comparison with the act of speaking enables us to go further and not be restricted only to criticism of graphic representations as if we were aiming from the limits of legibility at some inaccessible Beyond. The act of walking is to the urban system what the act of speaking, the Speech Act, is to language or to spoken utterance. [My emphasis.] On the most elementary level it has in effect a threefold “uttering” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographic system by the pedestrian [emphasis mine] (just as the speaker appropriates and assumes language); it is a spatial realization [my emphasis] of the site (just as the act of speaking is a sonic realization of language); lastly, it implies relationships among distinct positions, i.e. pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements [emphasis mine] (just as verbal utterance is “allocution,” “places the others” before the speaker, and sets up contracts between fellow speakers). A first definition of walking thus seems to be a space of uttering [my emphasis].

Then he loses me completely in the following pages. I wish I could understand what he says. There was one sentence I associated with a post by Brian Marick, where he said that “object-oriented programming is not just programming with languages that provide inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation. It’s built from how people use those languages—from design patterns, from CRC cards [etc.].” de Certau wrote:

Usage defines the social phenomenon by which a system of communication is actually manifested […].

I guess this is true of many systems.