AtDTdA: (9) 248 Wednesday's kick-ass question

[Dave Monroe]

--- John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au> wrote:

> Cf. Michel de Certeau's chapter "Walking in the
> City" in The Practice of Everyday Life, where he
> argues that those bird's eye view medieval maps
> suggest a desire for ocular mastery over the city -
> itself impossible, really, since you have to remove
> yourself from the city in order to "master" it that
> way. The all-seeing eye is a powerful fiction.
> Obviously pertinent to the Chums.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of
Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in
Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy
and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with
institutions and structures of power, while "tactics"
are utilized by individuals to create space for
themselves in environments defined by strategies. In
the influential chapter "Walking in the City," he
describes "the city" as a "concept," generated by the
strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations,
and other institutional bodies who produce things like
maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it
might be experienced by someone looking down from high
above. By contrast, the walker at street level moves
in ways that are tactical and never fully determined
by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or
meandering aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian
layout of the grid of streets. This concretely
illustrates Certeau's assertion that everyday life
works by a process of poaching on the territory of
others, recombining the rules and products that
already exist in culture in a way that is influenced,
but never wholly determined, by those rules and
products.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Certeau

... cf. Michel de Certeau's contrasts between the map
and the tour -- De Certeau describes the "tour" as an
everyday narration of movement and opposes it to the
"map," a scientific  representation that erases the
itineraries that produced it, and whose history shows
this process of disengagement. For de Certeau, who is
interested in the tactics of poaching and consumption,
everyday stories are guides to spatial practices."

http://www.christianhubert.com/hypertext/mapping.html

... space and spatial practices are equally important
in coming to understand everyday life, which can elude
power and discipline  [we can start see this by using
spatial metaphors like 'keeping your distance'  from
authority, or 'trying to find your own space'.
Buchanan (2000) also suggests that the spatial
metaphor refers to particular positions in time as
well]. 

As you walk through the city you weave spaces together
in a subjective way: this can never be captured
objectively, say by drawing maps to trace journeys,
since it is the experience of walking or ‘passing by’
that counts. Maps are typical forms of fixation of the
flux of everyday life, which try to pin it down by
abstracting heavily from it.

There is a rhetoric of walking, so that all walkers
actually articulate sentences using a series of
signifiers, although this is often done unconsciously
(as when one finds oneself unconsciously drawn to
particular circuits of city streets or locations in
cities)....

http://www.arasite.org/decwalk.htm


       
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