Pedestrian utterances and hegemonic order in 'haunted' urban space: 'A crucial wellspring is memory' and 'lapses in the syntax created by the law' as discussed by de Certeau and Crang

(Originally posted elsewhere on 31 October 2023.)

Just putting Michel de Certeau’s original (and seminal) The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) in conversation with geographer Mike Crang’s later discussion of de Certeau (2000).

Because it’s Halloween, and each scholar mobilizes the notion of “haunted” urban space, in which the persistent memories and ways-of-being—”the world’s debris”—that were meant to be integrated/repressed by “the Concept-City” of modernity instead speak back to order through “memories,” “stories,” and “pedestrian” mobility. A return of the repressed. Y’know: Gothic-y.

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The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. [...] [T]he everyday has a certain strangeness [...]. The city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for [modernist, imperialist] socioeconomic and political strategies [and ideologies] [...]. The Concept-city is decaying. [...] [But there remains] practices which [...] [this powerful] system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived [...]. Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. [...] Their intertwined paths give their shape to places. They weave places together. [...] [T]he city itself [can seem to be] an immense social experience of lacking a place [...]. Numbered streets and street numbers (112th St., or 9 rue Saint-Charles) [...] orders of identities [...], constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the [landscape] [...]. [But] stories and legends [...] haunt urban space [...]. It is through [...] their capacity to create cellars and garrets everywhere, that local legends [...] permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces. [...] Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris. [...] [The hegemonic] order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning [...]. [People, through stories and engagement with landscape, can] produce effects of dissimulation and escape [...]. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber. [...] “Memories tie us to that place. [...] [T]hat’s what gives a neighborhood its character.” There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in -- and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.

Text above by: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendell (1984). [Original publication in French from 1980. From the chapter “Walking in the City.”]

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[W]hat has to be forgotten to make things [legible to hegemonic systems] [...], the survivals of other ways of thinking that creep in as ‘lapses in the syntax created by the law [...]’ where ‘they symbolize a return of the repressed [...].’ [L]ook at the authority mechanisms through which speech is credentialised [...]. The propre creates objects through transforming the uncertainties of history into readable spaces [...]. These are the ruins of non-hegemonic systems [...]. Instead he seeks a mode of knowledge through travel to open space to difference [...]. Stories are not about movement, but make movements, not objects but effects, they transform [...]. [R]eading, narrating and speaking. Where ‘pedestrian utterances’ [engaging, commuting, interacting with the landscape] speak the city [...]. [S]pace is practised place. [...] The gaze of power transfixes objects but also thus becomes blind to a vast array of things that do not fit its categories. [...] Control of space is a matter of strategy which is orientated through the construction of proper knowledge. In contrast, there are tactics -- the arts of making do, like reading, or cooking -- which use what is there in multiple permutations. This practical knowledge of the city [or other types of places] transforms and crosses spaces, creates new links [...], comprising mobile geography of looks and glances. A crucial well spring is memory. [...] The alterity is that these memories contain not just events, but still carry the remains of different conceptual systems from whence they came. These then are the ghosts in the machine. Walking [moving, exploring, engaging] is to create [...] haunted geographies.

Text by: Mike Crang. “Relics, places and unwritten geographies in the work of Michel de Certeau (1925-86).” In: Thinking Space. 2000.