Walking in the City... and Getting Lost

After reading Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” chapter, I think I’ll structure my response around the parts I found interesting and least confusing.

            First, I found it interesting that the voyeur is distinguished from the walker. As the city is meant to be “read” as a text, the importance of seeing or perceiving is stressed. He says that the “desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it” (92). This signals that perceptions, ideas, and concepts are necessary to have before one can experience something. I think this is what he’s getting at as he begins talking about the connection between concept and practices.

            Second, as he mentions the discourse over “the city,” he notes: “Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate” (95). If the goal was to show with “rational transparency” from where these ruses and combinations of powers stem, I still feel at a loss. What I can make from this section is that the city as an idea has shifted into something that is beyond the control of what it was imagined or intended to be. In other words, the city has taken on a life of its own, with its own set of rules and practices.

            Third, I was not expecting a connection between pedestrians and the theory of a speech act. If I can think all the way back to 501, I remember that in J.L. Austin’s “How To Do Things With Words” to say something is to do something, a “performative.” A language system provides structure, but the individual can independently interpret and appropriate those “rules.” I understand that the pedestrian in the city can also appropriate the rules that the “topographical system” has created (97). I know this connection is central to understanding this chapter, but I’m still struggling with its significance. Is it highlighting the agency that a pedestrian possesses in a world (or city) that has been created for that pedestrian? Is it referring back to how the concept of the city has developed into more than just a conceptual idea? If so, what is that “more”?

The connections to rhetoric, figurative language, symbolism, etc. stress me out; however, I’d like to end with a comment on the close of the chapter. We even get taken to Freud in this chapter, but I guess that shouldn’t be so surprising. He says, “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” (110). Like so many other things, the city is a place or space from which the individual, or subject, can create an understanding of himself or herself. The city has the power to shape our selfhood and our understanding of it.

So, in all, these are the moments that struck me the most, mostly because I felt like I could speak on these points, accurately or not... I’m looking forward to our discussion on this tomorrow!