4/2 De Certeau - Walking in the City

1.     What doe de Certeau mean when he says, when a person sees Manhattan from the 110^h floor of the world trade center, “his elevation transforms him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world [. . .] into a text. [. . .] It allows him to read it; to be a solar eye” (92).

            This illustrates the difference between the voyeur and walker de Certeau points out. A walker is someone down below, who can only focus on the immediate paths in front of them. The voyeur sees a whole and complete view of what the city is, how it is mapped out, and how it is functioning. All of a sudden there is a logic to how the city is set up by urban planners, architects, etc.

2.     De Certeau states that “urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded” (95) and “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining social conditions of social life” (96). Explain these statements and discuss how they relate to the title of this section-- “From Concepts to Practices.”

            De Certeau is emphasizing how important the work of urban planners and architects are. What they do, the concepts they develop, eventually become real buildings and real cities. The way a city is mapped out is integral to how each individual, or walker, navigates the city. Every daily path is therefore affected by these spatial practices.

3.     What is “the Chorus of idle footsteps” and why can’t “they be counted” (97)? Refer to the notion of “tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation” in your answer (97).

 They have qualitative characteristics and are singular units. They create and define spaces infinitely. In technical terms, one can trace how often a path is travelled, but these statistics do not include the qualitative act of passing by. De Certeau explains this as “window shopping” or “wandering”.

           

4.    De Certeau maintains that walking creates “one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city” (97).  What does this mean and how does it relate to hiss assertion that, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language” (97)? What is he trying to establish by saying this?

           

            The city is essentially a language that must be spoken to be fully appreciated and utilized. Walking brings the city to life, it reaffirms the city’s purpose. Without people walking and using the city as it was designed, the city has no purpose in its existence. A language can exist as only a written language, but if it is not a spoken language it is known as a “dead” language because it can’t really be used to its full potential.

5.    Why can’t walking be “reduced to [a] graphic trail” such as you would see on a map or urban plan, according to de Certeau (99)?

                  According to de Certeau, he says that “walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects etc., the trajectories it “speaks’” (99). Therefore walking is important in the experience of itself. Every step and sequence is different in each moment with each individual, therefore it can never be drawn out like a path. Walking in the city is a continuous movement.

6.    What does de Certeau mean by “the long poem of Walking”  (101).

                  The “long poem of walking” describes how once again, walking is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, walking is an art that carries many implications. It refers to the city in terms of its culture and individuals. De Certeau suggests that it is like a “peddler”, which carries something that is surprising and interesting.

7.    De Certeau defines two “pedestrian figures” through which “rhetoric of walking” (100) is created: synecdoche and asyndeton. He notes that synecdoche “expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a ‘more’” (101). On the other hand, asyndeton, “by elision, creates a ‘less” opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts” (101).  Explore and explain these terms and relate them to de Certeau’s larger argument.

Asyndeton creates a “less”, while synecdoche can replace a “more” with a “less”.
synecdoche: a small part made to represent the whole
asyndeton: the omission of conjunctions
De Certeau's larger argument is that walking serves as the speech of a language. These two terms play a role in the way that walking creates fragments in time, and omits certain spaces, it can never be perfectly connected as a trail. At the same time, a small part of walking can implicate so much more because of its "wandering" aspect. 

8.    De Certeau argues that the proper nouns which mark a city (naming streets, buildings, monuments) once were “arranged in constellations that heirarchize and semantically order the surface of the city . . .” (104) .  However, even though these words eventually lose their original value, “their ability to signify outlives its first definition” (104) and they function to articulate “a second, poetic geography  on top of the geography of the literal . . . meaning” (105). Explain what he means by these statements.

                  Fifth avenue is named the fifth avenue because it is the fifth in the sequence of avenues in Manhattan. However, overtime the avenue develops and grows its own definition of the term “Fifth Avenue”. Now, when people say fifth avenue it implies many things such as a shopping area, or a significant part of New York City. It is not simply the fifth avenue in Manhattan, but Fifth Avenue. De Certeau is suggesting that the way we explore the geography and pass it on through experience and memory actually gives geography another layer of meaning to their names.

9.    Explain de Certeau’s statement that “places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, [. . .] encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body: ‘I feel good here’” (108). How does this fit into the larger argument about the “habitability” of the city?

            Each place contains infinite stories and pasts belonging to each individual that no other will ever be able to experience or understand. They exist in the space, but cannot be reached by anyone else.

10. Explain the following quote, which occurs in the final paragraph of the essay: “the childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a “metaphorical” or mobile city” (110). How does this statement fit into the argument as a whole?       

            Childhood experience greatly affects the way we grow up to experience spaces. De Certeau says, “to practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood” where one is free to reinterpret what space is and how it works (110). It is how we are trained to “read” the city in our own way. This is how we create the new layer of poetic meaning above what the geography has been simply defined as.