THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Michel de Certeau
Translated by Steven Rendall
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley   Los Angeles London
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latter is already at work. Thus it is exemplary that Detienne and Vernant should have made themselves the storytellers of this "labyrinthine intelligence" ("intelligence en dedales"), as Francoise Frontisi so well terms it.14 This discursive practice of the story (1'histoire) is both its art and its discourse.
At bottom, this is all a very old story. When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered exactly a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses. He had then arrived at the age of metis: "The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories."15 He had explained the reason admirably: as in the older Freud, it was a connoisseur's admiration for the tact that composed harmonies and for its art of doing it by surprise: "The lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders."16
Part III
Spatial Practices
Chapter VII   Walking in the City
fe>} tX,A.
Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide—extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rorne, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in. monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.1
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Voyeurs or walkers
To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of "seeing the whole," of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.
To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.
Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below? An Icarian fall. On the 110th floor, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: It's hard to be down when you're up.
The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval .or Renaissance-painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye~ had yet enjoyed.2 This fiction already made the medieval spec-tatorTnto a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an "all-seeing power"?3 The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the> Utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.
Is the immense texturology spread out before one's eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping
aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. The panorama-city is a "theoretical" (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The voyeur-god created by this fiction, who, like Schreber's God, knows only cadavers,4 must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them.
The ordinary practitioners of the city live "down below," 'below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk an elementary form of ' this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmdnner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able-to read it. These practitioners make use of spaceTffiaTcahnot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as-that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.5 The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.
Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the "geometrical" or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ("ways of operating"), to "another spatiality"6 (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.
. 1. From the concept of the city to urban practices
The World Trade Center is only the most monumental figure of Western urban development. The atopia-utopia of optical knowledge has long had the ambition of surmounting and articulating the contradictions arising from urban agglomeration. It is a question of managing a growth of human agglomeration or accumulation. "The city is a huge monastery," said Erasmus. Perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold projection.of an opaque past and an uncertain future onto a
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keeps us under its gaze, which one cannot bear without feeling dizzy," says a resident of Rouen.36 In the spaces brutally lit by an alien reason, proper names carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meanings. They "make sense"; in other words, they are the impetus of movements, like vocations and calls that turn or divert an itinerary by giving it a meaning (or a direction) (sens) that was previously unforeseen. These names create a nowhere in places; they change them into passages.
A friend who lives in the city of Sevres drifts, when he is in Paris, toward the rue des Saints-P<?r<?.s and the rue de Sevres, even though he is going to see his mother in another part of town: these names articulate a sentence that his steps compose without his knowing it. Numbered streets and street numbers (112th St., or 9 rue Saint-Charles) orient the magnetic field of trajectories just as they can haunt dreams. Another friend unconsciously represses the streets which have names and, by this fact, transmit her—orders or identities in the same way as summonses and classifications; she goes instead along paths that have no name or signature. But her walking is thus still controlled negatively by proper names.
What is it then that they spell out? Disposed in constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the city, operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications, these words (Borrego, Botzaris, Bougainville . . . ) slowly lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them, but their ability to signify outlives its first definition. Saints-Peres, Corentin Cehon, Red Square . . . these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of "meanings" held in suspension, directing the physical deambulations below: Place de VEtoile, Concorde, Poissonnfere . . . These constellations of names provide traffic patterns: they are stars directing itineraries. "The Place de la Concorde does not exist," Malaparte said, "it is an idea."37 It is much more than an "idea." A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travellers they direct and simultaneously decorate.
Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of an cmptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: "I fill this great "empty space with a beautiful name."38 People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions.39 Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, sym-bolize and orient walkers' steps: names that have ceased precisely to be "proper."
In'these symbolizing kernels three distinct (but connected) functions of the relations between spatial and signifying practices are indicated (and perhaps founded): the believable, the memorable, and the primitive. They designate what "authorizes" (or makes possible or credible) spatial appropriations, what is repeated in them (or is recalled in them) from a silent and withdrawn memory, and what is structured in them and continues to be signed by an in-fantile (in-fans) origin. These three symbolic mechanisms organize the topoi of a discourse on/of the city (legend, memory, and dream) in a way that also eludes urbanistic systematicity. They can already be recognized in the functions of proper names: they make habitable or believable the place that they clothe with a word (by emptying themselves of their classifying power, they acquire that of "permitting" something else); they recall or suggest phantoms (the dead who are supposed to have disappeared) that still move about, concealed in gestures and in bodies in motion; and, by naming, that is, by imposing an injunction proceeding from the other (a story) and by altering functionalist identity by detaching themselves from it, they create in the place itself that erosion or nowhere that the law of the other carves out within it.
Credible things and memorable things: habitability
By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that makes people believe is the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what it promises. Far from expressing a void or describing
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a lack, it creates such. It makes room for a void. In that way, it opens up clearings; it "allows" a certain play within a system of defined places. It "authorizes" the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. It makes places habitable. On these grounds, I call such discourse a "local authority." It is a crack in the system that saturates places with signification and indeed so reduces them to this signification that it is "impossible to breathe in them." It is a symptomatic tendency of functionalist totalitarianism (including its programming of games and celebrations) that it seeks precisely to eliminate these local authorities, because they compromise the univocity of the system. Totalitarianism attacks what it quite correctly calls superstitions: supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves "over and above" and "in excess,"40 and annex to a past or poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves.
Ultimately, since proper names are already "local authorities" or "superstitions," they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live)41 makes the city a "suspended symbolic order."42 The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here "there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all. . . . There isn't anything." Nothing "special": nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a st6ry, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only "places in which one can no longer believe in anything."43
It. is through the opportunity they offer to store up rich silences and wordless stories, or rather through their capacity to create cellars and garrets everywhere, that local legends {legenda: what is to be read, but also what can be read) permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces. Certainly walking about and traveling substitute for exits, for going away and coming back, which were formerly made available by a body of legends that places nowadays lack. Physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday's or today's "superstitions." Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that
used to open up space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, "an exploration of the deserted places of my memory," the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the "discovery" of relics and legends: "fleeting visions of the French countryside," "fragments of music and poetry,"44 in short, something like an "uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations.45 As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.
From this point of view, their contents remain revelatory, and still more so is the principle that organizes them. Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world's debris. Even if the literary form and the actantial schema of "superstitions" correspond to stable models whose structures and combinations have often been analyzed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of their "manifestation") are furnished by the leftovers from nominations, taxonomies, heroic or comic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous form of the story. Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.
The verbal relics of which the story is composed, being tied to lost stories and opaque acts, are juxtaposed in a collage where their relations are not thought, and for this reason they form a symbolic whole.46 They are articulated by lacunae. Within the structured space of the text, they thus produce anti-texts, effects of dissimulation and escape, possibilities of moving into other landscapes, like cellars and bushes: "o massifs, 6 phiriels."41 Because of the process of dissemination that they open up, stories differ from rumors in that the latter are always injunctions, initiators and results of a levelling of space, creators of common movements that reinforce an order by adding an activity of making people believe things to that of making people do things. Stories diversify, rumors totalize. If there is still a certain oscillation between them, it
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seems that today there is rather a stratification: stories are becoming private and sink into the secluded places in neighborhoods, families, or individuals, while the rumors propagated by the media cover everything and, gathered under the figure of the City, the masterword of an anonymous law, the substitute for all proper names, they wipe out or combat any superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure.
The dispersion of stories points to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends. 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. A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories. ''Here, there used to be a bakery." "That's where old lady Dupuis used to live." It is striking here that the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there: "you see, here there used to be . . . ," but it can no longer be seen. Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible: it is the very definition of a place, in fact, that it is composed by these series of displacements and effects among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these moving layers.
- "Memories tie us to that place. . . . It's personal, not interesting to anyone eiseT^t^^TafrthatTwhat gives a neighborhood its" char-acter/'^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. But like the gothic sculptures of kings and queens that once adorned Notre-Dame and have been buried for two centuries in the basement of a building in the rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin,49 these "spirits," themselves broken into pieces in like manner, do not speak any more than they see. This is a sort of knowledge that remains silent. Only hints of what is known but unrevealed are passed on "just between you and me."
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, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. "I feel good here":50 the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.
Childhood and metaphors of places
Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.
Aristotle, Poetics 1457b
The memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place. In this place that is a palimpsest, subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence and makes it "be there," Dasein. But as we have seen, this being-there acts only in spatial practices, that is, in ways of moving into something different (manieres de passer a I'autre). It must ultimately be seen as the repetition, in diverse metaphors, of a decisive and originary experience, that of the child's differentiation from the mother's body. It is through that experience that the possibility of space and of a localization (a "not everything") of the subject is inaugurated. We need not return to the famous analysis Freud made of this matrix-experience by following the game played by his eighteen-month-old grandson, who threw a reel away from himself, crying oh-oh-oh in pleasure, fortl (i.e., "over there," "gone," or "no more") and then pulled it back with the piece of string attached to it with a delighted dal (i.e., "here," "back again");51 it suffices here to remember this (perilous and satisfied) process of detachment from indifferentiation in the mother's body, whose substitute is the spool: this departure of the mother (sometimes she disappears by herself, sometimes the child makes her disappear) constitutes localization and exteriority against the background of an absence. There is a joyful manipulation that can make the maternal object "go away" and make oneself disappear (insofar as one considers oneself identical with that object), making it possible to be there (because) without the other but in a necessary relation to what has disappeared; this manipulation is an "original spatial structure."
No doubt one could trace this differentiation further back, as far as the naming that separates the foetus identified as masculine from his mother—but how about the female foetus, who is from this very moment introduced into another relationship to space? In the initiatory game, just as in the "joyful activity" of the child who, standing before a mirror, sees itself as one (it is she or he,- seen as a whole) but another (that, an image with which the child identifies itself),52 what counts is the process of this "spatial captation" that inscribes the passage toward the other as
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the law of being and the law of place, 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.
Thus begins the walk that Freud compares to the trampling underfoot of the mother-land.53 This relationship of oneself to oneself governs the internal alterations of the place (the relations among its strata) or the pedestrian unfolding of the stories accumulated in a place (moving about the city and travelling). 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, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: "a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation."54
Chapter IX   Spatial Stories
"Narration created humanity." Pierre Janet, L'Evolution de la memoire et la notion de temps, 1928, p. 261.
In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a "metaphor"— a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble nunc: every day, they traverse and organize rj^cM^^ex!_,select..and link them together; they make sentences and - itineraries.- out_ of them. They are spatial trajectories.
Tp this respect, narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes. By1 means of a whole panoply of codes, ordered ways of proceeding and constraints, they regulate changes in space (or moves from one place to another) made by stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series: from here (Paris), one goes there (Montargis); this place (a room) includes another (a dream or a memory); etc. More than that, when they are represented in descriptions or acted out by actors (a foreigner, a city-dweller, a ghost), these places are linked together more or less tightly or easily by "modalities" that specify the kind of passage leading from the one to the other: the transition can be given an "epistemological" modality concerning knowledge (for example: "it's not certain that this is the Place de la Republique"), an "alethic" one concerning existence (for example, "the land of milk and honey is an improbable end-point"), or a deontic one concerning obligation (for example: "from this point, you have to go over to that one"). . . . These are only a few notations among many others, and serve only to indicate with what subtle complexity stories, whether everyday or literary, serve us as means of mass transportation, as metaphorai.
Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practices.concern "^Tfy^ay^taHicsTafe^rt of them, from the alphabet
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of spatial indication ("It's to the right," "Take a left"), the beginning of a story the rest of which is written by footsteps, to the daily "news" ("Ouess who I met at the bakery?"), television news reports ("Teheran: Khomeini is becoming increasingly isolated . . . "), legends (Cinderellas living in hovels), and stories that are told (memories and fiction of foreign lands or more or less distant times in the past). These narrated adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the commonplaces of an order, do not merely constitute a "supplement" to pedestrian enunciations and rhetorics. They are not satisfied with displacing the latter and transposing them into the field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it.
These proliferating metaphors—sayings and stories that organize places through the displacements they "describe" (as a mobile point "describes" a curve)—what kind of analysis can be applied to theml To mention only the studies concerning spatializing operations (and not spatial systems), there are numerous works that provide methods and categories for such an analysis. Among the most recent, particular attention can be drawn to those referring to a semantics of space (John Lyons on "Locative Subjects" and "Spatial Expressions"),' a psycholinguistics of perception (Miller and Johnson-Laird on "the hypothesis of localization"),2 a sociolinguistics of descriptions of places (for example, William Labov's),3 a phenomenology of the behavior that organizes "territories" (for example, the work of Albert E. Scheflen and Norman Ashcraft),4 an "ethnomethodology" of the indices of localization in conversation (for example, by Emanuel A. Schegloff),5 or a semiotics viewing culture as a spatial metalanguage (for example, the work of the Tartu School, especially Y. M. Lotman, B. A. Ouspenski),6 etc. Just as signifying practices, which concern the ways of putting language into effect, were taken into consideration after linguistic systems had been investigated, today spatializing practices are attracting attention now that the codes and taxonomies of the spatial order have been examined. Our investigation belongs to this "second" moment of the analysis, which moves from structures to actions. But in this vast ensemble, I shall consider only narrative actions; this will allow us to specify a few elementary forms of practices organizing space: the bipolar distinction between "map" and "itinerary," the procedures of delimitation or "marking boundaries" ("homage") and "enunciative focalizations" (that is, the indication of the body within discourse).
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"Spaces " and "places "
At the outset, I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the "proper" rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are* beside one another, each situated in its own "proper" and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. .
A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a "proper."
In short, space is. a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way7 an"Tcf"6fTea~dIhg is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.
Merleau-Ponty distinguished a "geometrical" space ("a homogeneous and isotropic spatiality," analogous to our "place") from another "spa-tiality" which he called an "anthropological space." This distinction depended on a distinct problematic, which sought to distinguish from "geometrical" univocity the experience of an "outside" given in the form of space, and for which "space is existential" and "existence is spatial." This experience is a relation to the world; in dreams and in perception, and because it probably precedes their differentiation, it expresses "the same essential structure of our being as a being situated in relationship to a milieu"—being situated by a desire, indissociable from a "direction of existence" and implanted in the space of a landscape. From this point
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of view "there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences."7 The perspective is determined by a "phenomenology" of existing in the world.
In our examination of the daily practices that articulate that experience, the opposition between "place" and "space" will rather refer to two sorts of determinations in stories: the first, a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead, the law of a "place" (from the pebble to the cadaver, an inert body always seems, in the West, to found a place and give it the appearance of a tomb); the second, a determination through operations which, when they are attributed to a stone, tree, or human being, specify "spaces" by the actions of historical subjects (a movement always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history). Between these two determinations, there are passages back and forth< such as the putting to death (or putting into a landscape) of heroes who transgress frontiers and who, guilty of an offense against the law of the place, best provide its restoration with their tombs; or again, on the contrary, the awakening of inert objects (a table, a forest, a person that plays a certain role in the environment) which, emerging from their stability, transform the place where they lay motionless into the foreignness of their own space.
Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces. The forms of this play are numberless, fanning out in a spectrum reaching from the putting in place of an immobile and stone-like order (in it, nothing moves except discourse itself, which, like a camera panning over a scene, moves over the whole panorama), to the accelerated succession of actions that multiply spaces (as in the detective novel or certain folktales, though this spatializing frenzy nevertheless remains circumscribed by the textual place). It would be possible to construct a typology of all these stories in terms of identification of places and actualization of spaces. But in order to discern in them the modes in which these distinct operations are combined, we need criteria and analytical categories—a necessity that leads us back to travel stories of the most elementary kind.
Touxsjmd-maps~~
Oral descriptions of places, narrations concerning the home, stories about the streets, represent a first and enormous corpus. In a very
precise analysis of descriptions New York residents gave of their apartments, C. Linde and W. Labov recognize two distinct types, which they call the "map" and the "tour." The first is of the type: "The girls' room is next to the kitchen." The second: "You turn right and come into the living^foom7""Now, in the New York corpus, only three percent of the descriptions are of the "map" type. All the rest, that is, virtually the whole corpus, are of the "tour" type: "Youx.ojn.eJjaJhrough.a..low_d.o..ar," etc. These descriptions are made for the. most part in terms of operations and show "how to enter each room." Concerning this second type, the authors point out that a circuit or "tour" is a speech-act (an act of enunciation) that "furnishes a minimal series of paths by which to go into each room"; and that the "path" is a series of units that have the form of vectors that are either "static" ("to the right," "in front of you," etc.) or "mobile" ("if you turn to the left," etc.).8
In other words, description oscillates between the terms of an alternative: either seeingJihe knowledge of an order of places) or_gw'«£ (spatializing actions). Either it presents a tableau ("there are . . . "), or it OTgssnzes'movements ("you enter, you go across, you turn . . . "). Of these two hypotheses, the choices made by the New York narrators overwhelmingly favored the second.
Leaving Linde and Labov's study aside (it is primarily concerned with the rules of the social interactions and conventions that govern "natural language," a problem we will come back to later), I would like to make use of these New York stories—and other similar stories'—to try to specify the relationships between the indicators of "tours" and those of "maps," where they coexist in a single description. How are acting and seeing coordinated in this realm of ordinary language in which the former is so obviously dominant? The question ultimately concerns the basis of the everyday narrations, the relation between the itinerary (a discursive series of operations) and the map (a plane projection totalizing observations), that is, between two symbolic and anthropological languages of space. Two poles of experience. It seems that in passing from "ordinary" culture to scientific discourse, one passes from one pole to the other.
In narrations concerning apartments or streets, manipulations of space or "tours" are dominant. This form of description usually determines the whole style of the narration. When the other form intervenes, it has the characteristic of being conditioned or presupposed by the first. Examples of tours conditioning a map: "If you turn to the right, there is . . . ", or the closely related form, "If you go straight ahead, you'll see . . . " In
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both cases, an action permits one to see something. But there are also cases in which a tour assumes a place indication: "There, there's a door, you take the next one"—an element of mapping is the presupposition of a certain itinerary. The narrative fabric in which describers (descripteurs) of itineraries predominate is thus punctuated by describers of the map type which have the function of indicating either an effect obtained by the tour ("you see . . . ") or a given that it postulates as its limit ("there is a wall"), its possibility ("there's a door"), or an. obligation ("there's a one-way street"), etc. The chain of spatializing operations seems to be marked by references to what it produces (a representation of places) or to what it implies (a local order). We thus have the structure of the travel story: stories of journeys and actions are marked out by the "citation" of the places that result from them or authorize them.
From this angle, we can compare the combination of "tours" and "maps" in everyday stories with the manner in which, over the ,past five centuries, they have been interlaced and then slowly dissociated in literary and scientific representations of space. In particular, if one takes the "map" in its current geographical form, we can see that in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (i.e., from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility. The first medieval maps included only the rectilinear jnarking out of itineraries (performative indications chiefly concerning pilgrimages), along with the stops one was to make (cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray at, etc.) and distances calculated in hours or in days, that is, in terms of the time it would take to cover them on foot.10 Each of these maps is a memorandum prescribing action*.. 1 he tour to be^made is predominanj^in^them. It includes the map.eiement^Just as today the description of a route to be taken accompanies a hasty sketch already on paper, in the form of citations of places, a sort of dance through the city: "20 paces straight ahead, then turn to the left, then another 40 paces. ..." The drawing articulates spatializing practices, like the maps of urban routes, arts of actions and stories of paces, that serve the Japanese as "address books,"" or the wonderful fifteenth-century Aztec map describing the exodus of the Totomihuacas. This drawing outlines not the "route" (there wasn't one) but the "log" of their journey on foot—an outline marked out by footprints with regular gaps between them and by pictures of the successive events that took place in the course of the journey (meals, battles, crossings of rivers or mountains, etc.): not a "geographical map" but "history book."12
Between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the map became more autonomous. No doubt the proliferation of the "narrative" figures that have long been its stock-in-trade (ships, animals, and characters of all kinds) still had the function of indicating the operations—travelling, military, architectural, political or commercial—that make possible the fabrication of a geographical plan.13 Far from being "illustrations," iconic glosses on, the text, these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines. It is equivalent to a describer of the "tour" type. But the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it. Transformed first by Euclidean geometry and then by descriptive geometry, constituted as a formal ensemble of abstract places, it is a "theater" (as one used to call atlases) in which the same system of projection nevertheless juxtaposes two very different elements: the data furnished by a tradition (Ptolemy's Geography, for instance) and those that came from navigators (portulans, for example). The map thus collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation. But the important thing here is the erasure of the itineraries which, presupposing the first category of places and conditioning the second, makes it possible to move from one to the other. The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a "state" of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary„,condition. It remains alone on the stage. The tour describers have disappeared.
The organization that can be discerned in stories about space in everyday culture is inverted by the process that has isolated a system of geographical places. The difference between the two modes of description obviously does not consist in the presence or absence of practices (they are at work everywhere), but in the fact that maps, constituted as proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge, form tables of legible results. Stories about space exhibit on the contrary the operations that allow it, within a constraining and non-"proper" place, to mingle its elements anyway, as one apartment-dweller put it concerning the rooms in his flat: "One can mix them up" {"On peut les triturer").14 From the folktale to descriptions of residences, an exacerbation of "practice" ("faire") (and thus of enunciation), actuates the stories
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narrating tours in places that, from the ancient cosmos to contemporary public housing developments, are all forms of an imposed order.
In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that "one can't do anything in them" to the legendary, long-lost attic that "could be used for everything,"15 everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space.
Marking out boundaries
As operations on places, stories also play the everyday role of a mobile and magisterial tribunal in cases concerning their delimitation. As always, this role appears more clearly at the second degree, when it is made explicit and duplicated by juridical discourse. In the traditional language of court proceedings, magistrates formerly "visited the scene of the case at issue" ("se transportaient sur les lieux") (transports and juridical metaphors), in order to "hear" the contradictory statements (dits) made by the parties to a dispute concerning debatable boundaries. Their "interlocutory judgment," as it was called, was an "operation of marking out boundaries" (bornage). Written in a beautiful hand by the court clerk on parchments where the writing sometimes flowed into (or was inaugurated by?) drawings outlining the boundaries, these interlocutory judgments were in sum nothing other than meta-stories. They combined together (the work of a scribe collating variants) the opposing stories of the parties involved: "Mr. Mulatier declares that his grandfather planted this apple tree on the edge of his field. . . . Jeanpierre reminds us that Mr. Bouvet maintains a dungheap on a piece of land of which he is supposed to be the joint owner with his brother André. . . ." Genealogies of places, legends about territories. Like a critical edition, the judge's narration reconciles these versions. The narration is "established" on the basis of "primary" stories (those of Mr. Mulatier, Jeanpierre, and so many others), stories that already have the function of spatial legislation since they determine rights and divide up lands by "acts" or discourses about actions (planting a tree, maintaining a dung-heap, etc.).
These "operations of marking out boundaries," consisting in narrative contracts and compilations of stories, are composed of fragments drawn from earlier stories and fitted together in makeshift fashion (bricolés). In this sense, they shed light on the formation of myths, since they also
have the function of founding and articulating spaces. Preserved in the court records, they constitute an immense travel literature, that is, a literature concerned with actions organizing more or less extensive social cultural areas. But this literature itself represents only a tiny part (the part that is written about disputed points) of the oral narration that interminably labors to compose spaces, to verify, collate, and displace their frontiers.
The ways of "conducting" a story offer, as Pierre Janet pointed out,16 a very rich field for the analysis of spatiality. Among the questions that depend on it, we should distinguish those that concern dimensions (extensionality), orientation (vectorality), affinity (homographies), etc. I shall stress only a few of its aspects that have to do with delimitation itself, the primary and literally "fundamental" question: it is the partition of space that structures it. Everything refers in fact to this differentiation which makes possible the isolation and interplay of distinct spaces. From the distinction that separates a subject from its exteriority to the distinctions that localize objects, from the home (constituted on the basis of the wall) to the journey (constituted on "the basis of a geographical "elsewhere" or a cosmological "beyond"), from the functioning of the urban network to that of the rural landscape, there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers.
In this organization, the story plays a decisive role. It "describes," to be sure. But "every description is more than a fixation," it is "a culturally creative act."'7 It even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds spaces. Reciprocally, where stories are disappearing (or else are being reduced to museographical objects), there is a loss of space: deprived of narrations (as one sees it happen in both the city and the countryside), the group or the individual regresses toward the disquieting, fatalistic experience of a formless, indistinct, and nocturnal totality. By considering the role of stories in delimitation, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of "crossword" decoding stencil (a dynamic partitioning of space) whose essential narrative figures seem to be the frontier and the bridge.
1. Creating a theater of actions. The story's first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found. Strictly speaking, this function is
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ize, or more exactly, to found. Strictly speaking, this function is not juridical, that is, related to laws or judgments. It depends rather on what Georges Dumezil analyzes in connection with the Indo-European root dhe, "to set in place," and its derivatives in Sanskrit (dhatu) and Latin (fas). The Latin noun "fas" he writes, "is properly speaking the mystical foundation, which is in the invisible world, and without which all forms of conduct that are enjoined or authorized by ius (human law) and, more generally speaking, all human conduct, are doubtful, perilous, and even fatal. Fas cannot be subjected to analysis or casuistry, as ius can: fas can no more be broken up into parts than its name can be declined." A foundation either exists or it doesn't: fas est or fas non est. "A time or a place are said to be fasti or nefasti [auspacious or inauspacious] depending on whether they provide or fail to provide human action with this necessary foundation."18 (.
In the Western parts of the Indo-European world, this function has been divided in a particular way among different institutions—in contrast to what happened in ancient India, where different roles were played in turn by the same characters. Occidental culture created its own ritual concerning fas, which was carried out in Rome by specialized priests called fetiales. It was practiced "before Rome undertook any action with regard to a foreign nation," such as a declaration of war, a military expedition, or an alliance. The ritual was a procession with three centrifugal stages, the first within Roman territory but near the frontier, the second on the frontier, the third in foreign territory. The ritual action was carried out before every civil or military action because it is designed to create the field necessary for political or military activities. It is thus also a repetitio rerum: both a renewal and a repetition of the originary founding acts, a recitation and a citation of the genealogies that could legitimate the new enterprise, and a prediction and a promise of success at the beginning of battles, contracts, or conquests. As a general repetition before the actual representation, the rite, a narration in acts, precedes the historical realization. The tour or procession of the fetiales opens a space and provides a foundation for the operations of the military men, diplomats, or merchants who dare to cross the frontiers. Similarly in the Vedas, Visnu, "by his footsteps, opens the zone of space in which Indra's military action must take place." The fas ritual is a foundation. It "provides space" for the actions that will be undertaken; it "creates a field" which serves as their "base" and their "theater."19
This founding is precisely the primary role of the story. It opens a legitimate theater for practical actions. It creates a field that authorizes dangerous and contingent social actions. But it differs in^three ways from the function the Roman ritual so carefully isolated: the story founds fas in a form that is fragmented (not unique and whole), miniaturized (not on a national scale), and polyvalent (not specialized). It is fragmented, not only because of the diversification of social milieus, but especially because of the increasing, heterogeneity (or because of a heterogeneity that is increasingly obvious) of the authorizing "references": the excommunication of territorial "divinities," the deconsecration of places haunted by the story-spirit, and the extension of neutral areas deprived of legitimacy have marked the disappearance and fragmentation of the narrations that organized frontiers and appropriations. (Official historiography history books, television news reports, etc.—nevertheless tries to make everyone believe in the existence of a national space.) It is miniaturized, because socioeconomic technocratization confines the significance of fas and nefas to the level of the family unit or the individual, and leads to the multiplication of "family stories," "life stories," and psychoanalytical narrations. (Gradually cut loose from these particular stories, public justifications nevertheless continue to exist in the form of blind rumors, or resurface savagely in class or race conflicts). It is finally polyvalent, because the mixing together of so many micro-stories gives them functions that change according to the groups in which they circulate. This polyvalence does not affect the relational origins of narrativity, however: the ancient ritual that creates fields of action is recognizable in the "fragments" of narration planted around the obscure thresholds of our existence; these buried fragments articulate without its knowing it the "biographical" story whose space they found.
A narrative activity, even if it is multiform and no longer unitary, thus continues to develop where frontiers and relations with space abroad are concerned. Fragmented and disseminated, it is continually concerned with marking out boundaries. What it puts in action is once more the fas that "authorizes" enterprises and precedes them. Like the Roman fetiales, stories "go in a procession" ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them. Decisions and juridical combinations themselves come only afterwards, like the statements and acts of Roman law (ius), arbitrating the areas^ of action granted to each party, participating themselves in the activities for which fas provided a "foundation."
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According to the rules that are proper to them, the magistrates' "interlocutory judgments" operate within the aggregate of heterogeneous spaces that have already been created and established by the innumerable forms of an oral narrativity composed of family or local stories, customary or professional "poems" and "recitations" of paths taken or countrysides traversed. The magistrates' judgments do not create these theaters of action, they articulate and manipulate them. They presuppose the narrative authorities that the magistrates "hear" compare, and put into hierarchies. Preceding the judgment that regulates and settles, there is a founding narration.
2. Frontiers and bridges. Stories are actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority. In order to account for contradiction, it is helpful to go back to the elementary units. Leaving aside morphology (which is not our concern here) and situating ourselves in the perspective of a pragmatics and, more precisely, a syntax aimed at determining "programs" or series of practices through which space is appropriated, we can take as our point of departure the "region," which Miller and Johnson-Laird define as a basic unit: the place where programs and actions interact. A "region" is thus the space created by an interaction.21 It follows that in the same place there are as many "regions" as there are interactions or intersections of programs. And also that the determination of space is dual and operational, and, in a problematics of enunciation, related to an "interlocutory" process.
In this way a dynamic contradiction between each delimitation and its mobility is introduced. On the one hand, the story tirelessly marks out frontiers. It multiplies them, but in terms of interactions among the characters—things, animals, human beings: the acting subjects (aciants) divide up among themselves places as well as predicates (simple, crafty, ambitious, silly, etc.) and movements (advancing, withdrawing, going into exile, returning, etc.). Limits are drawn by the points at which the progressive appropriations (the acquisition of predicates in the course of the story) and the successive displacements (internal or external movements) of the acting subjects meet. Both appropriations and displacements depend on a dynamic distribution of possible goods and functions in order to constitute an increasingly complex network of differentiations, a combinative system of spaces. They result from the operation of
distinctions resulting from encounters. Thus, in the obscurity of their unlimitedness, bodies can be distinguished only where the "contacts" ("touches'") of amorous or hostile struggles are inscribed on them. This is a paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? Neither. Does that amount to saying: no one?
The theoretical and practical problem of the frontier: to whom does it belong? The river, wall or tree makes a frontier. It does not have the character of a nowhere that cartographical representation ultimately presupposes. It has a mediating role. So does the story that gives it voice: "Stop," says the forest the wolf comes out of. "Stop!" says the river, revealing its crocodile. But this actor, by virtue of the very fact that he is the mouthpiece of the limit, creates communication as well as separation; more than that, he establishes a border only by saying what crosses it, having come from the other side. He articulates it. He is also a passing through or over. In the story, the frontier functions as a third element. It is an "in-between"—a "space between," Zwischenraum, as Morgenstern puts it in a marvelous and ironic poem on "closure" (Zaun), which rhymes with "space" (Raum) and "to see through" (hindurchzu-schaun).22 It is the story of a picket fence (Lattenzaun):
Es war einmal ein Lattenzaun One time there was a picket fence
mit Zwischenraum, hindurchzu- with space to gaze from hence to
schaun.' thence.
A middle place, composed of interactions and inter-views, the frontier is a sort of void, a narrative sym-bol of exchanges and encounters. Passing by, an architect suddenly appropriates this "in-between space" and builds a great edifice on it:
Ein Architekt, der dieses sah, An architect who saw this sight
stand eines Abends plötzlich da—       approached it suddenly one night,
und nahm den Zwischenraum removed the spaces from the
heraus fence und baute draus ein grosses Haus.       and built of them a residence.
Transformation of the void into a plenitude, of the in-between into an established place. The rest goes without saying. The Senate "takes on"
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the monument—the Law establishes itself in it—and the architect escapes to Afri-or-America:
Drum zog ihn der Senat auch ein.       the senate had to intervene.
Der Architekt jedoch entfloh The architect, however, flew
nach Afri-od-Ameriko to Afri- or Americoo.
(Max Knight, trans.)
The Architect's drive to cement up the picket fence, to fill in and build up "the space in-between," is also his illusion, for without knowing it he is working toward the political freezing of the place and there is nothing left for him to do, when he sees his work finished, but to flee far away from the blocs of the law.
In contrast, the story privileges a "logic of ambiguity" through its accounts of interaction. It "turns" the frontier into a crossing, and the river into a bridge. It recounts inversions and displacements: the door that closes is precisely what may be opened; the river is what makes passage possible; the tree is what marks the stages of advance; the picket fence is an ensemble of interstices through which one's glances pass.
The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy. Thus, for example, it occurs as a central and ambivalent character in the stories of the Noirmoutrins, before, during, and after the construction of a bridge between La Fosse and Fromentine in Vendee in 1972.23 It carries on a double life in innumerable memories of places and everyday legends, often summed up in proper names, hidden paradoxes, ellipses in stories, riddles to be solved: Bridgehead, Bridgenorth, Bridgetown, Bridgewater, Bridgman, Cambridge, Trowbridge, etc.
Justifiably, the bridge is the index of the diabolic in the paintings where Bosch invents his modifications of spaces.24 As a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place, it represents a departure, an attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power, or the flight of an exile; in any case, the "betrayal" of an order. But at the same time as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or causes the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives ob-jectivity (that is, expression and re-presentation) to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits, so that in recrossing the bridge and coming back within the enclosure the traveler henceforth finds there the exteriority that he had first sought by
going outside and then fled by returning. Within the frontiers, the alien is already there, an exoticism or sabbath of the memory, a disquieting familiarity. It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other.
Delinquencies?
What the map cuts up, the story cuts-across. In Greek, narration is called "diegesis": it establishes an itinerary (it "guides") and it passes through (it "transgresses"). The space of operations it travels in is made of movements: it is topological, cqneerning the deformations of figures, rather than topical, defining places. It is only ambivalently that the limit circumscribes in this space. It plays a double game. It does the opposite of what it says. It hands the place over to the foreigner that it gives the impression of throwing out. Or rather, when it marks a stopping place, the latter is not stable but follows the variations of encounters between programs. Boundaries are transportable limits and transportations of limits; they are also metaphorai.
In the narrations that organize spaces, boundaries seem to play the role of the Greek xoana, statuettes whose invention is attributed to the clever Daedalus: they are crafty like Daedalus and mark out limits only by moving themselves (and the limits). These straight-line indicators put emphasis on the curves and movements of space. Their distributive work is thus completely different from that of the divisions established by poles, pickets or stable columns which, planted in the earth, cut up and compose an order of places.25 They are also transportable limits.
Today, narrative operations of boundary-setting take the place of these enigmatic describers of earlier times when they bring movement in through the very act of fixing, in the name of delimitation. Michelet already said it: when the aristocracy of the great Olympian gods collapsed at the end of Antiquity, it did not take down with it "the mass of indigenous gods, the populace of gods that still possessed the immensity of fields, forests, woods, mountains, springs, intimately associated with the life of the country. These gods lived in the hearts of oaks, in the swift, deep waters, and could not be driven out of them. . . . Where are they? In the desert, on the heath, in the forest? Yes, but also and especially in the home. They live on in the most intimate of domestic habits."26 But they also live on in our streets and in our apartments. They were perhaps after all only the agile representatives of narrativity,
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and of narrativity in its most delinquent form. The fact that they have changed their names (every power is toponymical and initiates its order of places by naming them) takes nothing away from the multiple, insidious, moving force. It survives the avatars of the great history that debaptises and rebaptises them.
If the delinquent exists only by displacing itself, if its specific mark is to live not on the margins but in the interstices of the codes that it undoes and displaces, if it is characterized by the privilege of the tour over the state, then the story is delinquent. Social delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic outlets and expectations of spaces, where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside the pale. Inversely, the story is a sort of delinquency in reserve, maintained, but itself displaced and consistent, in traditional societies (ancient, medieval, etc.), with an order that is firmly established but flexible enough to allow the proliferation of this challenging mobility that does not respect places, is alternately playful and threatening, and extends from the microbe-like forms of everyday narration to the carnivalesque celebrations of earlier days.27
It remains to be discovered, of course, what actual changes produce this delinquent narrativity in a society. In any event, one can already say that in matters concerning space, this delinquency begins with the inscription of the body in the order's text. The opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organizes a here in relation to an abroad, a "familiarity" in relation to a "foreignness." A spatial story is in its minimal degree a spoken language, that is, a linguistic system that distributes places insofar as it is articulated by an "enunciatory focalization," by an act of practicing it. It is the object of "proxemics."28 Before we return to its manifestations in the organization of memory, it will suffice here to recall that, in this focalizing enunciation, space appears once more as a practiced place.
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NOTES TO PR 82-94
NOTES TO PP. 95-100
219
7. "Memory," in the ancient sense of the term, which designates a presence to the plurality of times and is thus not limited to the past.
8. Expressions in quotation marks in this section are from Detienne and Vernant, Les Ruses de ['intelligence, 23-25.
9. See M. de Certeau, "L'Etrange secret. Maniere d'ecnre pascalienne," Rivista diStoria e Letteratura Religiosa, 13 (1977), 104-126.
10. See Maurice Halbwachs, Lex Cadres sociaux de la memoire (La Haye: Mouton, 1975).
11. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
12. See below, Part IV, Uses of Language.
13. See below, and also above in Chapter II, p. 22.
14. Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Dedale. Mythologie de Tartisan en Grece ancienne (Paris: Maspero, 1975).
15. Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. V. Rose (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1967) fragment 668.
16. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 2, 982 bI8.
7. "Walking in the City"
1. See Alain Medam's admirable "New York City," Les Temps modernes, August-September 1976, 15-33; and the same author's New York Terminal (Paris: Galilee, 1977).
2. See H. Lavedan, Les Representations des villes dans Tart du Moyen Age (Paris: Van Oest, 1942); R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: Norton, 1962); L. Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d'espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973); etc.
3. M. Foucault, "L'Oeil du pouvoir," in J. Bentham, Le Panoptique (Paris: Belfond, 1977), 16.
4. D. P. Schreber, Memoires d'un nevropathe (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 41, 60, etc.
5. Descartes, in his Regulae, had already made the blind man the guarantor of the knowledge of things and places against the illusions and deceptions of vision.
6. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard Tel, 1976), 332-333.
7. See F. Choay, "Figures d'un discours inconnu," Critique, April 1973, 293-317.
8. Urbanistic techniques, which classify things spatially, can be related to the tradition of the "art of memory": see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). The ability to produce a spatial organization of knowledge (with "places" assigned to each type of "figure" or "function") develops its procedures on the basis of this "art," It determines Utopias and can be recognized even in Bentham's Panopticon. Such a form remains stable in spite of the diversity of its contents (past, future, present) and its projects (conserving or creating) relative to changes in the status of knowledge.
9. See André Glucksmann, "Le Totalitarisme en effet," Traverses, No. 9, 1977, 34-40.
10. M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
11. Ch. Alexander, "La Cite semi-treillis, mais non arbre," Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 1967.
12. See R. Barthes's remarks in Architecture d'aujourd'hui, No. 153, December 1970—January 1971, 11-13: "We speak our city. . . merely by inhabiting it, walking through it, looking at it." Cf. C. Soucy, LTmage du centre dans quatre romans contemporains (Paris: CSU, 1971), 6-15.
13. See the numerous studies devoted to the subject since J. Searle's "What is a Speech Act?" in Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (London: Allen & Unwin; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 221-239.
14. E. Benveniste, Problémes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), II, 79-88, etc.
15. R. Barthes, quoted in C. Soucy, LTmage du centre, 10.
16. "Here and now delimit the spatial and temporal instance coextensive and contemporary with the present instance of discourse containing I": E. Benveniste, Problémes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1, p. 253.
17. R. Jakobson, Essais de linguistique generale (Paris: Seuil Points, 1970), p. 217.
18. On modalities, see H. Parret, La Pragmatique des modalités (Urbino: Centro di Semiotica, 1975);rA. R. White, Modal Thinking (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).
19. See Paul Lemaire's analyses, Les Signes sauvages. Une Philosophie du langage ordinaire (Ottawa: Universitě d'Ottawa et Universitě Saint-Paul, 1981), in particular the introduction.
20. A. J. Greimas, "Linguistique statistique et linguistique structural," Le Francais moderne. October 1962, 245.
21. In a neighboring field, rhetoric and poetics in the gestural language of mute people, I am grateful to E. S. Klima of the University of California, San Diego and U. Bellugi, "Poetry and Song in a Language without Sound," an unpublished paper; see also Klima, "The Linguistic Symbol with and without Sound," in 77?<? Role of Speech in Language, ed. J. Kavanagh a*nd J. E. Cuttings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1975).
22. Conscience de la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1977).
23. See Ostrowetsky, "Logiques du lieu," in Sémiotique de L'espace (Paris: Denoel-Gonthier Mediations, 1979), 155-173.
24. Pas á pas. Essai sur le cheminement quotidien en milieu urbain (Paris: Seuil, 1979).
25. In his analysis of culinary practices, P. Bourdieu regards as decisive not the ingredients but the way in which they are prepared and used: "Le Sens pratique," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, February 1976, 77.
26. J. Sumpf, Introduction ä la stylistique dufrancais (Paris: Larousse, 1971), 87.
27. On the "theory of the proper," see J. Derrida, Marges de la philosophic
220
NOTES TO PP. 101-108
NOTES TO PP. 108-120
221
(Paris: Minuit, 1972), 247-324; Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
28. Augoyard, Pas ä pas.
29. T. Todorov, "Synecdoques," Communications, No. 16 (1970), 30. See also P. Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 87-97; J. Dubois et al., Rhetorique generale (Paris: Larousse, 1970), 102-112.
30. On this space that practices organize into "islands," see P. Bourdieu, Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique (Geneve: Droz, 1972), 215, etc.; "Le Sens pratique," 51-52.
31. See Anne Baldassari and Michel Joubert, Pratiques relationnelles des enfants a l'espace et institution (Paris: CRECELE-CORDES, 1976); and by the same authors, "Ce qui se trame," Paralleles, No. 1, June 1976.
32. Derrida, Marges, 287, on metaphor.
33. Benveniste, ProbVemes, I, 86-87.
34. For Benveniste, "discourse is language considered as assumed by the person who is speaking and in the condition of intersubjectivity" (ibid., 266).
35. See for example S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), Chapter VI, § 1-4, on condensation and displacement, "processes of figuration" that are proper to "dreamwork."
36. Ph. Dard, F. Desbons et al., La Ville. symbolique en souffrance (Paris: CEP, 1975), 200.
37. See also, for example, the epigraph in Patrick Modiano, Place de TEtoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
38. Joachim du Beilay, Regrets, 189.
39. For example, Sarcelles, the name of a great urbanistic ambition (near Paris), has taken on a symbolic value for the inhabitants of the town by becoming in the eyes of France as a whole the example of a total failure. This extreme avatar provides its citizens with the "prestige" of an exceptional identity.
40. Superstore: "to be above," as something in addition or superfluous.
41. See F. Lugassy, Contribution ä une psychosociologie de l'espace urbain. L'Habitat et la foret (Paris: Recherche urbaine, 1970).
42. Dard, Desbons et al., La Ville, symbolique en souffrance.
43. Ibid., 174,206.
44. C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plön, 1955), 434-436; Tristes tropiques, trans. J. Russell (New York: Criterion, 1962).
45. One could say the same about the photos brought back from trips, substituted for and turned into legends about the starting place.
46. Terms whose relationships are not thought but postulated as necessary can be said to be symbolic. On this definition of symbolism as a cognitive mechanism characterized by a "deficit" of thinking, see Dan Sperber, Le Sym-bolisme en general (Paris: Hermann, 1974); Rethinking Symbolism, trans. A. L. Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
47. F. Pqnge, La Promenade dans nos serres (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
48. A woman living in the Croix-Rousse quarter in Lyon (interview by Pierre Mayol): see L'lnvention du quotidien, II, Habiter, cuisiner (Paris: UGE 10/18, 1980).
49. See Le Monde for May 4, 1977.
50. See note 48.
51. See the two analyses provided by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1980); and also Sami-Ali, L'Espace imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 42-64.
52. J. Lacan, "Le Stade du miroir," Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 93-100; "The Mirror Stage," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).
53. S. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (New York: Norton, 1977).
54. V. Kandinsky, Du spirituel dans Tart (Paris: Denoel, 1969), 57.
9. "SpatialStories"
1. John Lyons, Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), II, 475-481,690-703.
2. George A. Miller and Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
3. See below, p. 118.
4. Albert E. Scheflen and Norman Ashcraft, Human Territories. How we Behave in Space-Time (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976).
5. E. A. Schegloff, "Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place," in Studies in Social Interaction, ed. David Sudnow (New York: The Free Press, 1972), pp. 75-119.
6. See, for example, Ecole de Tartu, Travaux sur les systemes de signes, ed. Y. M. Lotman and B. A. Ouspenski (Paris: PUF; Bruxelles: Complexe, 1976), 18-39, 77-93, etc.; Iouri Lotman, La Structure du texte artistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 309, etc; Juri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. R. Vroon (Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Michigan, 1977); B. A: Uspenskii, A Poetics of Composition, trans. V. Zavarin and S. Witting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
7. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phänomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard Tel, 1976), 324-344.
8. Charlotte Linde and William Labov, "Spatial Networks as a Site for the Study of Language and Thought," Language, 51 (1975), 924-939. On the relation between practice (le faire) and space, see also Groupe 107 (M. Hammad et al.), Semiotique de l'espace (Paris: DGRST, 1973), 28.
9. See, for example, Catherine Bidou and Francis Ho Tham Kouie, Le Vecu des habitants dans leur logement a trovers soixante entretiens libres (Paris: CEREBE, 1974); Alain Medam and Jean-Franfois Augoyard, Situations d'habi-tat et faeons d'habiter (Paris: ESA, 1976); etc.
10. See George H. T. Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1938); etc.
11. Roland Barthcs, L'Empire des signes (Geneve: Skira, 1970), pp. 47-51.
12. The map is reproduced and analyzed by Pierre Janet, L'Evoluiion de la memoire et la notion du temps (Paris: Chahine, 1928), 284-287. The original is
222
NOTES TO PP. 121-131
in Cuauhtinchan (Puebla, Mexico).
13. See, for example, Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d'espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973), 257-290, on the relation between figures (a "discourse-tour") and the map (a "system-text") in three representations of the city in the seventeenth century: a relation between a "narrative" and a "geometric."
14. Quoted in Bidou and Ho Tham Kouie, Le Vécu des habitants, 55.
15. Ibid., 57 and 59.
16. Janet, L'Evolution de la memoire, particularly the lectures on "the procedures of narrative" and "fabrication" (249-294). Médam and Augoyard have used this unit to define the subject matter of their investigation (Situations d'habitat, 90-95).
17. Lotman, in École de Tartu, Travaux sur les sysťemes de signes, 89.
18. Georges Dumézil, Idées romaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 61-78, on'Tus fetiale."
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 31-45.
21. Miller and Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception, 57-66, .385-390, 564, etc.
22. Christian Morgenstern, "Der Lattenzaun" (the picket fence), in Gesammelte Werke (München: Piper, 1965), 229.
23. See Nicole Brunet, "Un Pont vers l'acculturation. lie de Noirmoutiers," Diss. (DEA Ethnologie) Universitě de Paris VII, 1979.
24. See M. de Certeau, "Délires et délices de JérSmc Bosch," Traverses, No. 5-6 (1976), 37-54.
25. See Fran9oise Frontisi-Ducroux, Dédale. Mythologie de Vartisan en Grěce ancienne (Paris: Maspero, 1975), 104, 100-101, 117, etc., on the mobility of these rigid statues.
26. Jules Michelet, La Sorciěre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, n.d.), 23-24.
27. See, for example, on the subject of this ambiguity, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); The Carnival at Romans, trans. M. Fenney (New York: George Braziller, 1979).
28. See Paolo Fabbri, "Considerations sur la proxémique," Langages, No. 10 (June 1968), 65-75. E. T. Hall defined proxemics as "the study of how man unconsciously structures spaces—the distance between men in the conduct of daily transactions, the organization of space in his houses and buildings, and* ultimately the lay out of his towns" ("Proxemics: the Study of Man's Spatial Relations," in Man's Image in Medicine and Anthropology, ed. I. Gladston (New York: International Universities Press, 1963)).
10. "The Scriptural Economy"
1. Translated from Grundtvig, Budstikke i Hjiinorden (1864), 31 X 527; text quoted by Erica Simon, Réveil national et culture populaire en Scandinavie. La genese de la Hfaskole nordique, 1844-1878 (Copenhague, 1960), 59.
2. Simon, Réveil national et culture populaire, 54-59.