The Individual Walk

One of the sections I appreciated most in de Certeau was the chapter “Walking in the City.” After reading introduction to his theory on the “practices” of everyday life, including his exploration of “tactics” versus “strategy,” I enjoyed his exploration of the everyday practice of walking as a parallel experience to enunciating in language.

One of the ideas that resonated with me most about this section was how the practice of walking is at once a measured and transient thing. You can measure where people walk, what their most likely trajectory is, what the most common paths are and possible reasons, but the second you go to measure these things, the actual object of study, i.e. the movement of the passerby, is gone. This is similar to how he begins the section with being above the city in the World Trade Center, seeing the whole of the city but not any one particular. In this, he is also exploring the contradiction of examining the particulars of everyday life. For when you are above the city and able to see it all, you are no longer a participant in the city. But when you are participating in the particulars, you are unable to see the whole picture and your own placement in that picture.

I think this exploration speaks to the transient nature of most of our everyday practices (perhaps as he explores through the idea of tactics, not grounded in place). We can examine how we cook, how we walk, how we talk, but we do not examine those in the moment where the action is actually taking place. So how accurate can our measurements and data be when they are given in retrospect?

On page 103, de Certeau claims “to walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.” I think of this idea also in relationship to traveling. Traveling allows one to be absent from the obligations of day-to-day life, to step outside of the familiar and thus change one’s perspective. In traveling, one seems to be in search of a way to locate oneself with this new environment; that, in this case, is the proper.

When I was taking a break from this chapter yesterday, I went on The New York Times website and read an article about a woman with a rare psychological disorder called “dissociative fugue, a rare form of amnesia that causes people to forget their identity, suddenly and without warning, and can last from a few hours to years.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/nyregion/thecity/01miss.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=upp&st=cse)

The woman, a 23-year-old teacher, was missing for three weeks before she was found floating in the river. The last thing she recalled was a run she took on the day she went missing. However, she had functioned all that time. People with the disorder she had retain the ability to practice everyday actions, but they are suspended from their identities. In other words, they know how to participate as a person in the everyday but they have lost all of their personal connection and meaning attached to it.

I wonder about this absence of personality and the singular in everyday tactics. What does it mean to eat if we have none of our previous associations with food? Or to walk if we are not walking to or from work or home—to walk with no destination? Or to check email (as she did at the Apple store, but signed out after she didn’t recognize her own name on the heading) if we don’t have connections to the people or organizations sending them? This disruption of experience also makes me think about how much we can accurately calculate tactics and strategies of “the everyday” in an abstraction, apart from the decisions we make as individual personalities.

De Certeau mentions that it is the singularity of the walker that makes the walk unpredictable. The walker can “actualize some of these possibilities,” but he also “moves about them and he invents others….” (98). He adds, “the walker transforms each sptial signifier into something else” (98). It is the individual experience of the walker, the enunciation of the walk, that ultimately challenges what is expected or possible.

~Lisa