University of California Berkeley Open City Novel Discussion Write a post about the way Open City resonates with and/or challenges Michel de Certeau’s theo | Course Hero

University of California Berkeley Open City Novel Discussion Write a post about the way Open City resonates with and/or challenges Michel de Certeau’s theory of ‘practicing’ the city. Write a 600 word post and be as specific as possible about the way you see the text/material conversing with de Certeau’s theory. Be sure to cite one quote or reference a particular example in your post. What questions or problems emerge when we put Cole’s novel in conversation with de Certeau’s ideas about the city and the everyday people who move in and through urban spaces?

The attachments are readings you need to look through

Once you’ve made your post, read over your colleagues’ posts and respond to at least one.

Classmate’s posts (choose one to respond):

post 1

New York City is a place where individuals from all over the world see America through their own lens. For these individuals, the American Dream represents a pursuit of meaning, usually by the means of financial stability. Teju Cole’s Open City and Ralph Ellison’s Harlem Is Nowhere paint a picture of the American dream through the perspective of the less fortunate, the detached, and the obscure. While Open City provides the reader with economic and societal context throughout NYC, Harlem Is Nowhere focuses on the struggle and detachment of one neighborhood. While Cole emphasizes perspective as a framework for meaningful pursuit, Ellison suggests that meaning brews from the “inner struggle” of those who seek it.

Cole’s Open City portrays NYC as a melting pot of different cultures, all contributing their unique perspectives in resembling the American dream. By compelling the reader to look through the lens of Julius, a Nigerian immigrant, Cole integrates perspective as the text’s dominant force. Julius described each neighborhood of NYC as being “made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks” (Cole). Each neighborhood has its own foreign culture and collectively serves as an integral piece of the American dream. By specifically referring to “the housing projects and luxury hotels” as being “made of a different substance”, Cole highlights the economic disparities between neighborhoods and the cultures, mindsets, and attitudes that shape such disparities.

In Harlem Is Nowhere, “to live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay” (Ellison). Being forced “to pass through a labyrinthine existence”, Black individuals in Harlem were shoved into a bewildering maze that hindered prosperity and meaning, where economic and social discrimination stood as blockades. Ellison metaphorically implies that meaning is a pursuit by which individuals internally overcome the struggles placed before them. Black individuals needed to overcome the struggles of discrimination in finding their life’s meaning. Although both texts signify the pursuit of meaning in life, perspective is a key element in Cole’s text, while struggle plays an integral role in Ellison’s.

Open City and Harlem Is Nowhere portray the struggles of those in search of meaning, in a place that limits clarity to some. Those who can’t see past the bewildering stupor are unlikely to escape the detached culture they live in. Both texts highlight the detachment of certain people and neighborhoods from the American dream, as well as balance the conversation between perspective and struggle in finding one’s meaning.

post 2

“Many Americans assume that European Muslims are covered from head to toe if they are women, or that they were a full beard if they are men, and that they are only interested in protesting perceived insults to Islam. The man on the street – do you understand this expression? – the ordinary American probable does not imagine that Muslims in Europe sit in cafes drinking beer, smoking, and discussing political philosophy. In the same way, American blacks are like any other Americans; they are like any other people.” (Cole 119).

I chose to discuss this quote because it brings to light the main themes in Open City and does a good job in portraying the way this novel explores the concepts of race in society. In this book, Julius often embarks on long walks through the city, as we all know, and when he does this, he finds tons of joy. This is because he is effectively exiting reality and walking into the unknown when he goes on his walks – he does not know what he may find or who he may meet, but he just knows that from observing, he will learn a lot. All he has with him is his point of view, and the hope that some ideas he encounters, whether from other people or from society itself, may challenge this point of view or reiterate it in some way. One of these examples if from above, where Julius shares his beliefs on race in his city of New York, and learns about the way others view race in their European city of Brussels, from a different perspective (the perspective of those marginalized). This leads me, as the reader, to the belief that any idea is challengeable and malleable and can always become a better form of itself, visible through the quote, in which Julius demonstrates to his Moroccan-Belgian friends the concept of marginalization and improper perceptions of race.

On the other hand, Nella Larsen’s Passing didn’t seem to give off the same message. There, instead, it seemed that challenging a concept and using it for growth played second fiddle to this idea of comfort: the idea that situations should just be viewed in a manner that is the most convenient and comfortable for those involved. This is evident in Clare’s marriage, where she accepts her husband’s outrageous racism and chooses to marry him, instead of marrying someone who will accept all races or have an advanced view on society. Similarly, when Irene believes Bryan to be cheating on her with Clare, she chooses not to challenge the concept, in her own head or with her spouse, and simply chooses to erase it from her brain for the purpose of simplicity and convenience. Thus, these two stories seem to give us conflicting views on society and the ways in which society can progress and be accepting of others.

The main problem emerging from putting these two texts in the same conversation arises from time frame. passing takes place almost 100 years earlier, and thus society was very different at that time, leading rise to the differences in the two novels. However, the main themes remain regardless, and these differences in a way, go to show how society and these northern cities may have changed over the course of those 90 ish years. THE PRACTICE OF
EVERYDAY LIFE
Michel de Certeau
Translated by Steven Rendall
q3
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished
university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the
world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences,
and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press
Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals
and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD.
London, England
Copyright © 1984 by the Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1988
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Certeau, Michel de.
The practice of everyday life.
Translation of: Arts de faire.
1. Social history—Addresses, essays, lectures.
1. Title.
1-1118.C4313 1984 909 83-18070
ISBN 978-0-520-27145-6
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
To the ordinary man.
To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless
thousands on the streets. In invoking here at the outset of my narratives
the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity,
I inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. What are
we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the
rumble of history to license us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate
to him the writing that one formerly offered in praise of the gods or the
inspiring muses?
This anonymous hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of
societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. He does not expect
representations. He squats now at the center of our scientific stages. The
floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names
and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary
characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. The increasingly
sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the
anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic
details—parts taken for the whole. Slowly the representatives that
formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the
stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. We witness the
advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city,
administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven
tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of
quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered
river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities
_
that belong to no one.
Part III
Spatial Practices
Chapter VII Walking in the City
s
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 Rome, 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.’
EEING
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WALKING IN THE CITY
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 spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since
technical procedures have organized an “all-seeing power”? 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
WALKING IN THE CITY
93
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, Wandersmanner, whose
bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without
being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot
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.’ 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 agairisi 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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WALKING IN THE CITY
surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city.
Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history,
it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an
urbanistic ratio. Linking the city to the concept never makes them
identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is
both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of
thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be
able to do it.
An operational concept?
The “city” founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse’ is defined by
the possibility of a threefold operation:
1. The production of its own space (un espace propre): rational
organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political
pollutions that would compromise it;
2. the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the
indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal
scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data in
a plane projection, must replace the tactics of users who take advantage
of “opportunities” and who, through these trap-events, these lapses in
visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere;
3. finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is
the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its
political model, Hobbes’ State, all the functions and predicates that were
previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects—
groups, associations, or individuals. “The city,” like a proper name, thus
provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a
finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.
Administration is combined with a process of elimination in this place
organized by “speculative” and classificatory operations.8 On the one
hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations,
etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable of
being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the “waste products” of a
functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.).
To be sure, progress allows an increasing number of these waste products
f
WALKING IN THE CITY
95
to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even
deficiencies (in health, security, etc.) into ways of making the networks
of order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary to
those at which it aims: the profit system generates a loss which, in the
multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of
waste inside it, constantly turns production into “expenditure.” Moreover, the rationalization of the city leads to its mythification in strategic
discourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the necessity of its destruction in order to arrive at a final decision.9 Finally, the
functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e., time), causes the
condition of its own possibility—space itself—to be forgotten; space
thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This
is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but
also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.
Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have
to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and
almost mythital landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies,
urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the
urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself “urbanizing,” but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.
The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no
longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the
discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers
that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can
take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to
administer.
The return of practices
The Concept-city is decaying. Does that mean that the illness afflicting
both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the
urban populations as well? Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with
the procedures that organized them. But we must be careful here. The
ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe
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WALKING IN THE CITY
was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and
their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into
theories of misfortune. When they transform their bewilderment into
“catastrophes,” when they seek to enclose the people in the “panic” of
their discourses, are they once more necessarily right?
Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its
privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer
of progress), one can try another path: one can try another path: one
can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an
urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which
have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these
procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic
administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy,
developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance,
and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point
of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that
are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the
observational organization.
This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but also as the
reciprocal, of Foucault’s analysis of the structures of power. He moved
it in the direction of mechanisms and technical procedures, “minor
instrumentalities” capable, merely by their organization of “details,” of
transforming a human multiplicity into a “disciplinary” society and of
managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances
concerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the army, or work.’° “These
often miniscule ruses of discipline,” these “minor but flawless” mechanisms, draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and
the space that they redistribute in order to make an “operator” out of it.
But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is
manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? In
the present conjuncture, which is marked by a contradiction between the
collective mode of administration and an individual mode of reappropriation, this question is no less important, if one admits that spatial
practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social
life. I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistance,
tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a
theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity
of the city.
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2. The chorus of idle footsteps
“The goddess can be recognized by her step”
Virgil, Aeneid, I, 405
Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but
do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has
a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic
appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of
singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They
weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one
of these “real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.”11 They
are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more
inserted within a container than those Chinese characters speakers sketch
out on their hands with their fingertips.
It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps
in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very
faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick
or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed
by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The
operation of walking, wandering, or “window shopping,” that is, the
activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing
and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in
the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of
making invisible the operation that -made it possible. These fixations
constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted
for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical
system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing
so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.
Pedestrian speech acts
A comparison with the speech act will allow us to go further12 and not
limit ourselves to the critique of graphic representations alone, looking
from the shores of legibility toward an inaccessible beyond. The act of
walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to
the statements uttered.° At the most elementary level, it has a triple
“enunciative” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker
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appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the
place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it
implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation
is an “allocution,” “posits another opposite” the speaker and puts contracts between…
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