“Walking in the City” De Certeau Questions

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

            De Derteau says when a person is viewing everything from a place that high, he or she is not effected by certain norms. Because of how a person is isolated at this height, it is possible to see what they usually would not perceive at ground level.

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

            Urban life has changed the way people live, making their daily lives a lot more convenient. Because communication with others is so easily accessible in urban areas, information, ideas, and opinions travel around rather quickly. This allows the ease of change and with the ease of sharing, the intangible can transform into reality.

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

            The Chorus of idle footsteps refers to the people walking past each other in the city without a second thought of how these people are. Tactile apprehension is the sense that something unpleasant may happen and that’s how people are when they interact with strangers of see people for the first time. As there are accepted norms, there are accepted actions. That’s what kinesthetic appropriation is and people behave a certain way when placed in a new environment.

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

            The walking is a metaphor for how the people themselves set and create a system. The city is the space that allows the people to act out their ideas and thoughts.  He believes that anyone can spread their thoughts to the mass in a city/urban environment.

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

            According to De Certeau, walking is not just a simple forward movement. There are many aspects that come into play such as “alethic" modalities of the necessary, the impossible, the possible, or the contingent), an epistemological value ("epistemic" modalities of the certain, the excluded. the plausible, or the questionable) or finally an ethical or legal value ("de­ontic" modalities of the obligatory, the forbidden, the permitted, or the optional).”

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

            Walking is like the thought process. There are a lot of trial and erros changes and flips. This can be seen as somewhat poetic.

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

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

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

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