This is a dangerous omission, Certeau argues, because in the activity of re-use lies an abundance of opportunities for ordinary people to subvert the rituals and representations that institutions seek to impose upon them.
Exactly. Relevant to my project, as I'm interested in appropriation, ritual, and I suppose on some level, consumerism (and anti-)-- so this has been an extremely fun read.
My notes:
(13) on Wittgenstein: reading/doing philosophy: like savages (sic. yes, sick) hearing expressions of civilized men (sigh), putting a false interpretation on what we hear & drawing the queerest conclusions from it." -- no longer position of professionals but rather "...being a foreigner at home, a "savage" in the midst of ordinary culture, lost in the complexity of the common agreement and what goes without saying it. ...Since in short there is no way out, the fact remains that we are foreigners on the inside, but there is no outside. Thus we must constantly "run up against the limits" of ordinary language."
-- this reminds me of Pierre Joris's idea of the poet always outside of language (even mother tongue); though de Certeau seems to purport that this is everyone's position, at least concerning philosophy? (but certainly could be extended to language, as it's infinitely customized/able to suit individual needs/to overcome shortcomings) But are we as poets privileged (if these two ideas can be conflated) because we can see language not only as perplexing but also as malleable? We are outside it (as much as possible) with the inside scoop? (dare I say) benevolently looking in? or violently, maybe-- doesn't poetry reflect/dictate most efficiently the patterns & trends of ordinary language?
(17) Religion & Voodoo-- Brazilian (specifically religious and/or mystical) songs "provide a site that is impregnable, because it exists nowhere, a utopia. They create another space, which coexists with that of an experience deprived of illusions. (emphasis mine)
-- So songs can begin to or do articulate the ineffable? *Songs (and religion, for that matter) are received language (makes me think of Notley's idea of music played v. being the essence of music)-- an imposed system. But what elevates this above any other received liturgy-- or is that the point?
(21) proverbs: "Like tools, provers (and other discourses) are marked by uses; they offer to analysis the imprints of acts or of processes of enunciation; they signify the operations whose object they have been, operations which are relative to situations and which can ben thought of as the conjectural modalizations of statements or of practices; more generally, they thus indicate a social historicity in which systems of representations or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users."
la perruque: the wig, obviously, but also: pursuiing one's own ends on company time
la perruque with folk songs/tales: displayed as justification to city folk (implied then that low/high art still ≠ and still relevant terms?
(27) "texts that honor and bury them at the same time"-- texts of miracles, masters, history
(28) manifesto:
"make textual objects that signify an art & solidarities; ...we can exchange gifts... practice an 'ordinary' art, to find oneself in the common situation, & to make a kind of perruque of writing itself."
"Making Do:" superimposes and creates a space where one has no choice but to live & which lays down its law for one, one establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity
-- use and re-use-- poethics?
"Walking in the City"
City can be viewed from above and by walking (latter "practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen") "A migrational, metaphorical city slips into the clear text of the planned & readable city."
***possible in poetics?
(97) operations of walking (esp. on set "paths") forget the experience itself (window shopping etc.) "the trace left behind is substituted for the practice."
--appropriation, spatial acting-out of the place, implies relations among the differentiated positions.
(98) if a walker actualizes some possibilities of a place (it is a place in which no one can move, a walk prevents further movement) he makes them exist as well as emerge
-- link to Bataille? sacrifice--ritual--signifies emergence (not just participation)?
(98) created discreteness: choices made/ "the user of a city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret"-- makes choices among the signifiers of spatial "language" or by displacing them through the use he makes of them
(99) here & there imply an "I" and introduce possibilities of an "other" in relation to this "I" thus establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places
synecdoche: makes more from less; fragment to whole (frag represents whole)
asyndeton: suppression of linking words such as adverbs and conjunctions either within a sentence or between sentences. cuts out; creates a "less" via elision; opens gaps in spatial continuum; undoes continuity; undercuts its plausibility
(103) "to walk is to lack a place"
(103-4) le sens des mots & le sens de la marche: external factors/ordering of space (the City, for instance) watches/keeps its gaze on us; the proper names give/offer familiarity-- they "make sense"-- we both recognize them & they give us direction
--more than an idea: "the magical powers proper names enjoy"-- their power over us, to control (positively or negatively) our actions
(106) other than home (marked, opened up by a memory or a story signed by something/one else) in City there are only "places in which one can no longer believe in anything."
(107) To tell oneself legends = to invent spaces. makeshift things.
fort/da principle (fort= over there, gone, no more; da= to be other and to move toward the other)
(110) to practice space... it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other
"Spatial Stories": admittedly, I didn't enjoy this chapter as much as the others, perhaps because by the time I re-read it, I was reading it from my course pack from 740, with all of my notes from "Rhetoric of Song"-- which made this reading a bit difficult, as I kept relating de Certeau's ideas back to song. But a few notes:
(117) "In short, space is a practiced place." Place v. Space seems to = Static v. Mobile
(120) idea of the tour v. the map seems to be the difference between the 2nd person POV ("on the right, you see a low door") and the 3rd ("the girls' room is next to the kitchen"). Interestingly, the "tour" (2nd person POV) is the overwhelmingly popular method. I'm pretty sure that I give directions in this way; I think it's because I'm trying to orient myself in this "story"-- and so to put you there, I put myself there. Says de Certeau: "Everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space." (122)
Purposes of stories:
1) Creating a theater of actions, to authorize, to found. "It 'provides space' for the actions that will be undertaken; it 'creates a field' which serves as their 'base' and their 'theater.'" (124) It is fragmented, miniaturized, and polyvalent: "Fragmented and disseminated, it is continually concerned with marking out boundaries." (125)
2) Frontiers and bridges, representing the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, a legitimate space and its exteriority. This space is created by that interaction: "And also that the determination of space is dual and operational, and, in a problematics of enunciation, related to an 'interlocutory' process." (126)
Again, "Limits are drawn by the points at which the progressive appropriations (the acquisitions of predicates in the course of the story) and the successive displacements (internal or external movements) of the acting subjects meet... 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. Conjuction 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?" (126-7)
Theoretical problem: the border makes the frontier such-- so to whom does it belong? The mouthpiece of the limit "creates communication as well as separation" and establishes the border only by "saying what crosses it, having come from the other side."
Specifically, bridges: "As a transgression of the limit... it represents a departure, an attack on a sate, the ambition of a conquering power, or the flight of an exile; in any case, the 'betrayal' of an order." (128) It facilitates departure, offers an other option
and it all comes back to space being a practiced place.
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