The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Sally R. Munt
ductive: in The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau writes about New York
as a city of regeneration. Standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade
Center he looks down on Manhattan and draws on Foucault’s model of the
panopticon. As his “view” travels down to the streets he sees a city constantly
reinventing itself, and his scopic, gnostic drive falters. Taking up the
position of the walker he discovers another, more anarchic spatiality. The
city as concept is exceeded by the many pluralities that are generated in, of,
and between it; it cannot be fully regulated. The city is a machine that produces
an excess, a proliferation of illegitimacy, which discursive practices
cannot contain. Pedestrian life has a singularity that escapes the cartological
discipline of the architect’s plans:
The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, so no
matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it
can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it
does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities
within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and
citations into them. ... These diverse aspects provide the basis of
a rhetoric. 30
de Certeau sees walking as a space of enunciation, and the pedestrian’s journey,
like the speech act, has an unlimited diversity. Within the city-as-text
there is an antitext: “Things extra and other . . . 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.” 31
The perambulations of the lesbian flâneur on the streets of the city
mark out a territorial discourse—to extend the spatial analogy—of heroic
proportions. Her journey from “here” to “there” invokes an active “I,” a
phatic statement of subjectivity and location that refuses verbal and spatial
effacement. Her desire is the machine of her incarnation. Briefly returning to
Brighton for the summer, my eye follows a woman wearing a wide-shouldered linen
suit. Down the street, she starts to decelerate. I zip up my jacket, put my best boot forward,
and tell myself that “home” is just around the corner.