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The Spatial Theory of De Certeau, a Vagabond in Stray Space1

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The Spatial Theory of De Certeau, a Vagabond in Stray Space1 Localities, Vol. 5, 2015, pp. 89-102 http://dx.doi.org/10.15299/local.2015.11.5.89 The Spatial Theory of de Certeau, a Vagabond in Stray Space1 Se-Yong Jang HK Professor, Korean Studies Institute Pusan National University, Korea E-mail: [email protected] Abstract By using the spatial turn in his search for an alternative space, Michel de Certeau (1925-86) departed from the critique of the absolute space of the nation- state, focusing his attention on stray space which maintains/sustains/enables heterologous differentiation and fragmentation. However, we must note that he foresaw an unsystematic stray space of advertisement and propaganda which flow unceasingly, in which there spreads a micro-revolt without which the stray space has no territory of its own. De Certeau even foresaw an absent space in which the non-place is realized, a space where the Other or the self never become absolute. De Certeau explored the fables of mystics and tried to achieve a space of frustration and silence, expulsion and secession. In this sense, absent space is, by the ethical turn which corrects the limits of scientific rationalism, in a revolutionary space. Key words: Spatial turn, Practiced place, Absolute space, Stray space, Absent space 1) Translated from the French by Dr. Hal Swindall. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF‐2007‐361‐AL0001). 89 Se-Yong Jang Introduction: Stories of Space For de Certeau, space is a “product of subject,” a notion that is confused and radically heterologous: “It’s like a tapestry whose horizons encompass historic revolutions, economic changes and demographic mixtures, on which lie customs, rituals and practices,” he wrote.2 De Certeau delicately separated space, a territory of daily life, from place, an institutional territory which has its own stability and confers a sort of authority to activities. Only the practiced place could have the basic attribute of stories of space.3 De Certeau’s spatial thought founded on the heterophenomenological experience was developed with John L. Austin’s theory of language acts, Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, Deleuze/Guattari’s nomadism, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the field and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. 4 For de Certeau, the notion of space stories is an act of strategically producing a space on the plan of “spatial turning” in displacing the text in the concept of space. But why is it perceived as a strategic production? Because this type of projection of space is a process of space production operated by a group of experts having a certain “doctrine” for disguising their way of producing truth.5 Spatial turning is thus developed around the idea of stray space which floats without stopping in critiquing the absolute space organized according to the bureaucratic administration and technocracy of a nation- state. De Certeau followed by adding the idea of absent space, which 2) Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien 1, 294. 3) Ibid., 174. 4) Buchanan; Dosse, 2002; Delacroix; F. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, 2006; Highmore, 2006. 5) Certeau, Histoire psychanalyse entre science et fiction, 218; Massumi, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, 203. Cf. Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 55. 90 The Spatial Theory of de Certeau, a Vagabond in Stray Space carries the reflections of every existing spatial structure and all its values, and which reverses them. Absent space is one of displacement, not of opposition in which one creates absence across mutual dialogs.6 The objective of this research consists in finding a spatial theory that is an ethical turning of space. Stray Space: a Space of Differentiation and Fragmentation Stray space is the alternative territory where the spatial struggle continues as class struggle, and is the heterologous field where a micro- revolt prepares itself. It is a “practiced place” in which the privileged status and the fixed identity of a subject which were justified until now are doubtful, and where an otherness varied by cultural minorities such as India’s, women’s, blacks’ and Jews’ are accepted.7 The notion of a “practiced place” reminds us of the concepts of the “wig” and the “poaching,” which served as tools de Certeau used in a diverted manner while he explained the realization of popular culture. First, the “wig” signifies the employment of diverted cunning by which the reader changes, reverses, astonishes and twists the sense of space, and uses transformational tropes. Next, “poaching” is an operation to fabricate a series of cracks on the apparent uniformity of the existing social organization and structure of the space of a text.8 De Certeau took in a deviant manner the notions of Lefebvre’s 9 terms strategy and tactic, which sought a revolt against alienated everydayness. In de Certeau’s work, strategy becomes a foundation for an absolute space on which 6) Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, 73. 7) Certeau, Histoire psychanalyse entre science et fiction, 210-15; Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, xv, 217-18. 8) Certeau, L’invention du quotidian 1. Arts de faire, 45-46, 252. 9) Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne II, 139. 91 Se-Yong Jang relations of domination and a calculation of relations between wills to power of subjects are produced. It is the act of assuming a distinct “place” by its realization, and producing an exterior with which shares its border. A strategic place is where, based on the abstract copy, the production of goods, of security, of control and of possession is refined and totalized. Modern politics, economics and scientific rationalism are established on precisely this strategic model.10 By contrast, tactical space is one where people seek an ecological structure in a local dimension. However, the calculation of tactical space does not depend on space in the sense institutionally localized “clean areas” or lines of demarcation. Tactical space shows itself as constantly unstable, secondary and moving. It is a space devoted to the other, that is to say a “practiced place.” A tactic is a technique for minorities and the weak who provide a “political dimension to everyday actions,” and which “makes the weak strong by a potential power to overturn.” 11 Above all, a tactic is a “course of an adventurous route” which, spatially speaking, exploits the adversary’s time and space by crossing it without leaving tracks or possessing it, being a mutating hybrid whose totality is inestimable. This is because tactics’ courses constitute “an unpredictable and partially unreadable ‘route which crosses’ a space”12 in a structurally functionalized and technocratically constructed space. A tactic is thus a “calculated action which defines the absence of something of its own,” and does not possess an autonomous position specific to itself. It is uniquely positioned as the other that de Certeau counted as the most important element in the theory of spaces. What it needs is the ability to organize the rules of unknown powers in a territory imposed by the dominator, that is to say the power to carry on business in a battlefield 10) Certeau, L’invention du quotidien 1, 59. Cf. J. P. Mitchel, “A Fourth Critic of the Englightenment: Michel de Certeau and the Ethnography of Subjectivity.” Social Anthropology. Anthropologie Sociale 15 (2007), 89-106. 11) Certeau, L’invention du quotidien 1, xvii, 61, 173. 12) Ibid., xlv. 92 The Spatial Theory of de Certeau, a Vagabond in Stray Space that is ruled and controlled by enemies.13 If strategy generates and “controls” a physical place, which is the foundation of long-term power, and if it is an operation which demands stability and economic, scientific symbolic and accumulated capital, then the agile tactic seizes changes in the political situation in an instantaneous moment and strikes the cracks which appear in space or wherever else they are unexpected. It is a combative poetics, a method of mobile attack, of displacement and of strikes which transform the organization of space. A tactic creates a space which “erodes” these places in a short time by a “practice of bacterias.” The “possibility of non-determinability” is always open in this space; it avoids the capture or power or even rationalization, and “pursues the other interest and cunning of desire which are neither determined nor captures by the dominant system.”14 This is why tactical space is a stray space. What concretely signifies the “way of practicing space”? According to de Certeau, it starts with the refusal of urbanism developed by city dwellers under the name of rationality.15 What is important in a spatial town is the everyday movement created by pedestrians. The varied attitudes, textures and styles of walking engender ways of interlacing. Pedestrians define and realize the form of the space in which coincidences superimpose themselves. Just as the act of enunciating allows an enunciator to interiorize a linguistic system, so the act of walking allows a pedestrian to interiorize streets in towns by the demonstration of a spatial walk.16 Pedestrians’ ways of walking reconstruct the original sense of urbanism; they appropriate places with names of their own to reconstruct new meanings and impregnate the town with them. This is where alternative space itself and the point of departure for the liberated area is found. The 13) Ibid., 60-61. 14) Ibid., 64. 15) Certeau, La Culture au pluriel, 205; l”invention du quotidien 1, 143-46. 16) Ibid., 148. 93 Se-Yong Jang tactic of “detachment” and “fragmentation” functions in this space. If detachment permits different points of view to penetrate the cracks in achieving the particularity of a space, then fragmentation is joined to the plurality of knowing which produces meanings that principally come from exceptional and negative things.17 But a problem presents itself here because the moment when resistant otherness theorizes the indeterminable practice of resistance in tactical space, it is highly probable that it finds itself facing a paradox which damages the flexibility and indeterminability of the tactic.
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