Andrew's Wiki
Practice Everyday Life

Intro

• Wikipedia
  • Jesuit scholar; mysticism, phenomenology, a “Freudian school” founder
  • Practice of Everyday Life (1980, trans 1984)
    • Not about structures of power, but how the individual unconsciously navigates the world. Everyday life is about habit and automatic actions.
    • Strategies v tactics: strategies used by institutions, tactics by individuals used to create their own spaces
      • Tactic, as a kind of beyond space: “A tactic is a calculated action, determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power”
    • People are affected by the structures of power, but in everyday life they “map” their own routes anyway: “victories of the weak over the strong”
      • It’s about the consumer, not the producer
• Users can manipulate their environment
  • In unforeseeable, unmappable ways
• Cites language as the domain we can learn from to describe such practices (rhetoric has the tools we need)
• One of the most accepted interventions against the “iron cage,” de Certeau here gives us chances for subversion, resistance, etc, an outside of totalitarian systems

Ideas

• Method, ix
  • “a science of singularity…link[ing] everyday pursuits to particular circumstances”
  • to find the “subtle logic of these ‘ordinary’ activities” which have three goals: survival, aesthetics, and ethics
• General Introduction, xi
  • to find out how “users” “operate” even though they’ve been “commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules”
  • for ”’ways of operating,’ or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity”
  • not about individuality b/c his individual is a “locus” for social relations ONLY
    • plus he wants to know about their “schemata” not themselves
• 1. Usage, or Consumption xii
  • Study what people DO or MAKE while watching television or shopping or walking in urban space
    • I’d say this is a better understanding of consumption than merely shopping: not just the images they consume or advertisements will tell us the truth; their actions will, and we have to use books to find those behaviors out
    • a hidden poiesis, creation, a production: hidden b/c “scattered”
      • scattered where? well, consumers no longer have any well defined place, he says, b/c of the growth of spaces of production (urban development, commerce, etc)
  • So, we know people are making, but he also says there’s “another production called ‘consumption’”
    • Consumption = devious, dispersed, “insuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly” WHY? b/c is NOT about the products, but about the “way of using” the products
      • thank God someone finally gets what consumption ACTUALLY is
      • ex: When Spanish colonized Indians, they did what Spanish told em to (Catholicism), but they did it in their own way, “used them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept”
    • You can “escape it without leaving it”
      • ex: how the “common people” use the elite culture that seeps down
  • Just the objects themselves won’t help: “the presence and circulation of a representation…tells us nothing about what it is for its users” xiii
    • “users who are not its makers”
  • What is his kind of consumption? a “secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization”
  • calls it a “collective activity” xiv
• 2. The procedures of everyday creativity xiv
  • Says he follows Foucault’s Discipline and Punish b/c of the substitution of ”’miniscule’ technical procedures” for institutions
    • However, a problem: “privileges the productive apparatus” and so we need to discover how people “resist” being “reduced to” discipline
    • Thus, he agrees w/Foucault about the basic structure of power, but he wants to extend that structure to the evasion of power too
  • How do people “evade” this discipline network?
    • “reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production”
      • but he doesn’t give lots of examples: he admits in his preface that his work is opening up a field for study, rather than being a study itself, thus opening up the space for me to work
    • “microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of ‘tactics’ articulated in the details of everyday life” xiv
    • “the network of antidiscipline”
• 3. The formal structure of practice
  • “multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed within devices whose mode of usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions”
    • perhaps this is why these acts of reappropriation are always temporary and incomplete?
  • however, they do have “rules” and a “logic”
  • “an art of combination”
  • we must take UNCONSCIOUS thought seriously xv
    • Bourdieu, Goffman have done so, as well as a variety of sociologists and anthropologists (surely we could say Simmel does the same), and analytic philosophy
  • they have the “delicate layering and plasticity of ordinary language, with its almost orchestral combinations of logical elements” xvi
    • I like how you could explain the bells of the church in Dalloway this way, as well as the Cymbeline quote repeating
  • “logical and cultural legitimacy” of these everyday practices
• “Marginality of the majority”
  • operations, which are appropriations and creative: this is what characterizes consumption
    • again I love how everyone else takes ‘consumption’ for granted but not him
  • Marginality is “massive and pervasive” b/c technically they are “non-producers” in the sense that their activity “is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized” xvii
    • this activity is all we have: we are all marginal
    • but we’re not homogeneous xvii
  • All reuses of products are “linked together in a kind of obligatory language…related to social situations and power relationships”
    • it’s like the terms are already defined for you, but you get to shuffle them around
    • not identical “within the consumer grid;” some people have more space to work around in
  • Thus this study will reveal “polemological analysis of culture” (conflicts, violence, contracts, balances, compromises)
  • Each act “more or less temporary” xvii
  • Each act has “political dimension” to it
• His Three Goals
  • “search for a problematics that could articulate the material collected” (that is a method and a purpose)
  • descriptions of exemplary practices
  • extending these rules from everyday life to “scientific fields” xvii
    • does this extension have to happen to science? can it extend somewhere else?

Tactics v Strategies

• People are “unrecognized producers” xiii
  • Reminds me of D and G, everything is production
• How do they produce? With ”’indirect’ or ‘errant’ trajectories obeying their own logic,” “unforeseeable sentences”
  • me: Stein mightn’t see liberation in this, but rather another kind of syntax-tyranny, where your meaning is limited and you must break the sentence-form…but maybe everyday practices don’t truly have a set grammar and are the utopian possibility Stein wishes for language? How far can we take the language analogy?
    • Certeau does say, “composed with the vocabularies of established language” and “subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms” nonetheless they are “neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop” xiii
      • I think Stein is fiercer than de Certeau here
    • can all of this overlap tell me something about the mixture of modernist experimentation and everyday life practices? Do they interplay? Can one comment on another? Which is freer? Does Stein want a freedom only life activity can have, or is de Certeau settling for something less than revolutionary?
      • maybe we have 2 modernisms: some who are happy improvising, and some who break the syntax: both in everyday practice and in authorship
      • you can have an act-radical but text-liberal; an act-liberal but text-radical; act-liberal text-liberal; act-radical text-radical; etc
      • can I understand modernism as this issue, that we recognize that the text and action work by semiotics/a grammar, and then you see how people react to it: what they accept and what they don’t.
      • political-conservative: keep the same values and goals and actors; p-liberal: like the unforeseeable Parliament; p-radical: break Parliament!
      • see xxii, where he actually makes the comparison: “equivalent of the rules of meter and rhyme for poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays”
• What is the space they move around in?
  • “technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space”
• Mode of production: “phrasing,” “bricolage,” “artisan-like inventiveness” (Ruskin?)
  • Does remind me of Ruskin, making his Gothic stone-cutters the paradigm of de Certeau!
  • “discursiveness” despite the fact that the objects “are all in general circulation and rather drab” xiii
• Strategy
  • “calculus of force-relationships” at the basis of “political, economic, and scientific rationality”
  • this is when “subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’”
    • why isolated? b/c only then can it be “generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clienteles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research)” xix
    • very cool! you must isolate something to put it into a FORCE relation you can control (whereas this other model is gonna be about immersion, I bet)
  • involves creation of “a place that can be circumscribed as proper” (boundaries of force relations, I’d say)
• Tactic
  • “belongs to the other”
  • Does not have a “proper” [“a victory of space over time”] place or a “borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality”
  • Its action: insinuates; “fragmentarily” not wholly taking something over; “without being able to keep it at a distance”
    • that’s what we like to call “imbrication”
      • again here’s another place to articulate a better set of relations than “complicity” and “opposition”
      • b/c you have to be complicit to have opposition in the first place!
  • Thus it’s limited: can’t “capitalize” on its winnings, or expand, or have advantage of independence
  • B/c it doesn’t control a space, it must work with TIME; must “constantly manipulate”
    • never safe
    • “combine heterogeneous elements” xix when opportunity is seized
  • Lots of everyday activity is a tactic: “talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc” xix
  • “victories of the weak over the strong…clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things”
    • sounds like Becky Sharp
  • Its character in modernity
    • “as local stabilities break down…tactics wander out of orbit, making consumers into immigrants into a system too vast to be their own” or to escape xdx
    • “our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision…impulse to read…’semeiocracy’...consumer…as a voyeur”
    • “strategies of modernity (which identify creation with the invention of a personal language, whether cultural or scientific” xxii
      • “a whole society made into a book, into the writing of the anonymous law of production” (compared w/Middle Ages)
  • Tactics as Brownian motion
  • Proprietors are “blind” to such creation; they “support” it but can’t see it
  • “to rediscover…the ‘art’ of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days” xxiv
    • This section shows that applying de C might be anachronistic (he’s talking about “electronicized and computerized megalopolis”) but I’d say this result is the end of a progression that was programmed in way before computers were made, and the tendency towards this situation was quite well recognized at that time
• Types of Tactics
  • Uses rhetoric to create typology: tropes
    • why? b/c shows how you can use people, using tricks of language
    • hmm sounds like a job for Kenneth Burke!
    • conversation: “a provisional and collective effect” xxii
  • Sophists: they make the weaker position look the stronger: hence like tactics
• Tactics “produce without capitalizing” xxi
  • “that is, without taking control over time”
• Reading
  • B/c our society is one that privileges vision, reading is the ace example: it’s not passive, but instead “Silent production” xxi
  • Text is actually changed by reading: reading is poaching a text
  • How? By you insinuating yourself into the text (haha, think of being absorbed in a book!)
    • Writing as a “film” that allows the “movement of strata, a play of spaces” so that you are in the reader’s world, not the writer’s
    • B/c books are “habitable, like a rented apartment” xxi
• Suggests that “the epistemology of science” has missed tactics, thus there’s distance between actual world and the “utopian” world of the laboratory
• Individual: the institutional fabric is too large to escape it; there are no “free” areas anymore (were there during my period of study? hmmm) xxiv
  • the subject has political dimension, as a CONSUMER, “reappropriating the product-system”
  • becomes an anti-hero
• WHY?
  • “therapeutics for deteriorating social relations” xxiv
  • Says that Freud, Civ and its Discontents, has “opened up” a perspective (this also proves that my time period is applicable, also b/c mentions Musil, etC)
    • in his connex between manipulating and enjoying
    • the Musil quote: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras…. You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.” xxiv
      • reminds me of “Miss Brill” and her cake, perhaps w/an almond

Space: Walking in the City

• A comment in his introduction: “our research has concentrated above all on the uses of space” xxii as well as cooking, ec
  • all of them are: “establishing a kind of reliability [hmmm you’re makin me think of chaos management] within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires—an art of manipulating and enjoying.”
  • the only sketchy thing is, capitalism loves you doing that you know
  • Also recognizes “the inadequacy of procedures for thinking about, in our case, space” xxiii, “not really accessible through the usual political and economic determinations”
• Image of NYC: “its present invents itself, from hour to hour…a universe that is constantly exploding” 91
  • He’s at the top of the World Trade Center, so his description recapitulates the viewpoint of scientific rationalism: perspective, the isolated Person looking at the Object
    • He agrees with my own personal love of Harvey and mapping history: “Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city…” even before people could literally get up this high
    • He calls it “the totalizing eye”
  • He’s a “voyeur” this way, by distance, like a god, “this lust to bea viewpoint and nothing more” 92
• What’s the limitation of this viewpoint?
  • Only a “representation,” “theoretical” “simulacrum”
  • It’s a fiction, “an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices” 93
• Reality: the walkers who write the text “without being able to read it”
  • These practices are blind, “elude legibility” 93
  • Even one person can’t understand what s/he writes b/c multiple people are in it: “neither author nor spectator”
  • “in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other” 93
    • How you no doubt wonder can he possibly then analyze it? B/c trying to see the full picture is not the same as getting behind the laws of movement
    • thus it’s not like the “eye” that wants to totalize
• His Space Is Not Geometrical, Geographical Space
  • He says it’s the “another spatiality” Merleau-Ponty recognized: an experience of space, “poetic and mythic”
    • Sounds like Ulysses to me
      • And yet Ulysses was written w/a map in front of Joyce
  • A “migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” 93
• The Enemy: the City-concept
  • Twinning of “perspective vision” and “prospective vision” that will create a “surface that can be dealt with” 94
  • Here he’s saying something familiar (Janet): rationalism is done to control the future, secure a desired end
  • They are repressive, shutting out all that might “pollute” it, as well as time (a “nowhen”), using “univocal scientific strategies” to “flatten out” all data 94
  • They create “a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself:” it makes the city knowable, a combination of finite, stable, isolatable properties (to use his terms)
  • They create a classificatory system (”Functionalist organization”) and flush out all that doesn’t fit in it: “waste products” like “abnormality, deviance, illness, death” 94
  • Not entirely successful: “the profit system generates a loss” 95 where production turns into “expenditure”
    • (again, he’s underestimating potential of capital to engulf that as ok and even better!)
  • They rationalize the city: “mythification in strategic discourses”
  • He says this process makes them forget space “by privileging progress (ie, time)” 95
    • Perhaps then the lack of attention to space is IDEOLOGY that needs to be revealed, eh?
    • He says that “scientific and political technology” is blind to space
• City-concept, “simultaneously the machinery and and the hero of modernity” 95
  • Where it fails: it “permits the re-emergence” of tactics “outside the reach of panoptic power”
    • “no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations”
    • “without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer”
      • geez I was intuitively a de Certeauan w/out realizing it
  • “The Concept-city is decaying.” 95 and an “illness afflicting..the rationality that founded it and its professionals”
    • but perhaps it wasn’t in 1900? hmm I don’t know
    • Strange things happen b/c these discourses try to make you think that the end of them is the end of the universe
      • “transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune” 96
      • that will “enclose the people in the ‘panic’ of their discourses”
• On to the Real Content of This Chapter
  • “one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was suppose dto administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay”
    • “swarming procedures” 96 that “reinforced themselves…developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance”
    • both “consequences” and “reciprocal of Foucault’s analysis of the structures of power”
  • Why space? “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determinig conditions of social life”
    • “multiform, resistant, tricky, and stubborn”
    • “elude” discipline but still w/in it
• “The Chorus of Idle Footsteps”
  • “Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series.” 97
    • “they cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation”
    • “an innumerable collection of singularities”
    • “their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces” 97
      • rather than being put inside a “Container”
      • “it is rather they that spatialize”
    • can’t be put into a map (that’s only a representation, an absence)
• “Pedestrian Speech Acts”
  • Compares walking in the city to speech acts
    • Walking is the speech act of the langue of the city
  • Pedestrian appropriates, acts out place, “implies relations” 98
  • “walking as a space of enunciation” 98
  • The whole speech act thing, he says, represents a GENERAL rule, not just confined to speech, b/c shows diff between the system itself (rules) and the ways of using it
  • Three Characteristics of the Pedestrian Speech Act
    • The Present
      • He makes things exist: certain pathways; actualization
    • The Discrete
      • Creates a series of his own; some exist, some are erased
    • The Phatic
      • I am here/not there
      • It’s Malinowski and Jakobson’s term; “terms that initiate, maintain, or interrupt contact” ie hello 99
      • “to ensure communication” 99 (he notes that’s how birds talk!)
  • Walking as rhetorical: “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” 99
    • path is a statement that has epistemological, ethical values
• Watching passers-by: “a series of turns and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures.’” 100
  • “composing a path,” an art
  • two parts compose this “way of operating”
    • that has style: the singular, which is symbolic
    • and it has use: “refers to elements of a code”
  • this rhetoric: “homology between verbal figures and the figures of walking”
    • why? b/c both “consist in ‘treatments’ or operations bearing on isolatable units” 100 and they “displace meaning in the direction of equivocalness”
      • that is outside denotation
    • also, both have norms: the normative expectations for use: a “proper meaning” for spaces, as well as grammar
      • I love this: it helps me find out WHAT is rebellion and WHY, and the place of urban and leisure space planning
      • that is, literal and figurative levels of language = literal and figurative levels of SPACE
      • the normative use, the “proper meaning…cannot be found in current use” but is rather a “fiction”
• Walking thus “manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they might be” 101
  • In a kind of liminal space b/c it must have these panoptic spaces but isn’t determined by them
  • “Creates shadows and ambiguities” w/in space
  • “inserts multitudinous references and citations into them” 101
• Synechdoche
  • “using a word in a sense which is part of another meaning of the same word” (he’s quoting Augoyard here) 101
  • “names a part” instead of the whole: “sail” refers to “ship”
  • makes more dense; miniaturizes 101
• Asyndeton
  • “suppression of linking words such as conjunctions and adverbs” 101
  • for walking, it “selects and fragments the space traversed” (doesn’t link the spaces in the way you’re supposed to; deletes other parts of the space)
  • “opens up gaps,” makes LESS, “cuts out,” makes discontinuous
• Both of them together: “jerry-built” from the common
  • “stylistic metamorphosis of space” 102
  • Rilke’s “trees of gesture” are “everywhere” 102 “Their forests walk through the streets”
  • he says they’re impermanent, but if you’d like an image, think of graffiti (but remember they can’t be represented by an image)
    • does limit whether Dalloway “paints the reality” of such street haunting: clearly he says Woolf can’t represent it, but it’s interesting she uses it as a figure and does recognize it as a source of experience; maybe she like de Certeau is making a THEORY of it, not a map… yeah, in that case she could be non-fictional and thus illuminating the rules: sure she couldn’t pain a picture of it and think she’s transcribing experience…but finding out the rules is cool)
      • this gap, this limit, speaks to me about the problem in modernism about the inability of modernism to carry out its goal b/c becoming Tradition would make it non-anarchical, non-rebellious, non-New; b/c we have the difference between some experience itself (experiment, new creation) and the RECORDING of such an experience (what’s left, which is dead, no longer has possibility): it’s because the modernists were looking for an ACT in the first place, not actually looking for a TEXT. They were trying to ask of the text what it could not give. It can’t help but be a record, a reification.
    • “carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism” 102
• As people interact in places, the names “slowly lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them, but their ability to signify outlives its first definition” 104
  • The names of roads, squares, etc “make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by”
  • “A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of ‘meanings’” 104
  • Now, they are “liberated spaces that can be occupied” in “rich indetermination” “articulating a second poetic geography” 105 by making new routes
• “Local authority” ”’authorizes’ the production of an area of free play on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities” 106
  • “a crack in the system” ruining its “univocity”
  • “supererogatory semantic overlays” that are “in excess” 106
  • You can make “cellars and garrets everywhere”
• Why Space Matters: to find a place for new meaning
  • “Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different.” 106-7
  • Walking: allows creation of fictions by inventing spaces
  • “Stores about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris.” 107
    • remember how he talked about waste created by classificatory space of rationality; from “leftovers” “extra” and “other”
  • Space shows: “the surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order” 107
• Stories v Rumors
  • “Stories diversify, rumors totalize.” 107
  • Stories are collages where the breaks and disjunctions are the creators of meaning
  • Rumors level space and make you BELIEVE things, associated w/media and the Law

200-2: Stratified Places

• Epigraph is Lukacs: “the anarchy of the chiaroscuro of the everyday”
• “The kind of difference that defines every place is not on the order of a juxtaposition but rather takes the form of imbricated strata.” 200
  • Maybe modernism theory needs a spatial theory of modernism to describe the relationship of modernism to modernity
• His description of the space of rationalism reminds me of what Le Corbusier is trying to do: “Every urban ‘renovation’ nonetheless prefers a tabula rasa on which to write in cement the composition created in the laboratory on the basis of discrete ‘needs’ to which functional responses are made.” 200-1
  • Whoa! it’s like he’s in Le C’s brain: “neat and clean”
  • He makes this a larger deal: calls it “the logic of production” since the 18th c; where “the lack of satisfaction that defines each need calls for and justifies in advance the construction that combines it with other needs” 201; creates “practical” spaces of “concentration” like offices, cities, factories; “rejects the relevance of places it does not create”
    • Reminds me of conservation efforts that people considered w/the rise of medieval fad and came to fruition in the 1930s w/beginning of national preservation projects
  • Of course, this crap isn’t gonna win: “beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain. The revolutions of history, economic mutations, demographic mixtures lie in layers within it, and remain there, hidden in customs, rites, and spatial practices”
    • “The legible discourses that formerly articulated them have disappeared” but they’re still there 201
  • Places have DEPTH even while they are collages, “a piling up of heterogeneous places” (now to me that’s truly where space becomes space and not time)
    • Each of these “past” spaces piled up references its own socioconomics, politics, symbolism, and unity: “the place is a palimpsest” 202
      • thus, the whole is not all of “contemporary parts and still linked to totalities that have fallen into ruins” 201 (his example, Freud on Rome)
      • hmm space can never be Now, eh? or at least it’s a diff kind of Now
      • how can spaces stay together? an “equilibrium” of “complementarity:” it’s a bunch of movements, all interacting, all together that look stable, like it’s immobile
• “Casual time is what is narrated in the actual discourse of the city: an indeterminate fable” not historiographical time with its dominance of reason, of fitting everything into the same story where nothing is accidental or unforeseen 203
  • Symbolism is diff because it “coheres without being coherent” and “makes connection without being thinkable” 202 (it is “inseparable from gaps” and KEEPS the indeterminable)
  • “To eliminate the unforeseen or expel it from calculation as an illegitimate accident and an obstacle to rationality is to interdict the possibility of a living and ‘mythical’ practice of the city.” 203
    • Completely diff from the “empire of the evident in functionalist technocracy” 203

Quotes/Notes

• A good way to describe the Enlightenment rational viewpoint: “observation grasps only the relation between what it wants to produce and what resists it” 201
  • 202: “scientific analysis knows only its most recent text” and only in regard to “its decisions, its criteria, and its goals”
  • science owes its apparent “success less to their perspicacity than to their opwer of breaking down the complexion of these interrelations between disparate forces and times” that he sees in spaces as palimpsests
    • perhaps this is also a way to damn a kind of cheap modernism that would be reducible to make it new
• Memory is not like a collection
  • “memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable” 108
  • The Past and History: “Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber.” 108
  • Memories about places are all actually about absence: this USED to be here or DID happen but isn’t happening now
    • “the very definition of a place, in fact, that it is composed by these series of displacements and effects among the fragmented strata that form it”
    • “the invisible identities of the visible”
      • whoa, I’m thinking that’s what a narrator’s access to interiority does
    • every place, every single places is haunted “by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can invoke or not.”
      • maybe that’s what Yeats it doing w/his occultism: it’s a kind of HISTORY making.
    • it’s what makes places habitable, this haunting
      • it is “stories in reserve” “pasts that others are not allowed to read”
• Inscribed “To the ordinary man.” Rather than “in praise of the gods or the inspiring muses”
  • “does not expect representations” but will get them now as he turns the “floodlights” to the audience
  • “sociological and anthropological Perspective…privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic details—parts taken for the whole”
    • like Woolf, except that he wants a total erasure of the proper name
    • “comes along with democracy, the large city”
  • “multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets”
• “Everyday life invents itself by poaching” xii