It is a theoretical text, a piece of philosophy written by Michel De Certeau in his book, THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE. In moments there's not a word I understand. In others I build a clear understanding. I started reading De Certeau's book in 4th year undergrad (when it came into an English translation) and am still wrestling with it, as I am many of my design and intellectual interests such as John Hejduk. To me Hejduk and De Certeau have a resonance that is very strong. I love the way De Certeau explains "Place" and "Space". I love the way he describes the architect's approach to such work. I love how this text engages two "metaphorai": The Frontier and The Bridge.
Read this text. It is available to you below in this post and its available to you to the left, as a PDF, in the readings list.
Chapter IX Spatial Stories
Pierre Janet, L 'Evolution de la memoire et la notion de temps, 1928, p. 261.
In this respect, narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes. By means of a whole panoply of codes, ordered ways of proceeding and constraints, they regulate changes in space (or moves from one place to another) made by stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series: from here (Paris), one goes there (Montargis); this place (a room) includes another (a dream or a memory); etc. More than that, when they are represented in descriptions or acted out by actors (a foreigner, a city-dweller, a ghost), these places are linked together more or less tightly or easily by "modalities" that specify the kind of passage leading from the one to the other: the transition can be given an "epistemological" modality concerning knowledge (for example: "it's not certain that this is the Place de la Republique"), an "alethic" one concerning existence (for example, "the land of milk and honey is an improbable end-point"), or a deontic one concerning obligation (for example: "from this point, you have to go over to that one") .... These are only a few notations among many others, and serve only to indicate with what subtle complexity stories., whether everyday or literary, serve us as means of mass transportation, as metaphorai.
Every story is a travel story--a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics. are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication ("It's to the right," "Take a left"), the beginning of a story the rest of which is written by footsteps, to the daily "news" ("Guess who I met at the bakery?"), television news reports ("Teheran: Khomeini is becoming increasingly isolated .. "), legends (Cinderellas living in hovels), and stories that are told (memories and fiction of foreign lands or more or less distant times in the past). These narrated adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the commonplaces of an order, do not merely constitute a "supplement" to pedestrian enunciations and rhetorics. They are not satisfied with displacing the latter and transposing them into the field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it.
These proliferating metaphors--sayings and stories that organize places through the displacements they "describe" (as a mobile point "describes" a curve)-what kind of analysis can be applied to them? To mention only the studies concerning spatializing operations (and not spatial systems), there are numerous works that provide methods and categories for such an analysis. Among the most recent, particular attention can be drawn to those referring to a semantics of space (John Lyons on "Locative Subjects" and "Spatial Expressions"), I a psycholinguistics of perception (Miller and Johnson- Laird on "the hypothesis of localization"), a sociolinguistics of descriptions of places (for example, William Labov's), a phenomenOlogy of the behavior that organizes "territories"
(for example, the work of Albert E. Scheflen and Norman Ashcraft), an "ethnomethodology" of the indices of localization in conversation (for example, by Emanuel A. Schegloff), j or a semiotics viewing culture as a spatial metalanguage (for example, the work of the Tartu School, especially Y. M. Lotman, B. A. Ouspenski): etc. Just as signifying practices, which concern the ways of putting language into effect, were taken into consideration after linguistic systems had been investigated, today spatializing practices are attracting attention now that the codes and taxonomies of the spatial order have been examined. Our investigation belongs to this "second" moment of the analysis, which moves from structures to actions. But in this vast ensemble, I shall consider only narrative actions; this will allow us to specify a few elementary forms of practices organizing space: the bipolar distinction between "map" and "itinerary," the procedures of delimitation or "marking boundaries" ("bornage") and "enunciative focalizations" (that is, the indication of the body within discourse).
At the outset, I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the "proper" rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own "proper" and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of contractual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a "proper." In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.
Merleau-Ponty distinguished a "geometrical" space ("a homogeneous and isotropic spatiality," analogous to our "place") from another "spatiality" which he called an "anthropological space." This distinction depended on a distinct problematic, which sought to distinguish from "geometrical" univocity the experience of an "outside" given in the form of space, and for which "space is existential" and "existence is spatiaL" This experience is a relation to the world; in dreams and in perception, and because it probably precedes their differentiation. it expresses "the same essential structure of our being as a being situated in relationship to a milieu" being situated by a desire, indissociable from a "direction of existence" and implanted in the space of a landscape. From this point of view "there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. The perspective is determined by a "phenomenology" of existing in the world.
In our examination of the daily practices that articulate that experience, the opposition between "place" and "space" will rather refer to two sorts of determinations in stories: the first, a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead, the law of a "place" (from the pebble to the cadaver, an inert body always seems, in the West, to found a place and give it the appearance of a tomb); the second, a determination through operations which, when they are attributed to a stone, tree, or human being, specify "spaces" by the actions of historical subjects (a movement always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history). Between these two determinations, there are passages back and forth, such as the putting to death (or putting into a landscape) of heroes who transgress frontiers and who, guilty of an offense against the law of the place, best provide its restoration with their tombs; or again, on the contrary, the awakening of inert objects (a table, a forest, a person that plays a certain role in the environment) which, emerging from their stability, transform the place where they lay motionless into the foreignness of their own space.
Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces. The forms of this play are numberless, fanning out in a spectrum reaching from the putting in place of an immobile and stone-like order (in it, nothing moves except discourse itself, which, like a camera panning over a scene, moves over the whole panorama), to the accelerated succession of actions that multiply spaces (as in the detective novel or certain folktales, though this spatializing frenzy nevertheless remains circumscribed by the textual place). It would be possible to construct a typology of all these stories in terms of identification of places and actualization of spaces. But in order to discern in them the modes in which these distinct operations are combined, we need criteria and analytical categories-a necessity that leads us back to travel stories of the most elementary kind.
Oral descriptions of places, narrations concerning the home, stories about the streets, represent a first and enormous corpus. In a very precise analysis of descriptions New York residents gave of their apartments, C. Linde and W. Labov recognize two distinct types, which they call the "map" and the "tour." The first is of the type: "The girls' room is next to the kitchen." The second: "You turn right and come into the living room." Now, in the New York corpus, only three percent of the descriptions are of the "map" type. All the rest, that is, virtually the whole corpus, are of the "tour" type: "You come in through a low door," etc. These descriptions are made for the most part in terms of operations and show "how to enter each room." Concerning this second type, the authors point out that a circuit or "tour" is a speech-act (an act of enunciation) that "furnishes a minimal series of paths by which to go into each room"; and that the "path" is a series of units that have the form of vectors that are either "static" ("to the right," "in front of you," etc.) or "mobile" ("if you turn to the left," etc.).
In other words, description oscillates between the terms of an alternative:
either seeing (the knowledge of an order of places) or going (spatializing actions). Either it presents a tableau ("there are ... "), or it organizes movements ("you enter, you go across, you turn ... "). Of these two hypotheses, the choices made by the New York narrators overwhelmingly favored the second.
Leaving Linde and Labov's study aside (it is primarily concerned with the rules of the social interactions and conventions that govern "natural language," a problem we will corne back to later), I would like to make use of these New York stories-and other similar stories to try to specify the relationships between the indicators of "tours" and those of "maps," where they coexist in a single description. How are acting and seeing coordinated in this realm of ordinary language in which the former is so obviously dominant? The question ultimately concerns the basis of the everyday narrations, the relation between the itinerary (a discursive series of operations) and the map (a plane projection totalizing observations), that is, between two symbolic and anthropological languages of space. Two poles of experience. It seems that in passing from "ordinary" culture to scientific discourse, one passes from one pole to the other.
In narrations concerning apartments or streets, manipulations of space or "tours" are dominant. This form of description usually determines the whole style of the narration. When the other form intervenes, it has the characteristic of being conditioned or presupposed by the first. Examples of tours conditioning a map: "If you turn to the right, there is ... ", or the closely related form, "If you go straight ahead, you'll see ... " In both cases, an action permits one to see something. But there are also cases in which a tour assumes a place indication: "There, there's a door. you take the next one"-~an element of mapping is the presupposition of a certain itinerary. The narrative fabric in which describers (descripteurs) of itineraries predominate is thus punctuated by describers of the map type which have the function of indicating either an effect obtained by the tour ("you see ... ") or a given that it postulates as its limit ("there is a wall"), its possibility ("there's a door"), or an obligation ("there's a one-way street"), etc. The chain of spatializing operations seems to be marked by references to what it produces (a representation of places) or to what it implies (a local order). We thus have the structure of the travel story: stories of journeys and actions are marked out by the "citation" of the places that result from them or authorize them.
From this angle, we can compare the combination of "tours" and "maps" in everyday stories with the manner in which, over the past five centuries, they have been interlaced and then slowly dissociated in literary and scientific representations of space. In particular, if one takes the "map" in its current geographical form, we can see that in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (i.e., from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility. The first medieval maps included only the rectilinear marking out of itineraries (performative indications chie!ly concerning pilgrimages), along with the stops one was to make (cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray at, etc.) and distances calculated in hours or in days. that is, in terms of the time it would take to cover them on foot. Each of these maps is a memorandum prescribing actions. The tour to be made is predominant in them. It includes the map elements, just as today the description of a route to be taken accompanies a hasty sketch already on paper, in the form of citations of places, a sort of dance through the city: "20 paces straight ahead, then turn to the left, then another 40 paces ... ." The drawing articulates spatializing practices, like the maps of urban routes, arts of actions and stories of paces, that serve the Japanese as "address books," II or the wonderful fifteenth-century Aztec map describing the exodus of the Totomihuacas. This drawing outlines not the "route" (there wasn't one) but the "log" of their journey on foot-an outline marked out by footprints with regular gaps between them and by pictures of the successive events that took place in the course of the journey (meals, battles, crossings of rivers or mountains, etc.): not a "geographical map" but "history book."
Between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the map became more autonomous. No doubt the proliferation of the "narrative" figures that have long been its stock-in-trade (ships, animals, and characters of all kinds) still had the function of indicating the operations-travelling, military, architectural, political or commercial-that make possible the fabrication of a geographical plan. 13 Far from being "illustrations," iconic glosses on the text, these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines. It is equivalent to a describer of the "tour" type. But the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it. Transformed first by Euclidean geometry and then by descriptive geometry, constituted as a formal ensemble of abstract places, it is a "theater" (as one used to call atlases) in which the same system of projection nevertheless juxtaposes two very different elements: the data furnished by a tradition (Ptolemy's Geography, for instance) and those that came from navigators (portulans, for example). The map thus collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation. But the important thing here is the erasure of the itineraries which, presupposing the first category of places and conditioning the second, makes it possible to move from one to the other. The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a "state" of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition. It remains alone on the stage. The tour describers have disappeared.
The organization that can be discerned in stories about space in everyday culture is inverted by the process that has isolated a system of geographical places, The difference between the two modes of description obviously does not consist in the presence or absence of practices (they are at work everywhere), but in the fact that maps, constituted as proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge, form tables of legible results. Stories about space exhibit on the contrary the operations that allow it, within a constraining and non-"proper" place, to mingle its elements anyway, as one apartment-dweller put it concerning the rooms in his !lat: "One can mix them up" ("On peut les triturer,,).14 From the folktale to descriptions of residences, an exacerbation of "practice" ("Jaire") (and thus of enunciation), actuates the stories narrating tours in places that, from the ancient cosmos to contemporary public housing developments, are all forms of an imposed order.
In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that "one can't do anything in them" to the legendary, long-lost attic that "could be used for everything," everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space.
As operations on places, stories also play the everyday role of a mobile and magisterial tribunal in cases concerning their delimitation. As always, this role appears more clearly at the second degree, when it is made explicit and duplicated by juridical discourse. In the traditional language of court proceedings, magistrates formerly "visited the scene of the case at issue" ("se transportaient sur les lieux") (transports and juridical metaphors), in order to "hear" the contradictory statements (dits) made by the parties to a dispute concerning debatable boundaries. Their "interlocutory judgment," as it was called, was an "operation of marking out boundaries" (bomage). Written in a beautiful hand by the court clerk on parchments where the writing sometimes flowed into (or was inaugurated by?) drawings outlining the boundaries, these interlocutory judgments were in sum nothing other than meta-stories. They combined together (the work of a scribe collating variants) the opposing stories of the parties involved: "Mr. Mulatier declares that his grandfather planted this apple tree on the edge of his field .... Jeanpierre reminds us that Mr. Bouvet maintains a dungheap on a piece of land of which he is supposed to be the joint owner with his brother Andre .... " Genealogies of places, legends about territories. Like a critical edition, the judge's narration reconciles these versions. The narration is "established" on the basis of "primary" stories (those of Mr. Mulatier, Jeanpierre, and so many others), stories that already have the function of spatial legislation since they determine rights and divide up lands by "acts" or discourses about actions (planting a tree, maintaining a dungheap, etc.).
These "operations of marking out boundaries," consisting in narrative contracts and compilations of stories, are composed of fragments drawn from earlier stories and fitted together in makeshift fashion (bricotes). In this sense, they shed light on the formation of myths, since they also have the function of founding and articulating spaces. Preserved in the court records, they constitute an immense travel literature, that is, a literature concerned with actions organizing more or less extensive social cultural areas. But this literature itself represents only a tiny part (the part that is written about disputed points) of the oral narration that interminably labors to compose spaces, to verify, collate, and displace their frontiers.
The ways of "conducting" a story offer, as Pierre Janet pointed out, a very rich field for the analysis of spatiality. Among the questions that depend on it, we should distinguish those that concern dimensions (extensionality), orientation (vectorality), affinity (homographies), etc. I shall stress only a few of its aspects that have to do with delimitation itself, the primary and literally "fundamental" question: it is the partition of space that structures it. Everything refers in fact to this differentiation which makes possible the isolation and interplay of distinct spaces. From the distinction that separates a subject from its exteriority to the distinctions that localize objects, from the home (constituted on the basis of the wall) to the journey (constituted on the basis of a geographical "elsewhere" or a cosmological "beyond"), from the functioning of the urban network to that of the rural landscape, there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers.
In this organization, the story plays a decisive role. It "describes," to be sure. But "every description is more than a fixation," it is "a culturally creative act." It even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds spaces. Reciprocally, where stories are disappearing (or else are being reduced to museographical objects), there is a loss of space: deprived of narrations (as one sees it happen in both the city and the countryside), the group or the individual regresses toward the disquieting, fatalistic experience of a formless, indistinct, and nocturnal totality. By considering the role of stories in delimitation, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of "crossword" decoding stencil (a dynamic partitioning of space) whose essential narrative figures seem to be the frontier and the bridge.
I. Creating a theater of actions. The story's first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found. Strictly speaking, this function isize, or more exactly, to found. Strictly speaking, this function is not juridical, that is, related to laws or judgments. It depends rather on what Georges Dumezil analyzes in connection with the Indo-European root dhl, "to set in place," and its derivatives in Sanskrit (dhiilU) and Latin (fiis). The Latin noun ')as," he writes, "is properly speaking the mystical foundation, which is in the invisible world, and without which all forms of conduct that are enjoined or authorized by ius (human law) and, more generally speaking, all human conduct, are doubtful, perilous, and even fatal. Fas cannot be subjected to analysis or casuistry, as ius can: jas can no more be broken up into parts than its name can be declined." A foundalion either exists or it doesn't:fos eSI orfiis non esl. "A time or a place are said to be fasti or nefasti [auspacious or inauspacious] depending on whether they provide or fail to provide human action with this necessary foundation.
In the Western parts of the Indo-European world, this function has been divided in a particular way among different institutions-in contrast to what happened in ancient India, where different roles were played in turn by the same characters. Occidental culture created its own ritual concerning fas, which was carried out in Rome by specialized priests called fiWales. It was practiced "before Rome undertook any action with regard to a foreign nation," such as a declaration of war, a military expedition, or an alliance. The ritual was a procession with three centrifugal stages, the first within Roman territory but near the frontier, the second on the frontier, the third in foreign territory. The ritual action was carried out before every civil or military action because it is designed to creale the field necessary for political or military activities. It is thus also a repetitio rerum: both a renewal and a repetition of the originary founding acts, a recital ion and a citation of the genealogies that could legitimate the new enterprise, and a prediction and a promise of success at the beginning of battles, contracts, or conquests. As a general repetition before the actual representation, the rite. a narration in acts, precedes the historical realization. The tour or procession of the fettales opens a space and provides a foundation for the operations of the military men, diplomats, or merchants who dare to cross the frontiers. Similarly in the Vedas, Vi~.,u, "by his footsteps, opens the zone of space in which Indra's military action must take place." The/as ritual is a foundation. It "provides space" for the actions that will be undertaken; it "creates a field" which serves as their "base" and their "theater.
This founding is precisely the primary role of the story. It opens a legitimate theater for practical actions. It creates a field that authorizes dangerous and contingent social actions. But it differs in three ways from the function the Roman ritual so carefully isolated: the story founds fas in a form that is fragmented (not unique and whole), miniaturized (not on a national scale), and polyvalent (not specialized). I t is fragmented, not only because of the diversification of social milieus, but especially because of the increasing heterogeneity (or because of a heterogeneity that is increasingly obvious) of the authorizing "references": the excommunication of territorial "divinities," the deconsecration of places haunted by the story-spirit, and the extension of neutral areas deprived of legitimacy have marked the disappearance and fragmentation of the narrations that organized frontiers and appropriations. (Official historiography-history books, television news reports, etc.-nevertheless tries to make everyone believe in the existence of a national space.) It is miniaturized, because socioeconomic technocratization confines the significance of fas and ne/as to the level of the familv unit or the individual, and leads to the multiplication of "family-stories," "life stories." and psychoanalytical narrations. (Gradually cut loose from these particular stories, public justifications neverthelf!ss continue to exist in the form of blind rumors, or resurface savagely in class or race conflicts). It is finally polyvalent, because the mixing together of so many micro-stories gives them functions that change according to the groups in which they circulate. This polyvalence does not affect the relational origins of narrativity, however: the ancient ritual that creates fields of action is recognizable in the "fragments" of narration planted around the obscure thresholds of our existence; these buried fragments articulate without its knowing it the "biographical" story whose space they found.
A narrative activity, even if it is multiform and no longer unitary, thus continues to develop where frontiers and relations with space abroad are concerned. Fragmented and disseminated, it is continually concerned with marking out boundaries. What it puts in action is once more the las that "authorizes" enterprises and precedes them. Like the Roman fetlales, stories "go in a procession" ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them. Decisions and juridical combinations themselves come only afterwards, like the statements and acts of Roman law (iiis). arbitrating the areas of action granted to each party/o participating themselves in the activities for which fas provided a "foundation." According to the rules that are proper to them, the magistrates' "interlocutory judgments" operate within the aggregate of heterogeneous spaces that have already been created and established by the innumerable forms of an oral narrativity composed of family or local stories, customary or professional "poems" and "recitations" of paths taken or countrysides traversed. The magistrates' judgments do not create these theaters of action, they articulate and manipulate them. They presuppose the narrative authorities that the magistrates "hear" compare, and put into hierarchies. Preceding the judgment that regulates and settles. there is a founding narration.
2. Frontiers and bridges. Stories are actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority. In order to account for contradiction, it is helpful to go back to the elementary units. Leaving aside morphology (which is not our concern here) and situating ourselves in the perspective of a pragmatics and, more precisely, a syntax aimed at determining "programs" or series of practices through which space is appropriated, we can take as our point of departure the "region," which Miller and Johnson- Laird define as a basic unit: the place where programs and actions interact. A "region" is thus the space created by an interaction. 21 It follows that in the same place there are as many "regions" as there are interactions or intersections of programs. And also that the determination of space is dual and operational, and, in a problematics of enunciation, related to an "interlocutory" process.
In this way a dynamic contradiction between each delimitation and its mobility is introduced. On the one hand, the story tirelessly marks out frontiers. It multiplies them, but in terms of interactions among the characters~things, animals, human beings: the acting subjects (act ants) divide up among themselves places as well as predicates (simple, crafty, ambitious, silly, etc.) and movements (advancing, withdrawing, going into exile, returning, etc.). Limits are drawn by the points at which the progressive appropriations (the acquisition of predicates in the course of the story) and the successive displacements (internal or external movements) of the acting subjects meet. Both appropriations and displacements depend on a dynamic distribution of possible goods and functions in order to constitute an increasingly complex network of differentiations, a combinative system of spaces. They result from the operation of distinctions resulting from encounters. 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. Conjunction 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?
The theoretical and practical problem of the frontier: to whom does it belong? The river, wall or tree makes a frontier. It does not have the character of a nowhere that cartographical representation ultimately presupposes. It has a mediating role. So does the story that gives it voice: "Stop," says the forest the wolf comes out of. "Stop!" says the river, revealing its crocodile. But this actor, by virtue of the very fact that he is the mouthpiece of the limit, creates communication as well as separation; more than that, he establishes a border only by saying what crosses it, having come from the other side. He articulates it. He is also a passing through or over. In the story, the frontier functions as a third element. It is an "in-between "~~a "space between," Zwischenraum, as Morgenstern puts it in a marvelous and ironic poem on "closure" (Zaun), which rhymes with "space" (Raum) and "to see through" (hindurchzuschaun) It is the story of a picket fence (Lallenzaun):
| Es war einmal ein Lattenzaun mit Zwischenraum, hindurchzuschaun. |
One time there was a picket fence with space to gaze from hence to thence. |
| Ein Architekt, der dieses sah, stand eines Abends plotzlich da- und nahm den Zwischenraum heraus und baute draus ein grosses Haus. |
An architect who saw this sight approached it suddenly one night. removed the spaces from the fence and built of them a residence. |
| Drum zog ihn der Senat auch ein. nach Afri-od-Ameriko |
the senate had to intervene. to Afri- or Americoo. |
(Max Knight, trans.)
The Architect's drive to cement up the picket fence, to fill in and build up "the space in-between," is also his illusion, for without knowing it he is working toward the political freezing of the place and there is nothing left for him to do, when he sees his work finished, but to flee far away from the blocs of the law. In contrast, the story privileges a "logic of ambiguity" through its accounts of interaction. It "turns" the frontier into a crossing, and the river into a bridge. It recounts inversions and displacements: the doorthat closes is precisely what may be opened; the river is what makes passage possible; the tree is what marks the stages of advance; the picket fence is an ensemble of interstices through which one's glances pass.
The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy. Thus, for example, it occurs as a central and ambivalent character in the stories of the Noirmoutrins, before, during, and after the construction of a bridge between La Fosse and Fromentine in Vendee in 1972.23 It carries on a double life in innumerable memories of places and everyday legends, often summed up in proper names, hidden paradoxes, ellipses in stories, riddles to be solved: Bridgehead, Bridgenorth, Bridgetown, Bridgewater, Bridgman, Cambridge, Trowbridge, etc.
Justifiably, the bridge is the index of the diabolic in the paintings where Bosch invents his modifications of spaces. 24 As a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place, it represents a departure, an attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power, or the night of an exile; in any case, the "betrayal" of an order. But at the same time as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or causes the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives ob-jectivity (that is, expression and re-presentation) to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits, so that in recrossing the bridge and coming back within the enclosure the traveler henceforth finds there the exteriority that he had first sought by going outside and then fled by returning. Within the frontiers, the alien is already there, an exoticism or sabbath of the memory, a disquieting familiarity. It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other.
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. In Greek, narration is called "diegesis ": it establishes an itinerary (it "guides") and it passes through (it "transgresses"). The space of operations it travels in is made of movements: it is topological, concerning the deformations of figures, rather than topical, defining places. It is only ambivalently that the limit circumscribes in this space. It plays a double game. It does the opposite of what it says. It hands the place over to the foreigner that it gives the impression of throwing out. Or rather, when it marks a stopping place, the latter is not stable but follows the variations of encounters between programs. Boundaries are transportable limits and transportations of limits; they are also melaphorai.
In the narrations that organize spaces, boundaries seem to play the role of the Greek xoana, statuettes whose invention is attributed to the clever Daedalus: they are crafty like Daedalus and mark out limits only by moving themselves (and the limits). These straight-line indicators put emphasis on the curves and movements of space. Their distributive work is thus completely different from that of tile divisions established by poles, pickets or stable columns which, planted in the earth, cut up and compose an order of places. They are also transportable limits.
Today, narrative operations of boundary-setting take the place of these enigmatic describers of earlier times when they bring movement in through the very act of fixing, in the name of delimitation. Michelet already said it: when the aristocracy of the great Olympian gods collapsed at the end of Antiquity, it did not take down with it "the mass of indigenous gods, the populace of gods that still possessed the immensity of fields, forests, woods, mountains, springs, intimately associated with the life of the country. These gods lived in the hearts of oaks, in the swift, deep waters, and could not be driven out of them .... Where are they? In the desert, on the heath, in the forest? Yes, but also and especially in the home. They live on in the most intimate of domestic habits. But they also live on in our streets and in our apartments.
They were perhaps after all only the agile representatives of narrativity,and of narrativity in its most delinquent form. The fact that they have changed their names (every power is toponymical and initiates its order of places by naming them) takes nothing away from the multiple,insidious, moving force. It survives the avatars of the great history that debaptises and rebaptises them.
If the delinquent exists only by displacing itself, if its specific mark is to live not on the margins but in the interstices of the codes that it undoes and displaces, if it is characterized by the privilege of the /Our over the state, then the story is delinquent. Social delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic outlets and expectations of spaces, where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or illegal drifting away, that is, one form or another of prison and wandering outside the pale. Inversely, the story is a sort of delinquency in reserve, maintained, but itself displaced and consistent, in traditional societies (ancient, medieval, etc.), with an order that is firmly established but flexible enough to allow the proliferation of this challenging mobility that does not respect places, is alternately playful and threatening, and extends from the microbe-like forms of everyday narration to the carnivalesque celebrations of earlier days.
It remains to be discovered, of course, what actual changes produce this delinquent narrativity in a society. In any event, one can already say that in matters concerning space, this delinquency begins with the inscription of the body in the order's text. The opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organizes a here in relation to an abroad, a "familiarity" in relation to a "foreignness." A spatial story is in its minimal degree a spoken language, that is, a linguistic system that distributes places insofar as it is articulated by an "enunciatory focalization," by an act of practicing it. It is the object of "proxemics. Before we return to its manifestations in the organization of memory, it will suffice here to recall that, in this focalizing enunciation, space appears once more as a practiced place.
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