Spatial Stories

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Michel de Certeau

In his life as a scholar and Jesuit priest, Michel de Certeau traversed the disciplinary terrains of geography, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and the social sciences. His work established 'spatial practice' as the proliferation of metaphors quantified only to the extent of distinct spatial experiences. In this text narration is explored as a negotiator between that which is seen, mapped and stable, and that which is experienced, toured and individuated. We are reminded that stories have the potential to define and describe legislatively as well as found a 'theatre of actions' that accumulates meaning and relevance over and through time. This text identifies the role narrative plays in both reading and acting in space, while acknowledging that spatial experiences are specific to each body, time and place.

In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a 'metaphor' – a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.

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 République'), 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’),¹ a psycholinguistics of perception (Miller and Johnson-Laird on ‘the hypothesis of localization’),² a sociolinguistics of descriptions of places (for example, William Labov’s),³ a phenomenology of the behavior that organizes ‘territories’ (for example, the work of Albert E. Scheflen and Norman Ashcraft),⁴ an ‘ethnomethodology’ of the indices of localization in conversation (for example, by Emanuel A. Schegloff),⁵ or a semiotics viewing culture as a spatial metalanguage (for example, the work of the Tartu School, especially Y. M. Lotman, B. A. Ouspenski),⁶ 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 conflictual 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.'⁷ 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 offence 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. (… p 118)

Notes

1 John Lyons, Semantics, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1977, II, pp 475–81, 690–703.
2 George A Miller and Philip N Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1976.
3 Charlotte Linde and William Labov, 'Spatial Networks as a Site for the Study of Language and Thought', Language, 51, 1975, pp 924–39. On the relation between practice (le faire) and space, see also Groupe 107, M Hammad et al, Sémiotique de l'espace, DGRST (Paris), 1973, p 28.
4 Albert E Scheflen and Norman Ashcraft, Human Territories: How we Behave in Space Time, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1976.
5 Emanuel A Schegloff, 'Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place', David Sudnow (ed), Studies in Social Interaction, The Free Press (New York), 1972, pp 75–119.
6 See for example, École de tartu, Travaux sur les systèmes de signes, YM Lotman, BA Ouspenski (eds), PUF (Paris); Complexe (Bruxelles), 1976, pp 18–39, 77–93, etc.; Iouri Lotman, La Structure du texte artistique, Gallimard (Paris), 1973, p 309, etc.; Jüri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans R Vroon, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), 1977; BA Uspenski, A Poetics of Composition, trans V Zavarin and S Witting, University of California Press (Berkeley), 1973.
7 M Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Gallimard Tel (Paris), 1976, pp 324–44.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, ed and trans Steven Rendall, University of California Press (Berkeley), 1984.

(Excerpt pp 115–18)