Spatial Stories

Author: Michel de Certeau Year: 2006 (original text 1984) Source type: chapter Raw file: raw/chapters/de-certeau-2006-spatial-stories.md

Summary

"Spatial Stories" is Chapter 9 of Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (Fr. L'invention du quotidien, 1980; trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1984), excerpted here at the original pp 115–118 and reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (ed. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp 78–82) — the 2006 reprint volume supplies this ingest's date. The excerpt explores narration as a spatial practice: stories "traverse and organize places," "select and link them together," and "make sentences and itineraries out of them" — vehicles of meaning he names, after modern Athens's buses, metaphorai. Its conceptual core is the distinction between place (lieu — the order of coexisting positions, "an instantaneous configuration of positions," ruled by "the law of the 'proper'") and space (espace — "intersections of mobile elements," actuated by movement), condensed in the formula "In short, space is a practiced place." Stories "carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places." The Intimus editors frame the text as exploring narration as "a negotiator between that which is seen, mapped and stable, and that which is experienced, toured and individuated," with spatial experiences "specific to each body, time and place."

Key Claims

Stories as mass transportation: "In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai" — to go to work, one takes a "metaphor" (a bus or train). Stories deserve the same 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." (p. 78)
Narrative structures have "the status of spatial syntaxes": by codes, ordered ways of proceeding and constraints, stories regulate changes of space, putting places "in linear or interlaced series" (from here (Paris), one goes there (Montargis); this place (a room) includes another (a dream or a memory)); the passages are specified by 'modalities' — epistemological ("it's not certain that this is the Place de la République"), alethic ("the land of milk and honey is an improbable end-point"), deontic ("from this point, you have to go over to that one"). (p. 78)
"Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice." Narrated adventures — from the alphabet of spatial indication ("It's to the right," "Take a left") to daily news, television reports, legends (Cinderellas living in hovels) and told memories — are not a mere "supplement" to pedestrian enunciations: "In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it." (p. 79)
The analytic moment is practice, not structure: following the study of linguistic systems and of "the codes and taxonomies of the spatial order," "today spatializing practices are attracting attention… Our investigation belongs to this 'second' moment of the analysis, which moves from structures to actions." The survey spans a semantics of space (Lyons), psycholinguistics (Miller & Johnson-Laird's "hypothesis of localization"), sociolinguistics (Linde & Labov), a phenomenology of territorial behavior (Scheflen & Ashcraft), ethnomethodology of localization in conversation (Schegloff), and the Tartu School's semiotics of culture as spatial metalanguage (Lotman, Uspenski). (p. 79)
Place (lieu): "the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence" — excluding two things being in the same location; "the law of the 'proper' rules in the place"; "A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability." (p. 79)
Space (espace): "exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables" — "composed of intersections of mobile elements… actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it," the effect produced by operations that "orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function"; "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" — with "none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper.'" (p. 80)
The formula: "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." (p. 80)
Merleau-Ponty reworked: de Certeau aligns his lieu with Merleau-Ponty's 'geometrical' space ("a homogeneous and isotropic spatiality") and derives espace from 'anthropological space', where "space is existential" and "existence is spatial" and "there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences" — converting a phenomenology of embodied perception into a theory of the two determinations of stories. (p. 80)
Two determinations in stories: through objects — "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") — and through operations attributed to a stone, tree, or human being, "the actions of historical subjects" ("a movement always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history"). (p. 80)
Transgression and restoration: heroes who transgress frontiers and offend against the law of the place "best provide its restoration with their tombs"; conversely, "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." (pp. 80–81)
The narrative labor: "Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places," and "organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces" — a spectrum from the immobile, stone-like order where "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" (the detective novel, certain folktales), a "spatializing frenzy" that "nevertheless remains circumscribed by the textual place." (p. 81)
Announced program (beyond this excerpt): the analysis of narrative actions will 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)." (p. 79)

Connections

Concepts: Practiced Place (Space vs. Place) · Narrative Space · Spatial Metaphors · Space · Strategy and Tactic · Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture Authors: Michel de Certeau · Maurice Merleau-Ponty Debates: Power and Space · Theories of the Everyday: Affirm, Transform, or Resist Related source notes: The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, full book) · Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) · Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) · Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945) · Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006)

Direct Quotes

"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." (p. 78)

"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." (p. 78)

"In this respect, narrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes." (p. 78)

"Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice." (p. 79)

"In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it." (p. 79)

"A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence." (p. 79)

"The law of the 'proper' rules in the place… A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability." (p. 79)

"A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements." (p. 80)

"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." (p. 80)

"In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers." (p. 80)

"'there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences.'" (p. 80, quoting Merleau-Ponty)

"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" (p. 80)

"a movement always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history" (p. 80)

"Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places." (p. 81)

"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." (pp. 80–81)

Open Questions

The excerpt announces but does not develop its analytic toolkit — the map/itinerary distinction, bornage, and enunciative focalization (developed at the original pp 119–130, outside this excerpt). The wiki has no page yet for the map and itinerary pair; logged as PAGE NEEDED.
If space exists only as practiced place, can it be designed at all — or does design only ever produce places that await their transformation into spaces by occupants?
Stories "make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it" — does the designed interior pre-organize its narratives (the plan, the circulation route, the museum sequence) the way the travel story pre-organizes the walk, and can occupants tell a different story than the one laid out?
De Certeau's spatializing spectrum runs from the stone-like order (only discourse moves, "like a camera panning") to the detective novel's frenzy "circumscribed by the textual place" — where do designed interiors sit on this spectrum, and does the "textual place" circumscribing spatializing frenzy describe the plan's hold on occupation?