Michel de Certeau and The Practice of Everyday Life

I've been thinking a lot about the flaneur -- Baudelaire's invention -- the "painter of modern life" -- and trying to figure out how to integrate the concept into my writing. Provisionally, I've been using the concept of the flaneur as a synonym for an artist who gathers inspiration and material through the act of walking through the city. I'm not particular about what city, the gender of the flaneur (though that can be problematic), the "art" produced, or the intentions of the artist. In that way, the flaneur can be a stand-in for just someone who walks and sorts the information gleaned in some creative way, like a journalist, sociologist, photographer, poet, historian, or collector, among others.

This thought brings me to something I read today from Michel de Certeau and The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). The quote I share below refers to the idea that simply walking in the city is an act of rebellion against the functions of the city as seen by its designers and govern-ers. Those who control the city see it as a whole with allowances for only prefigured pathways, certain social interactions, and planned usage. The inhabitants of the city are seen as superfluous to the city, or at least subservient to the system of the city. De Certeau suggests that the inhabitants themselves actually subvert this domination by walking the city, thereby crowning themselves the real citymakers:

"If it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. Thus Charlie Chaplin multiplies the possibilities of his cane: he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization. In the same way, the walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else. And if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities fixed by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on the other he increases the number of possibilities (for example, by creating shortcuts and detours) and prohibitions (for example, he forbids himself to take paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory). He thus makes a selection. 'The user of the city picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret.'"

Interestingly, that final quote within the quote comes from Roland Barthes, commenting on visual culture, which adds some weight to my thought that the flaneur/walker/artist can, at least theoretically, be a photographer as much as anything else.

I don't know if this is even useful or necessary, but this might help to offer a theoretical net in which I can make sense of the historical figures who "slummed" in New York way back in the early twentieth century...