Anglisztika Kurzus

Herényi-Tóth Ildikó T7R3HJ

Michel de Certeau:  Walking in the city

Michel de Certeau’s essay, Walking in the city, is quite philosophical and abstract. It depicts
the urban culture and the use of urban space. He applies double standards; on the one hand, he
views the city with a bird’s eye, on the other hand, he utters that the only way to see, “to read” the
city is walking in it. Instead of a thorough analysis, I attempt to highlight the aspects that grabbed my
attention after having read the essay both in English and in its original language.

Watching Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Center means a kind of distance
keeping, an objective view when one becomes a “voyeur”. The landscape is nothing else but a still,
motionless picture, a “painting” from a perspective. Yet, the totalizing eye is unable to grasp the tiny
details, they are distorted, that is the crowd made up of individuals that puts the city into motion,
give its dynamics. This city dynamism is presented in an outstanding way from Dick Whittington’s
viewpoint in Fitzgerald’s My lost city. “It’s hard to be down when you are up” and it is also hard to be
up when you are down. Although the city is only legible from a perspective vision, de Certeau
suggests an urban story written unconsciously by passersby, pedestrians, who are anonymous
though, but whose paths are getting intertwined thus “giving shape to spaces”. In his analogy, the
writer compares this walking in the city to poetry; the more deviations, detours are from formal
spatial possibilities, the longer, the more beautiful the poem becomes.

Furthermore, de Certeau takes a critical tone describing the city concepts and theories; “the
atopia-utopia of optical knowledge has long had the ambition of surmounting and articulating the
contradictions arising from urban agglomeration”, “perspective vision and prospective vision”, “The
ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very
changes that affected their ideologies and their positions.” He goes on with two metaphors: “They
transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune.” His language, playing with
words and poetic devices are very impressive, hiding irony behind them.

A polarity accompanies the whole essay: strategic vs. tactics, compliance vs. resistance,
official and authorities vs. common people, rhetoric vs. logic, etc. putting a heavy emphasis on the
ambivalent city concepts. The toughest part for me is how the “waste products of a functionalist
administration”, wretchedness, poverty, and deviance, which are an organic part of a cosmopolitan
city, are dealt with – according to de Certeau. With no doubt, they are still controversial issues,
despite, or as a consequence of the swift development of society, technology, and city
administration.
 Anglisztika Kurzus
Herényi-Tóth Ildikó T7R3HJ

In my interpretation, a city cannot be defined by algorithms, functions, without taking the

roots into account, as a tourist is unable to understand a metropolis by merely visiting its sights.