Apocalyptic Walking

Walking, which alternately follows a path and has followers, creates a mobile organicity in the environment, a sequence of phatic topoi. - Michel de Certeau

This passage, taken from Certeau's 1974 essay "Walking in the City", is central to his idea of walking as a "speech act" or an exercise in rhetoric, a writing of the immense text that is life in a modern urban area. It is a profound quotation with much relevance to the theme of apocalypticism, but we can only see this once an overall understanding of Certeau's essay is gained. As such, I will begin with a summary.

The beginning of Certeau's essay is deceptive. He places readers on the top of the World Trade Center in New York, then the highest building in world. Such a vantage point allows a collective view of Manhattan. Certeau likens this view to having an entire text open before a reader at once. He calls Manhattan a text of "extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions in race and styles ... a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production" (149). But immediately we are dropped back to the street. We have speed read the text. Now, Certeau wants to show us how it is continually being written. His basic thesis is that the social text of a modern city is written by walking. Walking is the base unit of the language of urban spatial appropriation. The buildings, bridges and impassible walls of the city are akin to the fixed meanings and rules of a language. When we walk we participate in that language, but we also subvert and violate it. The names of streets, the stories we associate with certain places, and the myths of specialness that surround those places, we subvert them all when we walk. Thus when Certeau says that walking "creates a mobile organicity in the enviroment, a sequence of phatic topoi" he means that walking constitutes opportunities for initation of communication with others: actions such as saying hello, stopping another on the street to talk, avoid someone we don't want to talk to, etc. The opportunities are limitless and always in process. Just as there is no private language, there is no private walking. Walking suggests an other to observe me doing it and to mutally engage me in it. It's hard to directly link this passage to apocalypticism, but it is vitally important to an essay which does pose apocalyptic questions.

I can't decide if Certeau's essay is apocalyptic or anti-apocalyptic. He plays heavily off of Foucault's "Panopticism" is his understanding of the anoymous authoritarian identity of the city, a conglomation of individuals and groups of authority into an all seeing eye. And Foucault's panoptic reality is so dreadful and antithetical to the privacy and individual dignity that humans crave, it might as well be called apocalyptic. But Certeau subverts "Panopticism". His point is that survelliance cannot be all knowing,. Walking itself defeats it, not to mention the activities people are walking to perform. Much as a totalitarian state might try to erase the myths and significances associated with certain places for the sake of uniformity and conformity, walking itself reaffirms those stories and that sense of specialness. At the same time, his conception of the ideal city is miserable and totally against what I see as good living conditions for humans. Yet, it is unerasable and therefore maybe apocalyptic. I'm not sure.