With the end of each school week, I enter into another reality, a weekend characterized by refilling water glasses, clearing plates, resetting tables, and complying with varying requests from guests: the job of a “server’s assistant,” a fancy name for a busboy. However, this past weekend took on a different experience as the abstract ideas discussed in class accompanied me down the back, dark hallway and into the main dining room.
Not having any immediate tasks to attend, I started talking with two of my coworkers when the sudden appearance of Deidre’s food for her table cut the conversation short. “You never can complete a thought in this place,” said Ashley as the two of us were left standing there, thoughts dissipating with the recent distraction. Nonetheless, Ashley’s comment called to mind de Certeau’s “Walking in the City;” the restaurant suddenly took on a new form. Trying to remove myself from the hustle and bustle of the restaurant while being hopelessly in it, I noted the multitude of unrealized thoughts caused by the relentless flow of distractions and demands. One minute a booth served as the place for a couple to rekindle their romance (they didn’t even release hands as I cleared the table forcing me to awkwardly maneuver around their limbs), and then suddenly it became the playground for a kid as he threw biscuits on the floor. Sitting at a table became a metaphor, an extension, of walking, of lacking a place. The table became a pit stop along the customer’s indefinite search for a proper.
As de Certeau states, “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it speaks.” Stepping to the side by the soda fountain, I overheard a slew of boasting and complaints by the employees, and as they left to attend their tables once again, their walking no longer appeared like simple movements, to get from point A to point B. Walking took the form of the smack spoken by the bar, guests completely unaware that they were the topics of conversation. Walking spoke of the disgust for the table. Walking spoke of the need to impress the table.
And while it was hard for me to fully observe the constant flow of servers, food runners, managers, guests, etc. because I too was a part of this “texturology” of the restaurant, I nonetheless gained insights into the thinking patterns of some of the employees as they moved from spot to spot, conversations rarely completely carried out. This insight accompanied with my own train of thoughts combined to create a new way of viewing the restaurant as a home not merely for the money starved or hungry masses, but as a place of unrealized feelings and fragmented conversations among employees and guests caused by both distractions and continual motion. Yet, “at the end of the day” it didn’t matter that I didn’t fully hear how Deidre’s day went before work or if this lady made me refill her glass six times because work represented a reality that could be easily escaped, even easily ended.
Michael, this is a terrific and contemplative exploration of de Certeau. I really appreciate how you work through de Certeau's theories in a quotidian context with which you are familiar—an 'everyday' urban context that 'works' through and within its own 'texturology'.
ReplyDeleteSo why have you scare-quoted the phrase "'at the end of the day'"? You know that I am dubious of that phrase, but I suppose here, in the restaurant, it actually makes some sense: at the end of the day, work is done; you go home. Maybe one of the reasons that I am skeptical of this phrase is the way that it yokes the finality of apocalypticism with (in principle) endlessly cyclical labor time. In fact, from myriad work experiences earlier in my life, I remember how this feels very distinctly: you cannot WAIT for the day to be over, to just go home and 'zone out', as we say, to simply NOT work for 12 hours or so...knowing all the same that you'll be back in the same place, working and waiting, deferring life until 'the end of the day'. This is a real problematic.
Your post is full of vivid description and excellent writing—you've really done well with this instance of everyday theory.
Michael I am in agreement with Dr. Schaberg. Thanks for really offering-up stimulating and exciting thought. I wonder when you wrote:
ReplyDelete“Yet, ‘at the end of the day’ it didn’t matter that I didn’t fully hear how Deidre’s day went before work or if this lady made me refill her glass six times because work represented a reality that could be easily escaped, even easily ended”
if this statement does not reflect a certain problematic in these kinds of works, namely, that by “Focusing on the Texturology”: the hustle-and-bustle of the de-centered, diffracted individual, the de-placed, hyper-spaced flurry of design and consumption, we do not miss the hardcore materiality of oppressive work conditions and horrific social alienation still present despite it all.
For example, you note that, “while it was hard for me to fully observe the constant flow of servers, food runners, managers, guests, etc. because I too was a part of this “texturology” of the restaurant, I nonetheless gained insights…[these] insight[s] accompanied with my own train of thoughts combined to create a new way of viewing the restaurant as a home Not merely for the Money Starved or Hungry Masses, but as a place of Unrealized feelings and Fragmented conversations among employees and guests caused by both distractions and continual motion” (emphasis mine)”.
While this may be a point of resistance do you not also think that this feeling of the dis-stance of one to another in the mulitiplicities of re-inscribed and yet deferred (never wholly present) continuities may offer up a nice cover for exploitation? While it is characteristic to view fleeting moments of thoughts and conversations as IM’s, rather than dialogues, of waiter-ing not as dance with a gracious Other but as awkward maneuver with self-absorbed mirrors who simulate a couple in love more than being one, I still think that there may be yet other ways to view conversations, thoughts, and romantic affection.
Do we not have to admit in a spirit of Marx that at the literal end of a workday there is the irreducible, stubborn fact of economics and Work, which cannot be escaped, a Real which is never as easily ended or up-ended as a reading of Michel de Certeau?
Dr. Schaberg, what would be your take on the way that a texturology could serve the very purposes it seeks to subvert?
Bryan, I would say that you are right, in a sense: de Certeau's analysis can appear to be something like an aestheticization of of a deeply political field. On the other hand, though, when you talk about "other ways to view" human activities, it seems to me that this is what de Certeau, too, is offering: another way of seeing how the city moves such that it in fact *opens up* (to) critique. This is perhaps why de Certeau states: "Stories diversify, rumors totalize" (161). If we believe that de Certeau is working to attain a critical vantage point, then he is on the side of stories rather than rumors—for to de-totalize the city is to expose avenues for critique, to see it as a product of real, material social relations and forces of production. Does that make sense?
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