Walking in the Midterm

"Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order."

This passage makes the apocalyptic change seem inevitable, almost standard to the standing order. “Things extra and other…insert themselves into the accepted framework…” This relationship between the “extra” and order is the true surface shown through the “leaks of meaning” making the standing order actually a “sieve-order,” or something that is not orderly solid. This seems to me to be the very definition of everyday small apocalypses; the constant tearing open of the “surface” of our everyday order that we as humans cling to. De Certeau is speaking of the everyday, this is from his piece Walking in the City in which he examines the everyday acts of walking, eating, sleeping, and telling stories. This relationship between “spatial practices and the constructed order,” brought about by insertion of the extra and other, is the everyday’s small apocalypse. It is a connection made by change brought in from elsewhere. We do not ever really notice this relationship, unless we live through critical theory, because space often “becomes the blind spot in … technology” and by walking in the city we waste the space that could be used because “To walk is to lack a place.” Parcours as a mode of transportation has escaped this blind spot and sees the relationship De Certeau writes about.

He states in the piece, “Objects and words have a hollow place in which a past sleeps…in which ancient revolutions slumber.” If you look closely, the essay as a whole has apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery. “The surface is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.” “…it exhibits the property…of being able to transform…but in doing so causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.” De Certeau uses words to imply a lack of, or a forgetting of the world as it is; I believe that this is because the everyday is a constant blip in the immensity that is the word apocalypse. Here we are walking, and living never realizing that we are losing (or have already lost) our very special connection to the world in its non-elsewhereness. A dictionary definition of the word apocalypse is the “complete, final destruction of the world.” Though who is to say how long that will take, perhaps the world is slowly being drained to an end.