ABSTRACT
The foregoing emphasis on what may loosely be defined as objective space, meaning space that is shaped, multiplied and defined by material reality, by the walls of cottages, for example, or the twigs of birds’ nests, ought not to suggest that the Romantic subject merely occupies space without affecting its dimensions and constitution. Not only do physical bodies transect the spaces of everyday life through the innumerable motions, most of them habitual and subconscious, that comprise the regimens and routines of living, but Romantic subjects also in a sense create space through their physical and mental negotiations of it. As Michel de Certeau observes in The Practice of Everyday Life , our daily movements, everything from dwelling, walking, reading, cooking and shopping, “weave places together… . They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize” (97). Quotidian perambulations, in other words, from one room to the next, from house to garden and garden to house serve to make and localize a home no less than the wood and brick and glass of which that home is built. According to de Certeau, we “furnish” homes with acts and recreate them in later years with memories (xxi). The specific arrangement or configuration of our homes and, indeed, of our neighbourhoods thus depends as much on a subjective as on an objective ordering and definition of space. The subject's capacity to “weave places together,” literally to make homes and neighbourhoods, or alternately, to “condemn[] certain places to inertia or disappearance” (de Certeau 99) by choosing to pass them by, invests even the most mundane, habitual and seemingly meaningless actions with generative and transformative potential. For de Certeau, that potential is primarily of a political nature and expresses itself in subversive “reappropriat[ions] [of] the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” (xiv). Invoking the Foucauldian idea of a grid of bureaucratic, legal and institutional discipline devoted to the maintenance of socio-economic order, de Certeau contends that
112it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it [i.e. the grid], what popular procedures (also ‘miniscule’ and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what ‘ways of operating’ form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or ‘dominee's’?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socio-economic order. (xiv)
The countervailing “ways of operating” upon which he centers his discussion are those everyday behaviours or “tactics” by which the subject resists conformity to, and assimilation by, the grid of power. Pedestrianism, already a radical activity by the late eighteenth century (Jarvis 27), is perhaps the most obvious example and the one to which de Certeau recurs most frequently. Characterizing alternate modes of transport such as trains as “travelling incarceration[s]” (111), de Certeau sees in the walker the essence of navigational freedom and, consequently, political enfranchisement. The vagrant, the jaywalker, the roadside fruit vendor—each of these becomes a figure of resistance in de Certeau's countercultural topography. The effect and scope of their resistance is of course debatable. Indeed, one of the obvious limitations of the political agenda of de Certeau's cultural analytic is its diffuseness, its tendency to operate exclusively on the margins of society. As Kristin Ross points out, de Certeau's “tactics”add up to no larger strategy… . [They are] a lot of pinprick operations separated from each other in time and space… . The resistance of an escapee from the panopticon can only be individual, or at best part of a culture of consolation—which is to say, ultimately, aesthetic. (71, emphasis added)
