ABSTRACT
Out of this fundamental opposition emerges a second, less obvious duality, one that in many moments is closely commensurate with de Certeau’s evocation of the ‘dual city’ – the ‘Concept-city’ of ‘rational discourse’ associated with the structural, spatial and institutional aspects of urbanisation on the one hand, and the ‘experiential’ city (the ‘subjective and imaginative dimension of urban existence’) on the other. One important way of understanding this is to pose the duality as a contrast between the new and distinct forms of subjectivity engendered by consumerism at the level of individual consciousness, and the imposition at the societal level of ‘rationalising practices’ and other intense forms of social control that, as will unfold in later chapters, are the direct corollary of an unmediated consumer society (see Presdee 2000; Hayward 2002). This is a cultural paradox of some significance. Consumerism instills the mistaken belief that identity and self-worth can be constructed through the display and celebration of consumer products, and the perception that, whenever possible, consumption must take the form of an expressive, exciting, even hedonistic experience – sensibilities that no doubt de Certeau would have seen as contributing to the ‘experiential’ aspect of street/urban life. However, at the same time, for consumer capitalism to operate effectively, it must employ as its handmaiden a pervasive set of regulatory practices such as security, auto surveillance and other rational (and increasingly actuarial) logics – methods that, by definition, are forced to adopt the ‘distant (and disassociated) gaze’ that, for de Certeau, exemplify the so-called ‘Concept-city’.
