ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most famous and most reproduced piece of writing from Michel de Certeau’s many works – anthologized or extracted almost to distraction – is the seventh chapter from The Practice of Everyday Life called ‘Walking in the city’. In this chapter, I want to use that chapter as a jumping-off point, as a means of indexing and interrogating the nature of some (and only some) of the practices of the modern city. In particular, I want to lay the practice of walking, that de Certeau uses as a sign of the human, alongside the practice of driving. I want to argue that one hundred years or so after the birth of automobility, the experience of driving is sinking in to our ‘technological unconscious’ and producing a phenomenology which we increasingly take for granted but which in fact is historically novel. This new and very public sense of possession (de Certeau 2000) which is also a possession of sense constitutes a radically different set of spatial practicings of the city which do not easily conform to de Certeau’s strictures on space and place, and should at least give us pause.
