2 - Michel de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces

Summary

Space is a practiced place.

Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Space is existential, existence is spatial.

Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

At the heart of Lefebvre's writings on cities it is the urban planner who serves the state to shape a collective habitus. Dwellers in metropolitan centers, he notes time and again, have the task of using their milieus creatively, often at odds with the designs imposed upon them. The words are astonishingly similar to those of Michel de Certeau in his writings on everyday life. Lefebvre emerges from Marxist philosophy and history while Certeau counts, as François Dosse has shown (2002), as an inclassable, a writer who approaches space even more eclectically and from a variety of angles that include the history of religion, anthropology, linguistics, city planning, psychoanalysis and sociology. Certeau writes a cultural anthropology that discerns the unconscious religious tenor of everyday life. His discipline is one which mixes late medieval theology with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic and existential philosophy, from which he borrows the distinction between anthropological or symbolic and geometric or administrative spaces. When all is said and done both Lefebvre and Certeau deal with ways of living and of being in the world that, when juxtaposed, yield remarkable similarities and differences.

Everyday Practice in a Bureaucratic State

Geometric sites, Certeau argues, are those that a state and a disciplinary regime impose upon their subjects. They exploit architecture, urban planning and available technologies to project their mental and physical design on to members of the polis.