The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

214 The experience of space and timespaces of the city are created by myriad actions, all of which bear thestamp of human intent. Answering Foucault, de Certeau sees a dailysubstitution 'for the technological system of a coherent and totalizingspace' by a 'pedestrian rhetoric' of trajectories that have 'a mythicalstructure' understood as 'a story jerry-built out of elements takenfrom common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gapsmesh with the social practices it symbolizes.'De Certeau here defines a basis for understanding the .ferment ofpopular, localized street cultures, even as expressed within theframework imposed by some overarching repressive order. 'The goal,'he writes, 'is not to make clear how the violence of order is transmutedinto a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light theclandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical and makeshiftcreativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of"discipline.'" The 'resurgence of "popular" practices within industrialand scientific modernity,' he writes, 'cannot be confined to the past,the countryside or primitive peoples' but 'exists at the heart of thecontemporary economy.' Spaces can be more easily 'liberated' thanFoucault imagines, precisely because social practices spatialize ratherthan becoming localized within some repressive grid of social control.De Certeau, as we shall see, recognizes that the practices of eY.: