Spatial readings of cities parallel how conflicting narrative interpretations compete for authority
Evidence
At the start of the third chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life, De Certeau offers this evocative description as a way of marking the distance between the viewer on his lofty perch and therefore liable to imagine he has a commanding overview of the city and the “practitioners” of life in the city who scurry about down below. He uses the word texturology to describe both perspectives: the notion that the city can somehow be possessed and made to yield to a reading by the viewer with some kind of superior vantage point and the network of moving, intersecting “writers” in the streets. Vision may give the illusion of the city transformed into a singular text, but lived reality composes “a manifold story that has neither author nor spectators, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of space: in relation to representations it remains daily and indefinitely other.” … Glossing this idea, Neil Campbell and Alistair Kean add the note of conflict: “a city is a gathering of meanings in which people invest their interpretation and seek to create their own (hi)story,” forming “a chain of meanings in competition with one another, with certain interpretations emerging at specific points in time with more authority and subsequent power than others.” This useful linking of space and stories reminds us that both phenomena depend on the establishment and transgression of frontiers; fiction depends on characters straining against or being able to overcome barriers to their progress, just as frontiers exist to impede, at least temporarily, movements in space. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 271
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the De Certeau-derived vocabulary of ‘texturology’ and the competing-interpretations model as a way to read both cities and narratives.
- XREF: This city-as-contested-text model connects directly to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Lahore and New York, and Home Boy’s urban New York reframed through immigrant eyes. — connects to: Cities and stories both run on contested frontiers of meaning.
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Cities and stories both run on contested frontiers of meaning.
Broader Connections
- Cities and stories both run on contested frontiers of meaning.
#corroborates(0.92)