“Walking in the City” by Michel de Certeau

“Walking in the City” by Michel de Certeau
Student: Evan
2009/3/26


p.92
“Freud suggests that scopophlia--pleasure in looking--was one of the basic drives with which all (sighted) children are born” (107).

“Voyeurism is a way of seeing that is active; it distances and objectifies what is looked at. It is controlling and even sadistic, says Mulvey” (117).

--Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Material

　　　　　伊希迦黑提出….視覺是所有感官中最具距離感者，在視覺裡，主體與客體分離且相對，客體是在那邊的他者。
　　　　　…我所謂的觸覺，確實是指皮膚感受物質、手指觸摸紋理那樣的特定官能，但我也是指一種對包括所有感官本身的定向。舉例而言，我們可以想像一種視覺模式，比較不是那種與其對象保持距離且與以控制的凝視，而是一種在光與色彩中的侵浴。如此，這種觸覺式的官能定向是置身其中的，感覺到碰觸者與自己關係難分、互相連續，但又可彼此區別。 (117~118)

--“Women Recovering Our Clothes.” On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays

p.94
“Materialism also had many advocates in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most influential was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He believed that all phenomena, including man and animals, consist exclusively of particles of matter. Even human consciousness--or the soul--derives from the movement of tiny particles in the brain” (192).
--Sophie's World

p. 97
de Certeau :walking: urban system= Austin: speech act: language or the statements uttered
“[John] Austin’s theory is directed against traditional tendencies of philosophers….(2)to assume, in what Austin calls a logical obsession, that the standard sentence—of which other types are merely variants—is a statement that describes a situation or asserts a fact and can be judged to be either true or false”(301).
--A Glossary of Literary Terms

Speech act: speech= act

pp.100~101

style (personal style) vs. use(norm, code)

parole: language= personal way of walking: the urbanistic system

“Langue is the social arpect of language: it is the shared system which we (unconsciously) draw upon as speakers. Parole is the individual realization of the system in actual instances of language” (63).
--A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

Synecdoche: the use for the part stands for the whole.
e.g. a sail stands for a ship.
Asyndeton: Examples are veni, vidi, vici and its English translation "I came, I saw, I conquered." Its use can have the effect of speeding up the rhythm of a passage and making a single idea more memorable.
--Wikipedia

pp. 102~103

Strictly speaking, metonymy and synecdoche are different.

Synecdoche: the use for the part stands for the whole.
e.g. a sail stands for a ship.

Metonymy: the use of something closely related for the thing actually meant.
e.g. a scepter stands for a king.

“Synecdoche and metonymy are so much alike that it is hardly worthwhile to distinguish between them, and the latter terms is increasingly used for both” (76).
--Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry

walking= (discourse, language)=dreaming(the unconscious)
Freud: displacement and condensation in dream
Displacement: an element in a dream might stand for something else
e.g. a lover who is Italian= An Alfa Romeo Car
Condensation: several things compressed into one symbol
e.g . A person ‘may look like A perhaps, but be dressed like B, may do something that we remember C doing, and at the same the time we may know that he is D.’

Roman Jakobson(a linguist):
Displacement=metonymy
Condensation=metaphor e.g a metaphor like ‘the ship ploughed the waves condenses into a single item two different images, the ship cutting through the sea and the plough cutting through the soil.’

Lacan: the figures of dream (the unconscious)= the figures of language
Hence, the unconscious is structured like a language

Desartes: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ vs. Lacan: “I am where I think not.”

“The self is deconstructed, shown to be merely a linguist effect….the unconscious is the ‘kernel of our being,’ but the unconscious is like a language, and language exists as a structure before the individual enters into it”(113).
--Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory