Epoch ReadingField NotesOne-pager 041

A migrational, or metaphorical, city slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.Michel de Certeau · Walking in the City · The Practice of Everyday Life, Part III ch. VII · trans. Rendall, UC Press 1984, pp. 91–110

De Certeau starts at the top of the World Trade Center, where the city holds still and becomes a text you can read, and then walks back down to where the text is written by people who cannot read it: walkers whose steps are speech acts, whose routes are turns of phrase, whose proper names and neighborhood legends punch holes in the planned order. Started 09/01 at 6:07 P.M., sealed 09/04 at 12:53 P.M. The margins put the New York slogan back to work as a map under revision, name the two Jists, run the enunciation pages onto film cuts and a no-trespassing sign, pull in Stevie Wonder, Nas, and James Taylor, test the Portland drug crisis against the practices that outlive administration, and close on Freud’s spool with the walker as a yo-yo and a one-sentence summary about children and street lamps.

“Started 09/01/26 @ 6:07 p.m”pp. 91–110, every page inked09 · 04 · 2026
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Where the margins reached

the Panopticon, inverted Freud’s spool · the yo-yo the map spar · Illmatic Portland · the crisis that outlives Stevie · James Taylor the cinematic cut DE CERTEAU 1984
Book → Book Book → World
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The lines he pulled

“These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (‘ways of operating’), to ‘another spatiality’ (an ‘anthropological,’ poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.”

p.93, curly-bracketed top to bottom · tagged with his Jist operator: “The Jist/point of piece”

“The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.”

p.93, the first boxed passage of the read · his (A) a page earlier at the tower view: “The outside seat to watching map pieces shuffle”

“The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”

p.97 · his (B) beside the surveyed routes above it: “Maps fail to capture the depth of wandering experienced”

“To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.”

p.103 · his (C): “Walking man by James Taylor lyrics fit here”

“Haunted places are the only ones people can live in, and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.”

p.108 · his (B): “We see ghosts, memories see us”
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The read, page by page

p.91
  1. ✦The start stamp, top margin: “Started 09/01/26 @ 6:07 p.m” · the @ circled, at the top of the World Trade Center.
  2. ACity that never sleeps takes on a new meaning as a map constantly under revision · at the “universe that is constantly exploding.”
p.92
  1. AThe outside seat to watching map pieces shuffle · at the 1370-foot tower that “immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.”
p.93
  1. BAimless meandering · at the walkers’ “manifold story that has neither author nor spectator.”
  2. CThe Jist/point of piece · arrow up into the migrational-city passage, quoted whole above.
p.94
  1. A‘Livin’ for the City’ abject Poverty/ wear & tear this reminds me of · at the city as proper name and the “waste products” of a functionalist administration.
p.95
  1. BSo the fact that there are people employing time e.g. Harlem as distinct for in NY (a while) · at the boxed “ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity.”
p.96
  1. ASo like Portland Heroin crisis (?) · at the practices that “have outlived its decay” and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance. The (?) answered in the decode: the fit holds on the form, across decriminalization and back, with fentanyl the sharper word.
p.97
  1. BMaps fail to capture the depth of wandering experienced · at “These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting.”
p.98
  1. ✦A vertical scrawl along the boxed definition of walking as a space of enunciation · flagged in the decode, not read into.
  2. ARelated to the map spar this idea moves the idea of an outsider auditor → to surely be hard to imagine · at Chaplin’s cane and the walker who “transforms each spatial signifier into something else.”
p.99
  1. BLike a cinematic transition (?) · at the walker’s here and there and the phatic “hello.” Answered in the decode: a match; the cut joins and separates two places in one move, the establishing shot is the phatic term.
  2. CSymbolic meaning/language of passing a “no tresspassing” sign · at “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects.”
p.100
  1. AStroll versus Power walk · at the rhetoric of walking, turns and detours as turns of phrase.
  2. Buse is employment timing or actualization of a walk’s style · at style and use intersecting “to form a style of use.”
p.101
  1. Bweaving To and [scribbled] fro, door to door like a peddler · the long poem of walking, starred twice.
  2. CSimilar to walking · at asyndeton, the walk that “skips like a child, hopping on one foot.”
p.102
  1. ADialogue of trees & pedestrians · at the forests of gestures that walk through the streets.
  2. BObviously oppositional in organic composition · at the “wandering of the semantic” that diverts the city from its immobile order.
p.103
  1. CWalking man by James Taylor lyrics fit here · at “To walk is to lack a place.”
  2. DExplains Indy’s hollowness · at the place that “is only a name, the City.”
p.104
  1. AThe block itself is the story like w/ the ‘Illmatic’ point in Spar philo · at street names that “articulate a sentence that his steps compose without his knowing it.”
  2. BI came from the pizza shop on 4th” Immeditaly creates a narrative · at the magical powers proper names enjoy; his spelling, as inked.
p.105
  1. ✳Jist · a second thesis mark, after a scribbled word, under names that “create in the place itself that erosion or nowhere that the law of the other carves out within it.”
p.106
  1. ALocal authority like the St. Marys day Parade · at the “crack in the system” that functionalist totalitarianism seeks to eliminate.
  2. BControl these & you control the map · at the legends that are “the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure.”
p.107
  1. CCreating a new locality/native Space for a traveler e.g. KY 4 MI · at the “walking exile” that produces the legends one’s own vicinity lacks, Heidegger in the text.
  2. DRumors drive the revision of stories/serve to create new ones · at “Stories diversify, rumors totalize,” with his arrowed example: “e.g. Flat Earth/Columbus.”
p.108
  1. Amy moms favorite game- LOL · arrow into “Here, there used to be a bakery.” “That’s where old lady Dupuis used to live.”
  2. BWe see ghosts, memories see us · at the haunted places that invert the Panopticon.
p.109
  1. CWalking the city streets is hurling yourself through a memory/sense vacuum like a yo-yo · starred, at Freud’s grandson and the spool: fort, da.
p.110
  1. ✳Stars around “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other.” · and around the “metaphorical” or mobile city Kandinsky dreamed of.
  2. ✦The done stamp: “09/04/26” + “Done @ 12:53 p.m.” · Chapter VIII on the facing page struck through with one large X.

Structure is scaffold; every quoted line is his, verbatim from the annotated pages. Letters are his comment order as inked across each photographed sheet. One vertical scrawl stays flagged in the decode rather than guessed at, and words he struck out are shown struck, never smoothed.

The summary · his ink, marked “1 sentence Summary”
“we are all children wandering until the street lamps come on, playing pretend until they go out.”
1 sentence Summary · pp. 91–110 · sealed “09/04/26 Done @ 12:53 p.m.”