The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault's Panoptic Discourse and the

Cartographic Impulse
Author(s): Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 63-80
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 THE TRANSVERSALITY OF
MICHEL DE CERTEAU
FOUCAULT'S PANOPTIC DISCOURSE
AND THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMPULSE

BRYAN REYNOLDS AND JOSEPH FITZPATRICK

Above all (and this is a corollary, but an important one), the phenomeno-
logical and praxiological analysis of cultural trajectories must allow to be
grasped at once a composition of places and the innovation that modifies it
by dint of moving and cutting across them.
-Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural

Through his rigorous examinations of the common, the quotidian, the personal, the
plural practices that establish and continually transform societies, Michel de Certeau
develops a conception of culture born of the perpetual transgression, however subtle or
pronounced, of the boundaries imposed by all totalizing systems, whether theoretical or
social. This view of culture as a "cutting across" of boundaries, which can be found in
many forms throughout his work, achieves a special significance for the study of
subjectification in his discussion of "Spatial Practices" that comprises the third section
of The Practice of Everyday Life. In an important essay on Certeau's theory of space,
Ian Buchanan argues that "our understanding of culture must commence with an under-
standing of the formation of the subject," and that the latter is addressed by Certeau
through his essays on space [129-30]. Following this assertion, we want to argue that
Certeau's analyses of spatial practices in Heterologies, "The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa,"
and The Practice of Everyday Life [particularly the chapter "Walking in the City" 91-
110], outline a theory that describes subjectivity as what amounts to, as Certeau puts it
in Culture in the Plural, "a composition of places and the innovation that modifies it by
dint of moving and cutting across them" [146]. Furthermore, by articulating the close
relationship between Certeau's spatial theory and our own work on "transversal move-
ment," we will attempt to show that the method of analysis Certeau uses in "Walking in
the City" (and describes in several other works) is itself marked by the "transversal"
tactics that his theory describes.' By focusing in particular on Certeau's methodological
critique of Foucault in both The Practice of Everyday Life and Heterologies, we will
demonstrate the various ways in which he moves beyond what Bryan Reynolds and
James Intriligator have labeled the "dissective-cohesive mode" of analysis, an analyti-

1. The terms "transversal" and "transversality" are used throughout this essay in the sense
that Bryan Reynolds gives them in his article "The Devil's House, 'or worse': Transversal Power
and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England." Reynolds's source for the terms, as
noted in that article [148n16], is Felix Guattari's discussion of group desire in the essays col-
lected in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Reynolds explains that in appropriating
Guattari's term he also "extend[s] [Guattari's] definition of transversality to conceptuality and
its territories and allow[s] it to apply to the existential processes of individuals as well as of
groups."

diacritics / fall 1999 diacritics 29.3: 63-80 63

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cal approach (characteristic of most dialectical argumentation) that breaks its subject
matter into constituent parts and examines those parts with the goal of reassembling
them into a unified and accountable whole (such as, say, the city or the human subject in
"Walking in the City").2

Postmodern Space: Certeau and Jameson

In his essay "Heterophenomenology, or Certeau's Theory of Space," Ian Buchanan situ-

ates Certeau's writings on the production of space within the postmodern debate over
the autonomy of the subject, opposing Certeau's view to Fredric Jameson's "assump-
tion that the subject takes his or her psychic bearings from the built environment and
only has certain existence so long as he or she can cognitively 'map' this environment"
[Buchanan 114]. Citing the example of the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles,
Jameson argues that "this latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace-has fi-
nally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate
itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its
position in a mappable external world" [44]. The effect on cultural politics, according to
Jameson, is that the subject "submerged" by this postmodern hyperspace is deprived of
the "critical distance" that makes possible the "positioning of the cultural act outside of
the massive Being of capital" [48]. Buchanan finds in "Walking in the City" the basis
for a critique of this view though a conception of space stemming from "heterophe-
nomenology," defined as "a phenomenology predicated by a heterogeneously consti-
tuted subject which does not take for granted the unity of the body" [112]. Focusing on
Certeau's debt to Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception (which can best be seen in
Certeau's essay "The Madness of Vision"), Buchanan argues that the "subject is not
already constituted, thus he/she is able to adapt to new surroundings by forming new
and nevertheless constitutive relations with them" [124]. He goes on to argue (using
Lacanian terms for the subject's position in discourse) that while Jameson conceives of
space as the discursive circumstances that precede and therefore constitute the subject,
Certeau presents it instead as the product of the subject's interaction with the existing
environment, a paradigm that restores to the subject a level of agency and intentionality
that Jameson's analysis precludes.
Although this heterophenomenological approach to space proves useful within the
context of Jameson's discussion of the body's confusion in postmodern hyperspace, its
intense examination of perception as a bodily phenomenon and its constant reference to
Merleau-Ponty lie, by Buchanan's admission, beyond the scope of Certeau's essay. We
must not forget that the original object of Certeau's critique was Foucault's theory of
panopticism and that the problems of vision and perspective that are the focus of
Buchanan's essay are, in Certeau's writings, always closely intertwined with the "god"
of the panopticon. Following the opening image in "Walking in the City" of a person
looking down on New York City from the top of the World Trade Center, Certeau writes:

The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or
Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye
had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celes-

2. Bryan Reynolds and James Intriligator introduced this concept, as well as the others that
we shall associate with transversal methodology, in a paper entitled "Transversal Power: Mol-
ecules, Jesus Christ, The Greatful Dead, and Beyond," given at the Manifesto Conference at
Harvard University on May 9, 1998.

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 tial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have
organized an "all-seeing power"? [92]

The last phrase-which is a quotation from Foucault's introduction to a French transla-

tion of Bentham's Panopticon [16]-and the reference to the creation of "gods" through
the mechanical contrivance of an omniscient perspective (rather than a particular omni-
scient being) indicate that Certeau associates the "cartographic impulse"-as well as
the "elevation" of the World Trade Center that "allows one... to be a solar Eye, looking
down like a god" [92]-with the panoptic practices described by Foucault. With the
following analysis of this association, we hope to show that Certeau does not so much
"renounce ... the cartographic impulse" (as Buchanan's reading argues, which places
him in direct opposition to Jameson) as he in fact expands upon this impulse and the
related Foucauldian reading of panopticism [Buchanan 115].

Foucault and Panopticism

In an essay on Foucault's Discipline and Punish entitled "Micro-techniques and Panop-

tic Discourse: A Quid pro Quo,"' Certeau describes the state of affairs produced through
the development (in the army and in schools) of panoptic disciplinary techniques after
the Enlightenment, which had seen the creation of these techniques as a reform of the
vengeful and bloody displays of punishment inflicted on criminals by the ancien regime:

The new techniques are refined and applied without recourse to any overt
ideology.: the development of a cellular grid (whether for students, soldiers,
workers, criminals, or sick people) transforms space itself into an instrument
that can be used to discipline, to program, and to keep under observation any
social group. [ 186]

Although he critiques Foucault's analysis of panopticism and panoptic discourse, Certeau

does not challenge this basic assertion that the technologies of discipline and surveil-
lance spawned by the panoptic reforms of the Enlightenment have created a regulated
and normalized space (a "cellular grid") in which the modem subject exists. Rather than
attempting to debunk Foucault by searching for internal inconsistencies within this theory
of the panoptic partitioning of space, Certeau sets more inclusive parameters that ex-
pand Foucault's chosen area of investigation to reveal the forces and "micro-techniques"
omitted or elided by Foucault in his too narrowly focused study of panopticism:

What happened to all the other series of procedures that, in their unnoticed
itineraries,failed to give rise either to a specific discursive configuration or to
a technological systemization? There are many other procedures besides pan-
optical ones. These might well be looked on as an immense reserve containing
the seeds or the traces of alternate developments. [188]

Certeau claims that the problems with Foucault's study stem from his employment of
what we have described as the dissective-cohesive mode of analysis. According to
Certeau, Foucault's method is to "extract, and then turn over": Foucault "isolates a
design of some practices from a seamless web, in order to constitute these practices as a

3. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other 185-92. At several points, this essay corresponds
closely with the chapter "Foucault and Bourdieu" in The Practice of Everyday Life 45-60.

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distinct and separate corpus, a coherent whole"; then he inverts this isolated and osten-
sibly unified group of practices (in this case, panoptic practices) so that "[w]hat was
obscure, unspoken, and culturally alien becomes the very element that throws light on
the theory and upon which the discourse is founded" [190]. In this process the "other
series of procedures," everything outside of the panoptic practices, are first separated
from those procedures that comprise the object of investigation; then they are
marginalized by the inversion that focuses on the "obscure" details capable of illumi-
nating only the isolated group of procedures being studied. Those "other series of pro-
cedures" are therefore systematically marginalized and forgotten; their "unnoticed itin-
eraries" lead them away from--or through, or across, or onto--the "cellular grid" of
panoptic space, like the pedestrians in Certeau's description of New York. And insofar
as Foucault's panoptic discourse is itself "a narrative, a theoretical narrative, which
obeys rules analogous to those panoptic procedures," Certeau traces the itineraries of
the forgotten (or ignored) procedures back onto the discourse from which they were
originally removed:

But we do not yet know what to make of other, equally infinitesimal procedures
that have remained unprivileged by history yet which continue to flourish in
the interstices of the institutional technologies. This is most particularly the
case of procedures that lack the essential precondition indicated by Foucault,
namely the possession of a locus or specific space of their own on which the
panoptical machinery can function. Such techniques, which are just as opera-
tive though without locus, are rhetorical "tactics." I suggest that these se-
cretly reorganize Foucault's discourse, colonize his "panoptical" text, and
transform it into a "trompe-l'oeil." [191; 189]

If the "other series of procedures" is capable of "reorganizing" and "colonizing"

Foucault's discourse, we must conclude not only that these procedures should have
been incorporated and accounted for within Foucault's analysis to begin with, but also
that they are at least potentially capable of similarly disrupting the "cellular grid" of
panoptic space.

Places, Spaces, and the Evolution of Maps

Certeau's use of quotation marks to set off the word "tactics" in the above quotation
draws attention to its technical meaning for him in contrast to what he calls "strategies."
The latter he defines (in the general introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life) as:

the calculus offorce-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of

will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can
be isolated from an "environment." A strategy assumes a place that can be
circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating
relations with an exterior distinct from it. . . . [xix]

A "tactic," by contrast, is "a calculus which cannot count on a 'proper' (a spatial or

institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible
totality" [xix]. This distinction allows us to understand Foucault's panoptic procedures
as "strategies" that require, both by the definition given in The Practice of Everyday
Life and by the implication of the passage from Heterologies quoted above, a "proper"
place in which to exercise their authority. The importance of this notion of propriety to

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Certeau's theory of spatial practices is most clearly evident in the discussion of "Spatial
Stories" in The Practice of Everyday Life, where Certeau makes another crucial distinc-
tion between "place" (lieu) and "space" (espace) [115-30]. The difference between
these terms is to a large extent a matter of propriety: "The law of the 'proper' rules in the
place; the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its
own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines." Because each element in a
place rests in the position in which it belongs, place "implies an indication of stability"
[117]. Space, on the other hand,

exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and
time variables. ... Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that
orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of
conflictual programs or contractual proximities.... In contradistinction to the
place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a "proper." [ 117]

Space, then, cannot be "proper" because it is a product of action and movement. "In
short," writes Certeau, "space is a practiced place" [117].
Almost as soon as he has made this distinction between "place" and "space," Certeau
proceeds to problematize it by considering the example of cartography. Regarding the
"current geographical" map, he writes that, "in the course of the period marked by the
birth of modem scientific discourse (i.e., from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century)
the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its
possibility." The earliest kind of map was "not a 'geographical map' but a 'history book.'"
It recorded the experiences of a journey (usually a pilgrimage) pictorially: "This draw-
ing outlines not the 'route' (there wasn't one) but the 'log' of their journey on foot-an
outline marked out by footprints with regular gaps between them and by pictures of the
successive events that took place in the course of the journey." Later maps, from the
fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, "became more autonomous." They gradually dimin-
ished the signs of their own creation, reducing them to the "figurations" of ships or
monsters: "these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical
operations from which it resulted. Thus, the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the
maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines." But, according to
Certeau, "the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it elimi-
nates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it." The result is
the map in its "current geographical form," bereft (through a gradual process of forget-
ting) of the visible evidence of its own construction [120-21].
This explanation of the origin of maps leads to a paradoxical complication of the
original distinction between "place" and "space." Certeau contrasts this process of cre-
ating maps to the everyday stories that people use to construct the space around them:

The organization that can be discerned in stories about space in everyday

culture is inverted by the process that has isolated a system of geographical
places. The difference between the two modes of description obviously does
not consist in the presence or absence of practices (they are at work every-
where), but in the fact that maps, constituted as proper places in which to
exhibit the products of knowledge,form tables of legible results. Stories about
space exhibit on the contrary the operations that allow it, within a constrain-
ing and non-"proper" place, to mingle its elements anyway, as one apart-
ment-dweller put it concerning the rooms in his flat.: "One can mix them up."
[121]

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Certeau explicitly defines the distinction between "place" and "space" as a matter of the
presence or absence of practices--"space is a practiced place"-yet in this passage he
describes maps as if they represent places, even "proper places," while at the same time
he insists that they are the products of practices, and therefore should be considered to
represent spaces. The resolution of this paradox rests in the last statement of the quoted
passage, in the apartment-dweller's conception of the multiplicity of possible configu-
rations for his apartment. Certeau continues: "[i]n a pre-established geography, which
extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that 'one can't do
anything in them' to the legendary, long-lost attic that 'could be used for everything,'
everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of
space" [121]. Stories spatialize by enumerating possibilities, by demarcating the bound-
aries of what is possible within a given place. The stories that predicated the creation of
a map, then, also gave some indication of what could be done in or with the places being
mapped (for example, Certeau tells us that medieval "history book" maps would make
note of "cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray at, etc." [120]).
The omission of references to these stories from revised or subsequent maps eradicates
the explicit assumptions that those stories make regarding the possibilities of a particu-
lar place; in doing so, those assumptions become implicit in the map itself. For example,
one cartographer might see a group of rocks in a stream as a crossing point, and there-
fore note them on the map, while a second cartographer might not conceive of this
possible use for the rocks, and thus omit them from the map. The two resultant maps
would then implicitly present different ranges of possibility for the use of the rocks,
insofar as the latter map would not even record their existence. In this sense we can
understand how maps are "proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowl-
edge" and "form tables of legible results"-for although they are presented as objective
indicators of place, maps are founded on spatializing assumptions that affect the way
that those mapped places are perceived. The forgetting of these original spatializations,
their erasure from the increasingly geographical (and geometrical) maps,4 makes it pos-
sible for maps to become arbiters of what is "proper"-makes it possible, in short, for
spatial constructions to be perceived as "places."

Panopticism, Cartography, and the "Utopian" City

In "Walking in the City," Certeau writes that "[t]he 'city' founded by utopian and
urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation" [94]. The first
two elements of this operation can be considered abstractions of the processes that we
have seen at work in both the discourse of panopticism and the formulation of maps:

1. The production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must
thus repress all the physical, mental, and political pollutions that would compro-
mise it;
2. the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable
and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientific strategies, made
possible by the flattening out of all the data in a plane projection, must replace
the tactics of users who take advantage of "opportunities" and who, through these
trap-events, these lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history every-
where.

4. The terms "geographical" and "geometrical," which Certeau mentions in connection

with Merleau-Ponty, infact have a much more complex relation to maps and their spatializations
than is implied here. We will discuss the importance of these terms in the next section of this essay.

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We have seen the first of these processes at work both in the map itself and in the
"cellular grid" into which panoptic disciplinary techniques compartmentalize the city.
The second process describes the forgetting of the spatializing travels from which the
map arose, or of the complex web of practices from which those of panopticism were
originally extracted. The "utopian" city that these elements help to construct is pre-
sented by Certeau in the essay's opening image of a view of New York City from the top
of the World Trade Center, a view that actualizes the medieval desire (mentioned above)
to perceive the whole city in a glimpse, from a "god's" perspective: "[t]he totalizing eye
imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic
drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that
yesterday was only painted" [92].5 This "totalizing" view of the city, in the medieval
imagination as much as on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, produces a "pan-
orama-city," defined by Certeau as

a "theoretical" (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condi-

tion of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The
voyeur-god created by this fiction, who, like Schreber's God, knows only ca-
davers, must disentangle himselffrom the murky intertwining daily behaviors
and make himself alien to them. [93]

In saying that this "voyeur-god"--established, like the god of the panopticon, through
fictions-"knows only cadavers," Certeau again equates the "cellular grid" of
panopticism with the map's transformation of space into "proper" places: in describing
"the law of the place," he writes that "from the pebble to the cadaver, an inert body
always seems, in the West, to found a place" [Practice 118].
At this point it is crucial that we pause for a moment, step back from our analysis,
and view it transversally. In reference to the terminology mentioned in our introduc-
tion, we have until now described Certeau's analysis of spatial practices as tending
toward the dissective-cohesive. In other words, we have treated the distinction between
"place" and "space," complicated as it might be, as the axiomatic dichotomy that en-
genders subsequent distinctions between "strategies" and "tactics," panoptic practices
and the "other procedures" that they repress, the presentation of a map (as place) and its
tacit assumptions (as space), and the "voyeur god" and the pedestrian. This final dis-

5. Certeau continues: "[t]he 1370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan
continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable,
and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text." While Buchanan elaborates on Certeau's
implicit distinction here (as well as elsewhere in the essay) between the illusive "readerly text" of
the city created by the panoptic perspective and the actual "writerly text" created by the pedestri-
ans down below [see particularly 116-19 of Buchanan's essay], we believe that the readerly/
writerly dichotomy is a misleading analogy because it can imply a mutual exclusivity between its
two elements. While Certeau clearly opposes the panoptic or utopian view of the city to the daily
practice of pedestrians, the quotation with which we opened this paper shows that he saw the two
possibilities as forming an ongoing dialectic. The readerly/writerly dichotomy perceives the two
kinds of texts primarily as separate: the writerly text, according to Barthes, "is ourselves writing,
before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped,
plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of
entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" [S/Z 5]. For Certeau, "writerly"
(quotidian) practices not only precede the systems that attempt to regulate them, but also con-
tinue to transgress the boundaries imposed by those systems. While Certeau sees these transgres-
sions as daily occurrences that help constitute culture, Barthes claims that the writerly can be
found in structured readerly texts only "very rarely: by accident, fleetingly, obliquely in certain
limit-works" [4-5].

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tinction, though, more clearly than any of the others, belies the very idea of treating
Certeau as a strictly dissective-cohesive thinker. Buchanan's essay, which traces out the
influence of Merleau-Ponty on Certeau's theory of space, gives a very different reading
of the "voyeur god"-pedestrian opposition. Buchanan bases his analysis on Certeau's
explicit connection of this opposition with the distinction Merleau-Ponty makes be-
tween "geometrical" and "anthropological" space, a distinction that Buchanan claims is
an "axiom" for Certeau [120]. In the early pages of "Walking in the City," Certeau states
clearly his intention "to locate the practices that are foreign to the 'geometrical' or 'geo-
graphical' space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions," and defines these
practices tentatively as constituting "an 'anthropological,' poetic and mythic experi-
ence of space" [93]. Buchanan convincingly argues that on these terms Certeau rejects
cartography because its assumption of a single, godlike, panoptic perspective is com-
pletely alien to the lived experiences of the numerous pedestrians whose individual
perspectives give them each a unique spatial interaction with their surroundings [see
esp. 120-21]. We must realize, however, that the terms "geometrical space" and "an-
thropological space" are not identical to Certeau's own "place" and "space." The two
sets of terms are, in Certeau's opinion, "analogous"; yet in the definitions of "place"
and "space" he gives in "Spatial Stories," Certeau sets aside Merleau-Ponty's terms by
referring to them in the past tense and by following his discussion of their phenomeno-
logical significance with the statement that "the opposition between 'place' and 'space'
will rather refer to two sorts of determination in stories" [Practice 117-18, our empha-
sis]. These "analogous" sets of terms are distinguished in such a way that the place/
space dichotomy cannot be defined using the terms "anthropological" and "geometri-
cal," a fact that, by the definition of an axiom, makes it impossible for Merleau-Ponty's
distinction to be "axiomatic" for Certeau. In "Walking in the City" Certeau mingles
these terms, as in his reference to the "voyeur-god ... who, like Schreber's God, knows
only cadavers," which combines the omniscient perspective of "geometrical space" with
the cadaver imagery that suggests the stasis of "place."
With an awareness of this coexistence of two distinct dissective-cohesive systems
within Certeau's analysis, we can begin to see how "Walking in the City" not only
rejects the cartographic impulse of "geometrical space," but moreover depicts the
pedestrian's daily reconceptualizations of proper "places." In the context of Merleau-
Ponty's distinction, the voyeur-god's "oblivion" and "misunderstanding of practices"
denote the inauthenticity of the "geometrical" spatializing that is represented by the
map or by the view from the top of the World Trade Center. When we think in terms of
the place-space distinction, however, this "oblivion" and "misunderstanding" recall the
historical evolution both of maps and of panoptic practices. To connect the voyeur-
god's "oblivion" with the view of present-day New York from 110 stories up is to project
those practices that are forgotten in the process of synchronization (the second element
that constitutes the "utopian" city) onto the present. In this sense, the panorama-city--
or, to use another of Certeau's appellations, the "concept-city"--is created by forgetting
these practices and can be maintained only by ignoring them. The "murky intertwining
daily behaviors," which Certeau spends the rest of the essay describing, continually
disrupt the order of a system that, seen from above, appears to be ruled by the law of
"place." They make impossible the third element that Certeau claims is a precondition
of the "utopian" city,

the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it
gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes'
State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and as-
signed to many different real subjects-groups, associations, or individuals.
"The city," like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and con-

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 structing space on the basis of afinite number of stable, isolatable, and inter-
connected properties. [Practice 94]

It is in their daily walks, the "intertwining" patterns that cannot be discerned from the
panoptic height of the World Trade Center's 110th floor, that individuals continually
transgress the "stable" and "isolatable" divisions through which the state attempts to
coopt their subjectivity.

Transversality and Anamnesis

This drive toward the creation of a universal subject connects the panoptic spatializations
of the concept-city back to the idea of transversality. The "stable" and "isolatable" divi-
sions mentioned above, the units of panopticism's "cellular grid," the "proper" places
delineated by the map, constitute the assemblage we refer to (in transversal terms) as
"subjective territory." Bryan Reynolds has defined this concept as:

the scope of the conceptual and emotional experience of those subjectified by

the state machinery or by any hegemonic society or sub-society (the university

or criminal organizations, for example). .... Subjective territory is delineated

by conceptual and emotional boundaries that are normally defined by the pre-
vailing science, morality, and ideology. [ 146]

By means of its diverse ideological and repressive apparatuses (including educational,

familial, juridical, and religious structures), the state works to enclose each subject in a
prescribed and regulated subjective territory. This subjective territory is in effect real-
ized physically (geographically) as well as conceptually and emotionally; physical con-
straints influence the conceptual and emotional aspects of subjectivity just as they are
symptoms and extensions of these aspects. For example, consider the constructed and
monitored life experiences, the subjectivity, of people occupying specific social and
class identities (male or female; rich or poor; Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim; and so on).
"In short," Reynolds writes, "subjective territory is the existential and experiential realm
in and from which a given subject of a given hierarchical society perceives and relates
to the universe and his or her place in it" [147]. And, as we have already seen, maps,
with their tacit spatializations, attempt to definitively mark out "what one can do in ...
and make out of' a space; that is, they direct how one perceives and performs in space.
This is precisely the act of defining a subjective territory.6 Within the greater conceptual
territory-that is, the realm of possible thought-represented by both known and unex-
plored worlds (Buchanan's excellent example of British explorers sailing for the first
time to Australia is particularly apt here), the spatial practices of cartographers map out
a defined and "proper" system of places. This system contributes to the establishment
of subjective territories with boundaries that limit access to as yet unappropriated con-
ceptual territory.
Whereas the infinite possibilities of conceptual territory are powerfully constrained
by the state machinery's cartographically implemented subjectification of the individual,
like Certeau, we do not believe that subjective territory is capable of fully containing
the subject. Beyond the limits of subjective territory, we must remember, lies "the non-
subjectified region of one's conceptual territory," an open space we call "transversal

6. We should note that Certeau simultaneously presents the construction of subjective terri-
tory both through the discursive spatializations of maps and through panoptic practices that exist
in "non- or pre-verbal domains" bereft of discourse [Heterologies 189].

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territory" [Reynolds 149]. It contains all of the possibilities that are precluded or ex-
cluded by the practices that the state uses to enclose the subject and reduce him or her to
the proper. Transversal territory can be reached by transgressing the boundaries that
those practices impose. "People occupy transversal territory when they defy or surpass
the conceptual boundaries of their prescribed subjective addresses. Transversal territory
invites people to deviate from the vertical, hierarchicalizing and horizontal, homog-
enizing assemblages of any organizational social structure [Reynolds 149]. This "de-
viation," this transgression of the boundaries of subjective territory, is made possible by
what we call "transversal power." Transversal power, which can be found in anything
from criminal acts to natural catastrophes to the daily practice of walking in the city,
"induces people to transversally cut across the striated, organized space of subjectiv-
ity-of all subjective territory-and enter the disorganized yet smoothly infinite space
of 'transversality"' [150]. Recall that we have already seen the importance that Certeau
attributes to such a "cutting across" in the production of culture. In "Walking in the
City," he focuses specifically on spatial practices within a panoptically and cartographi-
cally defined urban system, and locates transversal power in the everyday act of walk-
ing:

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how

panoptic they may be. it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only
within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from
them). ... Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occa-
sions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it
is like a peddlet; carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive com-
pared with the usual choices. [Practice 101]

We have also seen that the construction of the "utopian" city through cartographic and
panoptic procedures is contingent upon acts of forgetting. The act of walking-because
of the resultant transversal movements-must be forgotten in order to map the city:

Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of
walking, wandering, or "window shopping," that is, the activity of passers-by,
is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the
map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of
projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that
made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace
left behind is substituted for the practice. [Practice 97]

"The practice" of walking, transversal in nature, is thus opposed to the forgetting prin-
ciple of cartography. Any kind of "practicing"-a sparring boxer, a chess player strug-
gling against a computer opponent, a musician working through a difficult piece-pre-
vents the forgetting of the myriad tactics, moves, or stylistic subtleties that enable
creativities in the sport, game, or concert hall. And just like anyone else who becomes
"out of practice," pedestrians are capable, through the activity of walking, of remem-
bering many things that have been forgotten. In such cases transversal power takes the
form of anamnesis, a recollection of the spatial practices that the creation of maps at-
tempted to forget. This anamnesis can be seen most clearly in Certeau's account of
traveling (as an extension of walking):

Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space
to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a

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 sort of reversal, "an exploration of the deserted places of my memory," the
return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the
"discovery" of relics and legends ... ? [Practice 106-07]

Certeau finds similar "relics" lying behind the proper names used as labels throughout
the city (as in Nevsky Prospect, Trafalgar Square, or the George Washington Bridge).
Though the original referents of these proper names are often forgotten, "their ability to
signify outlives [their] first definition" [Practice 104]. As with the implicit spatializations
of maps, pedestrians dismiss or forget the intended meanings of these proper names and
replace those meanings with ones of their own: they appropriate the "ability to signify"
with which the names were originally endowed as they exercise their own power of
imagination. Certeau emphasizes that this deviation from the intended, "proper" mean-
ing-this transversal movement-is once again the consequence of anamnesis. "People
are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste
products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or
almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers' steps: names that have ceased precisely
to be 'proper"' [Practice 105]. The remembering of forgotten practices and the subse-
quent reconstructing or imbuing of them with new meanings are, for Certeau, a means
by which transversal power manifests itself. This is what occurs in Certeau's analysis of
Foucault's theory of panopticism.

Perspective and the Panoptic Gaze

In carrying out this examination of transversal tactics, Certeau repeatedly opposes prac-
tices to vision, associating the former with lived experience and the latter with panoptic
organizations of space [see esp. Practice 93, 97]. While the concept-city realized in the
view from the top of the World Trade Center is described as panoptic, "[t]he ordinary
practitioners of the city ... make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of
them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms" [Practice 93]. Certeau is clear in
his assessment of the panoptic perspective, but his association of the individual city
dweller's practice of space with "blindness" leaves his position on the individual's vi-
sual perspective in doubt. For an account of the relationship of the individual's perspec-
tive to the panoptic gaze, we must turn to Certeau's theorizing of panopticism in "The
Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa."
In this essay Certeau analyzes the "mystic theology" outlined in the fifteenth-cen-
tury bishop Nicholas of Cusa's treatise De visione Dei sive De icona. The preface to this
treatise describes an empirical experiment for the readers to enact using a portrait "whose
face is painted with an art so subtle that it seems to look at everything in the vicinity"
[11]. This portrait is to be hung on the northern wall of a room in which the readers
(imagined as monks) are gathered. The monk in the eastern part of the room perceives
the portrait staring at him and is surprised when he moves to the western part of the
room and discovers that it is staring at him still. Cusa then suggests that the monk walk
across the room while keeping his eyes fixed on those of the portrait. In doing so, the
monk will observe the eyes following him "continually" from one side of the room to
the other and back.
This second part of the experiment, in which the monk watches the painting as he
moves, is crucial to our understanding of the individual's perspective within a panoptic
system. In his analysis of this part of the experiment, Certeau discerns two "contradict-
ing" spaces being created:

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 The voyages of the eye from East to West and from West to East ought to trans-
form the perceived landscape: the spectator, modifying his "point of view,'
the painting, as he perceives it, is subject to proportional anamorphoses in the
successive places that he occupies. The landscape moves. But the gaze, for its
part, does not obey the law of that visual reciprocity that defines a landscape.
It "follows" the movements and it remains immutable. Its ubiquity unifies an
immobile space where the displacements of the eye ceaselessly change the
painting. The circulations of the spectator differentiate two types of space, that
of the eye and that of the gaze, which contradict each other in the same space.
[18]

In this way the individual's awareness of the panoptic gaze begins in his own percep-
tions. But while the locus of panoptic organization is in this case identical with the
portals of the gaze-which is to say, the portrait's eyes are all-seeing because of the way
in which the portrait's eyes are constructed-the situation is different in "Walking in the
City." The panoptic view from the World Trade Center is made possible because of the
way that the city itself is constructed. And the New York pedestrian who looks at the
skyline or along one of the long straight streets as he walks will have the same experi-
ence as Nicholas of Cusa's monks: the space in which he perceives the changing land-
scape of the buildings and people around him will coincide with the unchanging back-
drop of the Manhattan grid as it is seen from the top of the World Trade Center. The
city's organization does not present itself as obviously as it does to the observer 1370
feet above the street, but it is there to be seen nonetheless.
Of course, the appearance of the city's panoptic organization to the pedestrian need
not lead to that panopticism becoming "an operational concept" [Practice 94]. The Cusan
experiment continues with two monks walking across the room in opposite directions,
their eyes fixed on the portrait's, so that they can finally convince themselves of the
painting's panoptic gaze by verbally reassuring each other that the gaze is simultaneously
following the two of them in opposite directions-a coincidence of opposites that mir-
rors and reinforces the appearance of two contradictory spaces (of the eye and of the
gaze) that Certeau sees in the earlier part of the experiment. Analogously, Buchanan
argues that the concept-city only forces itself on us through discourse. Because of this,
he uses a heterophenomenological approach to find the "critical distance" allowed for
by Certeau's theory of space, from which point of view "[d]iscourse is a milieu that the
emerging subject constitutes as a terrain" [Buchanan 130]. We believe, though, that in
"Walking in the City" Certeau avoids the visual aspect of the pedestrian's daily experi-
ence (which becomes the starting point of Buchanan's analysis) because the "critical
distance" it provides need not in every case (or even in most cases) escape from the
panoptic view available even to the individual's perspective vision. Instead, Certeau
focuses on the practices that are daily-even perpetually-"cutting across" the existing
panoptic arrangements of space.7 The "critical distance" he finds is a kind of transversal
territory whose relationship to discourse is perhaps best described by Richard Terdiman
in "The Response of the Other": "[t]o respond is to be engaged with someone else;
simultaneously it is to remain different or diverse .... To respond is to pursue further
and yet to cross, to mesh but not to fuse, to be inside the interlocutor's discourse and
outside it at the same time. Not to be absorbed by the other's voice, but not to cease
hearing it either" [3].

7. This distinction is similar to our argument in note 5 (above) that applying Barthes's readerly/
writerly distinction to "Walking in the City" does not adequately convey Certeau's insistence that
the practices he describes are constant and pervasive.

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Transversal Discourse

But we may consider the micro-techniques as building the theory, instead of

being its object. The question no longer concerns the procedures organizing
social surveillance and discipline, but the procedures producing Foucault's
text itself In fact, the micro-techniques provide not only the content of the
discourse but also the process of its construction. [Heterologies 189-90]

In this passage from Heterologies, Certeau equates subject matter and method in
Foucault; he critiques panoptic discourse as well as Foucault's theory of panopticism
itself. He finds a similar process at work in Nicholas of Cusa's De icona. The coinci-
dence of opposites that marks the monks' discovery of the panoptic gaze is portrayed in
Certeau's analysis as a central theme of Cusa's treatise that is also fundamentally char-
acteristic of his methodology: "[Nicholas of Cusa] proceeds on the basis of theoretical
excesses: conceptual 'flashes' outrun, overflow, and disrupt the formal course of the
reasoning; they have the capacity of bringing surprise into the analysis and thus of
renewing it; they do not obey the principle of non-contradiction and thus cannot be
subject to a verification" ["Gaze" 10]. Such "conceptual 'flashes"' are the hallmarks of
a transversality that, not surprisingly, permeates Certeau's own methodology in his cri-
tique of Foucault. However, to provide critical background for our discussion of this
transversality, we want to illustrate briefly Certeau's longstanding critique of the
dissective-cohesive mode of analysis in his earlier writings on historiography, where he
recalls the Western historiographical tradition.
In his groundbreaking book on Certeau, Jeremy Ahearne succinctly describes
Certeau's historiographical methodology and his view of the ideal historian:

Certeau points to something like a reversal in the historiographical project, as

compared, say, with the grand schemes of the nineteenth century. Its aim is no
longer to present and to comprehend the totality of history---such an undertak-
ing could in any case end only in a mirage. The historian becomes rather a
liminalfigure, a textual poacher on the territories of others. [36]

For Certeau, the historian should be a traveler, like the pedestrian; he or she should be a
marginal figure, someone who transgresses the boundaries of tradition as well as of
time and place, not in search of wholeness, but of strange new worlds, new trajectories
to follow, even if this requires trespassing on the memories and histories of others.
Certeau asserts that it is impossible for the historian to pursue wholeness and still main-
tain awareness of the heterogeneous nuances inherent both in any historical period and
in any historiographical enterprise. In The Writing of History, which is his critical ac-
count of the persistent historiographical tradition, Certeau elucidates the tradition's
dissective-cohesive mode of analysis:

In history everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting to-
gether, of transforming certain classified objects into "documents." This new
cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in producing such
documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects,
simultaneously changing their locus and their status. This gesture consists in
"isolating" a body-as in physics-and "denaturing" things in order to turn
them into parts which willfill the lacunae inside an a priori totality. It forms
the "collection" of documents. In the words of Jean Baudrillard, it places
things in a "marginal system." It exiles them from practice in order to confer

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 upon them the status of "abstract" objects of knowledge. Far from accepting
"data," this gesture forms them. [72-73]

The effort to break down, categorize, and reconstruct data as coherent documents, which
has dominated Western historiography, Certeau claims, is not only irresponsible but
hopeless. This is because history is always already interconnected and polyunivocal. To
identify an independent or coherent event in space-time would mean that the historian
overlooked or forgot the simultaneous influences of and relationships among the event,
the mercurial historical process, the particular project of the historian, and the historian's
own location in history. Rather, Certeau explains that history must be seen as an evolv-
ing assemblage, a combined expression of multifarious and often seemly contradictory
occurrences:

In any event, reference to a "coherence" that might embrace the totality of

data from a period or of a country collides with the resistance of this raw
material. From this point on, what these data call forth is no longer a change
of the interpretive model, but rather the idea that it may be possible to think of
them in the singular. Hence the impression that a single society advances a
plurality of heterogeneous but combined developments. [Writing 121]

Certeau's writings on historiography are recollected and reflected in his own criti-
cal methodology; he takes into account the limitations of the dissective-cohesive mode
of analysis even as he employs, however provisionally, some of its tactics. His critical
self-awareness and ability to cut transversally across a variety of dissective-cohesive
methods are characteristics of what Bryan Reynolds and James Intriligator call an "in-
vestigative-expansive mode" of analysis. Unlike the dissective-cohesive mode, the in-
vestigative-expansive mode insists that the subject matter under investigation be parti-
tioned according to essentially ad hoc parameters. The internal connectedness (among
themselves) and external connectedness (to other forces, such as the subject matter's
social history) of the partitioned units (which can be considered variables) are then
examined with a readiness to reparameterizing as the analysis progresses-as unex-
pected problems, information, and ideas surface. Whereas the goal of the dissective-
cohesive mode is, as we have mentioned, to (re)construct an accountable whole, the
investigative-expansive mode seeks comprehension of the subject matter's fluid and
plural relationships to its own parts and to the greater environments of which it is a part.
The extent to which Certeau's methodology uses the investigative-expansive mode is
particularly evident in the essay "Walking in the City," in which his critique of the
totalizing and systemizing techniques of panopticism and cartography avoids realiza-
tion of such dissective-cohesive procedures, unfolding instead in a series of descriptive
meditations that shift transversally into one another.
The essay begins, as we have noted, with a view from the 110th floor of the World
Trade Center, placing the spectator in the center of the panopticon that systematizes and
hierarchizes the city. From this vantage, Certeau points out, Manhattan unfolds before
the eyes like a "wave of verticals" [Practice 91]. His own position on the crest of this
wave emphasizes the fact that Certeau has achieved this panoptic perspective through
elevation, that is, through travel in the third spatial dimension. Ironically, expanding
one's range of movement beyond the two-dimensional plane of the city streets is in fact
an act of projection onto a plane: by rendering the movements of pedestrians invisible,
it removes the fourth dimension of time from the city and transforms New York into a
map. The shift from the panoptic perspective to the street-level observance of pedestri-
ans is thus not simply a movement through the third dimension, but an addition of the

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fourth: Certeau breaks out of the dissective-cohesive panoptic analysis by perceiving
the city temporally. The result is a transversal shift par excellence, a movement into
(literally) a new dimension that allows the panoptic viewpoint to be critiqued through a
discourse other than its own.
This transversal shift is followed by a perfectly executed dissective-cohesive analysis
of walking as a speech act. This analysis grounds the essay, establishing a sense of order
and systematic understanding before the next transversal move. Starting from a com-
ment by Roland Barthes,8 Certeau reads walking as an "enunciative" act and relates it to
a number of topics in speech act theory. On this basis he then builds toward a "rhetoric
of walking," turning the speech act itself into an element in a larger system. Once he has
established the existence of a rhetoric, Certeau proceeds to dissect this rhetoric by es-
tablishing its major tropes, synecdoche and asyndeton. The conclusion of this dissective-
cohesive section is a brief foray into psychoanalysis. This move-specifically, the con-
nection of rhetorical discourse and dreams-is not itself transversal since its results
have been mapped out and systematized (as Certeau notes) by Freud and Benveniste,
among others. This fact seems to inspire Certeau, though, as he moves on to the analysis
of proper names that we discuss above.
Drawing, perhaps, on the "relics" of the transversal power that moved Freud before
his system was institutionalized,9 Certeau dramatically alters his investigation in two
important ways. Into the "long poem of walking" he inserts the words written on street
signs-"I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name" [Practice 105]-an act that
eradicates the separation of verbal and pedestrian speech acts. Having devoted consid-
erable energy toward demonstrating the similarity of these two forms of speech acts
(toward the apparent end of assimilating the latter type to the cohesive system that
describes the former), Certeau suddenly alludes to their difference by introducing the
proper name as a foreign element in the "rhetoric of walking." The "text" of the city
becomes a blank page, a "great empty space" waiting to be filled. We are left unsure
whether this overwriting produces a metadiscourse or a palimpsest: does the proper
name designate a space (as it does a place), or is it simply a different aspect of
spatialization?
Fully absorbed now by the investigative-expansive mode of analysis, Certeau tac-
itly dismisses the prospect of forcing his study of pedestrian speech acts to systemati-
cally accommodate this introduction of words. He is interested instead in the second
change that is brought to his investigation by this turn toward proper names. We have
seen that Certeau's focus on the process of walking introduced the dimension of time
into the synchronic models of the map and the panopticon. Proper names carry his
analysis further in this direction, beyond the brief moment of the speech act into the
almost forgotten histories in the comers of memory. This extension of the temporal
dimension is vast enough to induce a qualitative change in the investigation. Just as the
laws of Newtonian physics must be radically revised for objects that are very small
(subatomic) or moving very fast (any significant fraction of the speed of light), and just
as the elevation in the World Trade Center beyond "the threshold at which visibility
begins" [Practice 93] transforms the living city into a panoptic map, Certeau's reach

8. "We speak our city ... merely by inhabiting it, walking through it, looking at it" [Archi-
tecture d'aujourd'hui (No. 153, December 1970-January 1971), 11-13; qtd. in Practice of Ev-
eryday Life 219].
9. With Certeau's comments on proper names in mind, it is amusing and perhaps even infor-
mative to note that Freud devoted most of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (perhaps a
source for the English title of Certeau's book?) to convincing his skeptical readers of the mere
existence of a phenomenon (the "Freudian slip") that now, with his name attached to it, is cited
daily by people who have never read a word that he wrote.

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into the distant past here alters his investigation fundamentally. The transversal anam-
nesis associated with proper names initiates a mode of investigation similar to that which
we found in the essay "Micro-techniques and Panoptic Discourse: A Quid pro Quo," in
which panopticism is seen not as the erasing of all practices (as the World Trade Center
image postulates) but as the privileging, over time, of a chosen few. Certeau uses this
approach only briefly, though, before retreating along the temporal axis to consider a
third distinct time scale. Having examined both the brief instant of the utterance, in
which memory has no time to act, and the far reaches of memory that extend back past
the limits of personal experience, Certeau turns to the middle ground. In doing so, he
opens an investigation similar in method to the essay "Spatial Stories," taking as his
subject personal (rather than panoptic) representations of space. These spatial stories
and "local legends" are written in the memory instead of the "text" of the city. They
shatter the panoptic perspective, not as a consequence of their unorganized motion or
their remembrance of lost practices, but because of their ability to render space familiar
and livable.

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