Lefebvre and De Certeau: The Tube, A User's Manual
“With an average of 3 minutes waiting time on platforms, commuters have plenty of time to read, consider and take in your message. Moreover, 87% of consumers welcome Tube advertising as it provides a welcome distraction during their journey.”
- CBS Outdoor (advertising partner of the London Underground)
We are a captive and regulated audience. Between the directives of the Tube that aimed at safety and order - “Mind the gap”, “Do not leave belongings unattended”, “Do not run on the escalators” - and those of its corporate partners – buy this, wear this, date this person – the experience of traveling underground is framed by the language of passivity and consumption.
How a space is written governs how it is used. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre defines three layered concepts of space: space as it is perceived; representations, or rationalized, theorized conceptions of space; and representational spaces, the spatial imaginary of the time, which governs how people live.[1] The problem he identifies comes in the abstraction of space, so that the lived and the perceived are subordinated to the conceived, meaning lived experience is always filtered through and defined by a dominating discourse. This creates an “abstract space”, in which social interactions are understandable only through the language given by the dominating powers, and users are unable to feel any ownership or agency over their social relations. Lefebvre writes,
The place of social space as a whole has been usurped by a part of that space endowed with an illusory special status – namely, the part which is concerned with writing and imagery, underpinned by the written text (journalism, literature), and broadcast by the media; a part, in short, that amounts to abstraction wielding awesome reductionistic force vis-a-vis 'lived' experience.
We are all inscribed in locked metaphors as we go about our daily routines, unable to feel in control of our situation because we are unable to communicate or, even recognise the way lived experience differs from imposed abstractions. “Products and the circuits they establish (in space) are fetishized and so become more 'real' than reality itself – that is, than productive activity itself, which they thus take over”.[2] Lefebvre argues that knowledge arrises from experience of social space – the architecture of the city gives rise to “linear perspective” - but, once produced, the abstract knowledge has a tendency to hide or erase the fact that it is the product of the complex society that produced the space from which it arose. We experience it as a natural fact, rather than the outcome of human labor.
A top-heavy bureaucracy of administrative and corporate control authorizes the official representation of the Tube space and the behaviours associated with it, suppressed any sense of “public” agency. Although it is ostensibly a public service and is overseen by the Mayor, the Tube is run like any other corporation. Decisions about the design and communication of the space are made, not by the users, but by bureaucratic powers invariably focused on profitability rather than on humanity. Whilst traveling, our bodies, not our creativity, are the source of profit.
Travel is an indeterminate zone, outside the productive space of work and yet also distanced from the distracted sphere of leisure – television, vacation, the pub. It is not a destination, but a link. We create profit by allowing ourselves to be carried like so many inert objects. Michel de Certeau writes, “The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia.”[3] The minute we act as anything other than shippable goods, even in the smallest ways – by slowing down to examine the space, chatting with staff, or commenting on our neighbour's book – we step beyond the actions for which the Tube is designed and potentially threaten the efficiency of the system.
A-social, passive behaviour is encouraged by the dominant powers in two ways. First, through official signage and auditory commands. Second, in order to numb our criticality and even further their profitability, TfL has papered its stations and trains with advertisements. The advertisements catch us when we are most vulnerable, the unaccounted-for between time of travel, and order us to buy, to remember our identity as consumers. Despite CBS Outdoor's assertion that travellers enjoy advertisements because they relieve the boredom of travel, adverts are not a public service. Their purpose is corporate profit. A truly public service needs to take responsibility for the quality of public space and public sensibility it is creating. Corporate profit and public good are not equivalent. We are encouraged to use the Tube in the least critical and creative manner possible, fed tranquillisers of desire in the form of stupefying directives and escapist ads. Lefebvre writes, “When social space is placed beyond our range of vision in this way, its practical character vanishes and it is transformed in philosophical fashion into a kind of absolute. In face of this fetishised abstraction, 'users' spontaneously turn themselves, their presence, their 'lived experience' and their bodies into abstractions too”.[4]
However, the fact that space is not natural, but already the product of human creativity, contains within it a model of critique. Because there are no natural identities of human-constructed environments, any user should be able to insert her labor into the space, producing it against the dominant abstraction. It is enough to recognize that the dominant order is not divine to find your power to disturb it. Similarly, De Certeau argues that even when we are at our most passive, engaged as fully as possible in or consumerist receptivity, we are producing. He uses the example of reading as a productive activity;
The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place. This mutation [of the readable into the memorable – the reader's insertion of her meaning into the author's words] makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a movement by a transient.[5]
The subversive, creative practice of everyday life comes in learning how to become aware that we are constantly producing the social realities of the abstract narratives we inhabit.
Rather than radical protest, Lefebvre, followed by de Certeau, among others, emphasises resistance within the everyday, re-sensitizing ourselves to the “unbearability of everything” so that we can see innate opportunities for critique.[6] In his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre writes, “the familiar is not necessarily the known.”[7] Later, he asks, “Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn't the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?”[8] Making the familiar strange takes on the form of daily creative production within, but against, systems of abstraction and control.[9]
For de Certeau, the mechanics of finding the strange in the everyday occur in the gap between the code of language and its practice (enunciation). In his 1967 book, The Practice of Everyday Life, he proposes certain methods for practicing the codes given by power against themselves. Describing the general attitude of tactical subversion in the telling of “Spatial Stories”, De Certeau writes, “Social delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic outlets and expectations of spaces, where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or illegal drifting away.”[10] Delinquent storytelling is a dance of absurdity and subversion created wilfully within a system that, abstractly, denies the presence of individual will. It is a refusal to use the rules of the game, the grammar of the code, as it was intended. It is not illegal, but exists in the gap between the law/language and its practice, just as Bartleby's “I would prefer not to”, it is an escape that is not an escape, an escape through the gap between literal code and conventional practice.[11]
If advertisingrelies on the tropes and subliminal codes of society, the delinquent user, refuses the automatically accepted and understood substrata of everyday speech. She becomes a foreigner at home, an intentional outsider within. Society relies on everyone falling into step, accepting certain frameworks and conventions; questioning is often severely punished. Certain characters – the Shakespearian fool, the child, the mad-man – take, under the guise of innocence – the right to ask questions and behave against convention without immediately inciting anger or fear. In the past, sovereigns allowed fools to provoke and question, to trespass closer to the seat of power with immunity than any other subjects. “Playing dumb” is a powerful way of resisting the ideas that are most deeply ingrained and naturalized in a society, of pointing out the naturalizing lies told by our material and discursive products.
Today, the demands of security are often used to justify the over-regulation and domination of our bodies in spaces that might otherwise offer opportunities for commonality or escape from capitalist regimentation. Obviously, as the 2005 bombings proved, there is good reason to vigilantly safeguard the space of the Underground. However, this does not then justify the further layering of control in the form of advertisements and draconian enforcement of fare violations and other non-violent behaviour.[12] Surveillance is intended to stop tragedy, not to stop me from picking my nose, or, for that matter, the nose of the person next to me.
Our resistance on the London Underground is not the angry, impassionedresistance of people who have been harmed or violently oppressed. At its worst, the London Underground is a false public service, unevenly accessible, dedicated more to profit than people, a space of corporate control and oppressive capitalism.[13] It is a space of excessive regulation, mistrust and anxiety, and that, at least, feels inescapable. For the millions of people who have to use this system daily, there are plenty of reasons to search for some tactic of escape, some mode of regaining a sense of presence and agency. [14]
Critique and subversion are necessary in the Underground. Taking up the tactics of the jester, the trickster, may allow us to dance closer to the truth of this over-regulated, aggressively passifying space. What a tactical user of the Tube would look like is hard to say, but I propose that at her core she would be playful. She might act the part the confused gentleman who stumbles absurdly through Jacques Tati's 1967 film PlayTime, hopelessly jumbling the codes of Tati's eerily Jubilee-line-esque landscape of techno-futuristic Paris.[15] Perhaps this user would formulate a set of rules, á la Perec, systematically deleting e's from their commut or only sitting next to people wearing hats.[16] Perhaps he would detourne the advertisements along his route, collaging together new narratives of desire or convention.[17]
To many, the Tube is a non-space, a space of detachment, where the mind relinquishes the body to the commands of the rhythms of the architecture and signage. This is because capitalism does not know how to code the space between work and leisure, the space between production and consumption. The languages of safety and advertising attempt to order this space in the only ways capitalism understands – through strict policing and spectacularised desire. Yet, what if we dared to imagine a different use of this time-between? Could we reclaim this non-space as a space for non-profitable creativity, for imaginative exercise, and genuine play?
End Notes
[1] “Representations of space are shot through with a knowledge (savoir) -i.e. a mixture of understanding (connaissance) and ideology – which is always relative and in the process of change.” (41); Representational space is “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (39) , Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
[2] Lefebvre, 81
[3] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 111
[4] Lefebvre, 93.
[5] De Certeau draws extensively from linguistic and semiological theories. He explains this decision based on the extensive discussion of the generative gap between authorial intension and reader comprehension. This gap is where tactical production occurs. De Certeau, xxi
[6] The Situationists realized Lefebvre's call for the revelation of the unexpected in the banal through their artistic and political actions, particularly their practices of detournement, situography and derive
[7] Heri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, 15
[8] Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life 9
[9] Viktor Shklovski gives the term “en-stranging” or “making strange” to what he believes to be art's ability to make us look again at that which is familiar, which we have ceased to examine as we would something surprising or inexplicable.
[10] De Certeau, 130
[11] Many theorists have developed ideas around resistance through refusal around Herman Melville's strange character, Bartleby. ie. Giles Deleuze, Bartleby or The Formula
[12] See Essay #1, “Foucault: Power and Self-disciplinary Bodies in the London Underground” for a discussion of TfL's new ticket inspector signage
[13] See the discussion of public vs private space in essay #5
[14] Arguably, this is the general need/desire of every subject of neo-liberal capitalism. The corporately charged and disciplined space of the Tube does not create, but amplifies, this need.
[15] Jaques Tati, Play Time, 1967
[16] Georges Perec, A Void, Life a User's Manual
[17] “Detournement” is a key term of the Situationist International
- CBS Outdoor (advertising partner of the London Underground)
We are a captive and regulated audience. Between the directives of the Tube that aimed at safety and order - “Mind the gap”, “Do not leave belongings unattended”, “Do not run on the escalators” - and those of its corporate partners – buy this, wear this, date this person – the experience of traveling underground is framed by the language of passivity and consumption.
How a space is written governs how it is used. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre defines three layered concepts of space: space as it is perceived; representations, or rationalized, theorized conceptions of space; and representational spaces, the spatial imaginary of the time, which governs how people live.[1] The problem he identifies comes in the abstraction of space, so that the lived and the perceived are subordinated to the conceived, meaning lived experience is always filtered through and defined by a dominating discourse. This creates an “abstract space”, in which social interactions are understandable only through the language given by the dominating powers, and users are unable to feel any ownership or agency over their social relations. Lefebvre writes,
The place of social space as a whole has been usurped by a part of that space endowed with an illusory special status – namely, the part which is concerned with writing and imagery, underpinned by the written text (journalism, literature), and broadcast by the media; a part, in short, that amounts to abstraction wielding awesome reductionistic force vis-a-vis 'lived' experience.
We are all inscribed in locked metaphors as we go about our daily routines, unable to feel in control of our situation because we are unable to communicate or, even recognise the way lived experience differs from imposed abstractions. “Products and the circuits they establish (in space) are fetishized and so become more 'real' than reality itself – that is, than productive activity itself, which they thus take over”.[2] Lefebvre argues that knowledge arrises from experience of social space – the architecture of the city gives rise to “linear perspective” - but, once produced, the abstract knowledge has a tendency to hide or erase the fact that it is the product of the complex society that produced the space from which it arose. We experience it as a natural fact, rather than the outcome of human labor.
A top-heavy bureaucracy of administrative and corporate control authorizes the official representation of the Tube space and the behaviours associated with it, suppressed any sense of “public” agency. Although it is ostensibly a public service and is overseen by the Mayor, the Tube is run like any other corporation. Decisions about the design and communication of the space are made, not by the users, but by bureaucratic powers invariably focused on profitability rather than on humanity. Whilst traveling, our bodies, not our creativity, are the source of profit.
Travel is an indeterminate zone, outside the productive space of work and yet also distanced from the distracted sphere of leisure – television, vacation, the pub. It is not a destination, but a link. We create profit by allowing ourselves to be carried like so many inert objects. Michel de Certeau writes, “The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia.”[3] The minute we act as anything other than shippable goods, even in the smallest ways – by slowing down to examine the space, chatting with staff, or commenting on our neighbour's book – we step beyond the actions for which the Tube is designed and potentially threaten the efficiency of the system.
A-social, passive behaviour is encouraged by the dominant powers in two ways. First, through official signage and auditory commands. Second, in order to numb our criticality and even further their profitability, TfL has papered its stations and trains with advertisements. The advertisements catch us when we are most vulnerable, the unaccounted-for between time of travel, and order us to buy, to remember our identity as consumers. Despite CBS Outdoor's assertion that travellers enjoy advertisements because they relieve the boredom of travel, adverts are not a public service. Their purpose is corporate profit. A truly public service needs to take responsibility for the quality of public space and public sensibility it is creating. Corporate profit and public good are not equivalent. We are encouraged to use the Tube in the least critical and creative manner possible, fed tranquillisers of desire in the form of stupefying directives and escapist ads. Lefebvre writes, “When social space is placed beyond our range of vision in this way, its practical character vanishes and it is transformed in philosophical fashion into a kind of absolute. In face of this fetishised abstraction, 'users' spontaneously turn themselves, their presence, their 'lived experience' and their bodies into abstractions too”.[4]
However, the fact that space is not natural, but already the product of human creativity, contains within it a model of critique. Because there are no natural identities of human-constructed environments, any user should be able to insert her labor into the space, producing it against the dominant abstraction. It is enough to recognize that the dominant order is not divine to find your power to disturb it. Similarly, De Certeau argues that even when we are at our most passive, engaged as fully as possible in or consumerist receptivity, we are producing. He uses the example of reading as a productive activity;
The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place. This mutation [of the readable into the memorable – the reader's insertion of her meaning into the author's words] makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a movement by a transient.[5]
The subversive, creative practice of everyday life comes in learning how to become aware that we are constantly producing the social realities of the abstract narratives we inhabit.
Rather than radical protest, Lefebvre, followed by de Certeau, among others, emphasises resistance within the everyday, re-sensitizing ourselves to the “unbearability of everything” so that we can see innate opportunities for critique.[6] In his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre writes, “the familiar is not necessarily the known.”[7] Later, he asks, “Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn't the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?”[8] Making the familiar strange takes on the form of daily creative production within, but against, systems of abstraction and control.[9]
For de Certeau, the mechanics of finding the strange in the everyday occur in the gap between the code of language and its practice (enunciation). In his 1967 book, The Practice of Everyday Life, he proposes certain methods for practicing the codes given by power against themselves. Describing the general attitude of tactical subversion in the telling of “Spatial Stories”, De Certeau writes, “Social delinquency consists in taking the story literally, in making it the principle of physical existence where a society no longer offers to subjects or groups symbolic outlets and expectations of spaces, where there is no longer any alternative to disciplinary falling-into-line or illegal drifting away.”[10] Delinquent storytelling is a dance of absurdity and subversion created wilfully within a system that, abstractly, denies the presence of individual will. It is a refusal to use the rules of the game, the grammar of the code, as it was intended. It is not illegal, but exists in the gap between the law/language and its practice, just as Bartleby's “I would prefer not to”, it is an escape that is not an escape, an escape through the gap between literal code and conventional practice.[11]
If advertisingrelies on the tropes and subliminal codes of society, the delinquent user, refuses the automatically accepted and understood substrata of everyday speech. She becomes a foreigner at home, an intentional outsider within. Society relies on everyone falling into step, accepting certain frameworks and conventions; questioning is often severely punished. Certain characters – the Shakespearian fool, the child, the mad-man – take, under the guise of innocence – the right to ask questions and behave against convention without immediately inciting anger or fear. In the past, sovereigns allowed fools to provoke and question, to trespass closer to the seat of power with immunity than any other subjects. “Playing dumb” is a powerful way of resisting the ideas that are most deeply ingrained and naturalized in a society, of pointing out the naturalizing lies told by our material and discursive products.
Today, the demands of security are often used to justify the over-regulation and domination of our bodies in spaces that might otherwise offer opportunities for commonality or escape from capitalist regimentation. Obviously, as the 2005 bombings proved, there is good reason to vigilantly safeguard the space of the Underground. However, this does not then justify the further layering of control in the form of advertisements and draconian enforcement of fare violations and other non-violent behaviour.[12] Surveillance is intended to stop tragedy, not to stop me from picking my nose, or, for that matter, the nose of the person next to me.
Our resistance on the London Underground is not the angry, impassionedresistance of people who have been harmed or violently oppressed. At its worst, the London Underground is a false public service, unevenly accessible, dedicated more to profit than people, a space of corporate control and oppressive capitalism.[13] It is a space of excessive regulation, mistrust and anxiety, and that, at least, feels inescapable. For the millions of people who have to use this system daily, there are plenty of reasons to search for some tactic of escape, some mode of regaining a sense of presence and agency. [14]
Critique and subversion are necessary in the Underground. Taking up the tactics of the jester, the trickster, may allow us to dance closer to the truth of this over-regulated, aggressively passifying space. What a tactical user of the Tube would look like is hard to say, but I propose that at her core she would be playful. She might act the part the confused gentleman who stumbles absurdly through Jacques Tati's 1967 film PlayTime, hopelessly jumbling the codes of Tati's eerily Jubilee-line-esque landscape of techno-futuristic Paris.[15] Perhaps this user would formulate a set of rules, á la Perec, systematically deleting e's from their commut or only sitting next to people wearing hats.[16] Perhaps he would detourne the advertisements along his route, collaging together new narratives of desire or convention.[17]
To many, the Tube is a non-space, a space of detachment, where the mind relinquishes the body to the commands of the rhythms of the architecture and signage. This is because capitalism does not know how to code the space between work and leisure, the space between production and consumption. The languages of safety and advertising attempt to order this space in the only ways capitalism understands – through strict policing and spectacularised desire. Yet, what if we dared to imagine a different use of this time-between? Could we reclaim this non-space as a space for non-profitable creativity, for imaginative exercise, and genuine play?
End Notes
[1] “Representations of space are shot through with a knowledge (savoir) -i.e. a mixture of understanding (connaissance) and ideology – which is always relative and in the process of change.” (41); Representational space is “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (39) , Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
[2] Lefebvre, 81
[3] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 111
[4] Lefebvre, 93.
[5] De Certeau draws extensively from linguistic and semiological theories. He explains this decision based on the extensive discussion of the generative gap between authorial intension and reader comprehension. This gap is where tactical production occurs. De Certeau, xxi
[6] The Situationists realized Lefebvre's call for the revelation of the unexpected in the banal through their artistic and political actions, particularly their practices of detournement, situography and derive
[7] Heri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, 15
[8] Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life 9
[9] Viktor Shklovski gives the term “en-stranging” or “making strange” to what he believes to be art's ability to make us look again at that which is familiar, which we have ceased to examine as we would something surprising or inexplicable.
[10] De Certeau, 130
[11] Many theorists have developed ideas around resistance through refusal around Herman Melville's strange character, Bartleby. ie. Giles Deleuze, Bartleby or The Formula
[12] See Essay #1, “Foucault: Power and Self-disciplinary Bodies in the London Underground” for a discussion of TfL's new ticket inspector signage
[13] See the discussion of public vs private space in essay #5
[14] Arguably, this is the general need/desire of every subject of neo-liberal capitalism. The corporately charged and disciplined space of the Tube does not create, but amplifies, this need.
[15] Jaques Tati, Play Time, 1967
[16] Georges Perec, A Void, Life a User's Manual
[17] “Detournement” is a key term of the Situationist International