Ways to Walk New York After 9/11

Abstract

De Certeau begins his consideration of ‘Walking in the City’ with a god’s-eye view of New York from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, likening the viewer to Icarus. Although medieval and Renaissance painters had imagined this privileged perspective and used it to map their cities into orderly comprehension, the view was not widely available for sustained contemplation by worldly eyes until skyscrapers raised us up for it. The World Trade Center was not, of course, the first such vantage point, but de Certeau makes good use of it, proceeding from the premise that the higher, the more godlike. Yet he builds up the view from on high only to knock down the tower and join the flâneurs below. He points out that both the ‘voyeur-god’ and his view are illusions: the god, only a fiction of omniscience and omnipotence; the view, a simulacrum of knowledge ‘whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding’ (93). This imagined god cannot see what the tiny people are doing far below, how they rewrite the city as they walk its streets, the visual patterns that they seem to trace being ultimately irrelevant to the experience in which they remain enmeshed.

Memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, creating, going to bed in which ancient revolutions slumber. […] Haunted places are the only ones people can live in — and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.

(de Certeau 1984: 108)