In much of Western thought, everyday culture has traditionally been perceived as trivial and mundane, following the philosophical custom of marginalising the sensorial and privileging abstract reasoning.¹ An influential, contrasting perspective on the everyday was developed in the second half of the twentieth century by cultural critic Michel de Certeau. According to Certeau, ordinary undertakings do not represent “the obscure background of social activity,”² but ways of responding to the imposition of certain political and social arrangements. ³ As such, Certeau critiques the scriptural tendency to order, rationalise, and normalise what is evasive – that is, what is spoken or done rather than written⁴ – aiming to develop a sensibility towards the ways in which everyday life is practised.⁵

Engaging with the ways in which social orders may be subverted through daily activities, Certeau devotes a great deal of attention to spatial operations such as walking, wandering, and window shopping.⁶ While urbanistic discourse privileges the scopic view from above in developing the utopian concept city of modernism, passers-by experience the city from down below.⁷ The ordinary walking people – unknowingly – manipulate the panoptic-spatial organisations of urban social order by selecting and recreating pathways, choosing amongst, as well as displacing, the meanings given by the dominant, institutionalised graphic representation of the city. Hidden beneath “the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organisation,”⁸ everyday spatial practices such as walking are ways of eluding urbanistic discipline from within its terrain. According to Certeau, the minuscule trickeries of ordinary walkers represent forms of tactical resistance or antidisciplines developed against the strategies of more powerful actors.

Although Certeau stresses the need to question the centrality of the scriptural apparatus, of the written word in knowledge production, his analysis of spatial practices relies upon a comparison between walking and writing, as well as between movement and language.⁹ When he describes the invisible trails of urban walkers, they are networks of “moving, intersecting writings” that “compose a manifold story.”¹⁰ Furthermore, it is by drawing on speech-act theory that walking comes to analytical light: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”¹¹ Spatial practices are thus seen only from a symbolic and semiotic perspective,¹² their materiality being subjugated still to the linguistic and the textual: Individual bodies and crowds remain sidelined, as do traffic lights, sidewalk waste, walking sticks, and shoes.

By analysing the practice of walking in the city, I aim to investigate the ways in which the everyday may constitute a space where social (dis)orders are negotiated. I do so from an onto-epistemological perspective that considers subjectivity as embodied and nonhumans as agents in city life. In other words, the essay asks: How do the notions of embodiment and materiality alter the understanding of everyday tactical resistance, as initially formulated by Certeau? Does everyday tactical resistance stand the test of taking materiality seriously?

I explore the question of everyday resistance by following feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman understanding of subjectivity as embodied, where the body is “a supplier of forces, energies, whose materiality lends them to being used, manipulated and socially constructed.”¹³ The body represents an essential milieu for conducting everyday operations. Bodies are, however, not simply static, fixed locations where a subject develops. Movements, material performativity, as well as their procedural histories, are essential to embodiment.¹⁴ Additionally, when I speak of materiality, I do not merely refer to human bodies but also to the nonhumans that participate in the formation of the practice of walking – whether they accommodate (shoes), aid (walking sticks), inconvenience (dog poop), or restrict (physical barriers, stop signs) the walker. By paying attention to how bodies in movement are materialised and socially constructed, the politics of walking presents us with a more complicated mechanism than Certeau’s theory of everyday resistance implies.

Of ‘Normal’ and ‘Abnormal’ Walks and Bodies
As a child, I was a particularly slow learner of the everyday routine acts that keep us alive and breathing, such as tying shoelaces or properly eating with a spoon. On the subject of walking, good and bad sidewalk examples played a paramount part in my early pedestrian education. My parents would point to people in the street whose posture and steps they considered peculiar, unruly, or impolite. A man with a ‘feminine’ walk was quickly labelled sexually ‘deviant’ by my father. A hunch-backed walk would be interpreted by my mother as a sign of undesirable humility, characteristic of those impoverished, carrying the heavy weight of life’s duties on their shoulders. The vision of a ‘correct’ walk articulated by my parents reflects how social difference is materially per formed and reproduced through the formation and visual observation of walking as a practice. It nurtures and reproduces the establishment of a distinction between normal and abnormal bodies depending on their shape and how they are put to use. Walking unaided on two feet with a straight posture, stepping rhythmically from heel to toe, represents the normative standard. Deviating from this standard signals an abnormality, which triggers the onlooker’s moral anxiety.

In the modern history of Western medical, legal, and popular discourses, the ‘abnormal’ body disturbs precisely because of its simultaneous closeness and distance to the ideal human, an ideal that confers its monstrous social character as well as its ability to disrupt.¹⁵ In the current biopolitical context specifically, the disabled body must have its impairments fixed and, particularly, the body of the child is constructed as an “object of change,” carrying the potential to be remade.¹⁶ Performing everyday practices such as walking in ways that deviate from the norm places the subject under the biomedical and technoscientific gaze, as the ‘improval’ of disabled individuals’ quotidian operations are included in the discourses of innovation capitalism.¹⁷

As the walking body is subjected to wider material-discursive forces that circulate socially, disciplining seeps into everyday life and histories of normalisation materially unfold on the sidewalk. Particularly, the distinction between the normal and abnormal body is not only produced in medical discourse but equally operates at the level of the self in the lived everyday. Therefore, embodiment complicates Certeau’s understanding of tactical resistance towards power, as power flows through daily micro-interactions – those situated outside clear, nameable institutions – in the mundane unfolding of discipline.

Walking in the City as Mundane Parkour
The Dynamism of Everyday Disciplines and Tactics

Although the child who learns how to walk is subjected to the aesthetic and moral desires of the adults that surround them, the process of disciplining also has the more functional scope of developing coping mechanisms in the city: knowing the basic rules of street crossing, learning how to adjust our rhythms to others, how to orient ourselves in a crowd. The disciplinary mechanisms involved are producing an act of knowing the social and material urban world, knowledge that then can be further manipulated by walkers. Power-knowledge, as Foucault argued, is not simply bad or evil, but also socially creative, involving “matrices of transformations.”¹⁸

Walking in the city may be seen as the mundane form of parkour: It requires, in a less spectacular way, training and creative flexibility in order to most efficiently reach from point A to point B.¹⁹ Like the case of parkour, navigating through the city by foot necessitates switching between acts learned by means of discipline and those learned by thwarting such disciplines. They take place as one encounters the nonhuman artefacts that are meant to organise the social life of the city as well as those that disorganise it. As in philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s example of the rude door-closer that shuts quickly and violently, careless about the harm it may impose on the slow-enterer,²⁰ walking in the city requires developing local cultural skills to successfully cope with the disciplining prescriptions brought on the human. The pedestrian is faced with the numerous holes in the urban system, the disordered elements of urban life, such as traffic lights that are malfunctioning or simply slow, crowds that are too large to be accommodated by the sidewalk, as well as countless pavement hazards. To cope with urban unruliness, pedestrians tactically approach these problems, whether with the help of others or on their own. In London, to get on with the hectic work rhythm of a neoliberal metropole par excellence, getting somewhere on time often implies not following traffic light rules. Jaywalkers thus coordinate their pace, creating a protective wall against any possible incoming car or motorbike. The very narrow sidewalks in Bucharest, Romania, sometimes occupied by big chunks of dog poop, trash, or fallen plaster from decrepit buildings, force the pedestrian to constantly switch between walking on the car lane and walking on the sidewalk.

As walking is routinely practised, the everyday becomes a field where social orders are contested in ordinary micro-interactions. In Bucharest’s dynamic, as in other urban spaces, walking rather than driving to commute constitutes an “economic indicator” that someone comes from a lower-class background.²¹ Drivers are overtly privileged on a day-to-day basis in the city’s sociospatial relations. The lack of proper parking spots means that cars often block sidewalk access to pedestrians, as seen in the first photo below from a central artery in Bucharest, Strada Mihai Eminescu. Individuals sometimes protest against this hierarchy and its implications by lifting up the cars’ windscreen wipers in order to express their disdain. Through this act, pedestrians cause a slight inconvenience for the drivers, delaying their departure.

The political nature of the battle between pedestrians and drivers is showcased on the local Facebook meme page Meme pentru tineri care urăsc mașinile [Memes for young people who hate cars]. There, anger is especially directed toward BMW drivers, culturally stereotyped as representing the nouveau riche, or small, petty business men [șmecheri]. The second photo, below, illustrates an ironic takedown of a BMW driver whose car blocked two crosswalks, contrasting the BMW-type with morally virtuous corporate workers on electric scooters and the ‘poorer’ bus users. These online and offline practices of contestation can be understood as tactics developed against the routinely reinforced hierarchy between forms of urban travel, where the pedestrian represents its most marginal figure. The material and lived everyday inserts itself into urban politics, prompting questions such as ‘who has a right to the city?’

Who the city belongs to is not only a matter of class distinction; it runs throughout the many other hierarchies of Western modernity (i.e. in the construction of gender, race, and able-bodiedness). Turning back to disability and quotidian operations, most metropoles represent “inaccessible worlds” for people that live with forms of motor impairment,²² worlds that have been in turn contested by disability activists. In an attempt to construct a crip technoscientific theoretical alternative to the neoliberal framing of disability, Hamraie and Fritsch speak of disabled people’s own technological designs that run parallel to the structures of innovation capitalism mentioned in section 1. Arguing that disabled people are “experts and designers of everyday life,”²³ they highlight, among other examples, how ADAPT (American Disabled For Attendant Programs Today) activists built their own curb ramps or smashed sidewalks to protest lack of accessible urban infrastructures in the United States.²⁴

Moreover, the question of political struggle moves this essay towards a final observation about walking as a collective rather than individual practice (walking together- with). At the micro-interactive level of tactics and mundane disciplining, walking together-with may be seen as a process by which a moving assemblage – “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms” that co-function symbiotically²⁵ – takes shape. Searching for such a walking assemblage, we may look at the one that forms between a pram, a toddler, and a carer, one of the strongly marginalised collectivities in the urban hierarchy. This topic is taken up by artist Clare Qualmann in the photography and writing project Perambulator, set in downtown New York. The unaccommodating nature of the subway stairs and sidewalk closures pose plenty of problems for Clare as a mother and apparent ‘leader’ of this assemblage. Walking in the city with a pram necessitates continuously adjusting to new encounters, such as by asking for help from strangers, switching roadsides, and choosing when and where to take a break for the occasional parent-child cuddle.²⁶Simultaneously, the pram plays a quintessential role in the moving forward of the assemblage. Its wheels are sensitive to any material changes of the pavement’s surfaces, and so a deeply sensorial way of knowing the city takes shape, allowing Qualmann the possibility to reflect on the minuscule irregularities of the pavement’s constitution.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari,²⁷ we may regard the city as a mixture of striated space – homogenous, orderly, cartographical, belonging to state and corporate authority – and, with a more subtle presence, smooth space – heterogeneous, unruly, mutating irregularly, belonging to marginalised actors that resist the rules of neoliberal ordering. As social tendencies toward organisation and unevenness are present all throughout the city, the ordinary individual has to routinely negotiate between the (unwritten) rules to which they will conform or subvert. Approached from an embodied perspective, inclusive of the nonhuman, the everyday carries with it forms of resistance as well as of mundane disciplining, as the material and discursive fields of power come together to create a dynamic interplay between normalisation and resistance.

As such, it is perhaps by looking at the everyday that we may find interesting and important avenues for exploring the situated unfolding of complex sociomaterial processes. The everyday’s procedural nature highlights the dynamism of embodied subject formation and the role of materiality in the perpetual remaking of social hierarchies. The procedurality of everyday interactions further stresses the need to analytically abandon the fixedness and conceptual abstraction of ‘social order’ in favour of sociomaterial order-ing, a term that suggests the strong connection between the social and the material, as well as the prevalence of processes over states of affair, of becoming over being.²⁸

As a final observation, conceptually arriving at sociomaterial order-ing from the more traditional cultural theory notion of the everyday may play an important role in de-exceptionalising the human. Although this is beyond the scope of the current paper, by emphasising the repetitiveness and slight variations of everyday human practices, one could actually come closer to the small usage conflicts that make nonhuman agency transpire, bridging humanist and posthuman approaches to culture, making room for the quotidian acts of resistance that nonhuman living organisms perform to be noticed.

Bio

Maria Persu is a cultural researcher and art worker from Bucharest, Romania. Maria is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics on postsocialist museum practices and knowledge production.

Notes

1Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Routledge, 2002. Ingold, Tim, and Jo Lee Vergunst. “Introduction.” Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst. Routledge, 2008, pp.1-20.

2de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 1. Translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1988. xi

3Certeau, ibid. xix

4Certeau ibid. 131

5Certeau ibid. 147

6Certeau ibid. 97

7Certeau ibid. 93-4

8Certeau ibid. 96

9Ingold, Tim, and Jo Lee Vergunst. “Introduction.” Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Routledge, 2008, p. 8

10Certeau op.cit. 93, emphasis added

11Certeau op.cit. 93

12Picciotto 6

13Braidotti 44

14 Ingold, Tim, and Jo Lee Vergunst. “Introduction.” Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst. Routledge, 2008, pp. 1-19 and Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345321

15Shildrik, Margrit. “This Body Which is Not One: Dealing with Differences.” Body & Society, vol. 5, no. 2–3, 1999, p.81, https://doi.org/10.1177/1351703 4X99005002005 and Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press, 1994.

16McLaughlin, Janice, and Edmund Coleman-Fountain. “The unfinished body: The medical and social reshaping of disabled young bodies.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 120, 2014, p. 79, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2014.09.012.

17Harmaie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto”. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-34, https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607

18Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978. p.99

19Kidder, Jeffrey L. “Parkour, The Affective Appropriation of Urban Space, and the Real/Virtual Dialectic.” City & Community, vol. 11, no. 3, 2012, p. 234, https:// doi. org/10.1111/j.1540- 6040.2012.01406.x.

20Johnson, Jim. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems, vol. 35, no. 3, 1988, pp. 302, DOI:https://doi. org/10.2307/800624.

21Gutberlet, Marie-Hélène, and Cara Snyman. Shoe Shop: Walking through Africa, the arts and beyond. Jacana Media, 2010. p. 8

22Hamraie and Fritsch, op.cit.. 3

23Hamraie and Fritsch ibid. 2

24Hamraie and Fritsch ibid. 6

25Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam, Columbia University Press, 1987. p. 69

26Qualmann, Clare. “Fort Greene and Long Island City: 17th September.” Perambulator, 26 September 2018 and Qualmann, Clare. “Everyday Choreography: The Pram Walk.” Perambulator, 23 May 2021

27Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 2005. pp. 480–481

28Bennett, Tony, and Patrick Joyce. “Material Powers: Introduction.” Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, edited by Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, Routledge – CRESC series, 2010, p. 6.