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29 Michel de Certeau, op. cit., p. 143.
30 Íd., XLIII.
31 How useful this notion
may prove to be for the populist right has been borne out by Donald Trump’s election as
45th president of the USA.
32 Íd., pp. 145-46.
fails to imitate and expand language. Michel de Certeau talks about ‘semiocracy’ and an ‘inflation of reading’ in the city. Far from leading to exhaustion, the repetition of work, toiling, transactions, and rites constantly rekindles the need for expression. A threefold operation defines the city: the production of an autonomous, self- sufficient space; the synchrony of work opposed to “tradition’s stubborn and elusive resistance”; and the city’s acting as a subject “in the fashion of a proper name [...] which affords the possibility to build space from a finite number of stable, isolable, mutually articulated properties”.29 Within this pattern of calculatedly controlled rhythms, the city elicits the proliferation of margins and resistance – and not necessarily in a topographical sense. “Marginality’s current incarnation is not the small group, but mass marginalization; the activities of people not engaged in cultural production are unreadable, without signature or symbols, and remain the only possibility for all those who nevertheless purchase the spectacle-products through which a productivist economy is spelled out. Marginality becomes universal; the marginalized turn into a silent majority”.30 The notion of a “silent majority” has ambiguous, even sinister, undertones,31 and de Certeau carefully avoids ascribing it to any political orientation. Its nature is unstable, corresponding to off-the-grid shifts that may propagate terror as much as indifference, revolutionary rage, solidarity, or chaos. De Certeau defines the processes of resistance within this type of mass marginalization as forms of “tactical craftsmanship,” amongst which rites and tricks coexist with all the “combinations of power without readable identity, [...] evading discipline without thereby fleeing the space where discipline is exercised, which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space and the uncanny familiarity of the city.”32 This marginality-without-margins moves below the grid, and may be safely assumed to maintain its practices in constant flow regardless of their content – it’s not about the “what,” it’s about the “how.” Here we might again turn to the action in X-Ville to catch a glimpse of how this other, dissonant, and un-symphonic synchronicity works in bursts and jolts, with all its random serendipitous moments, and its ceaseless, unscripted toil.
In the historical interval between Kracauer and de Certeau we may trace the completion of the process whereby the masses are marginalized and marginalization becomes massive, as well as the embryonic transformation of those same masses of
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