ABSTRACT

Since Michel de Certeau, it has become feasible, fashionable even, to think of cities enunciatively; that is, to postulate an analogous relationship between the spatial and the discursive. In investigating the idea of urban texts, de Certeau constructs a pedestrian subject who, by way of traversing streets, embodies a practice that is vernacular and agentive, in resistance to the hegemony of systemic and normativised discourses. Conceived as a speech act, the physical act of walking takes on a rhetorical stance. Now what if we spin de Certeau's scheme around to posit a spatial economy of textual phenomena? The present article pursues this line by examining writing practices through de Certeau's distinction between Place/Strategy and Space/Tactic. Using Walking as an analytic frame for Writing and drawing on examples from Singapore, I propose two modalities of writing: Choreographed and Emergent. I will further look at how dynamic writing practices can usefully complicate this picture to obtain a nuanced understanding of top-down and bottom-up approaches to writing as a mode of cultural consumption and production.

摘要

自从米歇尔·德·塞多（Michel de Certeau）以来，模棱两可地思考城市变得可行，甚至时尚。也就是说，假设空间和话语之间存在类似的关系。在研究城市文本的概念时，de Certeau构建了一个行人主题，通过穿越街道，体现了一种白话和有益的实践，以抵抗系统性和规范化话语的霸权。步行的物理行为被认为是言语行为，具有修辞立场。现在，如果我们转而采用de Certeau的方案来假设文本现象的空间经济，该怎么办？本文通过de Certeau对“位置/策略”与“空间/策略”之间的区分来研究写作实践，以此来探索这一思路。使用“步行”作为分析框架，以写作和借鉴新加坡的示例为基础，我提出了两种写作方式：编排和紧急。我将进一步研究动态写作实践如何有效地使这幅图复杂化，从而使人们对自上而下和自下而上的写作方法（作为一种文化消费和生产方式）有一个细微的了解。