Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, makes crucial arguments that can be used to combine these concepts of practice, performativity, and intersubjectivity as they pertain to identity. He connects it all in his bird’s-eye view of the metropolis and its specs of frenzied citizens as they walk through the daily routines of their everyday lives. “The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk… [and their] bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (de Certeau 93). They are unaware of the story they write, of the system that they create and operate, of the game that they both develop and play. The walkers write their urban text together, pressing their feet into the perpetually drying concrete and asphalt so that their steps are imprinted behind them. And those footprints, stepped in and stepped in and stepped in, become sized in such a way that they give off the illusion of only permitting certain shoes to fit.
The routines of the city’s citizens reveal themselves to be discursive – and rhetorically so. The walkers make arguments with their very existence and sentience. “Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize” (de Certeau 97). The city, de Certeau theorizes, becomes its own anonymous, all-enveloping subject – a totalizing entity that contains all of the people, groups, texts, buildings, ideas, discourse, etc. that constitute it and deems itself the subject of all of the real subjects within it (94). And, through such a process, the metropolis – whether it be real or virtual, a city of walkers or a community of gamers – establishes its seemingly static roles of identity by observing the norms that its subjects enact.
