Word Vomit

Much like Sarah, I'm going to be throwing out ideas about the De Certeau reading.  I spent the time I was reading it trying to compare it to literature, or anything about it.  There are many parts that I do not understand, and am hoping that class helps to clarify these.

• On page 1343, he writes about the city, "he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors and spectators"--so does a writer need to be directly involved in the culture he/she is writing about in order to understand it?  If so, then it would make sense for Johnston to argue that in order to truly represent a culture/people/group, one needs to be a part of it.  Then, contradictingly, De Certeau goes on to state that being apart from the city allows one distance, which transforms the city into "a text that lies before one's eyes.  It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god" (1343).  So which is it?  In order to truly write, and represent, do we as writers need to be immersed in a culture or distanced from it?  Is the problem of language the Icarian fall; when reunited with the city the language is flawed, unable to truly represent or convey meaning? 

• Continuing on, it's stated that the "totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements" (1344), but what of our failures?  Is there no knowledge or wisdom or enlightenment to be attained from the failure of earlier times?  Can't looking at old classifications of literature or problems of speech genre lead to greater understanding and better classifying?

• De Certeau breaks down the city and urban life into that of what seems to be "Gods" and "ordinary practitioners".  Within the practitioners "they are walkers, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it" (1344).  Are these writers, then, writers who write for pleasure (like the group Cooper discussed)?  So will the writings of city dwellers withstand the testament of time?  Will it outlive the persuasive writings--wait, can I even call the writings of those above persuasive?  Do they automatically fall into the other group? 

I then tried to compare the ideas of De Certeau and fit it into "genre".  On page 1344, De Certeau states "the networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other".  Is genre organized in this way, too?  Genre is shaped out of fragments/utterances, and remains daily and indefinitely "other" to representations in that it can be applicable to many events with nothing in common to one another.  Right?

Especially, in An Operational Concept section, the first step I took to be the utterance, the third genre, and the second...well, I'm not sure.  Can I even connect genre in the Re/Presentation section?  The last page of the writing is confusing me as well.....help!