and out of various quartiers online. Time needs to be taken to follow these movements and
moments as constituting “space as a practised place” (ibid). In short, the focus is on “real
people doing real things in a given historical moment, past or present, and trying to figure
out how what they are doing or have done will or will not reconfigure the world they live in”
(Ortner 1996:2). Hence projects that attempt to ‘re-capture’ such instances and honour
them involve a politics of research and engagement; as an ethical principle (see Certeau
1984: xix). In this sense, Certeau's goal is to retrieve everyday life from its proverbial state
of being “put in Coventry”. The many “others” absented from mainstream (political or
technocratic) accounts have always been present even when not in the spotlight. For
Certeau “any account is an account of a journey - a spatial practice” (ibid: 115); a literal and
virtual traversal. This understanding of space/spatiality as intrinsically social and
inter/subjective (as opposed to categorical or topographical) is also inherent to many non-
western epistemologies and intracultural relations.
To recap: Certeau’s approach bridges post-Marxist reconstructions, postcolonial critique and
postcolonial/non-western (cyberspatial) practices of everyday life in several ways. First, if
“everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others" (ibid:
xii) then, second, the “presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers,
educators, and popularizers as the key to socioeconomic advancement) … tells us nothing
about what it is for its users. We must first analyse its manipulation by users who are not its
makers” (ibid: xiii). Third, both elites and non-elites live and think in the “technocratically
constructed, written and functionalised” spaces of the social (and world) order (ibid: xviii).
His point is that non-elite "tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak
make use of the strong, … lend a political dimension to everyday practices" (ibid: xvii).
Radical politics (as political organization, research, “virtual” forms of resistance or organized
protest) are situated in the “innumerable practice by means of which users reappropriate the
space organised by the techniques of sociocultural production" (ibid: xv).
Postcolonial Traversals
A couple of delineations before proceeding. First, Internet-based interactions refract and
reconstitute the physically proximate features of urban neighbourhoods, their surrounding
cityscape and nation-state borders. Second, in an online quartier, spatial practices of the
everyday can be discerned not only in the immediate on-screen content, symbols and
conversations, but also in the complete or partial texts left behind in caches, pointed to in
“file deleted” or “under construction” notices, online statistical records, electronic tags like
cookies and spyware devices, email in-boxes, the ubiquitous hyperlink, appearance and
disappearance of avatars in Live Chat, and so on. Whilst these are digital comings and
goings, they are nonetheless actual ones; part of a whole new set of polysemic “murmurs”
of the everyday that overlay those on the ground - offline. Cyberspatial practices construct
other sorts of proximity, (non-)embodiment with both familiar and new tactical and/or
strategic operations in play.
Another caveat is that the everyday lives of (dispersed) non-western peoples are not
reducible to the quintessentially European practices observed by Certeau and his colleagues,
Giard and Mayol (1980/1998). But this is not to say that they belong to the subordinate end
of a tradition-versus-modernity hierarchy. Pacific Island diasporas are clustered in urban
centres in the West and when not, their internet access mostly (and very unevenly) occurs
in urban centres in the Pacific Islands; Apia, Honolulu, Suva, Nuku'alofa (Figure 2 ; Notes -
7
Convention