Urban inscriptions are performative devices that play a crucial part in urban assemblages. They mark sites, give places a name, designate directions. This paper questions such performativity by investigating the design and maintenance of subway signs in Paris. Studying backstage activities rather than user tactics, it shows that the semiotic production of space is mainly played out in standardization processes that are both oriented towards signs immutability and fueled by a daily consideration for their vulnerability. Such a posture allows us to take full account of the ontological variations of signs (which can be, for example, stable or unstable, consistent or fragile, immutable or mutable). Maintenance work, through which the agency of urban inscriptions is partially shaped, ensures the articulation of such a multiplicity.
AdeyP, 2009, “Facing airport security: Affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space27274–295
2.
AdeyPBrayerLMassonDMurphyPSimpsonPTixierN, 2013, “‘Pour votre tranquillité’: Ambiance, atmosphere, and surveillance”Geoforum49299–309
3.
AminAThriftN, (Eds), 2002Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Polity Press, Cambridge)
4.
AshJ, 2013, “Rethinking affective atmospheres: Technology, perturbation and space times of the non-human”Geoforum4920–28
5.
AustinJ L, 1962How to Do Things with Words (Oxford University Press, New York)
6.
BissellD, 2010, “Passenger mobilities: Affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space28270–289
7.
BrandS, 1994How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Penguin Books, London)
8.
BrennerN, 2004New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, Oxford)
9.
BrennerNMaddenD JWachsmuthD, 2011, “Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory”City15225–240
10.
BrighentiA M, 2010, “On territorology: Towards a general science of territory”Theory, Culture and Society2752–72
11.
ButlerJ, 1997Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, New York)
12.
CallonM, 2007, “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?”, in Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics Eds MacKenzieDMuniesaFSiuL, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ), pp 311–357
13.
CoorenF, 2004, “Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings”Organization11373–393
14.
CoorenF, 2010Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism (John Benjamins, Amsterdam)
15.
CresswellT, 2004Place: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, Malden, MA)
16.
de CerteauM, 1984The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
17.
De LaetMMolA, 2000, “The Zimbabwe bush pump: Mechanics of a fluid technology”Social Studies of Science30225–263
18.
DeleuzeGGuattariF, 1987A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Continuum, London)
19.
DenisJPontilleD, 2010aPetite sociologie de la signalétique: Les coulisses des panneaux du métro (Les Presses des Mines, Paris)
20.
DenisJPontilleD, 2010b, “Placing subway signs: Practical properties of signs at work”Visual Communication9441–462
21.
DenisJPontilleD, 2010c, “The graphical performation of a public space: The subway signs and their scripts”, in Urban Plots, Organizing Cities Eds SondaGColettaCGabbiF, (Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey) pp 11–22
22.
EdgertonD, 1999, “From innovation to use: Ten eclectic theses on the historiography of technology”History and Technology, an International Journal1137–41
23.
EdensorT, 2011, “Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann's Church”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series36238–252
24.
FaríasI, 2010, “Introduction: Decentring the object of urban studies”, in Urban Assemblages: How Actor-network Theory Changes Urban Studies Eds FariasIBenderT, (Routledge, London) pp 1–24
25.
FaríasIBenderT, (Eds), 2010Urban Assemblages: How Actor-network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Routledge, London)
26.
FraenkelB, 2006, “Actes écrits, actes oraux: La performativité à l'épreuve de l'écriture”Études de communication2969–93
27.
FrersLMeierL, (Eds), 2007Encountering Urban Places: Visual and Material Performances in the City (Ashgate, London)
28.
FullerG, 2002, “The arrow—directional semiotics: Wayfinding in transit”Social Semiotics12231–244
29.
GarfinkelH, 1967Studies in Ethnomethodology (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ)
GarfinkelH, 2002Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism (Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ)
32.
GherardiS, 2012How To Conduct A Practice-Based Study (Edward Elgar, Northampton, MA)
33.
GoffmanE, 1959The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Doubleday, New York)
34.
GoffmanE, 1986Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA)
35.
GrahamSMarvinS, (Eds), 2001Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (Routledge, London)
36.
GrahamSThriftN, 2007, “Out of order: Understanding repair and maintenance”Theory, Culture and Society241–25
37.
HenkeC R, 2000, “The mechanics of workplace order: Toward a sociology of repair”Berkeley Journal of Sociology4455–81
38.
HughesE, 1936, “The ecological aspects of institutions”American Sociological Review1180–189
39.
KärrholmM, 2007, “The materiality of territorial production: A conceptual discussion of territoriality, materiality, and the everyday life of public space”Space and Culture10437–453
40.
KärrholmM, 2012Retailising Space: Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation of Public Space (Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey)
41.
KnoxHO'DohertyDVurdubakisTWestrupC, 2008, “Enacting airports: Space, movement and modes of ordering”Organization15869–888
42.
LashSUrryJ, 1994Economies of Signs and Space (Sage, London)
43.
LathamAMcCormackD P, 2004, “Moving cities: Rethinking the materialities of urban geographies”Progress in Human Geography28701–724
44.
LatourB, 1986, “Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together”Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture and Present61–40
45.
LatourBHermantE, 1998Paris ville invisible (La Découverte, Paris)
46.
LatourBWoolgarS, 1979Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Sage, Beverly Hills, CA)
47.
LaveJ, 1988Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
48.
LawJ, 2002, “Objects and spaces”Theory, Culture and Society1991–105
49.
LefebvreH, 1991The Production of Space (Blackwell, Oxford)
50.
McFarlaneC, 2011, “The city as assemblage: Dwelling and urban space”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space29649–671
51.
MolA, 1999, “Ontological politics: A word and some questions”, in Actor-network Theory and After Eds LawJHassardJ, (Blackwell, Oxford) pp 74–89
52.
MolALawJ, 1994, “Regions, networks and fluids: Anaemia and social topology”Social Studies of Science24641–671
53.
MolotchH, 2011, “Objects in the city”, in The New Blackwell Companion to the City Eds BridgeSWatsonS, (Blackwell, London) pp 66–78
54.
MolotchH LNorénL, 2010Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York University Press, New York)
55.
OrrJ E, 1996Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Cornell University Press, New York)
56.
ParkR E, 1936, “Human ecology”Amercian Journal of Sociology421–15
57.
ScollonRScollonS W, 2003Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World (Routledge, London)
StarS L, 1999, “The ethnography of infrastructure”American Behavioral Scientist43377–391
62.
StarS LStraussA, 1999, “Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work”Computer Supported Cooperative Work89–30
63.
ThibaudJ-P, 2011, “The three dynamics of urban ambiances”, in Sites of Sound: Of Architecture and the EarVol. 2 Eds LaBelleBMartinhoC, (Errant Bodies Press, Berlin) pp 43–53
64.
TimpfS, 2002, “Ontologies of wayfinding: A traveler's perspective”Networks and Spatial Economics29–33
65.
UretaS, 2013, “Waiting for the Barbarians: Disciplinary devices on Metro de Santiago”Organization20596–614
66.
VarnelisK, (Ed.), 2009The Infrastructural City (Actar, New York)
67.
VerbeekP P, 2004What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency and Design (Penn State University Press, University Park, PA)
68.
VertesiJ, 2008, “Mind the gap: The London Underground map and users' representations of urban space”Social Studies of Science387–33
