Michel de Certeau Born : May 17, 1925 Died : January 9, 1986 Browse All Authors Top 28 quotes by Michel de Certeau The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual. Michel de Certeau grazing individual mass Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of he body. 'I feel good here': the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice. Michel de Certeau pain practice past The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path. Michel de Certeau hiking journey art To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. Michel de Certeau absent walks process More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable. Michel de Certeau opaque oddities cities Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others. Michel de Certeau poaching everyday way They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.' Michel de Certeau beautiful order mean To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation. Michel de Certeau cities practice moving A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories. Michel de Certeau sleep memories long First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements. Michel de Certeau wall journey moving The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere. Michel de Certeau media real opposites An absence of meaning opens a gap in time. Michel de Certeau gaps absence It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks 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. Michel de Certeau practice writing moving To walk is to lack a place. Michel de Certeau walks walking It seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation. Michel de Certeau hiking space journey The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. Michel de Certeau oblivion cities practice A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two thing being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. Michel de Certeau taken law order One is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's dues, in short, without paying. Michel de Certeau demonstration communism used The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten. Michel de Certeau able practice world The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order. Michel de Certeau leaks torn order
