Michel De Certeau
Michel De Certeau
walks walking
To walk is to lack a place.
cities oddities opaque
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
order leaks torn
The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.
process walks absent
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
gaps absence
An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.
individual grazing mass
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.
pain past practice
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.
moving writing practice
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.
wall moving journey
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.
art phrases detours
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.
moving practice cities
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.
real media opposites
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.
everyday way poaching
Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.
memories sleep long
A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.