Michel de Certeau (French: [sɛʁto]; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences.
Along with the lazy man. . . the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others.
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
To walk is to lack a place.
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.
It seems thus possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.
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.
A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.
An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.
When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said.
Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc. ) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.
New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.
The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.
Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.