Michel de Certeau Quotes

• Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.

  Michel de Certeau

  Everyday, Poaching, Way

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.12, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Individual, Mass, Grazing

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• To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.

  Michel de Certeau

  Process, Walks, Absent

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.103, Univ of California Press

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• 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, Past, Practice

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.108, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Moving, Practice, Cities

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• 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

  Art, Journey, Hiking

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.100, Univ of California Press

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• An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.

  Michel de Certeau

  Gaps, Absence

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• More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

  Michel de Certeau

  Oddities, Cities, Opaque

  Michel de Certeau, Pierre Mayol (1998). “The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and cooking. Volume 2”, p.134, U of Minnesota Press

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• 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

  Real, Media, Opposites

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.185, Univ of California Press

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• A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

  Michel de Certeau

  Memories, Sleep, Long

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.108, Univ of California Press

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• 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, Mean, Order

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.105, Univ of California Press

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• 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, Moving, Journey

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.98, Univ of California Press

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• To walk is to lack a place.

  Michel de Certeau

  Walks, Walking

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• It seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

  Michel de Certeau

  Journey, Hiking, Space

  "The Practice of Everyday Life".

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• The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

  Michel de Certeau

  Order, Leaks, Torn

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.107, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Moving, Writing, Practice

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• 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, Order, Law

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.117, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Practice, Cities, Oblivion

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.93, Univ of California Press

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• 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

  Communism, Demonstration, Used

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.177, Univ of California Press

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• The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated... He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress.

  Michel de Certeau

  Men, Sick, Secret

  "Arts de Faire".

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• 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

  Practice, World, Able

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.97, Univ of California Press

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• 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.

  Michel de Certeau

  Death, Men, Lazy Man

  Michel de Certeau, Steven Rendall (1988). “Arts de Faire”, p.190, Univ of California Press

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• Can the vast technology beneath our gaze be anything but a representation? Any optical artifact... The city panorama is a theoretical (ie visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstanding of processes.

  Michel de Certeau

  Technology, Cities, Process

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• Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places of believing practices, but for this very reason, they seem to have been haunted by the return of a very ancient (preChristian) and very “pagan” alliance between power and religion. It is as though now that religion has ceased to be an autonomous power (the “power of religion,” people used to say), politics has once again become religious.

  Michel de Certeau

  Religious, Believe, Practice

  "The Practice of Everyday Life".

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• 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.

  Michel de Certeau

  Art, New York, Past

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.91, Univ of California Press

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