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… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share Image
“Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share Image
Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others. — Michel de Certeau Copy Share Image
The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share Image
“His [the pedestrian's] elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts his at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share
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… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share
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… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share
When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share Image
“Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect,… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share
“Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share
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… — Michel de Certeau Copy Share Image