Michel De Certeau Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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.

Michel De Certeau

#3. Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.

Michel De Certeau

#4. 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

#5. An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.

Michel De Certeau

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Michel De Certeau

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

Michel De Certeau

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

Michel De Certeau

#12. To walk is to lack a place.

Michel De Certeau

#13. 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

#14. It seems thus possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

Michel De Certeau

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Michel De Certeau

#18. 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

#19. Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Michel De Certeau