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Michel de Certeau

Michel de Certeau Quotes

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Famous Michel de Certeau Quotes

“On the elementary level it has in effect a threefold “uttering” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographic system by the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and assumes language); it is a spatial realization of the site (just as the act of speaking is a sonic realization of language); lastly, it implies relationships among distinct positions, i.e. pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements (just as verbal utterance is “allocution”, “places the others” before the speaker, and sets up contracts between fellow speakers. A first definition of walking thus seems to be a space of uttering.”

LanguageWalkingUtterance
Author:Michel de Certeau
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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. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.”

IdentityWalkingCityNowhere103Pedestrianism
Book:The Practice of Everyday Life
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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.”

IfsWayFirstsWellsMovingOrderWalksJourneyPossibilityWallWalkingElementsPrivilegeWanderAbandonHikingOrganizeCrossingsImprovisationTrekkingStrollingDriftingSaunteringEnsembleSpatialDrifting AwayInterdiction
Book:The Practice of Everyday Life
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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.'”

GivingMeanBeautifulOrderNamesSpaceRichMovementWalkingEmptyFunctionHistoricalPoeticRoutesForbiddenGeographyLiberatedLiteralEmpty SpaceArticulating
Book:The Practice of Everyday Life
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