38 Quotes by Michel de Certeau

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.

History begins at ground level, with footsteps.

The paths taken by strollers consist of a series of turnings and returnings that can be likened to “turns of phrase” or “stylistic devices”. A perambulatory rhetoric does exist. The art of “turning” a phrase has its counterpart in the art of “turning” course.

The perambulatory gesture … is in itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that are constantly altering it into the advertisement of the other, the agent of whatever may surprise, cross or seduce its route. These aspects establish a rhetoric; they even define it.

We travel abroad to discover in distant lands something whose presence at home has become unrecognisable.

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.

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.

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.

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