Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.
Interpretation
Everyday life is shaped by borrowing ideas and practices from others.
This quote by Michel De Certeau emphasizes the idea that our daily routines and behaviors are not entirely original, but rather a mosaic created by integrating and adapting practices, ideas, and inspirations from those around us. It suggests that our lives are a continuous process of learning from others, as we draw on the 'property' of their experiences and creativity to construct our own identities and ways of living.
In practice
In a speech about innovation, one might say, 'As Michel De Certeau reminds us, our everyday life invents itself by poaching on the ideas of others.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
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.
What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes.
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
I am much inclined to live from my rucksack, and let my trousers fray as they like.
The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?
You have forgotten the One who doesn't care about ownership, who doesn't try to turn a profit from every human exchange.
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