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.
She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.
Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.
A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.
All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.