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.
Interpretation
Walking allows individuals to realize and transform their spatial environment.
In this quote, Michel De Certeau emphasizes the relationship between movement and space, suggesting that walking not only enables individuals to engage with and activate different possibilities within their environment but also allows them to creatively adapt or alter those spaces. By walking, people do not merely traverse space; they actively participate in shaping and reinterpreting it, thus turning potential experiences into actual ones while simultaneously inventing new avenues for exploration.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about urban planning and the significance of pedestrian spaces.
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.
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy.
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy.
cause down the shore everything's all right
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