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.
Interpretation
The masses are often limited to the illusion of freedom, consuming what the system provides rather than experiencing true autonomy.
Michel De Certeau's quote critiques the notion of freedom in modern society, suggesting that individuals are deceived into believing they are free while they remain confined by the choices and values imposed by the prevailing systems. The 'ration of simulacra' refers to the artificial representations and choices presented to society, which serve to distract from the true nature of their autonomy and agency.
In practice
During a lecture on modern consumerism, this quote could be used to illustrate the illusion of choice in a capitalist society.
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 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.
The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.
Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.
Keep your soul fit to manifest the life of the Son of God. Never live on memories; let the word of God be always living and active in you.
Most religious people in America fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction, so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is.
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.
I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.
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