More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
Michel de CerteauCan the vast technology beneath our gaze be anything but a representation? Any optical artifact... The city panorama is a theoretical (ie visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstanding of processes.
Michel de CerteauThe created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.
Michel de CerteauThe media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.
Michel de CerteauTo 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.
Michel de Certeau