When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses [โฆ]. โThe more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,โ he said.
Michel de CerteauThe 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.
Michel de CerteauTo walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
Michel de CerteauThe walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.
Michel de CerteauMore than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
Michel de CerteauThe 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.
Michel de Certeau