de certeau

'to cite is thus to give reality to the simulacrum produced by a power, by making people believe in it, but without providing any believable object.'
practice of everyday life | webcite

'The story of man's travels through his own texts remains in large measure unknown.'
practice of everyday life | reading

'But whereas the scientific apparatus (ours) is led to share the illusion of the powers it necessarily supports, that is, to assume that the masses are transformed by the conquests and victories of expansionist production, it is always good to remind ourselves that we mustn't take people for fools.'
practice of everyday life | theory | volition |

' From this formation, I shall distinguish another modern figure: “the voices of the body”. An example of this other scene is furnished by the opera, which gradually established itself at around the same time the scriptural model organized techniques and social practices in the eighteenth century. A space for voices, the opera allows an enunciation to speak that in its most elevated moments detaches itself from statements, disturbs and interferes with syntax, and wounds or pleasures, in the audience, those places in the body that have no language either. Thus in Verdi's Macbeth , in Lady Macbeth's mad aria, the voice that is at first supported by the orchestra soon continues alone after the orchestra has fallen silent, follows the curve of the melody a moment longer, vacillates, slowly slips away from its path, gets lost and finally disappears into silence. One voice among others breaching the discourse in which it constitutes a parenthesis and a deviation.'
practice of everyday life | opera | performance

‘Captured by the radio (the voice is the law), as soon as he awakens, the listener walks all day long through the forest of narrativities from journalism, advertising, and television, narrativities that still find time, as he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals of sleep.'
practice of everyday life| society

‘In modern Athens , the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai . To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor” – a bus or a train.'
practice of everyday life | cities | transport

‘In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meaning inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he in incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments “lost” in reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body. Ruse , metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an “invention” of the memory. Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place.'
practice of everyday life reading |