Walking the City

The ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph (Jacques Rancière).
How can the ordinary, or the everyday be torn from its obviousness? A tearing-from as an aggressive act in Rancière´s sense: let us tentatively place this gesture in a relation of comparison to the kind of “poaching” within the everyday which Michel De Certeau advocates. De Certeau describes the practice of walking the city as a deviant usage, out of which a changed understanding of cities becomes possible: if city walking is itself poached and approached not pragmatically, for the purpose of reaching a goal, but rather by way of immersion and intentional dérive, then everyday practices turn into innovative forces of production. …

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