dedication from the practice of everyday life by michel de certeau:
to a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. in invoking here at the outset of my narratives the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity, i inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. what are we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of history to license to us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate to him the writing that one formerly offered in praise of the gods or the inspiring muses?
this anonymous hero is very ancient. he (or she) is the murmuring voice of societies. in all ages, he comes before texts. he does not expect representations. he squats now at the center of our scientific stages. the floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. the increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic details - parts taken for the whole. slowly the representatives that formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. we witness the advent of the number. it comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. it is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heros who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.