Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Introduction, Chapter 1 and 2

 

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1988). Introduction, Chapter 1 and 2

Michel de Certeau presents his research agenda already in the first sentences of his work:

This essay is part of a continuing investigation of the ways in which users – commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules – operate (xi).

The presuppositions of his research are:

1.     It should create theoretical approaches to studies of the everyday life.

2.     It should not look at an individual per se, but rather look at the group and its dynamics.

The goal of his work is, therefore:

The purpose of this work is to make explicit the systems of operational combination (Ies combinatoires d'operations) which also compose a "culture," and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term "consumers." Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others (xi-xii).

The tricky thing with studying the spaces of everyday practice is that the established systems of production (like television, commerce, etc.) claim all this space for themselves and try not to give consumers a chance for a free choice. Yet the fact of consumption itself implies “production,” which

is dispersed, but […] insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order (xii-xiii).

The point here is that consumers – or “common” people, as Certeau uses an example of Indians – use semiotic systems imposed on them “with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept” (xiii):

They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it (xiii).

So, Certeau suggests that a research of everyday life should focus on the secondary “production” (i.e., consumption) of cultures, commodities, images, etc., or to understand how people who did not produce them still can manipulate them. In this way, he adopts the theoretical position of Austin:

By adopting the point of view of enunciation-which is the subject of our study-we privilege the act of speaking; according to that point of view, speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations. These four characteristics of the speech ace can be found in many other practices (walking, cooking, etc.) (xiii).

Another inspiration – or a framework to use for dialogue – is Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault looks at how the apparatus exercising power uses “miniscule” techniques to secure its domination in all spheres of life, by way of “disciplining” or “punishing.” The new objective of Certeau’s project is, then to see how the society is able to resist these “microphysics of power”:

If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what "ways of operating" form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order (xiv).

People (users, consumers) reappropriate the space organized by the dominant power or even dominant discourses. Caught in the nets of “discipline,” they use “clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity” (xiv). Certeau, thus, introduces the term “antidiscipline,” which becomes the subject of his book.

Certeau’s presupposition is that everyday practice is based on certain rules, has certain logic. The obstacle in his research is, however, “the marginality of a majority.” Certeau also mentions that everyday practice inevitably has a political dimension, even if it seems completely apolitical:

Like law (one of its models), culture articulates conflicts and alternately legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force. It develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which it provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary. The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices (xvii).

To trace the evading nature of everyday practice, Certeau introduces the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy, in his understanding, is “the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment’” (xix). In contrast, tactics is a “calculus” which cannot rely on the clear distinction between “us” and “other.” “The place of a tactic belongs to the other” (xix). Those who can only resort to tactics are by definition forced to live in a permanently changing environment:

A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The "proper" is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized "on the wing." Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities.” The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. (xix).

Reading is an exemplary field which a research of everyday practice should take into account:

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 meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance (xxi).

Part I. A Very Ordinary Culture

Chapter I. A Common Place: Ordinary Language

De Certeau starts by looking at the place of a “common man” in the previous intellectual writing. When he first appears in the European discourses, he is that mighty other who does not have agency, but is important because his otherness creates the borders of the intellectual world. With Freud, ordinary man becomes a figure of legitimation: he claims that his research is universal by making this ordinary man the protagonist of his work. But, as Freud lets him in, he starts producing “commonplace truths,” which marks the change of the very nature of human knowledge (about itself). This common man and his commonness claim more space by the 20^th century (he refers to late Freud), to the degree that “the ordinary [insinuates] into established scientific fields.” De Certeau, consequently, sees his objective as redefining the approaches to the ordinary:

It is a matter of restoring historicity to the movement which leads analytical procedures back to their frontiers, to the point where they are changed, indeed disturbed, by the ironic and mad banality that speaks in "Everyman" in the sixteenth century and that has returned in the final stages of Freud's knowledge. I shall try to describe the erosion that lays bare the ordinary in a body of analytical techniques, to reveal the openings that mark its trace on the borders where a science is mobilized, to indicate the displacements that lead toward the common place where "anyone" is finally silent, except for repeating (but in a different way) banalities. (5)

The problem is that for academic scholarship, the domain of the everyday had always been something outside of the scope of its interests (the “remainder,… [which] has become what we call culture” (6)).

This cleavage organizes modernity. It cuts it up into scientific and dominant islands set off against the background of practical "resistances" and symbolizations that cannot be reduced to thought (6).

The problem is even with the formal languages which scholarship devised for social sciences to study. Those who pretend to be experts in these fields, in fact, play a social role which is different from the production of scientific knowledge:

[Expert] inscribes himself in the common language of practices, where an overproduction of authority leads to the devaluation of authority, since one always gets more in exchange for an equal or inferior amount of competence. But when he continues to believe, or make others believe, that he is acting as a scientist, he confuses social place with technical discourse. He takes one for the other: it is a simple case of mistaken identity. He misunderstands the order which he represents. He no longer knows what he is saying (8).

Chapter II. Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language

Certeau analyzes South American Indians and the ways in which they exploit the structures and orders (social, political, religious, cultural) imposed on them to create a space in which they resist attempts to assimilate them within the established structures of power:

In numerable ways of playing and foiling the other's game, that is, the space instituted by others, characterize the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations. People have to make do with what they have (18).

But how to study this practices of resistance? The conventional way (categorization of cultural artefacts and their consequent analysis as structures which form the social body) has a disadvantage of losing the context of the production (of words, or things, or acts). Thus, such an approach does not take into account

a social historicity in which systems of representations or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users (21).

In contrast, an analysis which focuses on the ordinary language in the social environment of its poduction

distinguishes in these linguistic turns a style of thought and action – that is, models of practice (24).