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Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
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Background
Michel de Certeau—historian, cofounder of École Freudienne de Paris, and Jesuit priest—wrote The Practice of Everyday Life in 1980, turning his attention to popular culture, particularly the ways in which the quotidian practice of living resists the totalizing force of discourse. In a way, this work is a response to Foucault’s thesis of a panoptic, disciplinary society that taxonomizes the human individual or culture as a subject of study. This work pulls from not only Foucault’s work, but also figures as diverse as Alain Bordieu and J. L. Austin, and from disciplines such as philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics, literature, and psychoanalysis. A very dense book, it nonetheless employs a wandering, mystical prose that elucidates and narrates (describes and enacts) its theories through simile, analogy, imagery, and lyricism.
This entry refers to the 1984 English translation by Steven F. Rendall.
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Content
Michel de Certeau begins his study of the quotidian by shifting the dichotomy between consumers and producers (a common binary in cultural studies) to users and producers. The producers are the ones who make the infrastructure of culture (the “authors” of law, literature, cityscapes, history, science), and the users are the ones who manipulate, poach, and alter those structures, both internalizing them and populating them. This distinction leads to the thesis of Practice of Everyday Life: Though discourse and nexuses of power do pervade, regulate, enable, produce our lives, we, in the practice of everyday life (talking, reading, cleaning, navigating spatial areas, etc.), employ tactics that subvert, resist, and otherwise fall outside the scope of discursive encapsulation. This argument is best made through a rigorous exploration of the “rhetoric” of walking in a city: the cityplanners create a grid of streets that is rational and physically there, laid out in ways that seek to control the city through restricting and allowing access to the spaces therein. On the other hand, people walk around without any regard to the plan, forming memories of the city in brief glimpses of sensual detail, marking themselves onto the physical city itself through practices as conscious as graffiti and practices as unconscious as beating out a path through a grassy plot by years of repetition. People create shortcuts. People behave in ways utterly irrational. These ways of being in the city resist “official” measures of control; indeed, they are commonly unaccounted for in discourse while remaining supremely important in the social, affective, and epistemological experiences of people.
Other compelling examples of tactics include how people insinuate themselves into the text of a book as they read or faire la perruque, the action of a worker using company time to pursue personal projects. A tactic is the art of making do, of dealing with a local environment in the moment. And so it can be seen as a triumph of temporality (opportunity) over spatiality (the physical given of a city. On the other hand, this relationship is not so simple, for the space is what gives rise to opportunity and time itself has a way of turning reflective tactics into institutionalized strategies. Another important issue for discussion is visibility versus invisibility. The strategies of power are eminently visible: the towers, the infrastructures, the texts. Tactics on the other hand are resistances that are acted out almost as a ruse (the perruque example is apt): a person deals with the dominant texts of culture in personal practices that are invisible (making a recipe with what is available while taking into consideration taste, company, and memory).
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Key Terms
strategy
tactic
savoir-faire
proper
other
user
poaching
operational logic
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Dialogue
Michel de Certeau is in dialogue with French poststructuralism (Foucault, Badiou), analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein), psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and his own Jesuit tradition. As a proponent of liberation theology and the (hoped for) “democratization” of Roman Catholicism post Vatican II, Certeau both recognized the danger of hierarchical, discursive power and sought ways of resisting it. He brings a type of revolutionary optimism to the Foucauldian conception of power, demonstrating the ability of the everyday person to become and agent against and with the powers-that-be. Although this is refreshing, it could run the risk of minimizing the importance of technologies of power. Though the inverse of this critique (that an overemphasis on the power of institutions neglects the ways that people can navigate their lives creatively and subversively) applied to Foucault (at least until History of Sexuality) is equally apt.
Certeau is, in my opinion, way under-read in America (though in France, he was some sort of Jesuit celebrity). Nevertheless, his impact is largely felt on cultural studies and theories of popular culture, important in the turn towards thinking of “consumption” and fan culture as productive in and of themselves.
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References
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
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External Links