The Practice of Everyday Life

From MarxWiki

Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life

The ethnologization of arts (by David Newman)

• “It [Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers] places “sciences” and “arts” side by side, in a proximity that promises a later assimilation: the sciences are the operational languages whose grammar and syntax form constructed, regulated, and thus writeable, systems; the arts are techniques that await an enlightened knowledge they currently lack” (66).

La perruque (by Liz Pardue)

Definition: The ways in which workers trick their employers into thinking they are working when they are actually doing personal things using their company's time and spare materials. (`The workers own work disguised as work for his employer.` (25)) This work is specifically not profit-related, but is instead creative. Example: An office worker blogging on company time, and switching the computer window to a work-related site when the boss walks by.

• Quotes: `In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, [the worker] cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family through spending his time in this way.` (25-26)

• `Let us try to make a perruque in the economic system whose rules and hierarchies are repeated, as always, in scientific institutions...in these ways we can subvert the law that, in the scientific factory, puts work at the service of the machine and, by a similar logic, progressively destroys the requirement of creation and the 'obligation to give.'` (27-28)

“Walking in the City,” (by Adrienne DuComb)

de Certeau discusses walking as a tactic of escaping the dominant culture. He believed that walking permitted voyeurism and observation to fragment and disrupt the immobile order of the city. The city is a network of “nowheres” seeking a proper place. The reader appropriates the geographical system of the city in a way similar to how speech appropriates language. while walking through the city, the readers can take on the role of a flaneur.

• “The operation of walking, wandering, or ‘window shopping,’ that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map” (97).

• “To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper” (103).

• “Pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city’” (97).

Tactics and Strategies (by Alex Tischenko)

de Certeau differentiates between strategies, the tools of the powerful, and tactics, the art of the weak. The strength of strategies lies in their ability to establish a physical place on which power relationships take place. One example might be a university, where the physical location confers a sense of authority, neutrality, independence, and disinterestedness upon the knowledge produced. The key attribute of the university is its ablility to separate itself from “temporal relationships”, to refuse to see itself as a product and a reflection of its time. In this sense, tactics depend on a clever utilization of time in particular circumstances to undermine the foundations of power.

Strategy:

• “I call strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.”

• “Strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power . . . elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed.”

• “Recognize in these strategies a specific type of knowledge, one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place.”

• “Strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of place offers to the erosion of time.”

Tactics:

• “a tactic is a calculated action . . . The space of the tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power . . .a tactic is an art of the weak.”

• “[Tactics pin their hopes on] a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also the play that it introduces into the foundations of power.”

De Certeau states `the practices of everyday life` can open up and free oneself from oppressive tools of modern society. This book is not an analysis of individuals, but rather an exploration of the individual since social relations are always a necessary element of plurality within society. De Certeau also suggests that this idea of “everyday practices” is mutually dependent on the spaces which we as people come to inhabit. The only way in which to subvert dominant hegemonic culture is to create new spaces. By creating new spaces you are using “tricks” and “games” to create new places to inhabit and by doing so within the structure of language one needs not to subscribe to the ideas and places created by dominant society. (by Samuel Harowitz)