November 6, 2005

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life

de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Notes: Introduction

de Certeau's introduction lays out the theoretical framework he uses in the study of everyday life. Yet, it also brings together a set of frames necessary for analyzing remix culture, amateur production and active consumption. "Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others." (xii)

He uses three different frames for laying out the practice of everyday life: usage/consumption, process/power involved in creativity, formal structures of practice.

He looks at how consumption is actually production ("consumer production"), but a hidden one "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" (xiii). The process of consumption has agency and it is inherently resistant to the formalized production of the relevant culture.

He compares the agency of consumer production to the position of Indians during colonization who "made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to the ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept" (xiii). In other words, there is agency in reinterpretation, appropriation. (This connects deeply with theories of subalterns.)

de Certeau argues that in order to investigate everyday life "we must first analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers. Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization" (xiii).

Using Foucault's notion of power, he talks about how people engage with creativity as part of being embedded in "discipline" (xiv). He also considers the role of bricolage and the use of language, pointing to numerous theories that he intends to build off of.

He then moves on to lay a foundation for thinking about the majority as being in the margins. "Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture... Marginality is becoming universal" (xvii). In thinking about this, de Certeau suggests that in order to understand "the relation of procedures to the fields of force in which they act" requires a "polemological analysis of culture" (xvii).

In the second half of the preface, de Certeau turns to discussing tactics vs. strategies and the issues of trajectories.

"As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own path in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers produce through their signifying practices something that might be considered similar to the 'wandering lines' drawn by the autistic children studied by F. Deligny: 'indirect' or 'errant' trajectories obeying their own logic" (xviii).

Strategy: a formalized, proper relationship in which a subject can be separated from their environment (xix). Think: politics, economics, science, ...

Tactic: an ad-hoc, unorganized relationship that is contextualized by the environment (xiv). Think: everyday practices

He finishes the intro by laying the framework for the sites that intends to analyze (talking, dwelling, grocery shopping, cooking, etc.)

Posted by zephoria at 8:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)