The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau

The Practice of Everyday LifeMichel de CerteauG205 Week 10- Cierra Thomas-WilliamsReturning to our beginnings and the question of culture..what is it?The Practice of Everyday LifeThe Practice of Everyday Life theorizes the strategies of the producers of culture and the tactics of ordinary people [who] subvert the dominant economic order from within.These ordinary people are consumers, readers.Displaces academic assertions of passive consumption and spectatorship (Adorno) to creative and tactical use of products (Benjamin, de Certeau, Bordieu, Foucault). (Culture/culture, art/popular culture, elite/masses, xiii-xiv).Project is not about consumer products but is about the various uses of those products as a way to understand culture.

Peiss, Friedan, Rooks, Lutz and Collins all give us different methods for understanding mass culture, advertising an magazines. In some way each of these books work against the notion of the passive consumer. Certainly in this class we have emphasized deep analysis versus passive watching.2Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday LifeEveryday life reinvents itself by poaching the property of others.This practicethe everyday practicedoes not directly concern "individuality" or "the subjects," rather it offers "modes of operation or schemata of action," or more precisely "an operational logic.Everyday life is inseparable from economics, but de Certeau disagrees with Marxists that humans engage only through commodity fetishism.

review critical terms: audience, spectator, consumer

A Marxist analysis argue that human consciousness is united, understood, and engaged through work. 3General Introduction - What is the project?Consumption, or usage are everyday practice: the "investigation of ways in which users operate," or "ways of operating," or doing things. (Making Do)Ways of operating are necessary to be explicated in the process of representation as well as consumption, a hidden production by its users (xiv).Thus he elaborates the schema of "relations between consumers and the mechanism of production" distinguishing two nodes of power: strategies and tactics. (building upon previous cultural studies)everyday practice should not be concealed "as merely the obscure background of social activity," but it is necessary to "penetrate this obscurity" and to "articulate" everyday life.

What is de Certeau insinuating about theories of culture in the academy?4Consumer Production can be examined through 4 modes. Usage, or ConsumptionThe action of "making" is considered as a 'hidden' production and, as well as so-called "consumption, " corresponding to predominated systems of production.

Consumption is the silent manifestation of power relationships. For Example:"the analysis of the images" on television--"representation produced by a dominant economic order (xiii)."the time spent watching television what about internet and cell phones? how do you occupy your space and time?

The consumption, which is "devious, dispersed and insinuates itself everywhere," with certain impositions of a dominant economic order, "does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products" (475).Thus, de Certeau contravenes commodity fetishism in Marxisma structuralist argumentwith his cultural studies approach to popular culture.

Look at text xiii-xiv51. Usage, or Consumption in Consumer ProductionFour characteristics of speech act or speaking (mode of practice): "speaking operates within the field of a linguistic systemspeaking "affects an appropriation, or re-appropriation, of language by its speaker speaking "establishes a present relative to a time and place.speaking "posits a contract with the other in a network of places and relations.

The objective of these four characteristics "presumes that users make innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adopt it to their own interests and their own rules," which de Certeau posits determinants of this "collective activity.

Therefore, we can see that everyday practices allow for an understanding of agency with dominant structures, such as globalized communication technology. de Certeau argues, users make bricolent. (xiii)Continuing with studies of popular culture or marginal groups,de Certeau further draws out preliminary principles or determinations ofthe investigation of everyday practice.62. The Procedures of Everyday Creativity - Consumer ProductionFoucault argues that power is relationalmeaning power is everywhere and can be observed through discourse. de Certeau illustrates the relationship between dominant producers of popular culture is exercised as a technology of power, but so are the ways of operating through innumerable practices.- No outside to power - Xiv- Surveillance and discipline (Foucault) - Panopticon xv VIOLENCE OF ORDER (see Foucault example)Review critical terms: hegemony. Continuing with studies of popular culture or marginal groups,de Certeau further draws out preliminary principles or determinations ofthe investigation of everyday practice.definition of hegemony next slide7Example to explain a bit of Foucault Discipline and Punish

From True Grit

Hegemony - dominant classes maintain their power through achieving legitimacy and by winning consent. Rule becomes commonplace, commonsense, and simply the way things are.

Depends upon negotiation, stability, consensus. A continual process between hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces. These result in a synthesis through negotiation, stability, and consensus.

3. The Formal Structure of Practice in Consumer ProductionIn order to convey "the formal structure of these practices," de Certeau points out two sorts of investigations:1. The first sort of investigation, "descriptive in nature," concerns "certain ways of making" selected with "the value for the strategy of the analysis and with "a view obtaining fairly differentiated variants" (477) "to trace the intricate forms of the operations proper to the recomposition of a space by familial practices"to the tactics of the art of cooking which simultaneously organizes a network of relations, poetic ways of 'making do' and a re-use of marketing structure2. Action, time, and modalization, these three determinations makes possible an exploration of the cultural field, which is defined by an investigative problematics, seeking "to situate the types of operations:(478)consumption in the framework of an economy to discern in these practices of appropriation & indexes of the creativity1."Marginality is no longer limited to minority groups but is rather massive and pervasive," and becoming universal. Marginal group becomes a silent majority (479).2. "The procedures allowing the re-use of product are linked together in a kind of obligatory language, and their functioning is related to social relations and power relationships."3. "The necessity of differentiating both the 'actions' or 'engagements' that system of products effects within the consumer grid and the various kinds of room to maneuver left for consumers4. "The relation of procedures to the fields of force in which they act must therefore lead to a polemological analysis of culture"a. culture articulates conflictsb. culture legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force.c. culture develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises.

4. The Marginality of the majority in Consumer ProductionStrategy(1) The "proper" is a triumph of place over time. It allows one to capitalize acquired advantages, to prepare future expansion, and thus to give oneself a certain independence with respect to the variability of circumstances. It is a mastery of time through the foundation of an autonomous place.(2) It is also a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and "include" them within its scope of vision.T o be able to see (far into the distance) isalso to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space.(3) It would be legitimate to define the power of knowledge by this ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces. But it would be more correct to recognize in these "strategies" a specific type of knowledge, one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one's place.(36)Strategy is "the calculus of force-relationships, when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an environment,"Trajectories, Tactics, and RhetoricsTactic is "a calculus which cannot count on a proper, nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality," rather insinuating itself into "the other's place." A tactic depends on time and "must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities." (480)

Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time--to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms, etc.(38)

The Tactics of PracticeThe scheme of the relations between consumers and the mechanisms of production has been diversified in relation to three kinds of concerns: the search for a problematic that could articulate the material collectedthe description of a limited number of practices considered to be particularly significant the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to scientific fieldsA tactic is a calculated action, determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a 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...(36-7)What is culture?How does the economy fit in to our definition of culture?What is a cultural studies approach to popular culture?What is popular culture?How does popular culture differ from Culture?How does a reader differ from a spectator? How do we differentiate mass culture from popular culture?

Questions for General Introduction and Making Do: Uses and TacticsThe Practice of Everyday Lifede Certeau, Michel."General Introduction." The Practice of EverydayLife.Trans. Steven F. Rendail.Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984.xi-xxiv.--."'Making Do':Uses and Tactics."The Practice of EverydayLife.Trans. Steven F. Rendail.Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984.29-42.