The Practice of Everyday Life

The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
By Michel de Certeau

Synopsis: Utilizing a pop culture approach, de Certeau examines the ways in which "submissive groups subvert the meaning of those things imposed on them by using those things for their own, different means" (xiii). Argues that we must examine the gap between producers' intent and the actual consumer's use. He utilizes a range of fields including sociology, history, anthropology, and literature, though his theory is grounded in linguistics and focuses on speech acts and rhetoric. Book includes sections on ordinary culture, theory of practice, spatial practice, language, and believing. Is concerned with small creative acts of "weak" people rather than with overt oppositional movements; that is, how do consumers "resist" or make meaning through small acts/gestures. For example, he views walking as a creative act because you can carve your own path; reading too because it's about movement. Seems also to be annoyed by the privileging of speech/the visible/sight [interacts with Lefebvre in this way].

Interesting Specifics:

Most people today are on the margins, that is, they are not producers of culture. [This clearly is a pre-internet statement to make, because it totally leaves out the flexibility of production now, the value of the internet and digital media overall a la Convergence Culture's argument].

"Strategies" are more connected to a place/seat of power, whereas "tactics" are more about time - i.e. doing what you can in that given moment; a strategy is for those is power, a tactic is an act of the weak (37).

Strategies use spatial practices to articulate power.

"Walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language" (97).

"Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it 'speaks'" (99).

"To walk is to lack a place" (103).

Reading has no place; reader as traveler.

The fact that we no longer read out loud, shows that text no longer imposes its voice and rhythm on the body of the reader; text has become disembodied (175-76).

"The simulacrum is what the relationship of the visible to the real becomes when the assumption crumbles that an invisible immensity of Being (or of beings) lies hidden behind appearances" (187). We decide what is real based on its relationship to other things..

"The 'real' is what, in a given place, reference to another place makes people believe in" (188).

Interacts With:

Says his book interacts with Foucault in that both are interested in power and the way it is subverted.
In his focus on small everyday acts, does this connect to the Situationists at all?
Supposedly he was one of the forerunners of "power of the consumer" resistance idea, idea that small acts can be subversive and powerful. Apparently marked a turning point away from focus on the producer and to the consumer. Seen as radical.
Most every book on Janet's list that deals with resistance and re-appropriation/flexibility of meaning. Basically any book that talks about the ability of the consumer to create their own meaning from what they're given. Focus is on the consumer, not the producer.
Fiske (Understanding Popular Culture), Lefebvre, Bourdieu
Supposedly also refutes Bourdieu's idea that people are passive prisoners of the habitus and that cultural practices are used only to gain power. De Certeau says small cultural practices are ways of circumventing power. [So, his view believes more in agency that Bourdieu's does.]