de Certeau, Michel
de Certeau, Michel
Bio Sketch
Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) was a French Jesuit scholar, philosopher and cultural theorist working across history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and theology. His most influential work for Geoffrey's research is The Practice of Everyday Life (L'invention du quotidien, 1980; trans. 1984), which theorizes everyday practices as creative, tactical resistance by "users" of a culture. He is a foundational thinker of the everyday.
Key Works
- The Practice of Everyday Life (1980/1984) — strategies vs. tactics; consumer production; walking in the city; reading as poaching; the scriptural economy.
- The Writing of History (1975) — history, representation and the excluded.
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
Relevance to Geoffrey's Research
de Certeau is arguably the central theorist of Geoffrey's the everyday research area. His strategies/tactics, "walking in the city," "la perruque" (the worker's ruse), "reading as poaching," and the "scriptural economy" give the conceptual vocabulary for understanding everyday practice as a site of creativity and resistance against spatial/urban power — directly informing Geoffrey's treatment of architecture's everyday reception and use.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
- The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
- (Mentioned in Agarez & Mota (2015) — Bread & Butter of Architecture)
- Toward a Psychology of Everyday Living
- What is 'Everyday Life'? An Exploration of its Political Connections
- Architecture in Everyday Life
- Consumerism and Identity: Some Psychoanalytic Considerations
- The Moving Ground: Locating Everyday Life (Driscoll 2001) — the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) foundations of de Certeau's model; the everyday as the Other of culture.
- Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — de Certeau's politicization of the everyday through tactics and ruses.
- Culturally 'Doped' or Not? (Conroy) — de Certeau's critical semiotics of the everyday; place/space and strategy/tactic.
- Everyday life in the real world (Maycroft 2007) — complicates de Certeau's tactics: suggests it may be "increasingly apt to speak of resistance to everyday life" rather than resistance from it.
- Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — the Introduction quotes de Certeau 1988: xiv–xv (the everyday "inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, [obli]que, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals") and aligns his "microscopic, multiform techniques" of re-appropriation with Eco's "semiological guerilla warfare" (see semiological-guerrilla-warfare).