The Practice of Everyday Life

Author: Michel de Certeau
Year: 1984 (Fr. L'invention du quotidien, 1980)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/de-certeau-1984-practice-of-everyday-life.md

Summary

Michel de Certeau's foundational study of the everyday argues that "users" of a culture — the dominated, euphemistically called "consumers" — are far from passive. Confronted by the rationalized, productivist systems of television, urban development, and commerce, consumers carry out a hidden, dispersed "production of consumption": they poach on the property of others, making do with what the dominant order imposes. The book's central opposition is between strategies (the calculus of the strong, who possess a "proper" place from which to act) and tactics (the cunning, time-dependent maneuvers of the weak, who have no place of their own and must seize opportunities "on the wing"). Everyday life "invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others."

Key Claims

• Consumer production: consumption is itself a production (poiēsis), but a hidden one — "scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of production," it is invisible because it appears only in ways of using products imposed by a dominant economic order.
• Tactics vs. strategies: a strategy assumes a "proper" (propre) place — a proprietor, enterprise, city, or institution — from which to calculate force-relations with an exterior. A tactic "cannot count on a 'proper'"; it insinuates itself into the other's place, depends on time, and must turn heterogeneous elements into "opportunities." "The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them."
• Everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking) are tactical, "victories of the 'weak' over the 'strong'" — the Greek mētis (devices/cunning), continuous with "the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes."
• Against Foucault's analysis of disciplinary mechanisms (the "microphysics of power" in Discipline and Punish), de Certeau asks after the popular, quotidian "counterpart" — an "antidiscipline": the "dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity" of those "already caught in the nets of 'discipline.'"
• Walking in the City: the view from the World Trade Center's 110th floor turns the walker into a voyeur/god, totalizing the city into a readable text; but "the ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below'... they are walkers... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it." Walking is a "space of enunciation," actualizing and inventing possibilities, creating shortcuts and detours. A "migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city."
• Reading as poaching: reading is a "silent production," an "art of 'renters' who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text."
• Marginality is becoming universal: "A marginal group has now become a silent majority" — the creativity of the non-producers of culture flourishes "at the very point where practice ceases to have its own language." The tactics of consumption "lend a political dimension to everyday practices."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture · Consumerism
Authors: Michel de Certeau · Henri Lefebvre · Rita Felski · Claire Colebrook
Related source notes: The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski) · The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook) · Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre)

Direct Quotes

"Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others." (General Introduction)

"The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below,' below the thresholds at which visibility begins... they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it." ("Walking in the City")

"A marginal group has now become a silent majority." (General Introduction)

"I call a 'tactic,' on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a 'proper'... The place of a tactic belongs to the other." (General Introduction)

Open Questions

• Does de Certeau's "tactics" risk romanticizing the micro-resistances of the weak — a question Geoffrey's more skeptical critical sources (Fisher, Spencer) might pose against the everyday-resistance framework?
• How does the "walking" account bear on the spectacular/iconic architecture debate — is the panorama of the icon the lure de Certeau diagnoses as voyeurism?