De Certeau Pres

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de Certeau

The Practice of Everyday Life

Introduction

Introduction can be found at: http://www.ubu.com/papers/de_certeau.html

Atomism/Insularity/Reductionism ---> Holism/Emergence/Irreducibility

What happens when we pan out, blurring the distinctions between atomistic spheres,

between insular theories, between individuals and their practices?

holism: the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate connection, such that they

cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to

the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts

atomism: a theoretical approach that regards something as interpretable through

analysis into distinct, separable, and independent elementary components

Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines its terms, and not the reverse,

and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory)plurality of such relational determinations interact (xi).

The purpose of this work is to make explicit the systems of operational combination (les

combinatoires d'operations) which also compose a culture, and to bring to light the

models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in

society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed

by the euphemistic term consumers (xi-xii).
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Consumer Production

Makes a deliberate choice not to focus on the subculture

Usage, or consumption

{Representations, e.g., images broadcast by television}

{Modes of behavior, e.g., time spent watching television}

both [representations and modes of behaviors] should be complemented by a study of

what the cultural consumer makes or does during the this time and with these

images (xii).

(Thinking back to the Sandy Baldwin visit, modding seems a perfect example of doing

the unintentional with an otherwise mass marketed commodity.)

The "making" in question is a production, a Poiesis[2] -but a hidden one, because it is

scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of "production" (television, urban

development, commerce, etc.), and because the steadily increasing expansion of these

systems no longer leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what they

make or do with the products of these systems (xii).

([2]From the Greek poiein "to create, invent, generate.")

In linguistics, "performance" and "competence" are different: the act of speaking (with all

the enunciative strategies that implies) is not reducible to a knowledge of the language

(xiii).

How to exploit the panopticon . . . . . . . .

In this [Discipline and Punish] work, instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power

(i.e., the localizable, expansionist, repressive, and legal institutions), Foucault analyzes

the mechanisms (dispositifs) that have sapped the strength of these institutions and

surreptitiously reorganized the functioning of power: "miniscule" technical procedures

acting on and with details, redistributing a discursive space in order to make it themeans of a generalized "discipline" (surveillance) (xiv).

How do we resist and manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them

only in order to evade them? (xiv)
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Ways of operating: Foucault assists us in drawing a parallel between the microbe-like

functions operating within systems of power and repression and the clandestine tactics

necessarily taken by groups who have nowhere else to go. The ubiquity of our

repression in this sense can actually serve as a counter-attack. Pushed to their ideal

limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an

antidiscipline[5] which is the subject of this book (xv).

Marginality of a majority

Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and

pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is

unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those

who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist

economy articulates itself (xvii).

Example of immigrant worker: disadvantages elicit responses that are unprompted,devious, or fantastical (--> thinking again about performance and competence: what

happens when an outsider encounters a social media? Example of watching German

television)

The tactics of practice

Emergence theory: errant trajectories, untraceable etiologically

(To avoid a reductionist theorizing on trajectories, de Certeau moves on to strategies

and tactics.)

Strategy:

subject of will and power can be isolated from an environment

assumes that a place can be circumscribed as a proper (spacial or institutional

localization; victory over space and time)

thus serves as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (xix)

Tactic:

that which cannot count on a proper

belongs to the other

insinuates itself into the others place, fragmentarily, without taking it over

has no disposal or base where it can capitalize on its advantages

because it does not have a place, it depends on time

does not keep what it wins; must constantly manipulate events to turn them into

opportunities (xix)
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Chapter I: A Common Place: Ordinary Language

The expert and the philosopher

This cleavage organizes modernity. It cuts it up into scientific and dominant islands set

off against the background of practical resistances and symbolizations that cannot be

reduced to thought (6).

In the Expert, competence is transmuted into social authority; in the Philosopher,

ordinary questions become a skeptical principle in a technical field (7).

It is true that the Expert is growing more common in this society, to the point of

becoming its generalized figure, distended between the exigency of a growingspecialization and that of a communication that has become all the more necessary. He

blots out (and in a certain way replaces) the Philosopher, formerly the specialist of the

universal (7).

How do they [Experts] succeed in moving from their technique --a language they have

mastered and which regulates their discourse --to a more common language of another

situation? They do it through a curious operation which converts competence into

authority. Competence is exchanged for authority. Ultimately, the more authority the

Expert has, the less competence he has, up to the point where his fund of competence

is exhausted, like the energy necessary to put a mobile into movement (7).

A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific

language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the

last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons,

far from the scientific ground. Though legitimatized by scientific knowledge, their

discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games

between economic powers and symbolic authorities (7-8).

The Wittgensteinian model of ordinary language

Wittgenstein set himself the task of being the scientist of the activity of signifying in the

common language. Anything else can be considered as language only by analogy or

comparison with the apparatus of our ordinary language. But the problem is to treat it

in such a way as not to state anything that exceeds the competence of this language

and thus never to become an expert, or an interpreter, in another linguistic field (for

example, metaphysics or ethics), never to speak elsewherein its name. In that way the

conversion of competence into authority is to be rendered impossible.


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What is fascinating in the enterprise of this Hercules who set out to clean the

Augean stables of contemporary intellectual life is not so much his restrictive

procedures, which are the effects of the passion for exactitude that he puts at the

service of a certain reserve in the analysis of everyday language (this everyday

replaces, in the linguistic approach, the Everyman of Renaissance ethics, but bears the

same question); but rather, more fundamentally, the way in which Wittgenstein drawsfrom the inside of this language(to use his expression) the limits of that which,

whether ethical or mystical, exceeds it. It is exclusively from the inside that he

recognizes an outside which itself remains ineffable. His work thus operates a double

erosion: one which, from the interior of ordinary language, makes these limits appear;

another which reveals the unacceptable character (the nonsense) of any proposition

that attempts to escape toward that which cannot be said. The analysis locates the

empty places that sap language, and it destroys the statements that claim to fill them in

(9-10).

On the one hand, he combats the professionalization of philosophy, that is, its reductionto the technical (i.e., positivist) discourse of a speciality. More generally, he rejects the

purifying process that, by eliminating the ordinary use of language (everyday language),

makes it possible for science to produce and master an artificial language (10).

Prose of the world (Marleau-Ponty, 11)

[Ordinary language] encompasses every discourse, even if human experiences cannot

be reduced to what it can say about them. In order to constitute themselves, scientific

methods allow themselves to forget this fact and philosophers think they dominate it so

that they can authorize themselves to deal with it. In this respect, neither touches the

philosophical question, endlessly reopened by that urge that pushes man to run up

against the limits of language (an die Grenze der Sprache anzurennen). Wittgenstein

reintroduces this language both into philosophy, which has indeed taken it for a formal

object while according itself a fictional mastery over it, and into the sciences, which have

excluded it in order to accord themselves an actual mastery (11).

Philosophical or scientific privilege disappears into the ordinary. This disappearance has

as its corollary the invalidation of truths. From what privileged place could they be

signified? There will thus be facts that are no longer truths. The inflation of the latter is

controlled, if not shut off, by criticism of the places of authority in which facts are

converted into truths. Detecting them by their mixture of meaninglessness and power,Wittgenstein attempts to reduce these truths to linguistic facts and to that which, in these

facts, refers to an ineffable or mystical exteriority of language (11).

[B]y trying to determine the morphology of use of expressions, that is, to exmaine their

domains of use and to describe forms, it can recognize different modes of everyday


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functioning, governed by pragmatic rule, themselves dependent on forms of life

(Lebensformen) (12).

Chapter II: Popular Cultures: Ordinary Languages

A diversionary practice: la perruque

La perruqueis the workers own work disguised as the work for his employer. It differs

from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in

that the worker is officially on the job. La perruquemay be as simple a matter as a

secretarys writing a love letter on company time or as complex as a cabinetmakers

borrowing a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room (25).

Chapter XII: Reading as Poaching

To arrest the meanings of wordsonce and for all, that is what Terror

wants.

Jean-Fancois Lyotard, Rudiments paiens

bricolage: arrangement made from the materials at hand, a production that has no

relationship to a project (Levi-Strauss); from the French bricoler, fiddle or tinker

Binominal set production--consumption can often be replaced by its general equivalent

and indicator, the binominal set writing--reading (168).

Research on the psycho-linguistics of comprehension distinguishes between the lexical

act and the scriptural act in reading. It shows that the schoolchild learns to read by a

process that parallelshis learning to decipher; learning to read is not a resultof learning

to decipher: readingmeaning and decipheringletters correspond to two different

activities, even if they intersect (168).

every reading modifies its objects - Michel Charles

Is this reading activity reserved for the literary critic (always privileged in studies ofreadings), that is, once again, for a category of professional intellectuals (clercs), or can

it be extended to all cultural consumers? (169).

[clercstems from Latin clericusclergyman; which is reinforced by the French, clerc -->

de Certeau writes later of the social hierarchization of the church and its restrictions on

interpretation]


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Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and

poetic operations (the practitioners constructions of a text) intersect: a social

hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform to the information distributed by an

elite (or semi-elite); reading operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their

inventiveness into the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy (172).

I read and I daydream . . . . My reading is thus sort of impertinent absence. Is reading

an exercise in ubiquity? (173, Guy Rosolato)

One viewer says about the program she saw the previous evening: It was stupid and

yet I sat there all the same. What place captivated her, which was and yet was not that

of the image seen? It is the same with the reader: his place is not here or there, one or

the other, but neither the one or the other, simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving

both by mixing them together, associating texts like funerary statues that he awakens

and hosts, but never owns. In that way, he also escapes from the law of each text in

particular, and from that of the social milieu (174).

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