practice ofeverydaylife

General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday LifeMichel de Certeau

ZELİHA UYURCA

ID 501 - Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life

Outline

• Introduction

1. Consumer Production

• Usage or Consumption

• The Procedures of Everyday Creativity

• The Formal Structure of Practice

The Marginality of a Majority

2. The Tactics of Practice

• Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetoric

• Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc

• Extensions: prospects and Politics.

• Conclusion


General Review:

• The particular status of ways of using or ways of operating in the social practice

or "everyday practice."

• Neccesity of Ways of operating to be explicated in the process of representation

as well as "consumption,«

• Foucault's concept of social practices in Disciplines and Punish

• The scheme of "the relations between consumers and the mechanism of

production" and distinguishes two uses of practices: strategy and tactics.


Introduction:

• Not an analysis of individual because existence of social relations, but the plurality of

these relations.

• de Certeau :

• everyday practice, the "investigation of ways in which users operate," or "ways of

operating," or doing things.

The purpose of everyday practice is to "make explicit the system of operational

combination, 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,"

or in disguise of the term 'consumer.'

Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the propertiy

of others.




• "the representation of a society" and "its mode of behavior"

• the uses consumers make of the things that they purchase.

For example:

Representation Behavioranalysis of the images analysis of the time broadcast by television spent watching TV

what does cultural consumer "makes" or “does" during the these time with these images ?

The "making" in the question is a production.




The action of "making" 'hidden' production,

• as well as so-called "consumption, " corresponding to predominated systems of

production (Television).

Consumption:

• "devious, dispersed and insinuates itself everywhere," with a dominant

economic order, "does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather

through its ways of using the products“.

Spanish Colonizer and Indians




• at first, everyday practice is need to "analyze" the manipulation of the consumption

by users.

• Furthermore, "the difference or similarity between the production of the image and

the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization"

The Act of Speaking:

• “operates within the field of a linguistic system"

• "affects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speaker"

• establishes a present relative to a time and place."

• "posits a contract with the other“

• 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,“



• The procedures of Everyday Creativity

• ‘grid of discipline’ becoming more widespread;

• how does society resist this?

• how do people manipulate the mechanisms of discipline or conform to it so

they can evade it?

• which networks and resources help people resist and evade the discipline

offered by institutions?




• What is an art or ‘way of making’?

• popular culture arts of making

• Two sort of investigation?

• More descriptive in nature

• descriptive analysis of readers’ practices, urban spaces, everyday rituals,

reuses of collective memory

• Scientific Literature

• tracing the origins of the forms of these operations,

• sociologists, anthropologists and historians (Goffman, Bourdieu, Mauss,

DÈtienne, Boissevain, Laumann)

• the enthomethodological and socio-linguistic (Garfinkel, Labov, Sachs,

Schegloff)




• Formal logics, analytical philosophy: action, time and modalisation



The Marginality of a Majority

• No longer limited to minority groups

• Mass marginality: marginal groups have now become the silent majority

• linked together in a kind of obligatory language

• related to social relations and power

• Cultural activity of non-producers of culture

• 'unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolised‘

• “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the

strong, lends a political dimension to everyday practices”

Polemological analysis of culture

articulates conflicts

legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force

Develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence



Relations between the consumer and the mechanism of production in three

kinds of concerns:

• the search for a problematic that could articulate the material collected

• the description of a limited number of practices considered to be particularly significant

• the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to scientific fields



• Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetorics

• Trajectories

• consumers as ‘unrecognized producers’ and ‘poets of their own acts’

• unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space.

• a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, transcription, a graph

is substituted for an operation.

• limits of statistical analysis;

• captures material of consumer practices but not their form




• Differentiation between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’

Strategy:

•the calculus of force-relationships

•a place that can be circumscribed as proper

•generating relations with an exterior distinct

•the overarching plans of large institutions or power structures

Tactic:

•a calculus which cannot count on a proper

•insinuating itself into "the other's place.“

•depends on time

•manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities.




• Tactics:

• many everyday activities are tactical in nature,

• e.g. talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, as do ‘ways of

operating’

• and "victories of the weak over the strong.

• clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, joyful discover.

• Intelligence, inseparable from them

• strategies based on objective calculations from a collective power or institution

• tactics do not seek to take over or win and does not engage in sabotage



• Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetoric

• Rhetoric :

• The science of “way of speaking”

• Two logic of action (one tactical, other strategic)

• Sophist: make the weaker position seem the stronger

• claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by making

use of the opportunities in any given situation



• Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc

• an example of an everyday practice that produces without capitalizing

• Taking control over time, inevitable starting point.

• exorbitant focus of contemporary culture and its consumption (such as reading)

• production vs consumption; writing vs reading; consumer as a voyeur in a

‘show-biz society’

• The activity of reading, a silent production:

• "the drift across the page"

• "the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader"

• "the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps

over written spaces in an ephemeral dance"



• Extensions: prospects and Politics• Analysis of tactics extended to two areas

• Futurology/Prospect

• relationship between rationality and imagination;

• difference between tentative moves, pragmatic ruses and continuous tactics

• The individual subject in political life

• separate himself from them without escaping them but only try to get over them

• status of the individual in technical system is concerned

• Freud’s civilization and its discontents; the microscopic connections between

manipulation and enjoyment


Conclusion

de Certeau ;

• considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior

• people (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and heavily subject to

received culture.

• describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy

from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture.

practice ofeverydaylife

Technology

consumer production usage

everyday life 2

everyday life 1

formal structure

everyday life2

consumer production

general introduction

social relations