Michel de Certeau (1925 – 1986)

• French-born polymath.

• Obtained degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon.

• Spent his academic career in Paris, California, various European universities, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

• Interested in religious history, ethnography, psyhoanalysis, the history of colonial encounters and the history of popular culture. http://esenciaseirreverencias.blogspot.com

Preliminaries

• An investigation of how users operate.

• Articulation of everyday life.

• Groups are supposed to be formed out of individuals and are supposed to be always reducible to individuals.

• The study aims to make explicit the system of operational combination which also generate a culture and to reveal the models of action characteristic of users or in disguise of the term consumers.

Consumer Production

Usage, or Consumption

Consumer Production

Usage, or Consumption

Consumer Production

Usage, or Consumption

• The action of making is a hidden production.

• Consumption is another production which is devious, disperser and insinuates itself everywhere.

• There is a difference or the similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in its use.

• De Certeau’s investigation is concerned with this difference and adopted the point of view of enunciation and he privileged the act of speaking.

Consumer Production

Usage, or Consumption

• Four characteristics of speaking:

• Speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system.• Speaking effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its

speaker.• Speaking establishes a present relative to a time and place.• Speaking posits a contract with the other in a network of places and

relations.

• Users make countless transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules.

Consumer Production

The Procedures of Everyday Creativity

• Reference to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

• Instead of analysing the apparatus exercising power, Foucault focuses on the mechanisms that have sapped the strength of institutions.

• In contrast to that, de Certeau’s goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transformed into a disciplinary technology, but rather to enlighten the hidden forms taken by the scattered, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of discipline.

• He concludes as consumers who are pushed to the limit and who resist social norms, forms a sort of network of an antidiscipline.

Consumer Production

The Formal Structure of Practice

• Everyday pracrices should conform to a logic and certain rules.

• This assumption raises the issue of ‘what is an art or way of making?’

• Popular culture = arts of making.

artof

using

wayof

thinking

wayof

acting

Consumer Production

The Marginality of a Majority

• Situating the types of operations that characterize consumption in the framework of an economy.

• Finding the origin of the creativity via appropriation that is inherent in the act of consuming culture.

The Tactics of Practice

• The dichotomy between consumer and the mechanism of production diversified in three kinds of concerns:

1- The collected material

2- A limited number of practices

3- The extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to scientific fields.

The Tactics of Practice

Trajectories, Tactics, and Rhetorics

• Consumers as unrecognised producers and poets of their own acts.

• Consumers manipulate and make transformations on consumption by using strategies and tactics.

• Strategy: the overarching plans of large institutions or power structures.

• Tactics: belongs to the other, depends on time, always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the spur of the moment.

• Many everyday activities such as talking, reading, shopping, cooking, etc. and ‘ways of operating’ are tactical in character.

• The discipline of rhetoric, ways of speaking is related to the ways of persuading the will of the audience.

The Tactics of Practice

Reading, Talking, Dwelling Cooking, etc.

• De Certeau focused on reading as an example of an everyday practice.

• Reading as an act of production that is not recorded, is like a silent performance.

• The reader interprets the writer’s words subjectively, makes them in their own.

• The text becomes like a rented apartment where the occupier makes changes in the same way that a speaker changes a text by using their native tongue, accent or turns of phrase.

The Tactics of Practice

Extensions: Prospects and Politics

• Analysis of tactics extended to two areas. Prospects/futurology and the individual subject in political life.

• Futurology must be considered as, the relationship between rationality and imaginations and,the difference between the tactics of practical investigations and the strategies offered to the public as the product of these practical operations.

• The individual subject in political life.

Conclusion

• De Certeau, basically focused on if the users are passive or reactional/active recipients against a rational way of life imposed by authority.

• De Certeau claims that users, based on their practices of everyday life, carry out a resistence by trasforming the materials which are imposed by the authority.

• De Certeau also, insists that these practices are tactical.

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