The Practice of Everyday Life

The Practice of Everyday Life #1

by Michel de Certeau, Steven F. Rendall (Translator)

L'uomo comune, "senza qualità", dimostra un'insospettabile capacità di inventare il quotidiano grazie ad arti pratiche e a tattiche di resistenza, mediante le quali elude i vincoli dell'ordine sociale e fa un uso imprevedibile dei prodotti che gli vengono imposti. Solo in apparenza obbediente e passivo, egli si sottrae in realtà alle costrizioni di una razionalità tecnicistica che crede di sapere come organizzare al meglio gli uomini e le cose, assegnando a ciascuno un luogo, un ruolo, dei prodotti da consumare. Dietro il silenzio impenetrabile dell'uomo "ordinario", Michel de Certeau scopre una straordinaria creatività nascosta, che si manifesta attraverso mille astuzie sottili ed efficaci. Le analisi pionieristiche di Michel de Certeau, che risalgono ai primi anni Ottanta, sono divenute la base metodologica di successive importanti ricerche condotte da storici, filosofi e sociologi.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Sociology, Anthropology, Academic, Cultural Studies

229 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Michel de Certeau, historian, cultural theorist, psychoanalyst, and theologian was one of the most multifaceted French intellectuals and scholars of the late 20th century. His concept of everyday life practices was of signal importance for the development of cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon world. His use of space as a key category in the history and analysis of cultural practices has also influenced the later “spatial turn” in history and art history. Finally, his works on early modern mysticism constitute ground-breaking research in religious studies and theology. Interestingly enough, these studies on mysticism were less influential in the Anglo-Saxon world than they were in France or Germany, whence the distinction between the “American” (of the cultural studies) and the “European” Certeau (the historian of mysticism). In spite of the diversity of his oeuvre, Certeau saw his scholarly work as one, integrated, intellectual enterprise. Asked about his scholarly profession, this French Jesuit used to answer that he understood himself in the first place as a historian of spirituality. Understanding the meaning of Christian mysticism in an era in which it started to lose its self-evidence required a broader focus, embracing the most divergent and complex cultural developments up to his own time. The gradual broadening of his interest field also required new methodological directions, which he found in Lacanian psychoanalysis and in semiotics, resulting in his own topographical way of thinking. He became a public intellectual in 1968, after the publication of his La prise de la parole, a book in which he applied his insights on the role of the mystics in the 16th and 17th centuries to the protesting students in the streets of Paris. From that moment onward he started to develop his theory of everyday life practices, resulting in a number of different books, of which L’invention du Quotidien 1980 was the most elaborate.

Reviews

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I teach this sucker, so there's gotta be some good in it, right? Oh, but it's beastly dense in classic French post-structuralist fashion. Some of it is beautiful - I love his reflection on traveling by rail, and while I prefer Henri Lefebvre's place-space distinction (it makes more intuitive sense that the empty homogeneous stuff would be space and the emotionally marked stuff would be place), the discussion of how maps serve to make abstraction from itineraries (i.e. lived experience) is quite thought provoking. Also note the length and meander of the previous sentence is EASY READING compared to what awaits whoever picks this up. Expect to work to get the point, and be prepared to wonder if the point is really so profound as to be worth so much struggle.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving this a full five stars while operating on the presumption that the parts I didn't understand are just as good as the parts I did. de Certeau is by no means an easy read, and I imagine a full comprehension of what he argues requires a facility with many more theorists and disciplines than I have (for example, I loved his critiques and analysis of Foucault and Bourdieu, but couldn't wrap my head around his discussions of Freud and Heidegger largely, I think, because my psychoanalysis and philosophy are somewhat fuzzy). That said, his willingness to address the impossibility of theory while also making a suggestion of the types of work that might replace it is refreshing. In essence, de Certeau wants people to embrace a practice-based way of looking at the world. He sees an emphasis on analyzing users' practices as a way to grant them agency and power that the traditional production-consumption model presumes nonexistent. He shows how this might look in the investigation of such "everyday practices" as walking in the city and reading, allowing metaphors of space and time to stand in for any attempts at generalizability. In this way, de Certeau is wildly successful at granting his subjects agency without, as he warns, allowing the particularities of their practices to become metonyms for all of existence.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naslov, donekle, vara. Ovo nije studija o antropologiji svakodnevice, niti sociologije slobodnog vremena, već jedno zgusnuto delo kontinentalne filozofije, čiji se raspon tema kreće od preplitanja usmenosti, pisma i tela, konzumerizma, preko dihotomije place/space, sve do astečke narativne kartografije i „evanđeoskog marketinga”. Serto nadahnuto piše o čemu god stigne, što mu omogućava kako isusovačko obrazovanje, tako i disciplinovana otvorenost duha. Mnogo se o tome može govoriti, a ja bih samo da izdvojim dve slike, ni po čemu ključne ali simpatične. Jedna je da su dominantne stilske figure savremenog govora sinegdoha i asindeton: sinegdoha kao metafora koja kroz deo potvrđuje celinu, a asindeton kao figura izostavljanja veznika. Učestalost ovih figura govori o svojevrsnoj jezičkoj ekonomiji, gde se teži da se dodatna energija ne troši – ukoliko nešto mogu reći kraće, neću detaljisati ili razmatrati svaki slučaj pojedinačno. Druga je opet vezana za stilske figure – a to je da se u Atini vozila zovu METAPHORAI, te, prema Sertoovom viđenju, kao izrazi premosta obrazuju putanje prostorne sintakse. Džombasto i podsticajno.

[Linda Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read the first paragraph of the introduction, I knew I had found a theoretical home. Michel de Certeau's "investigation of the ways in which users--commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules--operate" is about freedom, resistance, access, and the art of "dwelling" in the everyday. Reading de Certeau validated all the ways I have been teaching inductively. My practice was found in his theory. A reversal of good fortune. Be certain to read Chapter 7 - "Walking in the City" in Part III - Spatial Practices. I return to this text time and again for understanding about everyday life, which "invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others" (xii). Can't put a date that I "finished" this book. It's an ongoing visit.

[Nazanin · Rating 1 out of 5]

As an anthropology Phd student I’ve read so many books on this area and this is the first book I barely understood anything from it and suffered every moment of reading it.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I echo some of the previous readers' comments about the density and difficulty of De Certeau's sentences - I had to look up words in the dictionary 3 times in one sentence at some point, and this was at the graduate school level. However, I also love love his metaphor of walking in the city as a way of affirming individual ways of doing life, of seeing, of choosing, of practicing everyday life, in contrast to mainstream ways that society is constructed, as expressed in the metaphor by the set routes and paths laid out for us in a typical city grid. There are so many ways this idea applies to discourses of power, identity, memory and a myriad of other areas we look at in life and were challenged to look at in grad school. I want to take another stab at the way he approached Derrida - difficult but I think it will be worth mining for ideas.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way too wordy, dense, and heady, but full of wonderful ideas that assume the agency and capability of regular people. We aren't just consumers! We are doing things! The world is terrible, but every day we are resisting in really small ways. Isn't that great to hear?

[Christopher]

I'm interested in what your professor expected you to get out of reading this.

"By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that makes people believe is the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what it promises." (105)

When read as a series of aphorisms without a central initiating purpose to orient the reader, the reader is in the position of pure wanderer; i.e. when read in excerpt, the 110th floor view of the writing is hidden from the reader. If the goal is to make the place/space distinction, I'm left to consider the purpose of the dizzying turgidity of the prose. The point can be made clearer: that there exists no "place" without the subjective. There exists only an abstract mathematical space, in which nothing is prioritized, and in which no left or right obtain. The modalities of place are emergent distinctions of Dasein. Yet, place precedes space, in that the subjective phenomena of experience and its survival requisites must be met before an abstract Cartesian space can be posited by the subject. Smuggling this insight into the realm of engineering yields the builder as the manipulator of pure space, and the architect-city planner as the master of place. Both perspectives must be considered in creating a dwelling-place-space for humans: but what is left out of the discussion is the fragmentation and organic swelling of the city from the inside: the simultaneous independent builders whose summative actions are constitutive, but who have no access to the view from nowhere, let alone that of the 110th floor. Is the building of a text more akin to engineering or architecture?

Awaiting your reply,
K

[note: this review is only of an excerpt, specifically, part III, chapter 7, “Walking the City”.]

[Candy Wood]

If I needed an explanation for not going into sociology, this book would provide it. Do we need a 200-page book to examine “the practice of everyday life”? I feel a bit like the centipede worrying about which foot to start out on. Still, there are some interesting insights: the tiny chapter 8, “Railway Navigation and Incarceration,” could stand alone as an essay on the strange relationship to space experienced by passengers on a train, and I was surprised and delighted to find a reference to Vermont’s Shelburne Museum as an example of a place where used objects from the past evoke the “presence of absences” (21). Chapter 7, “Walking in the City,” interests me too, but I need more examples to understand de Certeau’s application of rhetorical terms to the practice of walking. The translation (by Steven Rendall) may be part of the problem, given that space, place, and location probably don’t have the same distinctions as the French words in the original, but my French isn’t up to trying to find out. Some peculiar spelling (hetereogeneous?) is also distracting. The book has thought-provoking references to reading, writing, and literature, though, making it worth the effort.

[Chip Huyen · Rating 2 out of 5]

My professor assigned us this reading and I don't think any of my classmate managed to understand a single full page of the book.

My professor likes it so it must be good, it is dense. It's like someone starts with a normal sentence, then looks up Thesaurus and replaces every word with its most obscure synonym.

[Skrivena stranica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once again typical writing of French theory, sometimes hard to understand, many ideas that are kind of getting hard to follow, sometimes very interesting. Will need to come back to this once again.

[Andrew]

OK, so I know this was very influential on the transition between the study of representation and production and the study of practice and use. Despite that, other than a few select chapters, I found the book borderline unreadable. I can handle Foucault, Barthes, and Baudrillard just fine, and while Deleuze/Guattari is a stretch, I can still do it. This, on the other hand, just struck me as unreadable, and largely bullshit. So I can't say I was a fan, you know?

[Gastjäle]

What a dumbfounding work. It is written in a way that is not simply academic; it enlists the forces of academia for the oblique aims of poetry, and while it revels in obscurity, through this haze of "obfuscation" it also manages to point at dark shapes that definitely resonate with one's experience.

First of all, I definitely am not in the target group of this work. It becomes obvious early on, since de Certeau takes for granted so many concepts that I couldn't pin down, participating in discourses that hitherto I hadn't an inkling of. Secondly, keeping the first point in mind, it is also apparent that de Certeau's writing is not always particularly good: he gluts the text with quote-unquotes, English words, pithy summaries that work to the contrary and references to artists that don't belong to any particular curriculum. He also writes breath-takingly densely, forgoing paragraph changes in favour of one huge torrent of packed text. In other words, this is a difficult read, but not simply because one does not belong to the initiate.

At the same time, it does not help grumbling about de Certeau's shortcomings or one's own hesitations. I favour a dive into the deep end every once in a while, never knowing what I might find (e.g. a rock eager to connect with my noddle). The key thing is to jump in and let the text try to speak to you. Funnily enough, de Certeau is partly discussing the impossibility of communication, how the act of writing is always moving away from the writing subject, into the unknown place of reception (wherever that may be).

I would say that the overall aim of de Certeau was to try to imply certain areas of action that are not (nor could ever be, perhaps) under the control of the elite (in de Certeau's language the technocrats, media, politicians, marketers and other institutions). He had some misgivings about the very act of trying to describe them in text and trying to put them in the shape of a discourse, for that would inevitable mean something would be lost or left out, something that he might actually want to attain. (I'm not saying that de Certeau absolutely succeeded in this, but I would say these misgivings are part of the reason why he wrote in such an implicit, abstract manner about his subject.)

Nonetheless, using his famous dichotomy of strategies and tactics, he tries to indicate certain areas, where normal people can and, very importantly, already do wage little guerrilla war against the powers that be. These areas are, for example, walking, screaming, superstition, unexpectedness, the unforeseeable, inconsistency, death, or anything that strives away from the domain of discourse. Strategies, in this context, would refer to acts where someone with power imposes their "own space" on something, and thus formulating its rules (the examples of such impositions are endless, such as the concepts of proper parking, proper warfare, proper argumentation and proper behaviour), while tactics on the other hand refer to acts that the less powerful adopt in order to fool, mock or attack the system without necessarily imposing a new order in its stead (the order is not changed by the tactics, it merely undergoes a slight scratch, like ridicule). I'm sure a tactic can in its turn turn out to be a new strategy, but that is not what de Certeau is occupied with.

The way de Certeau writes about "forging paths" that differ from the city planning, the way he outlines the conquests of discourse and writing, the way he speaks of death all offer some sort of fluctuations on the "screens" that we view the world through every day, some sort of disruptions to the general vision of the everyday. He paints a rather bleak picture of the powers that rule the world, but at the same time he also offers a fairly empowering representation of the general public. The powers might continuously rely on the assumption that the people are simply gullible sheeps, ready to consume all that comes their way, but the reality de Certeau is pointing at is much more complicated and much more endowed with agency than that. We do not understand the news they read the way they were "intended to" be understood; we don't take politicians speeches always seriously; we don't truly subscribe to the company culture or its corporate values nonsense; we willingly misuse our employers' time by doing own our stuff; we might just flick through channels and once we decide to watch something, we might be "in a place" that the programme-makers could never have thought of; we might be feeling capricious, mischievous, forgetful, rude... all of these things are a sign of positive agency.

L'invention du quotidien is definitely something that calls for careful re-reading; I have merely scratched the surface. But the way it calls to question so many instances of power, and theoretises of such far-reaching conquests that for most people stay completely hidden, is, at the very least, thrillingly thought-provoking. What is also quite brilliant is the sheer scope of words that de Certeau sprinkles on his discourse: he manipulates the meaning of words and increases their relevance to the everyday life, which enables him to draw a very nuanced picture and also, cunningly, boosts the significance of many fields of study.

(The next time, I'll see if I could read it in French, since the Finnish translation was at times a bit lacking, with spelling mistakes, clunky wording and such. Or at least I could try an English translation...)

[Valentina Markasović · Rating 2 out of 5]

Someone tell the 20th century Frenchmen that quality of sensible sentences that express your thoughts >>> quantity of incomprehensible analogies/references/definitions

[Kathleen Quaintance · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think de Certeau is totally under-appreciated - however I think that is a good thing and reflects well on him as a theorist. I was telling someone earlier that I like his work because people don't 'invoke' it all the time in the way that you might invoke Foucault or Lacan. And I think that if you can be invoked, if your thought can be invoked as a some kind of qualifier, your thought is probably not that nuanced or really genius!!! (Also de Certeau is kind of all over the place in the way that makes him difficult to be invoked, which is why I love him & also Deleuze - being too all over the place to be a singular, one-dimensionalising force for someone else's argument is fab!)

[Mac]

A challenging book to read, to understand, and to connect to real life, but one that was also strikingly beautiful at times and profound even in its obscurity. I found that I appreciated it more after reading Vincent Miller's Consuming Religion which draws on de Certeau.

[Lisa Biletska]

I would rename the last chapter, "The Unnameable", and call it "The Unreadable". But otherwise pretty fun.

[Sagely · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read de Certeau's PEL for a DMin course. Below find my "working outline" and reflections on the text.

[Note: I found this difficult to follow—especially Parts 3-5. For this reason, my outline will be much briefer than for other texts.]

General Introduction
“Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of
others” (xii). The consumers/users of popular culture actively put the products of the producers to uses unforeseen/uncontrolled/unpredicted by the producers. The construction of individual sentences within an established syntax serves as a metaphor for this usage. Speech-act theory is helps sharpen this analysis of users reappropriation of producers’ products. These users, often rendered as powerless in scholarly discourse, constitute a marginalized, silent majority.
These uses must be approached as tactics, making use of the (class-)enemies’/producers’ material to further the users’ ends as opportunity presents itself. “The place of the tactic belongs to the other” (xix). The lack of a “proper” place for the user is a recurring theme in the action of the users (as traveler, as reader, shopper, etc.). These are “arts” (as in “arts and crafts”) of cunning (cf. Gk mêtis). Usage can be analyzed both polemeologically and rhetorically.

Pt 1 A Very Ordinary Culture
Ch 1 A Common Place: Ordinary Language
The products of producers are rendered by the voice of “everyman” into an “indefinite citation of the other” (1). Literatures (and other productions) becomes an echo of “everyone,” the anonymous Other. This occurs even for the (scientific) Expert and the Philosopher, who give up their definite place the moment they seek to represent that place to ordinary people, sinking into either a practice of the ordinary/generality (the Philosopher) or a mere echo of their proper field, abandoned in favor of authority for the ordinary person (the Expert). Wittgenstein tracked this with regard to language, intending “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” by drawing its limits “from the inside” of this language (9). Wittgenstein’s project offers a model for how to discuss the ordinary.

Ch 2 Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language
A turn to polemeological analysis, focalized by Brazilian popular devotion to Frei Damião. Believers here subvert colonial religion “by using [the very] frame of reference which also proceeds from [the] external power. ... They re-employ a system” (17) (= tactics). It is not the content employed so much as the use to which they are put. (Compare J L Austin to Lévi- Strauss regarding proverbs.) We the “operator’s way of operating” (21) illustrated in the games people play in society, the accounts the tell of playing these games, and the individual “style” evident in these accounts. (Cf. la perruque.)

Ch 3 “Making Do”: Uses and Tactics
“Ways of operating” for oneself can be located and analyzed within the activities mandated by those in power, superimposing a new space and new meaning on the received cultural forms. Consumption itself can be understood an alternative mode of production. These uses of cultural products can be analyzed in a way parallel to enunciation within speech-act theory. [Pp 34-42 then repeat, sometimes expanded, often verbatim, the Introduction, regarding tactics.]

Pt 2 Theories of the Art of Practice
Ch 4 Foucault and Bourdieu
Situating TPoEL in the scholarly conversation, de Certeau first takes up Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the relation of these uses and the discourse within which they might be placed. Foucault establishes how a non-discursive move (the arrangement of inmates as observable information within the institutional space) “organize[s] the discursive space” (46). De Certeau interrogates Foucault’s procedures in selecting this non-discursive move over against so many others that “have not given rise to a discursive configuration” (47), a “‘reserve’ of procedures” that include consumer practices; in narrating a coherence in the effects of this move; and with regard to the wider effects of so narrating this move on the unnarrated practices.
Next de Certeau turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s use of ethnography in establishing a “theory of practice.” For Bourdieu, even while he gestures to deny, ethnological particularities are subsumed and transformed by theory in the name of bringing the two together. “It is a delicate maneuver, which consists in fitting the ‘ethnological’ exception into an empty space in the sociological system” (52). Particularities are located in their “proper place” (55). In this move, the ethnologies (e.g., Bourdieu) becomes the Expert who is the one who knows what the society knows without the society knowing it. A tactics of use cannot be well accounted by such an approach.

Ch 5 The Arts of Theory
Foucault and Bourdieu demonstrate a common recipe for constructing theory from the reserve of everyday life: “first, cut out; then turn over. First an ‘ethnological’ isolation; then a logical inversion” (62). Cutting out involves marking out and narrowing focus on a population or set of practices foreign to the discourse, framed as a coherent whole (Foucault’s panoptic procedures; Bourdieu’s strategies of Béarn or Kabylia). This cut out element is then inverted so that it “illuminates theory and sustains discourse” (63). (Here theory itself shows up as a way of operating, just like the ways of operating it operates on.)
Next, reflection on the “arts” that fall outside of discourse, as discussed in the late-18th century. These arts comprise the outside, beyond of discourse, a position to which scientific discourse has yet fully to catch up. In this position, the arts constitute a knowledge that has “no legitimacy with respect to productivist rationality” (69), at home only in narrative, not in discourse. These arts constitute a know-how reflected in Kant’s description of tightrope dancers: “constant readjustment renews the balance while giving the impression of ‘keeping’ it” (73). That is, a tactical (tactful?) know-how.

Ch 6 Story Time
Crafting narratives is a “textual ‘way of operating’” (78) that may render the ways theory is produced within other ways of operating. Stories are a form of know-how, a “know-how-to- say” (78). Narration works by cutting out a space apart from the “real,” through many narrative techniques (establishing setting, quotation, etc.)—it is a matter of “effects, not objects” (79). Détienne exemplifies this in Greek myths—“They constitute an act which they intend to mean. There is no need to add a gloss that knows what they express without knowing it” (80).
The mêtis of the ancient Greeks represents a kind of knowing equal to this narration, “a form of intelligence that is always ‘immersed in practice’” (81). Mêtis allows less force applied from a rich reserve of memory at the very right moment to create a greater effect (see diagrams, 83ff.). Memory here is tactical—manipulated by exterior circumstances, momentary in action, and ceaselessly evolving.

Pt 3 Spatial Practices
In chs 7 through 9, de Certeau begins to utilize and/or destabilize a theory of uses of space. Walking constitutes the city just as it is constituted by it. Walking approached as a speech- act. Places established by our memories of it. An excursive reflection on railway travel as establishign nonplace. Stories as vehicles of public transportation, metaphorai, moving us into spaces as “practiced places” (117) (Cf. Heidegger) (Cf. narrated tours versus maps). Stories create space and mark out and transcend boundaries through conflict.

Pt 4 Uses of Language
In chs 10 through 12, attention shifts to the uses of language. The reproduction and inscription of language distances it from the people and from the voice, subjugating and colonizing the voice—a domination, however, that is slipping. Writing produces in its own proper place (the blank page, physically, politically, medically) power over the voice from which it is drawn. Writing thus establishes a new mythology. (Cf. Robinson Crusoe.) This inscription requires instruments to mark bodies or pages. But these very instruments testify to the persistence of the body, the voice. “Epistemological configurations are never replaced by the appearance of new orders; they compose strata that form the bedrock of the present” (146). The cry of pain or pleasure, escaping as these instruments mark the body/page, hinted at by Kafka and Duchamp.
The fleeting memory of voice persists in quotations—both as pre-text for writing and as interpretation of writing. Writing writes down what has been said, only to be voiced again as it is read and interpreted. The spoken escapes the oversight of langue. It must be translated into text: “The voice makes people write” (161). But also note the way in which voice interprets or plays with the meaning of text, as in Verdi’s mad aria for Lady Macbeth.
Reading, even silently, displays this interplay of the uses the practice of reading places the text to (as the eye lurches and stumbles across the page, as the mind flits to and fro intertextually and allusively). Reading is less an activity of information than of provoked misunderstanding. Literal meanings are the imposition of the will of the elite:
Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s 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 crocks in cultural orthodoxy. (172, a fine summary of how use of cultural products play out)

Pt 5 Ways of Believing
Institutions of faith (church, synagogue, party) depend on the vestiges of belief and on the “erosion itself of every conviction, ... the absence of a stronger credibility that draws [believers] elsewhere” (178)—inertia. The reserves of belief as act have been exhausted, but this effects a dispersion of belief into diaspora—whether by marketers, leftist political organizers, any who “speak in the name of reality” (185). Churches represent merely on expression of the activity of belief and its objects. There what was invisible was to be believed as really real; now (e.g., on television) what is seen, even if known not to be real, is often believed to be really real.
Dying is an unthinkable practice—it “falls outside the thinkable, which is identified with what one can do” (190). Dying presents a “subject without actions and [an] operation without author” (191). Shunted away, death turns to “exotic language” (192)—euphemisms, circumlocutions. But believing or speaking of death means believing or speaking of the Other. Still in writing, literary, scientific, therapeutic, death cannot named with permanence, as the very writing (paper, bodies) wears thin and dies away. Writing is mourning. Writing takes place (tactically) on enemy territory.
Indeterminate
“It is through [everyday practices] that an uncodeable difference insinuates itself into the happy relation the system would like to have with the operations it claims to administers. Far from being a local, and thus classifiable, revolt, it is a common and silent, almost sheeplike subversion—our own” (200). This is evident in place as palimpsest and in narrated, “casual” time

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro se ha convertido en una guía. llevaba mucho tiempo rondando su lectura, me llamaba algo de lo que aquí, como un secreto, se construía sin saber muy bien el qué. Creo que De Certeau acierta en muchos puntos, su crítica a Foucault y a Bourdieu es maravillosa, apunta cosas que no había visto y ofrece salidas. No solamente es un comepdnio de maneras de hacer teoría, sin parasitar el objeto de atención, si no que ofrece una teoría inconsciente del hacer cotidiano que desborda las genealogías Foucaultianas tan rígidas y espectaculares. Permite servir como guía de cómo acercarse a los fenómenos que tenemos inscritos en la piel como huellas de un hacer milenario tratando de escapar siempre a un hablar científico que aniquila lo observado y lo transforma en un rígido que no hace nada, conservado en formol. Es un libro gigante.

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Certeau's work provides a valuable framework for understanding the subtle ways individuals exercise agency and creativity in the face of dominant power structures. By focusing on the ordinary practices of everyday life, he reveals the forgotten and magical hidden tactics in the subconscious and the enduring power of the human spirit to shape its own destiny. His concepts of strategies and tactics, along with his emphasis on the active role of consumers, offer a compelling perspective on the dynamics of power and the possibilities for individual agency in a complex and often oppressive world.

.... is what i will say in my comps meeting....

what i will say here is that holy smokes this whooped my ass. Certeau, have you ever thought about explaining something in PLAIN LANGUAGE?!!! WHY AM I OUT HERE USING THE DICTIONARY TO UNDERSTAND? still 4 stars though because he did cook, just in an inaccessible way

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite books I read for my theory class so far. At times, it got bogged down (reinterpretations of Bourdieu and Foucault). But when it was just de Certeau — no trying to flaunt his acumen of other theorists — it was a lovely read. Will be thinking about pieces of this for a while!

[terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting, but in italian we say "parla come mangi"

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Książka dużo zapowiada i na pewno zarysowany na początku program jest niezwykle inspirujący, jednak mam duży niedosyt po lekturze całości. Miałam wrażenie, że autor rzuca fajne myśli, a potem rozmywa je w tekście będącym powtórzeniem tez poststrukturalizmu czy innych znanych w humanistyce, dołączając opisy tekstów kultury czy zjawisk społecznych, ale nie tych umykających teorii praktyk, które zapowiada. Do tego dość ciężko się go czyta, więc wymaga dużo samozaparcia. Może jeszcze wrócę do tej książki z innym nastawieniem, trochę rzeczy sobie zakreśliłam, ale liczyłam na dużo więcej.

[Oskari · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few select passages that resonated with me or that I found thought-provoking:

On reading:

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of 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. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image), which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments "lost" in reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body. Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an "invention" of the memory. Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text; the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place. (p. xxi, General introduction)

On public experts:

How do they succeed in moving from their technique - a language they have mastered and which regulates their discourse - to the 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. During the process of conversion, he is not without some competence (he either has to have some or make people think he has), but he abandons the competence he possesses as his authority is extended further and further, drawn out of its orbit by social demands and/or political responsibilities. That is the (general?) paradox of authority: a knowledge is ascribed to it and this knowledge is precisely what it lacks where it is exercised. Authority is indissociable from an "abuse of knowledge" - and in this case we ought perhaps to recognize the effect of the social law that divests the individual of his competence in order to establish (or re-establish) the capital of a collective competence, that is, of a common verisimilitude.

Since he cannot limit himself to talking about what he knows, the Expert pronounces on the basis of the place that his specialty has won for him. In that way he inscribes himself and is inscribed in a common order where specialization, as the rule and hierarchically ordering practice of productivist economy, has the value of initiation. Because he has successfully submitted himself to this initiatory practice, he can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socio-economic order. He speaks as an ordinary man, who can receive authority in exchange for knowledge just as one receives a paycheck in exchange for work. He inscribes himself in the common language of practices, where an overproduction of authority leads to the devaluation of authority, since one always gets more in exchange for an equal or inferior amount of competence. But when he continues to believe, or make others believe, that he is acting as a scientist, he confuses social place with technical discourse. He takes one for the other: it is a simple case of mistaken identity. He misunderstands the order which he represents. He no longer knows what he is saying. 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 legitimized 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. (pp. 7-8)

On how institutions of power inscribe themselves/the law on the body; i.e., the machinery of representation:

Two main operations characterize their activities. The first seeks primarily to remove something excessive, diseased, or unesthetic from the body, or else to add to the body what it lacks. (. . .) As in the case of removing the hair from one's legs or putting mascara on one's eyelashes, having one'a hair cut or having hair reimplanted, this activity of extracting or adding on is carried out by reference to a code. It keeps bodies within the limits set by a norm. In this respect, clothes themselves can be regarded as instruments through which a social law maintains its hold on bodies and its members, regulates them and exercises them through changes in fashion as well as through military maneuvers. (. . .) The foods that are selected by traditions and sold in the markets of a society also shape bodies at the same time that they nourish them; they impose on bodies a form and a muscle tone that function like an identity card. Glasses, cigarettes, shoes etc., reshape the physical 'portrait' in their own ways. Is there a limit to the machinery by which a society represents itself in living beings and makes them its representations? Where does the disciplinary apparatus end that displaces and corrects, adds or removes things from these bodies, malleable under the instrumentation of so many laws? To tell the truth, they become bodies only by conforming to these codes. Where and when is there ever anything bodily that is not written, remade, cultured, identified by the different tools which are part of a social symbolic code?
(. . .)
This first operation of removing or adding is thus only the corollary of another, more general operation, which consists in making the body tell the code. As we have seen, this work 'realizes' a social language, gives it its effectiveness. This is an immense task of 'machining' bodies to make them spell out an order. Economic individualism is no less effective than totalitarianism in carrying out this articulation of the law by means of bodies. It just proceeds by different methods. Instead of crushing groups in order to mark them with the unique brand of a power, it atomizes them first and multiplies the constraining networks of exchange that shape individual units in conformity with the rules (or 'fashions') of socioeconomic and cultural contracts. In both cases, one may wonder why it works. What desire or what need leads us to make our bodies the emblems of an identifying law?
(. . .)
The credibility of a discourse is what first makes believers act in accord with it. It produces practitioners. To make people believe is to make them act. But by a curious circularity, the ability to make people act - to write and to machine bodies - is precisely what makes people believe. Because the law is already applied with and on bodies, 'incarnated' in physical practices, it can accredit itself and make people believe that it speaks in the name of the 'real'. It makes itself believable by saying: 'This text has been dictated for you by Reality itself.' People believe what they assume to be real, but this 'reality' is assigned to a discourse by a belief that gives it a body inscribed by the law. The law requires an accumulation of corporeal capital in advance in order to make itself believed and practiced. It is thus inscribed because of what has already been inscribed: the witnesses, martyrs, or examples that make it credible to others. (pp. 147-148)

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li este livro para uma cadeira do doutorado e preciso dizer que é um ótimo livro e que tange diversas partes do conhecimento humano, talvez por isso ele se chame "a invenção do cotidiano", pois nele precisamos "saber-fazer" diversas coisas. O subtítulo artes de fazer também dá conta do fazer artes, ou do, pelo menos, fazer cultura, inventar cultura. Inventar a cultura, num sentido antropológico também é inventar o cotidiano, e ao tentarmos saber o que estamos fazendo e fazer da maneira como achamos que fazemos também estamos inventando a cultura. Os capítulos de De Certeau, nesse sentido, poderiam ser livros separados de uma coleção de pequenos livros, porque dão conta de uma maneira muito abrangente de diferentes âmbitos da existência humana, da criação até a morte. Um livro-curinga, que pode se adaptar a diversas situações cotidianas e culturais.

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it rather uneven. Sometimes de Certeau keeps himself on track and other times it seems like he's just torturing his point or engaging in flights of fancy. There's also something that feels wrong about writing about the Common Man and how he uses language in such convoluted prose that is quite difficult to decipher. The book moves from Freud and Wittgenstein to a more direct statement about texts/reading/writing.

[PizzaCaviar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imbuvable. Incompréhensible 99% du temps, la prose pédante et alambiquée a eu raison de moi malgré une forte détermination. C'est dommage car le discours s'éclaircit sporadiquement et révèle de rares pépites. Mais honnêtement, il y a tellement d'autres livres à lire je ne vois pas pourquoi je continuerai à me dégouter de la lecture avec une logorrhé hermétique. C'est bien de penser, mais si on ne sait même pas communiquer ses idées à autrui, la réflexion est à mon sens caduque.

[ThienVinh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to understand at first, but as you keep reading it, it starts making sense. de Certeau looks at how ordinary people through their everyday practices and embodied experiences reclaim their autonomy, and resist power structures.

[Meaghen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first time I've ever read a work of theory and felt like I was hearing my own thoughts, more clearly articulated, more grounded in the literature, but expressing impressions and preoccupations that were my own. I will reread it, quote it, act on it.

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revisiting de Certeau for my diss revisions - helpful, frustrating, and thought-provoking all at once.