de Certeau

de Certeau:
"To date, Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts"

"
Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" acting in environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the influential chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
According to Andrew Blauvelt who relies on the work of Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life:^[2]
"Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the "arts of doing" such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these strictures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression."

 xii
- tension between the individual and the society (Reminds me of Halliday - meaning making potential as couched within a particular system)
systems that help to describe this tension
"poaching" concept (what does that term do?)

intricacies of the "production" - not as easy to define

xiii

Native American subversion - Spanish culture
Strength/ Power/ procedures of "consumption"

"Using" difference between makers and users - analyze manipulation

Speaking as representation - many uses

xiv
consumers, bases, effects and possibilities

Foucault:
looks at things that take strength away from institutions

Very small moves (microbial?)
"Silent technologies"
what works to "evade" discipline?

What ways are individuals "reappropriating"?

dispersed tactics-everyday life

xv -
anti discipline

meaning making

marginality of a majority
loss of language - meaning?
xvii
marginal group - becomes the new majority

though not homogenous

products as an obligatory language

Different people react differently (sounds like stereotyping the immigrant)

cultural impacts on the "superior force

tensions - balances

2. tactics of practice
3 concerns

xviii
consumers - to what extent do they create their own "path" = composed with tools from society "the trajectories trace out ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop"

tough to count these tragectories

xix
tactics and strategies - distinction

strategy - subject seperated from environment
tactic - manipulate, opportunity (time) - seizes opportunities

weak/ strong language

xx
doesn't that pretty much cover everything?
"tricks and imitations of plants and fishes" - ecological

"continuity and permanence in these tactics" - like the transcendent eyeball

rhetoric - how to sustain power

xxi
reading - as consumer

reading - passivity

silent production

how do you "appropriate" reading?

xxii

texts as production
"productivist technochracy"

different than oral

xxiii

tactics - epistemologies of science

xxiv
small pleasures?

Ch. 1
push out to frontier, back to everyday life

science - modernity

gap - science reveals "artifice" of language

expert and philosopher

expert - competence & social authority - rise of expert - power via "function of socio-economic power"-- issues of maintaining competence


Philosopher - skeptic
9
loss of rights of philosopher

return language to everyday use

10
Wittgenstein-science/ language

double erosion

histiography

"According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed. He describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language, all philosophical problems can be solved without the muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, precisely because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no work at all.^[155] Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use."

11

issues with science language?

12 difficulty of looking at common language

13
Wittgenstein 'exactingness but not its mastery"
27
folktales - structure within which one can be creative