Michel de Certeau was a French scholar interested in history, ethnography, philosophy and more. He is known for his work "The Practice of Everyday Life" which examines how individuals operate within and resist dominant social systems through everyday tactics and practices. De Certeau argues that consumption involves a hidden, secondary production as users appropriate and creatively manipulate products and rituals imposed by dominant powers to serve their own ends. He analyzes reading, talking and other everyday activities as tactical in nature and sees everyday life as a site of political action through individuals' manipulation of opportunities.

1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE
PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
nice to meet you,too
cigdem demir
nice to meet you
michel de certeau
ID 501
EVERYDAY LIFE READER
by Ben Highmore
030315

2. Hi,
i’m Michel de Certau, oui French.
Born in 1925 and died in 1986, so sad!
Some say I’m a polymath, merci!
A scholar interested in history,
ethnography, philosophy, social
science, psychoanalysis, popular
culture...
You most probably know me with
The Practice of Everyday Life.
I have some other works.
Keep reading, those will be done!

3. #rules #individuality #modes of operation #operating #popular
culture #consumer #user #representation #cultural consumer
#production #consumption #creativity #making #power
#dicipline #order #tactic #strategy #space #marginality
#keywords

4. #intro
everyday practises are not only the background of social activity.
There are modes of operation and the logic of operations transform
indiviualities in order to survive and it is hidden by the form of
rationality in dominant Western culture.

5. #aim
de Certeau aims to reveal
systems of operational combination composing a culture. There are
models of characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element
in the society.

6. #usage, or consumption
There is ‘making’ which is production-but a hidden production. Because the
system no longer leaves ‘consumers’ any place to in which they can show
what they make or do with the products of these systems.
#?#No space to show their creativity?
This production corresponds another production, called ‘consumption’.
This is silently and invisibly everwhere. Because it does not manifest
itself through its own products, but rather through its way of using the
products imposed by a dominant economic order.

7. #usage, or consumption
To illustrate:
Spanish colonizers who imposed their own culture on the indigenious
Indians
Indians did not reject or alter imposed material but
They used these imposed rituals, representations, and laws with respect
to ends and references unfamiliar to the system of dominant power.

8. #usage, or consumption
Their use of the dominat social order deflected its power.
The strength of their difference lay in procedures of ‘consumption’.
Indians manipulated the culture the makers of which is not them.
#?#What about Turkish culture? There are also some imposed rituals but
resulting with surprising ends. Do you see the traces of these kind of
ends?

9. #usage, or consumption
The manipulation level /difference or similarity only could be
measured between the production of the image and the secondary
production hidden in the process of its utilization.
#?#Let’s think worker houses in England! There is a rule o f decoration
but they rule the decoration with usage procedures.
making production using consumption manipulation
second production

10. #usage, or consumption
Our investigation is concerned with
this difference. It can use as its theoretical
model of the construction of individual sentences
with an established vocabulary and syntax.
..........
Users make innumerable and infinitesimal
transformations of and within the dominat
cultural economy in order to adapt it to their
own interests and their own rules.

11. #the procedures of everyday creativity
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
He analyzes mechanisms reorganizing the functioning of power.
Productive apparatus produce the ‘discipline’.
The grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more
extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society
resists being reduce to it, what popular procedures manipulate the
mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade
them and finally,
what ‘ways of operating’ form the counterpart, on the consumer’s side, of
the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic
order.

12. #the procedures of everyday creativity
Consumers present themselves as arts of making, as combinatory or
utilizing modes of consumption. These practices bring into play a
‘popular’ ratio, a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an
art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using.

13. #the procedures of everyday creativity
In order to grasp the formal structure of these
practises, I have carried out two sorts of
investigations.
The first;practices through the authorities making
possible everyday practises
The second; scientific literature that might
furnish hypotheses allowing the logic of
unselfconsciousness

14. #the marginality of majority
There are types of operations characterizing consumption in the
framework of an economy, and to realize in these practises of
appropriation indexes of the creativity that flourishes at the
very point where practice ceases to have its own language.
marginality is a cultural activity of th non-producers of culture.
marginals; those hardly pay for the showy products
marginality is becoming universal, silent majority
#?#I think, marginality is a showy product of consumption of
everyday.

15. #the marginality of majority
Culture articulates and controls the dominat force.
The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak
make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to
everyday practices.

16. #trajectories, tactics, and rhetorics
Trajectory suggests a movement, but also plane projection. Hence,
de Certeau makes a distinction between tactics and strategies.
#strategy is the calculus of force-relationships which becomes
possible when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an
environment. A strategy assumes a place that can be
circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for
generating relations with an exterior distinct from it.
#tactic is a calculus which cannot count on a proper, nor thus on
a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The
place of tactic belong to other.

17. #trajectories, tactics, and rhetorics
Tactic must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them
into ‘opportunities’.
Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping,
cooking, etc.) are tactical in character.

18. #trajectories, tactics, and rhetorics
#?#In order to make my mind totaly clear I ask what are
the differentiation between these two terms.
#?#Let’s think the everydayness of designer, marginality of a
designer. Of course we have tactics and strategies. How we use
them, to survive?
tactis strategy

19. #reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, etc.
The focus of our contemporary culture and its consumption is
reading.
We are surrounded with many things -image or text- to be read.
Those are consumed through reading, and so writing becomes a
production
reading= consumption
writing= production
a silent production,
passive activity

20. #reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, etc.
It is possible to live in a space for an individual by
reintroducing into themselves the plural mobility of goals and
desires -an art of manipulating and enjoying.

21. #conclusion
.Everyday life is a political activity with all tactics and strategies.
.Indiviuals are the unconscious politicians of their life and related
lifes. This is the way of the creativity of everydayness.
.Opportunities are the success of weak over strong in everyday.

22. “MERCI!”
“de Certeau”
“oui”