Michel de Certeau examines culture and society through three chapters. [Chapter 6] discusses how minorities gain cultural identity in opposition to majoritarian societies but lack true political power. [Chapter 8] views culture as a labor to be undertaken across society, but it has become passive consumption. [Chapter 10] contrasts "hard" economic regions exploiting "soft" cultural spaces, creating a "pathological zone" of boredom and passivity. De Certeau sees culture as practices that transform social structures through creative operations across differentiated social places.

1. ‘Culture in the Plural’
Michel de Certeau
Chapter 6 Minorities
Chapter 8 Culture within Society
Chapter 10 Spaces and Practices
Gizem EVCEN
METU Faculty of Architecture Department in Industrial Design
ID 501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

2. Michel de Certeau
 born in 1925
 degrees in classics and philosophy

3. Chapter 6 - Minorities
Political and Cultural Manifestos?
 A cultural, social or ethnic autonomy always draws
attention to itself by saying no…
 …risk identifying both with a political ideology and an
exclusively cultural formation.
…cultural expression is only … do not possess any real
the surface of a social unity political force…
that has not yet been given its
own political and cultural
consistency.

4. Chapter 6 - Minorities
Political and Cultural Manifestos?
 They gained self-consciousness as “ Bretons” at the
very moment when they were mixed together with non-
Bretons.
 …feeling of being different…
 …in order to “become” Breton, Bretons will perceive no
means other than to “go” in reverse.

5. Chapter 6 - Minorities
Political and Cultural Manifestos?
 Large national structure…are now subject to the law of
centralization.
 Change of local magistrates
 Universities
 Urbanization of the country
 The ideology of every liberal or capitalist movement…
 ..erases from history the conflicts and relations…
 …thus eliminates all collective desire.

6. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Imperialism of Ethnological Knowledge
 “ethic” fundamental / not tangential
 …a social group exists only when it runs the risk of
existing.
 …a political group exists only as of the movement when
a group gives itself the objective and task to exist as
such.

7. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Imperialism of Ethnological Knowledge
 …minority movements are born in regions that have
been exploited by majoritarian societies.
cultural form
 “cultural form” is different from “existing” because it lacks of
its own means
 Politics
 Economy

8. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Imperialism of Ethnological Knowledge
 Autonomism is cultural… why? powerless
 …no autonomy without struggles.
 All movements that intend to defend autonomy must
prepare themselves one way or another. It is impossible
to hold to a political theory developed in some central
office or in cultural diffusion. These metaphors or signs
of future conflicts if we are really to take seriously the
demand for autonomy.

9. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Imperialism of Ethnological Knowledge
desire for ethnology
centralization/co
lonization
bourgeoisie Environment
negating culture (…which these that becomes
ethnologists belong) the object of
their gaze

10. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Imperialism of Ethnological Knowledge
 The political foundation of a social unit is the condition
of possibility for a new culture.
 It doesn‟t mean that all political autonomy will solve every
dilemma…financial investments, sales of industrial products
or commercial exchanges…these are advantages of
colonizing countries.

11. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Idiom of Autonomy
 It is not true that independence would only possible by a
language of one‟s own. On contrary, it can bring the risk of
being reactionary.
(ex: Breton, Algeria)
 A policy is characterized by linking a tactic to a strategy.
Autonomy is of the order of strategy; language is of the
order of tactics.
Tactic Strategy
Language Autonomy

12. Chapter 6 - Minorities
The Idiom of Autonomy
 The true language of autonomy is political.
 In any event, language cannot be considered as an end
without turning it into a taboo.

13. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
ABCs of Culture
 society production needs of population
• cultural
• elementary

14. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
ABCs of Culture
 Culture a labor to be undertaken over the
entire expanse of social life.
 Prerequisite operation is needed:
 A social functioning
 A topography of questions or a topic
 A field of strategic possibilities
 Political implications

15. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
ABCs of Culture
 Subculture : the culture of a subgroup, of a minority
 Counterculture : judgment that a majority makes of
subcultures

16. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
ABCs of Culture
Cultural expressions:
 Cultural Action: union action
 Cultural Activity: activity located in an inherited culture
 Cultural Agent: who exercise one of the functions or one
of the positions defined by cultural filed
 Cultural Politics: more or less coherent totality of
objectives
 Cultural Discourse: all language that deals with cultural
problems
 Cultural Development: extension of production or
consumption ,ideology of continuity

17. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
ABCs of Culture
 Cultural problems are introduced and reclassified in the sphere of
long-range planning.
 Thematic: progressively and concentrate
 Institutions: be drawn into structures of state and into an
administration of long term planning
 Objectives: revising social equilibrium

18. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Social Functioning
1. Valorization of Knowledge:
Labor Automation
 Decrease in both value and profitability
 Increase in privileges knowledge
 Ever-growing amount of unskilled labor
2. A Restructuring of Private Life in Relation to Professional Life
 ..connection must exist between productive labor and personal
development
 Resituated in relation to
 Private life
 Achievement on the basis of risk
 Explore other life styles :CULTURAL EXPRESSION

19. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Social Functioning
3. The Society Of Spectacle:
 CULTURAL GROWTH ( Symptomatic of the movement )
People Public
 In new cities…spectacle & production link together…
Militansts cultural agents
Planners cultural engineers

20. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Social Functioning
4. A Neuter Form: The Cultural:
 social conflict society unable to assimilate
local economic development leave aside
Culture happens to be assumed something indistinct and soft.(chapter
10)

21. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Topography of Questions
1 Institutions and Initiatives:
 Institutions obey the rule of a two-sided game:
the power inhibit reside public organization which belong to social
group - owners of innovation
 Public organizations remain in place and even extend themselves;
but they are trapped in their victory over change.
 Rejection of initiatives elimination of diversity

22. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Topography of Questions
2. Culture Passivity:
 Leisure activities are compensatory for labor.
 They are a spectator within a passivity.
 Consumer Culture represents the sector where;
the number of actorspassive subjects
Hierarchization
Intellectual-levels according to powers of groups
School-university
Sport-serve only privileged layers of society and culture
Diminution of creators
Multiplication of consumers

23. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Topography of Questions
3. Economic Production:
Commercial inflection Symptom of entire evaluation
Exchanges are measured in terms of economic relations.
“natural needs”
Conservative or revolutionary… go through the same way; economic
exchanges
Enterprises, administrations and media powers set off in quest of
values and seek to restore human relations.

24. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Field of Strategic Possibilities
1. Sociocultural Units Taking Shape:
 alienation cultural isolation
 Transformation of political or union organizations that until now
represented the interests and the convictions of collective groups.
 Associations;
 No longer follow the patterns of the same division
 Reunite people who take public transformation

25. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
A Field of Strategic Possibilities
2. Institutional Connections:
 Interference between culture and labor:
• circulate cultural models
• by taking account of motivations, the use of
surrounding space
• The development of collective participation, diffusion of
common values.
 Blockage of certain organizations (universities)
• Resistances that are tied to earlier stages of institutional
development, that localize in discourse the values slowly
drive out of social practice.

26. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
Politics and Culture
1. A condition of possibility: Political Power
 Politics:
 Do not:
• Assure happiness,
• Give meaning to things
 Does:
• Creates or refuses conditions of possibilities
• Prohibits or allows
• Makes possible or impossible

27. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
Politics and Culture
2. The Relation with the Authorities
 The relation between the authorities starts to change, exploit culture
without compromise.
 Cultural commodities serve class of those who create them
 The authorities secretly suck off the richness investment in the
different sectors of culture, from national television to countless
institutions that recycle the victims in the name of education or
psychology.

28. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
Politics and Culture
2. The Relation with the Authorities
 The relation between the authorities starts to change, exploit culture
without compromise.
 Cultural commodities serve class of those who create them
 The authorities secretly suck off the richness investment in the
different sectors of culture, from national television to countless
institutions that recycle the victims in the name of education or
psychology.

29. Chapter 8 – Culture within Society
Politics and Culture
3. A necessary Politicization
 Cultural politics camouflages the coherence that links depoliticized
 2. The Relation with the Authorities
culture and decultured politics used for ends used for heralds
Used for ends Used for heralds
 Politics subtracted from democratic, ideological and cultural language
as it is really practiced
 There can be no cultural politics unless sociocultural situations
can be fashioned in term of present forces and
commonly known oppositions.

30. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
The Soft and the Hard
 Ways and styles of practicing space take the control of city planners.
 (city planners map out city but…)
2. The Relation with the Authorities
 HARD REGION EXPLOIT SOFT REGION:
 Corporate trust Profitable enterprise disarmed culture
with their commodity
 Workers Consumers Public Mass
 Political authorities : Get Rich! Get rich!

31. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
The Soft and the Hard
 SOFT CULTURE HARD
 2. The Relation with the Authorities
 SOCIEY
Folklorization of Technocratization of
civic expression economic progress
RESULTS:
 Regression of the country
 A political disappropriation
 Dissappearance of the democratic power

32. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
A Pathological Zone
 Boredom of adults in professional sectors
Bredom in school depressive
 2. The Relation with the Authorities
Passivity experiences in leisure activities
 Loss in the sense of festival and play and the taste for risk and reasons
for living..
Major cncern Get rich! Firm up!
 The vivid color a stone gray color
 Behind the personal instinct racism

33. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
The French Theater
 Press, radio, television turns into theater
 2. The Relation with the Authorities
Political Theater
 Public appreciates but no longer believe: discovers the actor behind
the character: evaluates the way it is but no longer goes after it‟s
content.
 Mass media produces a rift :
what is said what is experienced
( but is not real) ( but cannot be put into words)
 Language becomes a fiction in relation to an every day reality that
has no language.

34. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
Permanences: The Borderline of a silence
what is invented
Culture : Relation with the Authorities
 2. The
what permanates
 İrruptions future generation will
Deviations successively draw their
Margin of inventiveness cultivated culture
 Elitist action of scientists and governments
Silent culture of collectivity (as an obstacle, a
neutralization, dysfunction of its own projects)
 Culture in the singular always imposes the law of a power.

35. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
A Creative Swarm:
 Creation: disseminated proliferation
 2. The Relation with thepasses because it is an act.
perishable, Authorities
can not exist without a relation to a collectivity
 We distinguish what is written from the gesture that produces it:
Cultural Experience
 A social group is produced by producing language;

36. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
A Creative Swarm:
 A „literary‟ or „artistic‟ form could never establish the norms of culture
 2. The Relation marginality assumes.
that practice of with the Authorities
 In places where production is concentrated, creativity seems to be
shameful, camouflaged in the minimal technical improvements.
 Workers claimed the right to use their trademark, to introduce their
ideas.

37. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
Some Cultural Operations:
 Techniques of expression are integrated into a social practice.

 2. The Relation with is an operation.
Cultural expression the Authorities
1. To do something with something
2. To do something with someone Striking points in
3. To change everyday reality description
 We move toward a perspective centered on practices, on human
relations and on the transformation of the structures of social life.

38. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
Some Cultural Operations:
 A qualitative gap between the acts of reading and writing.
 2. The Relation with the Authorities
1. silent creativity (what the reader does with the text)
2. very creativity (made explicit in the production of a new text)
 Cultural operation might be represented as a trajectory relating to the
places that determine its conditions of possibility.

39. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
Some Cultural Operations:
 places: the determined and differentiated places organized by the
 economic system, social Authorities traditions of customs and
2. The Relation with the hierarchies,
mentality, psychological structures.
 practice of a space: that is constructed when it introduces an
innovation or a displacement

40. Chapter 10 – Spaces and Practices
Some Cultural Operations:
 Cultural operations are movements. They inscribe creations in
 2. The Relation with the Authorities
coherences and trace them with trajectories that are not
indeterminate but that are unsuspected, that deform,erode and
slowly change the equilibrium of social constellations.

41. CONCLUSION
 His approach is interdisciplinary
 How cultural system functions, what are its characteristics…
 he introduced an important issue: that the requests publicity are at
the same time cultural and political.
 The new cultural value requires new political realities. negritude
came out as a demand when a new political issue appeared. he
described his ideological condition and his discomfort considering
bureaucratic state and bureaucratized institutions such as
universities.

42. Thank you…