1. Michel De Certeau’s Poetics of Everyday Life
Ben Highmore
Güzin Şen
12.03.2013

2. Comparison of LeFebvre’s and De Certeau’s approaches to ‘everyday life’:
They differ at the level of sensibility:
LeFebvre declamatory style of writing, everyday as an alienated condition
De Certeau elliptical and elusive, eclectic array of examples and theoretical perspectives,
everyday through material of the everyday itself
His theorizing is a labyrinth, because everyday is thought as a labyrinth
He presents unsystematic arguments  and unsystematic.
a style of writing the everyday in tune with its subject
(Highmore, 2002)

3. Assembling a poetics of everyday life:
TRAVEL EVERYDAY
(as a constant metaphor)
‘The theme of an active movement through time in space brings together a number of
operations that will make up materiality of the everyday for De Certeau.’
Travelling suggests a journey that alters not only traveller but also space traveled,
encounter with other cultures, with difference
Becoming rather than Being
‘In De Certeau’s writing there is no finished ‘system’, no structure that can be overlaid on
the everyday to produce neat schemas and mappable territories.’
(Highmore, 2002)

4. Studying everyday life:
For De Certeau,
Studying everyday life: an attempt to focus investigation on the way people operate,
the way they ‘practice’ every day life
‘What characterizes everyday for De Certeau is a creativity that response to situation.’
(act of reusing and recombining heterogeneous materials)
Making Do Making With
evidences the
with a (through
inventiveness
ready-made appropriation,
of everyday
culture reemployment)
‘But these assemblages are not just the products of an individual’s will or actions; they
are the products of a culture seen as heterogeneous, of culture in the plural’
inventive juxtapositions
The heterogeneity that people make
of culture the stubborn insistence difference , the resistance of
of the body, cultural histories otherness everyday
(Highmore, 2002)

5. Comparison of LeFebvre’s and De Certeau’s approaches to ‘everyday life’:
LeFebvre De Certeau
• everyday of capitalist modernity • ‘popular procedures’ which constitue
as being characterized by its ‘a style’ that evidences a resistance to the
lack of style and by its prosaic mode colonization of everyday life
• colonization of everyday by the • impossibility of full colonization of daily life
commodity form, the solution is in by the system, the continued fact of
everyday but as an alieanated possibility resistance, the ubiquitious eruption of the
heterogeneous
• extension of capitalist logic
into the everyday
------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------
“… the outcome of analysis is a avoidance from greeting the everyday life
revolutionary ‘praxis’ that will capitalize with a prescriptive ‘political’ assesment
on those ‘moments of possibility’”
Politics emerged from the everyday rather
than politics simply applied to the everyday
(Highmore, 2002)

6. Similarities between LeFebvre’s and De Certeau’s approaches to ‘everyday life’:
• everyday as ensemble of practices
• bringing the language of avant-gardism to bear on the business of attending
to the everyday
• noting the extensive ambition of rationalism, its failure to erase ritual and superstition
in general
• everyday as phenomena and as sensual : an aesthetic realm that requires attention to
the style and poetics of the everyday life
(Highmore, 2002)

7. Everyday life as a sphere of resistance:
resistance opposition
“…‘resistance’ is as much as an activity born of inertia as it is result of inventive forms of
appropriation.”
“ Resistance here is both preservative and a creation of something new: rather than
presenting the inverse of power, it offers a different and pluralized account of powers. ”
(Highmore, 2002)

8. The ‘poetics’ of everyday life:
Need of an inventive language to register the inventiveness of everyday
poetics of everyday life
(poetics of/in language, poetics of daily life)
(Tactical) use of non-oppositional binary terms:
production- consumption, tactics- strategies, space- place, spoken-written….
• He uses binary terms to challenge the structure of binary thought.
• ‘Not only do the terms ‘production’ and ‘consumption’, for example, fold back on
each other, but each provides the other with the very essense that would define them.’
• ‘Their successful use seems to depend upon a relational logic that must relate practices
to circumstances…’ (orality-scriptual, speaking-writing)
(Highmore, 2002)

9. Age old ruses Subjectless theory of the everyday life
•Main concern is ‘modes of operation’ rather than the ‘subjects’,
•Poetics of uses rather than poetics of users,
•Disengage from ‘traditional sociopolitical frames of reference’
Dropping of (extension or
(which ascribe resistance to identities
alteration of ) identity
rather than activities)
categories as a tactical
manouvre in his analysis
•The Practice of Everyday Life is peopled with moments and
practices rather than subjects
‘It will be an urban consiousness as much as an individual’s which will guide trajectories
through the city. It will be the techniques, gestures, machines, buildings, beliefs, as much as
bosses and the bossed, that will be invested the power to dominate and resist.’
(Highmore, 2002)

10. The terms Strategy & Tactic:
Ben Highmore questions the connotations of war within De Certeau’s terms ‘strategy’
and ‘tactic’.
Strategy
The metaphorics of war make reader to expect association of the term with the absymal
practices of colonization or bleak protocols of scientific management the actual and
possible generalization of the term should be clarified.
Tactic as calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus, making use of
cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers
The war analogy: tactics-guerialla combat
Tactics don’t operate outside a strategy, they are in the ambigious position of being inside
but the other.
The analogy works for understanding the differences of actions however leads to confusion.
‘…tactics as guerilla activity hardly prepare the ground for DeCerteau’s claim that everyday
practices (talking, reading, shopping…) is tactical in character.’
(Highmore, 2002)

11. Murmurs in archive:
The problem of archiving the everyday life (both practical and theoratical) Resources?
Methods?
an archive yet to be catalogued
everyday
an archive that might also resist cataloguing
Examples of archiving tradition: Simmel’s, Walter Benjamin’s LeFebvre’s
“..for LeFebvre the search for a differentiating totality leads him to treat the urban
Environment as an archive of ‘moments’ and forces.”
‘…the everyday doesn’t have a form of attention that is proper to it.’
(Highmore, 2002)

12. The problem of archiving the everyday life
Foucault, investigation detached itself from inquisitorial procedure,
Strategic characterization examination has remained extremely close to the
of everyday life disciplinary power that shaped it
De Certeau,
tactical aspects of the archive of everyday
everyday as irrepressible the possibility of putting together archives that don’t
work to erase the ‘tactical’ in the everyday.
Two positive ambitions everyday speaking for itself
for archival work
everydaying of archive
possibility that existing archives might be attended to by
focusing on the everyday as tenacious irruption and
interruption within them
(Highmore, 2002)

13. The problem of archiving the everyday life
Resources?
Methods?
What it says + what it keeps silent
geography of forgotten,
suppression of everyday life,
presense of absences
‘A different form of attention is needed that can listen to the silences
and see the gaps within the archive as positive signs.’
(Highmore, 2002)

14. Ben Highmore constructs an analogy between De Certeau’s poetics everyday life and
Freud’s pyschoanalysis to illustrate De Certeau’s speculative possibilities of registering
the everyday.
Freudian unconscious  tactics De Certeau’s
Psychoanalysis consciousness  strategy poetics everyday life
Psyhoanalysis is the continuation Tactics draw on different temporalities
of the past(s) in present which dominate present
Consciousness cannot completely
The tactical side of everday life
eradicate the unconscious
continually irrupts in the strategic
(symptomatic irruptions of unconscious
on conscioussness:obsession,
remembered dreams).
There is never a possibility of direct
Tactical forms are resistant to the
access to the unconscious in
ways of cataloguing and collecting
consciousness: it never declares itself
but insribes itself inobscure and
roundabout ways (Highmore, 2002)

15. Understanding limits and possibilities of archive:
Writing versus Speaking (speech)
writing as a strategic act offering a privileged access to
more somatic and repressed aspects
Voice is strategicall reconfigured of signification
within scriptual economy.
A problematic non-oppositional division of terms
For example: Media forms (oral) as a part of scriptual economy
DeCerteau priviliges voices within texts
Project of constructing a general poetics of the everyday practices dedicated to
practice of listening which is capable of hearing the tactical
Archive of everyday
Practice of listening the murmurs of life
Everydaying archive
(Highmore, 2002)

16. Foregrounding the everyday
Poetics of everyday life as a science of singularity
generality of particularity of
science the actual
An analogy: Freud’s understanding of dreamparticularity of dreams deriving from one’s
own experience
General interpretation of dream is refused, investigation of conditions that make the
interpretation possible. ‘peculiar logic of dreaming’
DeCerteau tries to find ‘peculiar logic of everyday practices’
“ A general poetics of everyday life is a science of the singular in that it allows for the
differentiation of ‘the relationships that link eveyday pursuits to particular circumstances’”
(Highmore, 2002)

17. References:
Highmore, B. (2002). Michel de Certeau’s Poetics of Everyday Life in Everyday
Life and Cultural Theory, Routledge: London and New York, pp. 145-173.

18. THANK YOU =)