THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Making Do”: Uses and TacticsMichel de Certeau,(1988)

ID 501 – Kıvılcım Çınar

contents

• Use or consumption

• The act of speaking

• Strategies and tactics

• The rhetorics of practice, ancient ruse

keywords

• ways of operating,

• tactics versus strategies,

• strategic rationalization-a way to delimit one's own

place in a world by the invisible powers of the other.

• the gap between the consumer and the products.

• rhetorics of practice

How an entire society can manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them?

La perruque

The ways in which workers trick their employers into thinking they are working when they are actually doing personal things using their company's time and materials.

De Certeau is interested with the devices, actions, and procedures people use every day on the micro level in order to subvert the disciplining powers.

He claims that everday life is made up of tactics.

To illustrate the definition of "the tactic", de Certeau introduces "la perruque"

Different ways of operating: (ways of walking, reading, producing, speaking...)

- depending on the situation- one can establish a degree of plurality and creativity,

use/re-use/manipulate/ignore/... - circumstantial factors in a way that is beneficial for a

person.

Example: North African living in Paris.

(creates for himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language)

Use, or consumption• Media – commercial production. (image broadcast,

newspapers, magazines ) What do people make of what they absorb, receive and pay for??

• Passive way of consumption. Dislodgment from the product => no active role from the user (pure receiver)

• Consumption shows itself not in its own products but in an art of using those imposed on it.

Tactics and consumption• The consumer cannot be identified or qualified by the

newspapers or commercial products he assimilates: there is a gap between the consumer and the product opened by the use that he makes of them.

• An aspect of the revenge that utilizing tactics take on the power that dominates production, which results in "popularization" or "degradation" of a culture.

The act of speaking (practice of language)

Enunciation (~ use) is a collection of circumstances adherent to the context from which it can be distinguished only by abstraction.

Problematics of enunciation• a realization of linguistic system (the act of speaking)• an appropriation of language by the speaker who uses it.• a certain relational contract with a receiver.• the establishment of a present ~ being situated in time.

Strategies and tactics• Strategies are able to produce, tabulate and impose

spaces, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate and divert them.

• Strategies: a calculation of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (institution) can be isolated.

• Distinguish a place of 'independent' power and will from an environment.

The effects of strategies

• A triumph over place and time based on autonomy.

• Mastery of places through sight: observation of foreign forces makes it possible to predict, run ahead of time by reading a space.

• A specific type of knowledge, sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one's own place.

Tactics: calculated actions determined by the absence of a proper locus (geometrical space).

De Certeau defines “tactics” as ways to artfully “use, manipulate, and divert” the cultural products and spaces imposed by an external power. 

The effects of tactics• No options of planning as certain opportunities present

themselves.• No centralized base for expansion or planning. • Make use of cracks in the surveillance of the proprietary

powers, take it on by surprise.• The art of the weak

•  The weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist,

the more the strategist will be able to use deception.

• The more the strategy is transformed into tactics.

• A tactic is determined by the absence of power just as

strategy is organized by the postulation of power.

Strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time,

Tactics pin their hopes on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and of the play that it introduces into the foundations of power. 

Both ways of acting can be distinguished according to whether they bet on place or on time.

The rhetorics of practice, ancient ruses

• Rhetorics are manipulations of language relative to the

occasions. They are intended to seduce, captivate or

invert the linguistic position of the addressee.

• Rhetorics ~ Tactics

• Clever 'tricks' of the 'weak' within the order established

by the 'strong' > applicable to the practice of everyday

life (speaking, reading, dwelling, moving about, shopping,

cooking,...)

Generalization of strategy and tactics

• The strategic model is defeated by its own success: the proper distinction from 'everything else' has diminished since the proper has become the whole.

• Tactics are going off their tracks, they are wandering in a space that is becoming more homogeneous.

• Consumers are transformed into immigrants.

• The system is too vast to be fixed in one place, but is too constraining to escape from it.

• Generalization of strategy and generalization of tactics exclude a clear distinction between both.

• Strateji: Güç ilişkilerine öncelik verir; zamana bağlı olan, geçici olan ilişkileri, ilişkilerdeki her bir unsura belli bir analitik ve sahiplenilecek bir “yer” vererek, sabitleyerek, tanımlayarak ve “birimlere” ya da birimlerden oluşan bütünlere indirmeye gayret ederler.

• Stratejiler önceden kabul edilen iktidar yeri, dağınık güç ve yerler ve de totalleştirici söylemler arasında ilişki kurar; her birinin üzerinde diğeri sayesinde hakimiyet kurar.

• Taktik sadece ötekinin olan ve kendine dayatılan, yabancı bir gücün kanunu tarafından organize edilen bir sahada ve o sahayla oynamak zorundadır; kendini, kendi yerinde, o sahanın dışında tutamaz.

• Bu “yersizlik” ona kuşkusuz hareket kazandırır ama zamanın rastlantılarına bağımlı bir uysallık içinde, açılan imkânları yakalamaya çalışır; sahip olan iktidarın gözetiminde ortaya çıkan çatlaklardan faydalanması gerekir.

• Stratejilerin tersine taktiklerin adı yoktur. Stratejiler basitleştirir ve ad koyar; taktikler ise bütün karmaşıklığıyla, ancak bütün birikimiyle ve yılların, yüzyılların hafızasıyla gündelik hayatın kendisidir; yürümek, yemek, içmek, konuşmak gibi pratikler ya da performanslardır.