The Practice of Everyday Life

One of the most interesting writings on everyday life is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, first published in Paris in 1980). Written in a somehow fragmented and often elliptical style, the book's central point revolves around everyday practices that he distinguishes between strategies and tactics that inform the author's arts de faire. De Certeau's hetereodox view sustains that daily life is defined by regularities, even though they may be recurrent. Far from being made of trivialities as in Erving Goffman's view, and distant from Hans-Georg Gadamer's interactive play, to say nothing of the set of normative social roles as in Talcott Parsons's view, De Certeau's everyday life is made of procedures. From his critical reading of authors such as M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu and M. Detienne, in his metaphorical language everyday life is similar to a battlefield in which procedures develop into practices, i.e. strategies and tactics. The description of the pair of concepts extends from guerrilla analogy allowing De Certeau to breaks with the understanding of daily life as routine and claims that it is rather continuous movement. In this movement, like in the battle ground, strategy refers to a "postulate of power", circumscribed to a variety of terms that De Certeau makes current use of: property, ownership, place, among others. Tactics on the contrary is seen "a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus" are ways of operating, taking "advantage of opportunities" of (daily) life (moving around, talking, reading, cooking, individual creative assemblages, etc). Determined by the "absence of power," (of proper locus) tactics is the "art of the weak" operating insidiously "blow by blow" as in the art of craft. The daily practice emphasizes how labyrinthine procedures of action function in reference to the procedural logic and dynamic of power relations. The emphasis on daily life as a battlefield, breaks with the normative character of everyday social action and highlights the power relations that relate substantially to the social construction of public life. The concept of everyday practice in De Certeau therefore helps us to consider different ways of space formation and appropriation, as well as breaking social and physical boundaries that demarcate contemporary urban life. This leads De Certeau to another pair of articulated concepts: space and place. Space refers to the absence of previously defined positions and, therefore, it is an order that provides various possible moving experiences in everyday life. Place, on the contrary, calls for certain rather stable configurations. The everyday practices and tactics allows for an understanding of the ruptures in contemporary urban life: an insinuating poetic and war-like inversion of everyday life. This is a fundamental reason why The Practice of Everyday Life is an essential reading for contemporary urban studies. Rogerio Proença Leite, PhD. Professor and resea

This book - whose subject is the tactics employed by those at odds with institutions physical and intellectual - offers profound insights not only into terrorism and the tools available to terrorists but also the deep philosophical and psychological rift between the Western and Arab worlds. It fact after reading the book I am convinced that efforts to combat terrorism are doomed to failure until the issues in this book are both discussed and absorbed by people in charge of counter-terrorism (on the policy level and on the enforcement side) and the public at large. Though it's not an easy read (What philosophical discourse is an easy read?), it is illuminates the battleground between the institution which imposes order (democracy for instance) and it's improvising enemy, who operates within the dominant force's own field of vision and seizes opportunities as they arise. It would give me great feeling of reassurance if FBI and CIA counter-terrorism officials used it as a practical guide.

Sometimes I am simply proud that I have read a book. This slim volume falls into that category. The fourteen short chapters explode with new ideas, fresh perspectives, and tantalizing viewpoints. To summarize these riches is unlikely to do them justice, yet I will try.De Certeau inverts social values and cultural hierarchies. His hero metaphor is not the exemplar, but rather the ant. Wisdom resides not in the pronouncement of expert or philosopher, but in the routine discourse between ordinary people. To De Certeau the definitional constraints imposed by the experts result in artificial distinctions. Only the discourse of ordinary people is firmly rooted in experience and embraces the varieties and logical complexities of living.Among these complexities of life is the amazing adaptive capacity of the ordinary. Even the most oppressive and controlling of cultures cannot eradicate the subversive agency of the peasant. This subversive agency is expressed through mythic stories, common proverbs, and verbal tricks. De Certeau refers to the adaptive capacity of the ordinary as tactics of living, and these tactics may be best exemplified when the worker does the personal while on the clock.The distinction between strategy and tactics is central to De Certeau's thought. Strategy refers to the top-down exercise of power to coerce compliance. Tactics refer to the opportunistic manipulations offered by circumstance. The conflict between strategies and tactics is ironic - as strategic forces expand to increase dominance, there is a corresponding increase in opportunity for tactical subversion. De Certeau relates his ideas to the theoretical work of Foucault and Bourdieu, and continues his inverted perspective by looking anew at the concept of city, commuter travel by rail, story telling, writing, reading, and believing. This book is more of a riddle than a narrative; de Certeau provides glimpses of his meaning from time to time, but deliberately avoids propositional clarity. This style requires that the reader take an unusual stance toward this book. Instead of expecting the author to communicate, the reader must content himself with hints and suggestions of meaning. I am convinced that these hints and suggestions are more than worth the reader's investment of time. Find a quiet place and enjoy!

Michel de Certeau's brilliant book is one of the primary nodes in the historical switchbox that eventually crossed the signals that led us through structuralism and practice theory to critical realism and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. His classic exploration of everyday life will send flashes of light and pleasure through the mind on a constant basis - his dense, absolutely masterful, and witty expository quasi-poetry on economy, power, and practice is essentially an extended series of aphorisms, upon any one of which an entire essay could be based. And a good one, at that.What we have here is a celebration of the everyday, the common, the mundane, and the wonderful capacity of life to resist systematization and classification via its organic flexibility and espirit de corps. It is a wonderful wake-up call: "A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons, far from the scientific ground. Though legitimized by scientific knowledge, their discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games between economic powers and symbolic authorities."Writing in the tradition of Lefevbre (more so than anyone else who comes to mind at the moment), his work touches upon contemporary Foucault and Bourdieu only briefly and then moves on to do much more. For example, in the way of analyses of strategic and tactical behavior, resistances, spatial practices, sublatern hermeneutics, and state/scientific ideologies of secrecy and knowledge. In de Certeau, we see not just a clearing of the intellectual path for towering figures such as Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Giddens, Lash, Appadurai, and Taussig (to name only a handful) - enabling them to come whistling along with their variously insightful ideas from A to Z - but we see it done with a panache and "Ich weiss es nicht" that is memorable in the persona it invokes. And as long as you're sitting on the Paris-Munchen ICE, scratching your chin and contemplating the axiological implications of beer or coffee at 9am, I can't think of anything better to read than de Certeau's comments on the rite of passage of Railway Incarceration and Navigation (Chapter VIII), in which a whole series of transformations is extracted from the mundane in a suprahumane and very-French manner. Bon voyage!

This is one of the great books of French post-structuralist thought. I realize that to some people that might be like saying "one of the nicest Nazis I know." But for those who don't immediately dismiss the entire genre, there is much to be gained from reading, and rereading, this book.In essence, Certeau is challenging the rather despairing vision of Foucault's The Order of Things, with its image of the panopticon from which no one can escape. Certeau focuses on everyday practices to see how people do in fact escape the all-seeing gaze of the panopticon. In particular his distinction between "strategy" and "tactics" is useful and intriguing.The language is highly poetic and at times difficult going, but *how* Certeau says what he says is in some ways as important as *what* he says. He wants to write in a way that at the same time uses and escapes the constraints of ordinary language. It takes some getting used to, but it is worth it.