Research Report: The Practice of Everyday Life

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P., 1984. 

By Allison Schifani, @Lit+ Visualization Project 

1. Abstract. Michel de Certeau engages what he calls the "tactics" of everyday practice. Tactics are here opposed to the "strategy" of capital and of power more broadly. In this work Certeau outlines the possibilities for tactical enunciation--particularly spatial enunciation, such as the path carved out by the walker in the urban landscape. These everyday practices of the powerless function against power but within its system, its strategy. With a particular focus on linguistic and psychoanalytic theories, this text seeks to elevate the everyday experience of the subject to a site of potential resistance. 

    

2. Description.  First published in French in 1980, The Practice of Everyday Life takes on what was then a long building crisis in Marxist materialist thought. The concept of class, after the large-scale social upheaval of the 1960s seemed no longer viable as a unifying concept and even less so the guarantor of a future revolution against capital. Scholars on the Left looked increasingly towards alternative explanations of the social structure and, indeed, alternative possibilities for resistance. Michel de Certeau, in keeping with a long history of his works which hoped to find in the quotidian not only the mechanisms of the exercise of power but also movements against it--small, everyday forms of resistance--takes up in The Practice of Everyday Life "the ordinary man." He dedicates his book to this "common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets." The text uses semiotic and linguistic theories (Certeau draws heavily from the work of Roland Barthes) in order to describe the ways in which everyday practices can be enunciations in urban space. "The act of walking is to the urban system," he writes, "what the speech act is to language or to statements uttered" (97). 'Walking in the city,' to take up this famous chapter in the work, functions very much the way that the speech act does: "At the most elementary level, it has a triple 'enunciative' function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic 'contracts' in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an 'allocution,' 'posits another opposite' the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action) (97-98). In this way the everyday practices of the ordinary man or woman can become tactics (a term he opposes to strategy--that is, the interlocking systems of control exercised by power). They are sites of resistance and potentially pleasure for the otherwise powerless. Certeau also draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory. Spatial practice is, for Certeau, always linked to the formation of the subject in relationship to the other and, indeed, thusly the site of a potential opening toward the other. Directly referencing Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror Stage," he writes "of the child who, standing before a mirror, sees itself as one (it is she or he, seen as a whole) but another (that, an image with which the child identifies itself), what counts is the process of this 'spatial captation' that inscribes the passage toward the other as the law of being and the law of place. To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in place, to be other and to move toward the other" (109-110).

    

3. Commentary.  Certeau's work offers an interesting opening into thinking on contemporary space (including, of course, the virtual) and quotidian practices. The "Sensemapper" project proposed by my group tracks messages on the SMS and microblogging platform Twitter based on location--indeed, following Certeau, urban location; we are gathering "tweets" in Los Angeles and New York City. Just as experience in daily life is central to Certeau's thinking on tactics, so too is experience the object of our study, particularly sensory experience of the urban world. Twitter has become, with an enormous user-base in both the cities that are the sites of our study, indeed a mundane, everyday practice. If nothing else, it seems Certeau's thinking on ordinary tactics might prove quite useful in theorizing what it is users are doing when they send out an urban tweet. The questions Certeau demands we pose are as follows: Is there, in these small messages, a subversive force? What strategies might tweets of this nature work against? Or work for? What do these messages indicate about urban space and urban spatial practice in the contemporary moment? What do they indicate about the experience of that space? What do they tell us about the constitution of subjects in such a space? Or of the relationships between subjects?  Of course, Certeau's text surfaced well before the virtual and material networks which Twitter-users utilize to send and receive their various messages. To think through the information we are able to cull in this project requires that we go beyond Certeau in thinking of the city, that is, beyond the 'ground' and into the dynamic space of the online interface, potentially, even, into extraterrestrial space (some tweets are, after all, tagged with GPS coordinates when senders use their mobile devices to communicate with satellites circling the Earth). Certeau's work does, though, offer a starting point by developing a way of thinking and writing about the ways in which the practices of ordinary life can become extraordinary possibilities for praxis.

    

4. Resources for Further Study.  
   1. Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 
   2. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Chicago, Illinois : Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991. 
   3. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions).      London: Duke University Press, 2002. 
   4. Soja, Edward W.. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York:      Verso, 1989,