“The Practice of Everyday Life”, or “Now Nick Feels Like an Idiot”
Loading ...Hey folks. This is my attempt to summarize this massive block of near-unreadable text. I’ll do my best to keep the editorial comments to a minimum, but if you read the text, I’m sure you’ll be able to understand my frustration. Click the jump for what’s probably a completely useless jumble of ideas.
The Practice of Everyday Life is an attempt to view the actions of “users” and articulate them, as opposed to just viewing consumers as simply those who purchase a product. de Certeau takes care to point out that he’s not defending an individualistic model of society; rather a networked theory that states that human beings are shaped as individuals only by their social interactions. He states that the purpose of the work is to elaborate the models of action of consumers in a world where they’re a “dominated” class.
1. Consumer Production
These three determinations make possible an exploration of the cultural field, an exploration defined by an investigative problematics and punctuated by more detailed inquiries located by reference to hypotheses that remain to be verified. Such an exploration will seek to situate the types of operations characterizing consumption in the framework of an economy, and to discern in these practices of appropriation indexes of the creativity that flourishes at the very point where practice ceases to have its own language.
Usage, or consumption
In this section, de Certeau characterizes consumption as a sort of secondary production. He finds drawing the classic binary of consumer vs. producer problematic, as it doesn’t take into account the actual uses of products by the consumer. Instead, he views consumption as a mode of production, which is the actual manipulation of the product. It’s the behaviors of use of a “representation”, such as a TV show or a gaming device. According to him, we have to analyze the consumers’ use of a product in order to draw comparisons between the intended use and the actual use. This also has to do with a difference in “performance” vs. “competence” - just because you know a language doesn’t mean you can utilize it in a manner that people can understand (how ironic that de Certeau would point that out to us).
The Procedures of Everyday Creativity
Here, de Certeau points out that consumers often engage in what he calls
clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline:” Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline.
Think iPhone hacking, Wiimote chopshopping, or any other number of things we’ve talked about this semester that have to do with reappropriating products in creative and fun ways. These activities constitute the “antidiscipline” that de Certeau is referring to.
The formal structure of practice
In this section, de Certeau divides the structure of peoples’ everyday practices into two separate categories that he’s investigated: The first is just how people “make do” with the objects they have, similar to cooking; the second, the subpsychological machinations of language and the “bricolage” of words.
The marginality of the majority
Here, the author claims that marginalization is no longer limited to minority groups, and that’s it’s a pervasive elements of the entire consumer world. This doesn’t mean the group is homogeneous, rather, this marginalization stems from the common plight of the consumer - the spaces in which they have to manipulate and maneuver through the products they consume. Essentially,
The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.
2. The Tactics of Practice
Trajectories, tactics, and rhetoric
de Certeau considers trajectories the ways consumers’ thoughts maneuver throughout the mass produced world - though the thoughts are influenced by this world, they’re not controlled, bound, or dictated by it. Tactics are referred to as manipulations of the other, in activities such as talking, shopping, cooking, and most importantly, rhetoric. These are all portrayed as ways of making the other either weaker or stronger depending on the goals of the user.
Reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, etc.
Here, the author elaborates on the above activities as not simply variants of consumption, but modes of production as well. Reading, especially, is referred to as a process of production, in which the construction of the book’s world in the reader’s head is the primary production - they furnish this world as they would an apartment.
Extensions: prospects and politics
Finally, de Certeau relates all of this to “futurology” and the individual in daily political life. In terms of futurology, this has to do with
(1) the relations between a certain kind of rationality and an imagination (which is in discourse the mark of the locus of its production); (2) the difference between, on the one hand, the tentative moves, pragmatic ruses, and successive tactics that mark the stages of practical investigation and, on the other hand, the strategic representations offered to the public as the product of these operations.
In terms of political life, de Certeau points out that while the world is becoming increasingly restrictive as production and mass media reaches into ever more aspects of our lives, there is hope in our reappropriation of the artifacts of this society:
These ways of reappropriating the product-system, ways created by consumers, have as their goal a therapeutics for deteriorating social relations and make use of techniques of re-employment in which we can recognize the procedures of everyday practices
That’s all I’ve got. Anyone else who’s read it is welcome to open this up for discussion or to chew me out on how little sense my summary makes. As for me, I’m going to use my mass-produced version of Photoshop to reappropriate some pixels and contribute to the chiptune community.
That image is so disturbing… god!