1. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
ZELİHA UYURCA
ID 501 - Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

2. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
Outline
•Introduction
1. Consumer Production
• Usage or Consumption
• The Procedures of Everyday Creativity
• The Formal Structure of Practice
The Marginality of a Majority
2. The Tactics of Practice
•Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetoric
•Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc
•Extensions: prospects and Politics.
•Conclusion

3. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
General Review:
• The particular status of ways of using or ways of operating in the social practice
or "everyday practice."
•Neccesity of Ways of operating to be explicated in the process of representation
as well as "consumption,«
• Foucault's concept of social practices in Disciplines and Punish
•The scheme of "the relations between consumers and the mechanism of
production" and distinguishes two uses of practices: strategy and tactics.

4. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
Introduction:
• Not an analysis of individual because existence of social relations, but the plurality of
these relations.
• de Certeau :
•everyday practice, the "investigation of ways in which users operate," or "ways of
operating," or doing things.
The purpose of everyday practice is to "make explicit the system of operational
combination, which also compose a 'culture,' and to bring to light the models of
action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society,"
or in disguise of the term 'consumer.'
Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the propertiy
of others.

5. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
• Usage or Consumption
•"the representation of a society" and "its mode of behavior"
• the uses consumers make of the things that they purchase.
For example:
Representation Behavior
analysis of the images analysis of the time
broadcast by television spent watching TV
what does cultural consumer "makes" or “does" during the these time with these images ?
The "making" in the question is a production.

6. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
• Usage or Consumption
The action of "making" 'hidden' production,
• as well as so-called "consumption, " corresponding to predominated systems
of production (Television).
Consumption:
• "devious, dispersed and insinuates itself everywhere," with a dominant
economic order, "does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather
through its ways of using the products“.
Spanish Colonizer and Indians

7. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
• Usage or Consumption
• at first, everyday practice is need to "analyze" the manipulation of the consumption
by users.
•Furthermore, "the difference or similarity between the production of the image and
the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization"
The Act of Speaking:
•“operates within the field of a linguistic system"
•"affects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speaker"
•establishes a present relative to a time and place."
•"posits a contract with the other“
• Users make innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant
cultural economy in order to adopt it to their own interests and their own rules,“

8. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
• The procedures of Everyday Creativity
•„grid of discipline‟ becoming more widespread;
• how does society resist this?
• how do people manipulate the mechanisms of discipline or conform to it so
they can evade it?
•which networks and resources help people resist and evade the discipline
offered by institutions?

9. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
• The Formal Structure of Practice
•What is an art or „way of making‟?
•popular culture arts of making
•Two sort of investigation?
•More descriptive in nature
• descriptive analysis of readers‟ practices, urban spaces, everyday rituals,
reuses of collective memory
•Scientific Literature
• tracing the origins of the forms of these operations,
•sociologists, anthropologists and historians (Goffman, Bourdieu, Mauss,
DÈtienne, Boissevain, Laumann)
•the enthomethodological and socio-linguistic (Garfinkel, Labov, Sachs,
Schegloff)

10. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
• The Formal Structure of Practice
• Formal logics, analytical philosophy: action, time and modalisation

11. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
1. Consumer Production
The Marginality of a Majority
•No longer limited to minority groups
•Mass marginality: marginal groups have now become the silent majority
•linked together in a kind of obligatory language
•related to social relations and power
•Cultural activity of non-producers of culture
•'unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolised„
•“The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the
strong, lends a political dimension to everyday practices”
Polemological analysis of culture
articulates conflicts
legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force
Develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence

12. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
Relations between the consumer and the mechanism of production in three
kinds of concerns:
• the search for a problematic that could articulate the material collected
• the description of a limited number of practices considered to be particularly
significant
• the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to scientific fields

13. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
•Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetorics
•Trajectories
•consumers as „unrecognized producers‟ and „poets of their own acts‟
•unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space.
•a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, transcription, a graph
is substituted for an operation.
•limits of statistical analysis;
•captures material of consumer practices but not their form

14. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
•Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetorics
• Differentiation between „strategies‟ and „tactics‟
Strategy: Tactic:
•the calculus of force-relationships •a calculus which cannot count on a
proper
•a place that can be circumscribed as
proper •insinuating itself into "the other's place.“
•generating relations with an exterior •depends on time
distinct
•manipulate events in order to turn them
•the overarching plans of large into opportunities.
institutions or power structures

15. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
•Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetorics
•Tactics:
•many everyday activities are tactical in nature,
•e.g. talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, as do „ways
of operating‟
•and "victories of the weak over the strong.
•clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, joyful discover.
•Intelligence, inseparable from them
•strategies based on objective calculations from a collective power or institution
• tactics do not seek to take over or win and does not engage in sabotage

16. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
•Trajectories, Tactics and Rhetoric
•Rhetoric :
• The science of “way of speaking”
•Two logic of action (one tactical, other strategic)
•Sophist: make the weaker position seem the stronger
• claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by
making use of the opportunities in any given situation

17. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
• Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc
•an example of an everyday practice that produces without capitalizing
•Taking control over time, inevitable starting point.
•exorbitant focus of contemporary culture and its consumption (such as
reading)
•production vs consumption; writing vs reading; consumer as a voyeur in a
„show-biz society‟
•The activity of reading, a silent production:
• "the drift across the page"
• "the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader"
•"the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps
over written spaces in an ephemeral dance"

18. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
2. The Tactics of Practice
• Extensions: prospects and Politics
• Analysis of tactics extended to two areas
•Futurology/Prospect
•relationship between rationality and imagination;
•difference between tentative moves, pragmatic ruses and continuous tactics
•The individual subject in political life
•separate himself from them without escaping them but only try to get over them
•status of the individual in technical system is concerned
•Freud‟s civilization and its discontents; the microscopic connections between
manipulation and enjoyment

19. General Introduction to the Practice of Everyday Life
Conclusion
de Certeau ;
• considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior
• people (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and heavily subject to
received culture.
• describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy
from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture.