Practice Of Everyday Life Michel De Certeau

[Celedonio Miranda]

ThePractice of Everyday Life is a book by Michel de Certeau that examines the ways in which people individualise mass culture, altering things, from utilitarian objects to street plans to rituals, laws and language, in order to make them their own. It was originally published in French as L'invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de faire' (1974). The 1984 English translation is by Steven Rendall. The book is one of the key texts in the study of everyday life.

The Practice of Everyday Life begins by pointing out that while social science possesses the ability to study the traditions, language, symbols, art and articles of exchange that make up a culture, it lacks a formal means by which to examine the ways in which people reappropriate them in everyday situations.

This is a dangerous omission, de Certeau argues, because in the activity of re-use lies an abundance of opportunities for ordinary people to subvert the rituals and representations that institutions seek to impose upon them.

With no clear understanding of such activity, social science is bound to create nothing other than a picture of people who are non-artists (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and heavily subject to received culture. Indeed, such a misinterpretation is borne out in the term "consumer". In the book, the word "user" is offered instead; the concept of "consumption" is expanded in the phrase "procedures of consumption" which then further transforms to "tactics of consumption".

Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the 'arts of doing' such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these structures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations.

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Frenchreligious historian and cultural critic. He is especially well known for his critique of historiography and his analyses of the practices of everyday life (particularly its spatial dimension) which he undertook in the middle part of his career. The work he did in the early and later parts of his career are less well known, especially in Anglophone countries, though no less significant or important.

After studying philosophy and the classics at the universities of Lyon and Grenoble, Certeau entered the Society of Jesus at the age of 25. Ordained into the Catholic priesthood in 1956, he went on to complete a doctorate in religious history at the Sorbonne in 1960. Certeau's principal theoretical interest in the early years of his career was the question of why we need history in the first place. Rather than inquire into the ideological meanings of histories, Certeau asked: What specific cultural need does history fulfil? Using as his model Freud's concept of dreamwork, Certeau argued that history should be seen as a kind of machine for easing the anxiety most westerners seem to feel in the face of death. By speaking of the past in the way it does, history raises the spectre of our inevitable demise within a memorial framework that makes it appear we will live forever after all. History is not, in other words, an innocent or straightforward documenting of the past, but an integral component of the structuring of the present. The main essays from this period were later collected in L'criture de l'histoire (1975) translated as The Writing of History (1988).

This new direction led to the work for which Certeau is best known, particularly in Cultural Studies, namely his writings on everyday life: L'Invention du quotidien 1. arts de faire (1980), translated as The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) and L'Invention du quotidien 2. habiter, cuisiner (1980), translated as The Practice of Everyday Life Volume 2: Living and Cooking (1998). The second volume was written in collaboration with his research associates Pierre Mayol and Luce Giard. A third volume on futurology was planned, but never completed. Certeau proposed that everyday life could be seen as a balance between two types of practices which he termed strategy and tactics: the one referring to the set of practices Foucault theorized as discipline and the other being a kind of anti-discipline or resistance.

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Drawing, as a daily practice, serves as a means of recording those experiences that would otherwise pass, unremarked, from experience to oblivion. These two artists have produced a kind of micro-microhistory in pictures, a record of the quotidian and mundane things that drift in and out our daily stream of consciousness.

These are the things that populate our optical unconscious. They are the fragments that cannot be categorized. This is the substance of everyday life, the material that constitutes the history of daily life, or what historians call Alltagsgeschichte.

A series of interviews -- mostly with women -- allows us to follow the subjects' individual routines, composed of the habits, constraints, and inventive strategies by which the speakers negotiate daily life. Through these accounts the speakers, "ordinary" people all, are revealed to be anything but passive consumers. Amid these experiences and voices, the ephemeral inventions of the "obscure heroes" of the everyday, we watch the art of making do become the art of living.This long-awaited second volume of de Certeau's masterwork, updated and revised in this first English edition, completes the picture begun in volume 1, drawing to the last detail the collective practices that define the texture, substance, and importance of the everyday.

I focus on the idea that the bicycle is a critical tool and everyday cycling is an emancipatory practice and a form of resistance in socio-spatial hegemonic contexts that can challenge power relationships. It has a transformative power to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives by making everyday life critical.

In this space-power situation, the car behind me usually honks its horn to pull me to the edge of the space. But I resist the imposed order by pedaling quietly in the middle of the car-centered streets. This is a critical practice and a form of resistance in the everyday life of a cyclist in such a car environment, to restructure everyday life by occupying the space. Whose belongs to the space?

But cycling creates an alternative rhythm of everyday life, a rhythm that goes against the mechanical and machinic cycle of time that prevails in car-oriented environments like Tehran. My slow pedaling in the streets of Tehran is a tactic to challenge the existing rhythm and dominant automotive discourse. The cyclist is not a passive mobile, but an active agent that can challenge hegemonic structures.

For cyclists, on the other hand, the street is not just a functional corridor connecting A to B, but a social space where a human relationship and an intimate, meaningful experience of the city are possible. Bicycles trigger the first spark of our acquaintance and easily bring us together.

When I cycle, I have close social contact with my cyclist friends on our bikes (directly) and with other cyclists and pedestrians on the street (indirectly). Cycling implies an intimate and engaged connection with the human and non-human environment and is an alternative way of experiencing the city, distinct from the mechanical movement of automobility.

Cyclists establish a direct, bodily, and social relationship on the bike, whereas there is no such relationship behind the car window. We greet each other when we see each other on our bicycles in Tehran, while as car drivers we only warn each other by honking our horns. This is a tactical practice that reverses the street discourse in our car-dominated context. Should we move fast or pedal slowly and engage in social interaction on the street?

The accumulation of disobedient bodies of cyclists creates a critical mass that represents different spatial alternatives. We use our entire bodies and muscles to produce our own spaces and represent alternatives to being and living in spaces. In carnival cycling, we ride slowly, talk to each other, look around and challenge the hegemonic order of the street. It is a bodily protest on the street, where our bodies critique the belief that spaces should be functional and bodies docile. This is our counter-hegemonic tactical practice.

The bicycle is a seemingly simple tool, but a complex and intertwined phenomenon with cultural, social, political and environmental aspects. It should be seen as an ethical and critical tool against the spatial strategies of urban regimes especially in socio-politically contested contexts.

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