Strategies And Tactics De Certeau

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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.

Influenced by the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau's main contribution to practice theory has been to posit practice as the ground of resistance to domination (in addition to the reproduction of power relations). De Certeau distinguishes between two types of practice: strategies and tactics. Strategies are only available to subjects of "will and power," so defined because of their access to a spatial or institutional location that allows them to objectify the rest of the social environment. "A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as a proper (propre) and thus serve as a basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, "clienteles," "targets," or "objects of research)" (1984, p. xix). Strategies thus invoke and actualize a schematic and stratified ordering of social reality.

Other people, however, though lacking a space of their own from which to apply strategies, are not merely passive objects of such subjects. On the contrary, they are active agents, but their mode of practice is tactical rather than strategic. Everyday practices of consumption (including activities like walking or reading) are tactical in that they continuously re-signify and disrupt the schematic ordering of reality produced through the strategic practices of the powerful. The possibility of contestation of the social order, which is created through multiple strategies, is always implicit in the tactical practices of everyday life.

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Positive Number to Propaganda - World War IiPractices - Practice Theory, Practice And Discourse: Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu And Anthony Giddens, Practice As Resistance: Michel De Certeau

According to de Certeau, strategies are the overarching framework of the dominant institutions and their objectives (e.g. to discipline or gain profit) and tactics are the individual actions included in everyday activities and how ordinary people use and appropriate the products created by the dominant institutions. One example of this in popular culture is television series.

Television series are produced networks such as the HBO, which is a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., an American multinational media corporation. They are broadcast over certain channels during specific times and are mostly funded through advertising. In this case, the corporation and the advertisers are the dominant group. Their strategy is to make a profit (and reinforce the existing capitalist regime). The expectation on the viewer is that they will watch the television series in the allocated time slots, watch the advertising and be prompted to buy the advertised goods (and perhaps show merchandise, like DVDs, t-shirts) and continue watching the channel. However, this is not what audience always do.

There are various tactics that viewers can apply that do not align with the goals and strategies of the corporations. To begin with, they may simply ignore the advertisements, instead of being prompted to buy. Secondly, the internet, allows shows to be watched online via streaming sites, or downloaded as torrents. Users actively record, upload and share television series with others. According to Forbes (McGregor, 2014), the popular Game of Thrones series became the most pirated show in history. Although this activity is illegal, it is widely practiced all over the world and allows users to subvert the rules of capitalism. Thirdly, the audience can use television series as inspiration for their own production. For example, there is plenty of fan art of Game of Thrones on websites like the DeviantArt.com, which can be bought and sold, instead of the official merchandise. These are only some obvious ways in which television audience can resist the strategies of the corporations through everyday tactics.

dottorando di ricerca in Scienze Pedagogiche, dell'Educazione e della Formazione presso l'Universit degli Studi di Padova, con una ricerca sull'educazione nel pensiero di Michel de Certeau. Si formato in filosofia presso l'Universit di Torino, l'Universit di Perugia e l'Istituto Universitario Sophia (Incisa e Figline Valdarno). Si interessa delle relazioni tra pedagogia e filosofia, con particolare attenzione per i temi dell'intercultura e della relazione tra identit e alterit.

Federico Rovea. Intercultural tactics. A reading of Michel De Certeau from an intercultural perspective. Dialegesthai. Rivista telematica di filosofia [on line], vol. 21 (2019) [published: 31 Dec 2019], available on World Wide Web: -rovea-01, ISSN 1128-5478.

The term interculturality, although widely used in both common language and the one of pedagogical and political research, shows a certain lack of theoretical elaboration. The assumption assumed is that through the concept of tactics is possible to contribute significantly to the discussion about interculturality, moving from a vision of it as a narrow reflection on the encounter of different cultures to a broader educational and political perspective on society.

Let us take as an example a hypothetical newly founded apparel brand: the strategy they will elaborate will be represented by the overall plan to sell as much clothes as possible, while the tactics used to achieve it could be the communication plan, the promotion and so forth.

The military sense of the word is not very different: a military tactic is indeed the complex of particular actions planned in order to achieve a bigger objective. The different actions and their structure is tactic, while the strategy is how they combine in a general plan, in order to achieve the goal of gaining the control over a specific territory, for instance.

Two main questions are pointed out in these definitions, which represent also the main differences between strategies and tactics: on one hand, the question of proper/improper space (1), on the other the presence/absence of a position of power (2).

To summarize: while the strategic action is characterised by the propriety of a space and by a clearly stated planning, tactics are spread, non-prepared, not even fully conscious, whose subject is the anonymous everyday-man.5 Tactical agency represents a form of alterity regarding the social reality: tactics are radically other, invisible, spontaneous ways to resist to power structure and assert collective freedom.

Last May speech was taken the way, in 1789, the Bastille was taken. The stronghold that was assailed is a knowledge held by the dispensers of culture, a knowledge meant to integrate or enclose student workers and wage earners in a system of assigned duties. From the taking of the Bastille to the taking of the Sourbonne, between these two symbols, an essential difference characterizes the event of May 13, 1968: today, it is imprisoned speech that was freed. (De Certeau 1997:11)

Along the students, other figures are find out to present the same character in different other works by Certeau: the Latin American communities inspired by the Theology of Liberation (De Certeau 1997:77), the native Americans exploited by the European colonialism (Certeau 1980; Certeau 1986:225-237), the mystic figures of the XVI century oppressed by the institutionalised Catholic Church (Certeau 1992b). All these figures share the same style, a similar reaction to some oppressive institutions characterised by a revolt without power that can lead to a deep renovation of the society they live in. Certeau analysed the actions and especially the language of this kind of communities, in order to show the particularity of their position regarding in society.

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