nici /danm 203 /certeau

Michael de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life

• Useful Links
  • ~ en.wikipedia.org > Wiki > De Certeau

    • According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture,” nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Everyday_Life
• Notes:

  • point of view of the enunciator: it effects an appropriation or reappropriation of the language, establishes a  presenter in relation to time and place, it positis a contract with the other in a network of places and relations. This is the point  of view of this study.

  • "if it is true that the grid of dicipling is everywhere becomming clearer and more extensive , it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire societyresist being reduced to it, what popular proceedures manipulate the mechanismsof disciplin and conform to them only in order to evade them..." The justification / motivation for this study.
  • "Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group is not the silent majority." The ratio of producer to consmer has dropped so low that almost all people consume but don't produce. (Is this true now? Look to all the websites that rely on the so called free labor of thier participants, the social netwotking sites, fliker, etc.)
  • "Similar strategic deployments, when acting on different relations of force, do not produce identical effects." Everyone takes what the dominant culture gives them and puts it to different uses. there is a relation between the use it is put and the persons position (marignalized, extreemly marginalize0 in that society.
  • differentiat between action and engagement
  • polmological: in the manner of the study of war

    • "culture articulates conflicts and alternatly legitimizes, displaces, or controlls the superior force." Culture is a battle over applied meanings?

    three kinds of relations between consumers and the mechanisms of production

    • the search for a probelmatics that could articulate the material collected

      • what questionms should we ask that will lead us to answers? Or at least the right questions?

      the description of a limited number of practices considered particularily significant

      • these were: reading, talking, walking, cooking, dwelling

      • Why are these actions considered especially significant, because they join consumerism with life? Because it's the aspect of consumerism that we let fly under the radar usually?
      • How does walking fit into this group? How can walking help reappropriate consumer products?

      and the extension of analysis of these everyday opperations to scientific fields apparently goverened by another kind of logic

    Trajectories: The ways in which people navigate the consumer landscape laid out before them according to wants and desires that may not come from or be inspired by that consumer world.

    • Statistical inquiry can only treat the trajectories by looking at individual instances, not the whole rout. Kinda like rhizones being paths between points, statistical inquiry would only be able to see each point.

  • Stategy is the calculus of the force -relationship when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an environment. This depends on the subject being "proper" which seems to mean located in (physical?) space and thus capable of creating (static?) definitions of other subjects in relation to to itself. So a shop owner (what would be the encvironment here?) has a physical shop location and other subjects can be described as competitors, clients, etc.
  • Tactis are when there is no spacial or institutionalized location
    • Back to strategy defends the castle, tactics are the encroaching army?
    • Is it tactics vs. strategy?

    Reading is a tactile act because you insert your own experiences and references into the interpretation of the text.

  • Futurology (the study of prospects) involves considering the relation between a certain kind of rationality and the imagination as well as the differences between successive tactics and strategic representations.