The Practice of Everyday Life [Paperback]

Michel de Certeau (Author), Steven F. Rendall (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0520236998 | ISBN-13: 978-0520236998 | Edition: 2

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Practice of Everyday Life...offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau and why more of us have not done so. For one, the work all but defies definition. History, sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology all come within de Certeau's ken... De Certeau acts very much like his own ordinary hero, manipulating, elaborating, and inventing on the scientific authority that he both denies and requires."-Priscilla P. Clark, Journal of Modern History "De Certeau's book is to be praised for setting out some of the practical procedures, in which we are all implicated, that are used to invent what appears to us as our reality, and for finding at least some ways in which the totalitarian nature of our current systems of sense-making can be subverted."-John Shotter, New Ideas in Psychology

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 229 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 2 edition (December 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520236998
• ISBN-13: 978-0520236998
• Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #538,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #76 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Social Theory

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

160 of 165 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Enigmatic and enlightening January 12, 2003

By Peter A. Kindle

Format:Paperback

Sometimes I am simply proud that I have read a book. This slim volume falls into that category. The fourteen short chapters explode with new ideas, fresh perspectives, and tantalizing viewpoints. To summarize these riches is unlikely to do them justice, yet I will try.

De Certeau inverts social values and cultural hierarchies. His hero metaphor is not the exemplar, but rather the ant. Wisdom resides not in the pronouncement of expert or philosopher, but in the routine discourse between ordinary people. To De Certeau the definitional constraints imposed by the experts result in artificial distinctions. Only the discourse of ordinary people is firmly rooted in experience and embraces the varieties and logical complexities of living.

Among these complexities of life is the amazing adaptive capacity of the ordinary. Even the most oppressive and controlling of cultures cannot eradicate the subversive agency of the peasant. This subversive agency is expressed through mythic stories, common proverbs, and verbal tricks. De Certeau refers to the adaptive capacity of the ordinary as tactics of living, and these tactics may be best exemplified when the worker does the personal while on the clock.

The distinction between strategy and tactics is central to De Certeau's thought. Strategy refers to the top-down exercise of power to coerce compliance. Tactics refer to the opportunistic manipulations offered by circumstance. The conflict between strategies and tactics is ironic - as strategic forces expand to increase dominance, there is a corresponding increase in opportunity for tactical subversion....

De Certeau relates his ideas to the theoretical work of Foucault and Bourdieu, and continues his inverted perspective by looking anew at the concept of city, commuter travel by rail, story telling, writing, reading, and believing.

This book is more of a riddle than a narrative; de Certeau provides glimpses of his meaning from time to time, but deliberately avoids propositional clarity. This style requires that the reader take an unusual stance toward this book. Instead of expecting the author to communicate, the reader must content himself with hints and suggestions of meaning. I am convinced that these hints and suggestions are more than worth the reader's investment of time. Find a quiet place and enjoy! Read more ›

131 of 145 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars good ideas, but painful reading May 11, 2001

By Jeremy P. Bushnell

Format:Paperback

DeCerteau's ideas in this book primarily deal with control and resistance: he finds that average people have developed various strategies that establishes their independence in a world that seeks to dominate them. He's especially interested in how people receive media: he thinks media producers (including writers) seek to impose meaning on media consumers, yet he rejects the notion that consumers consume mindlessly. DeCerteau examines the creative strategies employed by consumers, and he in fact sees them as a form of unrecognized producers (which is part of why this book is of interest to people studying 'fan fiction' and similar phenomena).

Like much French theory, this book functions like a poem, making its argument by way of symbolic relationships and analogy rather than by calling upon the causal / statistical relationships that characterize much American argument. This may turn some people off, and even by French-theory standards this book is not user-friendly at all. DeCerteau often uses common, general words (say, "writing," or "time") to refer to very particular, highly-nuanced concepts. Simply relying upon the commonly-accepted meanings of those words will not do, and yet deCerteau rarely takes the time to explain the meanings that he has in mind. The result is that the book reads like an enormous cryptogram: you can only decipher what he means by particular words by noting and crossreferencing the varying contexts in those words are used throughout the book-- a tedious process which forced this reader to continually question whether the nuggets of gold were really worth all the panning through silt.

65 of 71 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a book that changed the way I think January 14, 2002

By F Bauerschmidt

Format:Paperback

This is one of the great books of French post-structuralist thought. I realize that to some people that might be like saying "one of the nicest Nazis I know." But for those who don't immediately dismiss the entire genre, there is much to be gained from reading, and rereading, this book.

In essence, Certeau is challenging the rather despairing vision of Foucault's The Order of Things, with its image of the panopticon from which no one can escape. Certeau focuses on everyday practices to see how people do in fact escape the all-seeing gaze of the panopticon. In particular his distinction between "strategy" and "tactics" is useful and intriguing.

The language is highly poetic and at times difficult going, but *how* Certeau says what he says is in some ways as important as *what* he says. He wants to write in a way that at the same time uses and escapes the constraints of ordinary language. It takes some getting used to, but it is worth it.

35 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Incomparable style and scholarship August 15, 2002

By Ben Dongieux

Format:Paperback

Michel de Certeau's brilliant book is one of the primary nodes in the historical switchbox that eventually crossed the signals that led us through structuralism and practice theory to critical realism and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. His classic exploration of everyday life will send flashes of light and pleasure through the mind on a constant basis - his dense, absolutely masterful, and witty expository quasi-poetry on economy, power, and practice is essentially an extended series of aphorisms, upon any one of which an entire essay could be based. And a good one, at that.

What we have here is a celebration of the everyday, the common, the mundane, and the wonderful capacity of life to resist systematization and classification via its organic flexibility and espirit de corps. It is a wonderful wake-up call: "A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons, far from the scientific ground. Though legitimized by scientific knowledge, their discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games between economic powers and symbolic authorities."

Writing in the tradition of Lefevbre (more so than anyone else who comes to mind at the moment), his work touches upon contemporary Foucault and Bourdieu only briefly and then moves on to do much more. For example, in the way of analyses of strategic and tactical behavior, resistances, spatial practices, sublatern hermeneutics, and state/scientific ideologies of secrecy and knowledge.... In de Certeau, we see not just a clearing of the intellectual path for towering figures such as Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Giddens, Lash, Appadurai, and Taussig (to name only a handful) - enabling them to come whistling along with their variously insightful ideas from A to Z - but we see it done with a panache and "Ich weiss es nicht" that is memorable in the persona it invokes.

And as long as you're sitting on the Paris-Munchen ICE, scratching your chin and contemplating the axiological implications of beer or coffee at 9am, I can't think of anything better to read than de Certeau's comments on the rite of passage of Railway Incarceration and Navigation (Chapter VIII), in which a whole series of transformations is extracted from the mundane in a suprahumane and very-French manner. Bon voyage! Read more ›