Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

ZELİHA UYURCA

ID 501 - Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday Life

Outline

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

• le Febevre and de Certeau

• Resistance of Everyday Life

Age-Old Ruses

Murmurs in the Archive

• De Certeau Ambitions for Archival Work

• Freudian Approach

Foregrounding The Everday

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

Everyday

Practices

SPACE

TIME

De Certeau Travel Metaphor: EXPERIENCE

• apt for the everyday

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

De Certeau :

• no finished system, no structure to draw schemas or mappable territories for

everyday.

• a scene of use within the system constructed and spread by others.

• Creativity , characteristic of everyday to respond (resist) this situation.

• Resistance of everyday resulted from differences, otherness.

Everyday life:

Everyday :

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

le Febevre and de Certeau:

different approaches, Everyday Life

•Colonization of everyday life by commodity form (caused Alienation)

•Lack of Style of Everyday Life

•Different everyday, revolutionary praxis

•Impossibility of the full colonization of everyday life

•Evasive Style of Everyday Life

•Political assessment, damaging to study of everyday life

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

le Febevre and de Certeau:

Similarities they share

•Everyday as an ensemble of practices

•Everyday as phenomenal and sensual

• Everyday as an aesthetic realm that requires attention to the style and poetics living

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

Resistance of Everyday Life:

•resistance is as much about inertia as it is a result of inventive forms of appropriation

•Thick breadth, opaque and stubborn of life in everyday practices, -immediate and millenary-

Giard’ study of cooking. People may think I am drinking, I am remembering.(Bachelard)

•Stubbornness of memory, resistance • both a preservative and a creative for something new

Resistance Opposition

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Assembling a Poetics of Everyday Life

Resistance of Everyday Life:

Non-oppositional Binary:

Consumption Production

Reading Writing (Writing visible, more valued)

Tactic Strategies (Resistance - Power)

Space Place

Spoken Written

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Age-Old Ruses

• activities rather than expresses identities – a poetics of uses rather than users

•people and practices• generalizing the ‘operational logic’ of the everyday

• traditional sociopolitical frames of reference • can take comfort in ascribing resistance to identities(working class, sub-cultures) rather

than activities.

•science of singularity’- instances of culture, plurality.• It is people with moments and practices rather than subjects

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Age-Old Ruses

Strategy:•A subject separated from environment

•Proper place

•Lie behind the political and economic rationality

•Absence of proper place

•Not separated from other, in territory of other

•Opportunist

Tactic:

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Age-Old Ruses

• Tactics, inventive employment of possibilities within strategic circumstances: disguise, surprise, discretion, secrecy, wit, play, bluff and so on” . Tactics don’t operate outside a strategy that they cannot confront – this would be a counter-strategy

Football match could be an example

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Age-Old Ruses

• Extension of power & Everyday as non-reducible to it

•Different forms and logics,but their non-symmetrical combination • friction of ‘rubbing along’, rather than in direct conflict

Le Perruque

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Murmurs in the Archive

• everyday is irrepressible

•de Certeau’s offering two senses: • an archive of the everyday • an everyday-ing of archives

•the everyday leaves residues of its existence, its irruption and disruption

•Activities of use missing, but their mark (presence of absences).

• Signs audible only for those- prepared to “dream of countless combination of existence”

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Murmurs in the Archive

Everyday life Freudian Psychoanalysis

Relationship between Relationship betweenStrategy and Tactic Consciousness and Unconsciousness

(Slip of tongue, bungled)

Freudian Approach:

Strategy Consciousness

Cannot erase Cannot erase

Tactic Unconsciousness

• Direct access to unconsciousness not possible through consciousness.

• never decelerates itself but inscribe itself obscure and roundabout ways (dreams, neurotic symptoms)

• Tactics are not observable through strategies

•Strategy and tactics take place simultaneously

•Strategy- delimit one’s place in a world of invisible powers of Others, yet tactic in other’s place

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Murmurs in the Archive

Freudian Approach:

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Murmurs in the Archive

Writing Speaking Strategic (Archival) (grumbling, clearing throat)Speaking body

•Voice (Orality) are reconfigured within a scriptural economy (writing)

•Possibility of archives at least bearing traces of tactical side of life, hovewer, How Orality is at all within writing(archiving).

• Practice of listening, inscribing and describing.

• Two ambitions (archive of everyday and everyday-ing of the archives) become one

• practice of listening to the murmurs of everyday life

Freudian Approach:

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Foregrounding the everyday

peculiar logic of everyday practices

•de Certeau’s ‘science of singularity’, that seeks to produce the generality of science and the particularity of the actual

•de Certeau’s, interested in finding the peculiar logic of everyday practices- as in Freud peculiar logic of dreaming.

• No need of a fixed key that could unlock the puzzle of everyday life- as in Freud

• de Certeau provides ‘toolkits’ for allowing “the everyday to be heard, not as background noise, but as foreground voice”.

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

Foregrounding the everyday

politics of everyday life

• The tactical activities, mixture of creative moments ofgetting by (making the best of things) and a host of stubborn insistencies (the past, the body, the unconscious).

• Transformatory politics based on the attempts to describe this everyday life is restrictive.

• Political orientation towards everyday life, offers a series of modest and everyday’ proposals rather than offering a evolutionary’ or ‘oppositional’ form of politics

• generating beginnings rather than achieving particular ends

Michel de Certeau’ Poetics of Everyday LifeBen Higmore

PLACE TIME

STRATEGY TACTIC

Writing (Archiving) ReadingSpeaking

Commodity

Lack of Style (Alienation)

Production Consumption

EVERYDAY

Stubbornness of Memory