Michel De Certeau’s Poetics of Everyday Life

Güzin Şen 12.03.2013

Ben Highmore

Comparison of LeFebvre’s and De Certeau’s approaches to ‘everyday life’:

They differ at the level of sensibility: LeFebvre declamatory style of writing, everyday as an alienated condition De Certeau elliptical and elusive, eclectic array of examples and theoretical perspectives, everyday through material of the everyday itself His theorizing is a labyrinth, He presents unsystematic arguments

because everyday is thought as a labyrinth and unsystematic.

a style of writing the everyday in tune with its subject

(Highmore, 2002)

Assembling a poetics of everyday life:

TRAVEL (as a constant metaphor)

EVERYDAY

‘The theme of an active movement through time in space brings together a number of operations that will make up materiality of the everyday for De Certeau.’ Travelling suggests a journey that alters not only traveller but also space traveled, encounter with other cultures, with difference Becoming rather than Being ‘In De Certeau’s writing there is no finished ‘system’, no structure that can be overlaid on the everyday to produce neat schemas and mappable territories.’

(Highmore, 2002)

Studying everyday life: For De Certeau, Studying everyday life: an attempt to focus investigation on the way people operate, the way they ‘practice’ every day life

‘What characterizes everyday for De Certeau is a creativity that response to situation.’

Making Do with a

ready-made culture

Making With (through

appropriation, reemployment)

(act of reusing and recombining heterogeneous materials)

evidences the inventiveness of everyday

‘But these assemblages are not just the products of an individual’s will or actions; they are the products of a culture seen as heterogeneous, of culture in the plural’

The heterogeneity of culture

inventive juxtapositions that people make

the stubborn insistence of the body, cultural histories

difference , otherness

the resistance of everyday

(Highmore, 2002)

Comparison of LeFebvre’s and De Certeau’s approaches to ‘everyday life’:

LeFebvre • everyday of capitalist modernity as being characterized by its lack of style and by its prosaic mode • colonization of everyday by the commodity form, the solution is in everyday but as an alieanated possibility • extension of capitalist logic into the everyday ------------------------------------------------------- “… the outcome of analysis is a revolutionary ‘praxis’ that will capitalize on those ‘moments of possibility’”

De Certeau • ‘popular procedures’ which constitue ‘a style’ that evidences a resistance to the colonization of everyday life • impossibility of full colonization of daily life by the system, the continued fact of resistance, the ubiquitious eruption of the heterogeneous ---------------------------------------------------------- avoidance from greeting the everyday life with a prescriptive ‘political’ assesment

Politics emerged from the everyday rather than politics simply applied to the everyday

(Highmore, 2002)

Similarities between LeFebvre’s and De Certeau’s approaches to ‘everyday life’:

• everyday as ensemble of practices • bringing the language of avant-gardism to bear on the business of attending to the everyday • noting the extensive ambition of rationalism, its failure to erase ritual and superstition in general • everyday as phenomena and as sensual : an aesthetic realm that requires attention to the style and poetics of the everyday life

(Highmore, 2002)

Everyday life as a sphere of resistance:

resistance opposition “…‘resistance’ is as much as an activity born of inertia as it is result of inventive forms of appropriation.” “ Resistance here is both preservative and a creation of something new: rather than presenting the inverse of power, it offers a different and pluralized account of powers. ”

(Highmore, 2002)

The ‘poetics’ of everyday life: Need of an inventive language to register the inventiveness of everyday

poetics of everyday life (poetics of/in language, poetics of daily life)

(Tactical) use of non-oppositional binary terms: production- consumption, tactics- strategies, space- place, spoken-written…. • He uses binary terms to challenge the structure of binary thought. • ‘Not only do the terms ‘production’ and ‘consumption’, for example, fold back on each other, but each provides the other with the very essense that would define them.’ • ‘Their successful use seems to depend upon a relational logic that must relate practices to circumstances…’ (orality-scriptual, speaking-writing)

(Highmore, 2002)

Age old ruses Subjectless theory of the everyday life •Main concern is ‘modes of operation’ rather than the ‘subjects’, •Poetics of uses rather than poetics of users, •Disengage from ‘traditional sociopolitical frames of reference’ (which ascribe resistance to identities rather than activities) •The Practice of Everyday Life is peopled with moments and practices rather than subjects

Dropping of (extension or alteration of ) identity categories as a tactical manouvre in his analysis

‘It will be an urban consiousness as much as an individual’s which will guide trajectories through the city. It will be the techniques, gestures, machines, buildings, beliefs, as much as bosses and the bossed, that will be invested the power to dominate and resist.’

(Highmore, 2002)

The terms Strategy & Tactic: Ben Highmore questions the connotations of war within De Certeau’s terms ‘strategy’ and ‘tactic’.

Strategy The metaphorics of war make reader to expect association of the term with the absymal practices of colonization or bleak protocols of scientific management the actual and possible generalization of the term should be clarified. Tactic as calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus, making use of cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers The war analogy: tactics-guerialla combat Tactics don’t operate outside a strategy, they are in the ambigious position of being inside but the other.

The analogy works for understanding the differences of actions however leads to confusion. ‘…tactics as guerilla activity hardly prepare the ground for DeCerteau’s claim that everyday practices (talking, reading, shopping…) is tactical in character.’

(Highmore, 2002)

Murmurs in archive: The problem of archiving the everyday life (both practical and theoratical) Resources? Methods?

everyday an archive yet to be catalogued an archive that might also resist cataloguing

Examples of archiving tradition: Simmel’s, Walter Benjamin’s LeFebvre’s “..for LeFebvre the search for a differentiating totality leads him to treat the urban Environment as an archive of ‘moments’ and forces.” ‘…the everyday doesn’t have a form of attention that is proper to it.’

(Highmore, 2002)

The problem of archiving the everyday life

Foucault, Strategic characterization of everyday life

investigation detached itself from inquisitorial procedure, examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it

De Certeau, tactical aspects of the everyday as irrepressible

Two positive ambitions for archival work

archive of everyday the possibility of putting together archives that don’t work to erase the ‘tactical’ in the everyday. everyday speaking for itself

everydaying of archive possibility that existing archives might be attended to by focusing on the everyday as tenacious irruption and interruption within them

(Highmore, 2002)

The problem of archiving the everyday life

Resources? Methods?

What it says + what it keeps silent

geography of forgotten, suppression of everyday life,

presense of absences

‘A different form of attention is needed that can listen to the silences and see the gaps within the archive as positive signs.’

(Highmore, 2002)

Ben Highmore constructs an analogy between De Certeau’s poetics everyday life and Freud’s pyschoanalysis to illustrate De Certeau’s speculative possibilities of registering the everyday.

unconscious tactics consciousness strategy

Tactics draw on different temporalities which dominate present

Psyhoanalysis is the continuation of the past(s) in present Consciousness cannot completely eradicate the unconscious (symptomatic irruptions of unconscious on conscioussness:obsession, remembered dreams).

There is never a possibility of direct access to the unconscious in consciousness: it never declares itself but insribes itself inobscure and roundabout ways

The tactical side of everday life continually irrupts in the strategic Tactical forms are resistant to the ways of cataloguing and collecting

Freudian Psychoanalysis

De Certeau’s poetics everyday life

(Highmore, 2002)

Understanding limits and possibilities of archive:

Writing versus Speaking (speech)

writing as a strategic act Voice is strategicall reconfigured within scriptual economy.

offering a privileged access to more somatic and repressed aspects of signification

A problematic non-oppositional division of terms For example: Media forms (oral) as a part of scriptual economy

DeCerteau priviliges voices within texts Project of constructing a general poetics of the everyday practices dedicated to practice of listening which is capable of hearing the tactical

Archive of everyday Everydaying archive

Practice of listening the murmurs of life

(Highmore, 2002)

Foregrounding the everyday

Poetics of everyday life as a science of singularity

generality of science

particularity of the actual

An analogy: Freud’s understanding of dreamparticularity of dreams deriving from one’s own experience General interpretation of dream is refused, investigation of conditions that make the interpretation possible. ‘peculiar logic of dreaming’ DeCerteau tries to find ‘peculiar logic of everyday practices’ “ A general poetics of everyday life is a science of the singular in that it allows for the differentiation of ‘the relationships that link eveyday pursuits to particular circumstances’”

(Highmore, 2002)

References: Highmore, B. (2002). Michel de Certeau’s Poetics of Everyday Life in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, Routledge: London and New York, pp. 145-173.

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