The Practice of Everyday Life
by Michel de Certeau
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michel de CerteauEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-12-02
ISBN: 0520236998
Number of pages: 229
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of The Practice of Everyday Life
Book Review: an essential reading for contemporary urban studies
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the most interesting writings on everyday life is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, first published in Paris in 1980). Written in a somehow fragmented and often elliptical style, the book's central point revolves around everyday practices that he distinguishes between strategies and tactics that inform the author's arts de faire. De Certeau's hetereodox view sustains that daily life is defined by regularities, even though they may be recurrent. Far from being made of trivialities as in Erving Goffman's view, and distant from Hans-Georg Gadamer's interactive play, to say nothing of the set of normative social roles as in Talcott Parsons's view, De Certeau's everyday life is made of procedures. From his critical reading of authors such as M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu and M. Detienne, in his metaphorical language everyday life is similar to a battlefield in which procedures develop into practices, i.e. strategies and tactics. The description of the pair of concepts extends from guerrilla analogy allowing De Certeau to breaks with the understanding of daily life as routine and claims that it is rather continuous movement. In this movement, like in the battle ground, strategy refers to a "postulate of power", circumscribed to a variety of terms that De Certeau makes current use of: property, ownership, place, among others. Tactics on the contrary is seen "a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus" are ways of operating, taking "advantage of opportunities" of (daily) life (moving around, talking, reading, cooking, individual creative assemblages, etc). Determined by the "absence of power," (of proper locus) tactics is the "art of the weak" operating insidiously "blow by blow" as in the art of craft.
The daily practice emphasizes how labyrinthine procedures of action function in reference to the procedural logic and dynamic of power relations. The emphasis on daily life as a battlefield, breaks with the normative character of everyday social action and highlights the power relations that relate substantially to the social construction of public life. The concept of everyday practice in De Certeau therefore helps us to consider different ways of space formation and appropriation, as well as breaking social and physical boundaries that demarcate contemporary urban life. This leads De Certeau to another pair of articulated concepts: space and place. Space refers to the absence of previously defined positions and, therefore, it is an order that provides various possible moving experiences in everyday life. Place, on the contrary, calls for certain rather stable configurations. The everyday practices and tactics allows for an understanding of the ruptures in contemporary urban life: an insinuating poetic and war-like inversion of everyday life. This is a fundamental reason why The Practice of Everyday Life is an essential reading for contemporary urban studies.
Rogerio Proença Leite, PhD.
Professor and researcher
Federal University of Sergipe - UFS/Brazil
The Practice of Everyday Life
Summary of The Practice of Everyday Life
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.World Books
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