De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988. Print. Summary:De Certeau wants to challenge perceptions of power relationships and transgressions of those power structures by positing a new understanding. He creates four characteristics of “speech acts” as “usage or consumption,” “the procedures of everyday creativity,” “the formal structure of practice,” and “the marginality of a majority” (xii–xvi). In addition he establishes two terms to help demonstrate how actions operate as speech acts. There is strategy, which is the power inherent in a discourse and is unable to se itself, the large dominant power. Then there is tactic, which is the power of intelligence of the everyday and which are the small ways in which people subvert the strategy placed upon them. The spaces he writes about can be both physical and/or theoretical.Response:The chapter that raised the most questions for me was the one on Walking in the City. While I had heard his work mentioned before regarding space, until I read this chapter, I was not clear on how a space could be a rhetorical act. It is a little clearer to me how people navigate a space can be a tactical choice that challenges the strategy put in place. In an interesting way, the effect of a person who constructs a strategy can affect people long after the first person has died or moved away. For example, when de Certeau wrote about New York, I could not help but think about the strategic decisions made by urban planners and developers of the city that now still influence how present New Yorkers live and the tactics they use everyday.Connections/Questions:Similar to Foucault and Adorno and Horkheimer, de Certeau is interested in power relationships and how they pertain to language. Where as they all look at power regarding dominant structures, de Certeau seems particularly interested in how the individual navigates within or against them. Also similar to Foucault, de Certeau would agree that language gives agency to the individual. Similar to Britton, de Certeau points out the need for people to retell and even the joy or surprise that can come from doing this. When de Certeau writes about Propp’s categorization of fairy tales and how these functions, it is similar to how Bakhtin creates constructs for the epics and old stories. |
Quotations:“By adopting the point of view of enunciation—which is the subject of our study—we privilege the act of speaking; according to that point of view, speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and a place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations. These four characteristics of the speech acts can be found in many other practices (walking, cooking, etc.)” (xiii).“Art is thus a kind of knowledge that operates outside the enlightened discourse which it lacks” (66). “If the art of speaking is itself an art of operating and an art o thinking, practice and theory can be present in it” (77). |
