Politics of the Popular (Certeau)

In his article “The Practice of Everyday Life,” Michel de Certeau explores the ‘ways of operating,’ or everyday practices, in order to articulate them. Certeau focuses on consumer production, which involves usage, consumption, the procedures of everyday creativity, the formal structure of practice, the marginality of a majority; also, he focuses on the tactics of practices, which involves trajectories, tactics, and rhetorics, and reading, talking, dwelling, and cooking. In the last category, Certeau writes that, “To describe these everyday practices that produce without capitalizing, that is, without taking control over time, one starting point seemed inevitable because it is the ‘exorbitant’ focus of contemporary culture and its consumption: reading” (552).

In continuation, Certeau writes that, “Reading thus introduces an ‘art’ which is anything but passive. It resembles rather than art whose theory was developed by medieval poets and romancers: an innovation infiltrated into the text and even into the terms of a tradition” (553). Because reading does not entail passive consumption, Certeau seems to be arguing that consumers are very involved in their culture, and also contribute to it. Another example of an everyday practices that are not passive are holiday celebrations and parties. They are rooted into tradition and encompass a complex producer-consumer relationship.

Certeau’s article was an interesting read overall, and it seems to be successful in achieving its goal to “make such a discussion possible; that is, by means of inquiries and hypotheses, to indicate pathways for further research” (545). The ideas seem strong, and he gives sufficient examples and thorough explanations. In addition, I enjoyed his closing lines:

“But our research has concentrated above all on the uses of space, on the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place, on the complex processes of the art of cooking, and on the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires – an art of manipulating and enjoying”