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: A Prolegomena To Future Research
Summary: 4 Stars
Michel de Certeau- The Practice Of Everyday Life
Foucault has repeatedly insisted that power is invariably accompanied by resistance, that resistance is as ubiquitous as power. Hence his emphasis on the intrinsic reversibility of power, a reversibility which, at its limit, encounters totalitarian domination- the attempt to hypostatize power relations, to render them irreversible. Yet, it is characteristic of Foucault's intellectual honesty that he has never attempted to imbue this resistance with a positive descriptive content, nor has he been tempted to prescribe a definitive program of resistance. This has, understandably, exasperated many who read Foucault's reticence as being symptomatic of a widespread nihilism. This is undoubtedly exacerbated by Foucault's late focus on the `hermeneutics of the subject' and techniques of the self, which could easily be construed as a disastrous amalgam of Baudelairean aestheticism and neo-Stoic asceticism. Of course, what these critics overlook is that this ethical turn is offset by a series of lectures that provide political science with a critical re-orientation. I am speaking of `The Birth of Biopolitics', `Security, Territory, Population', `Society Must Be Defended', which find Foucault grappling with micrological technologies of governmentality and biopower.
Antonio Negri, in his re-appraisal of Deleuze and Foucault, has emphasized that their work, in refraining from crafting haughty manifestos, articulates the conditions by which democracy can be constituted through an ongoing, constructive process of articulation. What this effectively terminates is a whole legacy of political thought, from Machiavelli to Lenin, a lineage that circumambulates around the sublime object of the state. When Foucault exhorts us to `chop off the king's head', he is in a sense reiterating a Lacanian maxim: let us traverse our fantasy, let us exorcise the deadly fascination with the state. Once we insulate our ears from the sad elegies to the nation state, once we part ways with the `sad militants' (Foucault's intro to Anti-Oedipus) and their masochistic rhapsodies to castration, critique and action become possible once more. This is what Negri refers to when he speaks of the immanent, constituent power of the multitude, a creative forging of singularities that no longer have any reference to the state. A new agenda is drafted, one which introduces a new dimension to political praxis: the micropolitical. Before we can speak of grand politics, we must take stock of the molecular, capillary forms of power that circulate through our very bodies, the traces of power that saturate thought. Rimbaud's exhortation, changer la vie, resonates once more- if, in a postmodern `network' world, every relation is political, politics is nothing less than the creation of new forms of commonality.
Michel de Certeau's wonderful book might seem slightly dated. Its problematic is, on a cosmetic level, situated in the same heritage as Debord, Venaigem, the Frankfurt School and Agnes Heller. Compounding matters is the fact that this book was published in the `80s, one and a half decades after cultural Marxism's preoccupation with the `everyday'. What separates it from this strain of Marxist thought is its eschewal of any macrological empancipatory politics in favor of molecular interventions, small, imperceptible forms of resistance that elude mechanisms of control. The fragmentary and elliptical form of its presentation can be vexing- the book should be approached as a `toolbox', an intellectual notebook rather than a cohesive argument. De Certeau says as much when he proposes that it be read as a series of sketches, the elaboration of which is delegated to future researchers. These two provisos aside, I find this to be a marvelous read, an attempt to enact a `reverse-Foucauldianism', mapping the ways in which `regular' men and women circumvent the machinations of a technocratic world, re-appropriating the city for their own use, investing space with desire and pleasure.
First, a few words on the rhetorical acrobatics performed throughout the text. This is a very French piece of writing, its lyrical garrulity and lexical excess bordering on the obscene. On the level of form, this book is very much worth reading, being closer to the likes of Lautreamont, Perec and JMG Le Clezio than any French theorist I can name (perhaps Foucault's early essays, his book on Roussel and The Order Of Things approach the giddying delirium of de Certeau's passages on walking and the train). I can't help but feel that certain of the more poetic sections of this text don't translate very well into English- the syntactic structure of modern French literature just seems florid and awkward when transferred to English. Still, this text is endlessly surprising, studded with beguiling images and elegant declaratives.
Besides this, I think de Certeau does a good deal more in advancing the study of the quotidian than the likes of Baudrillard, Debord and the Frankfurt School, whose phenomenologies lean a bit too much on vulgar/neo-Romantic Marxist conceptions of `false consciousness' and `reification'. In a courageous move, de Certeau deconstructs the imposture of the intellectual as Master (a strategy that we rehearsed continuously in the work of Jacques Ranciere), reinvigorating the figure of the Everyman and rescuing him from the asphyxiating talons of capitalist domination. In contradistinction to the dour narratives that would submerge the person beneath some totalizing principle (the spectacle, simulation, alienation), reducing the individual to a mere cipher for anonymous relations of power, de Certeau attempts to enact a reversal of intellectual imperialism. In this way, he formulates a science that is strictly materialist, empiricist and pluralist, a science that attends closely to the concrete and permits itself to be twisted by what emerges from it. Guided by an unflinching respect for working men and women, it attempts to map `lines of flight', trajectories that irradiate from the most unexpected sources.
Of course, this is not all that he does. de Certeau as not so sanguine as to evacuate critique from his approach altogether, and there are a number of excellent chapters that deal with power and its multiple semiotic regimes. The closing chapter on death and the chapter on language and its relation to the body-which can be read as a dialogue with Lacan's supposition that `the letter kills'- are exemplary in this respect. The richness and breadth of this book are extraordinary. You should read it.
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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