Citation:
Certeau, M. D. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
Summary:
De Certeau explains that the experience of every day life is totally untranslatable into language. Rhetoric's power lies in ones ability to manipulate the coloring of the experience in order to impact an audience. Furthermore, disciplines -- and one's role within the discipline -- plays a rhetorical part in the individual'scommunications within the discipline. We compose rhetoric through our actions as much as we are enacted through by disciplinary rhetorics. Therefore, authority is both enacted and inscribed. The scientist may create knowledge through a discipline, but the discipline provides him ethos to say whatever he wants to. Certeau writes, "Paradoxically, the latter become invisible in the universe of codification and generalized transparency. Only the effects (the quantity and locus of the consumed products) of these waves that flow in everywhere remain perceptible. They circulate without being seen, discernible only through the objects that they move about and erode. The practices of consumption are the ghosts of the society that carries their name" (Kindle Location 682-684). Power structures are not only written, but inscribed. We write as we act just as much as we write what we act.
Response: De Certeau is especially interested in the relationship between language, power, space, and time. Language acts as a "tactic" is a process of reacting to/within the strategies of power. We develop understandings of language and its use through experience, cultivating a form of "metis," which is an intimate knowledge of experience that gives one a tactical advantage, or home field advantage. In this way, language can act as a strategy in the process of maintaining power.
Questions/Connections:
De Certeau follows the same idea proposed by Focoult, that authority is both enacted and inscribed. According to Focoult, language has power built into it, but it enacts power as it is used. Additionally, De Certeau shows a strong leaning toward inter-textuality. He wants to know how language is used, not the ways of using: "Paradoxically, the latter become invisible in the universe of codification and generalized transparency. Only the effects (the quantity and locus of the consumed products) of these waves that flow in everywhere remain perceptible. They circulate without being seen, discernible only through the objects that they move about and erode. The practices of consumption are the ghosts of the society that carries their name" (Kindle Locations 682-684).
(For further consideration) - How does de Certeau use play/games to describe his theory?
we can make textual objects that signify an art and solidarities; we can play the game of free exchange, even if it is penalized by bosses and colleagues when they are not willing to "turn a blind eye" on it; we can create networks of connivances and sleights of hand; we can exchange gifts; and in these ways we can subvert the law that, in the scientific factory, puts work at the service of the machine and, by a similar logic, progressively destroys the requirement of creation and the "obligation to give." I know of investigators experienced in this art of diversion, which is a return of the ethical, of pleasure and of invention within the scientific institution. Realizing no profit (profit is produced by work done for the factory), and often at a loss, they take something from the order of knowledge in order to inscribe "artistic achievements" on it and to carve on it the graffiti of their debts of honor. To deal with everyday tactics in this way would be to practice an "ordinary" art, to find oneself in the common situation, and to make a kind of perruque of writing itself.
Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life (Kindle Locations 591-598). Kindle Edition.
