Michel de Certeau - The Practice of Everyday Life

I am no stranger to highly academic writing, but this book was a particular challenge to concentrate and understand. I often found myself ‘meditating’ rather than actively reading and would go back and reread only to realize I’d done the same thing again. This frustration lasted until a poignant thesis from the book set upon my brain: reading is a creative endeavor. The act of reading is the act of physically walking around in a book, rearranging the words, determining meaning, making it one’s own. The ‘meditation’ the book was throwing me into was my own response to the information I was reading--consciously or not. The Practice of Everyday Life showed me how reading a book can be like listening to music. 

In reality, the activity of reading has…all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected [sic.] by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments ‘lost’ in reading (xxi).

Reading as an art is not the only concept in which Certeau reframes how we consume the products of a productivist economy. He approaches everything from entertainment, city building, speaking, believing, and even cooking through the lens of a society comprised of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers.’ Through this understanding, we learn that although the creativity of the non-producers of culture is left unsigned, unwritten and unknown, there is a highly artful production by which ‘consumers’ communicate and tell their stories. 

In chapters one and two, Certeau theorizes an ‘ordinary language.’ In locale (place) and culture, ordinary language pervades which cannot be understood by philosophy or science. This ordinary language is the everyday reality of consumers. Though, importantly, it is not the language of the consuming class but the language to which the consuming class is subjected. Ironically, just like how Spanish culture was adopted and changed by indigenous Americans after it was forced upon them, the producers have no way of understanding this ordinary language. Philosophy and science attempt to translate this language into the language of the producing class; however, the ‘speech act’ of ordinary language cannot “easily be grasped, recorded, transported, [nor] examined in secure places (20).” To analyze ordinary language, philosophy and science seek to analyze an object with which they are in the same situation: “both are organized by the practical activity with which they are concerned, both are determined by rules they neither establish nor see clearly…(11)” 

It is through this language that consumers create their own unsigned products. A particularly poignant example of how the consuming class exerts its will on its subjugators is what is known as la perruque in French. It is a concept I know all too well, having read a good chunk of this very book during work.

Take, for example, what in France is called la perruque, “the wig.” La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer…La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room…the worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family through spending his time this way (25-26). 

At my job, my labor is intellectual. I do not use a lathe, a table saw or any heavy machinery. To steal time from my employer (which is a necessary function of society in Certeau’s estimation), I collect the scraps of intellect that fall off my mental labor and use them to create art. This art is free. This art exists only to stimulate my own desire for creativity. La perruque, for me, is the act of stealing back my mental labor and putting it towards something that gratifies my own sense of self. In this way, I am redirecting the proceeds (profit) of my labor inwards.

In Part III of The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau narrows his focus to spatiality, specifically how our cities are built and how we move around them. Certeau analyzes how a city is produced and consumed. In the space which constitutes a city, producers want to simplify and subjugate the ordinary language (life) of consumers in order to understand and influence what they consume. This is done by organizing our cities panoptically. 

Foucault discerns at this level the move (le geste) which has organized the discursive space. This move is not…the epistemological and social move of isolating excluded people from normal social intercourse in order to create the space that makes possible a rational order; rather it is the miniscule and ubiquitously reproduced move of ‘gridding’ (quadriller) a visible space in such a way as to make its occupants available for observation and ‘information’ (46-47).

When consumers become too creative, too unified, too connected, the structure of our cities and how we move about them becomes authentically unknowable, and therefore unobservable, for the producing class. The automobiles and highways that dissect our neighborhoods present us with the notion of freedom and creativity, but are indeed gridlike ‘panoptic procedures’ designed to divide and control a population of consumers. 

To combat this isolation, consumers turn to stories that connect themselves with one another. In stories, we recognize ourselves, even when we do not realize it. 

[stories] represent a new variant in the continuous series of narrative documents which, from folktales providing a panoply of schemas for action to the Descriptions des Arts of the classical age, set forth ways of operating in the form of tales. This series includes therefore the contemporary novel as well as the micro-novels often constituted by ethnological descriptions of the techniques of craftwork, cooking, etc. A similar continuity suggests a certain theoretical relevance of narrativity so far as everyday practices are concerned (70).

Stories (and games for that matter) create a way of operating and an understanding of culture that enriches the ordinary language of the consuming class. These discursive strategies are similarly unreducible to philosophy and science as they cannot be simplified nor condensed from their original form. The tales of everyday life are supremely recognizable yet unknowable to the consuming class. It is this juxtaposition that causes art to lie outside the realm of calculated knowledge. 

To further set up this distinction, Certeau quotes an anecdote from Kant: “where I come from, [Kant] writes (in meinem Gegenden: in my region, in my ‘homeland’) ‘the ordinary man’...says…that charlatans and magicians…depend on knowledge (you can do it if you know the trick), whereas tightrope dancers…depend on an art (73).” The feeling, the unknowable, the tact and grace, these are the stories we tell that connect us to one another. When cities are built to observe and confine us, art is freeingly unseeable and unsimplifiable. We use everyday tactics (we might call it living) to pursue an everyday art--and it happens, most often, outside of understanding. When I write poetry at work, when a bartender jokes around with her coworkers, when a handyman builds his daughter a toy on company time, we create practical stories and art.

this tact ties together (moral) freedom, (esthetic) creation, and a (practical) act---three elements already present in the practice of ‘la perruque,’ that modern-day example of an everyday tactic (74).

This is the producer's biggest fear: that consumers might remain unseen, un-understandable, create their own value in their own communities. To this end, an attempt is made to limit ‘waste’ or feed it back into a system like a turbocharger. We might call this ‘progress.’ Productivist (capitalist) progress, though, happens necessarily at the expense of consumer’s moral freedom and creativity which, as Certeau illuminates, “repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims: the profit system generates a loss which in the multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into ‘expenditure’ (94-95).” Consumers who successfully turn invisible are cast aside, left behind by the productivist economy who supplied the cloak, causing strain on a system that relies on visibility. We are never more free than when the economy ceases to understand us. 

To prevent invisibility, producers (who are tightly woven into the fabric of the ruling class) create laws and social codes. Laws govern panoptically on our bodies. Certeau asserts that it is the code of law that in fact creates bodies.

Is there a limit to the machinery by which a society represents itself in living beings and makes them its representations? Where does the disciplinary apparatus end that displaces and corrects, adds or removes things from these bodies, malleable under the instrumentation of so many laws? To tell the truth, they become bodies only by conforming to these codes. Where and when is there ever anything bodily that is not written, remade, cultured, identified by the different tools which are part of a social symbolic code (147)?

Laws create bodies in an opposite fashion than ordinary language does. An ordinary language is one that is spoken and heard, whereas the language of law is one that is written and told. Certeau illuminates how the substitution of oral tradition for written tradition, which is only accessible by producers since consumers have been subjugated to ordinary language, has “brought about the replacement of custom by abstract law, the substitution of the State for traditional authorities, and the disintegration of the group to the advantage of the individual (168).” This can be seen clearly in how modern American Christianity devolved into a body of laws that dictate what others can and cannot do. We can see clearly where scriptural adherence has overtaken the oral tradition that originally founded the Church. This is a relatively new phenomenon in Christianity as Certeau explains: 

Formerly, the church, which instituted a social division between its intellectual clerks and the ‘faithful,’ ensured the Scriptures the status of a ‘Letter’ that was supposed to be independent of its readers and in fact, possessed by its exegetes: the autonomy of the text was the reproduction of sociocultural relationships within the institution whose officials determined what parts of it should be read (172)

Through the fracturing of Protestant Christianity in America, however, there are always American Christians who are actively reclaiming community through oral tradition, circumventing  the centralized power of the Church to be freer. In this way, we see that, “[the] creativity of the reader grows as the institution that controlled it declines (172).” If producers wish to maintain control of the interpretations of scripture (laws), they must create apologetical or hermeneutical writing or else create a new body of writing entirely. 

Understanding the relationship between writing, laws and control makes clear why the United States has one of the largest bodies of written law in the world. As the producers’ understanding of consumers begins to wane, as it is beginning to cyclically in American Protestantism, more laws (and interpretations of laws) are written. This desire for power, bolstered by a seemingly infinite body of writing has initiated a further substitution: religion for politics. Vehemently held religious convictions have become political convictions driven by producers' desire to see and understand the stories that consumers tell. Politics is religion. Politics is believing, “but for this very reason, [political organizations] seem to have been haunted by the return of a very ancient (pre-Christian) and very ‘pagan’ alliance between power and religion (181).” Politics, power, religion, scripture, laws, are tools used by producers and bolstered by the written word, to see and thereby panoptically control consumers. 

How then, do consumers become or remain invisible when “‘[modernization], modernity itself, is writing,’ says François Furet (168).” As I alluded to earlier, to become invisible, one must be or create ample ‘waste’ products, but as progress moves to reintegrate waste into the productivist system, remaining invisible becomes harder and harder. La perruque still serves as a valuable way for consumers to redirect profits towards their own creativity and vitality, but a productivist economy will always find a way to turn vitality into profits. Certeau finds that the only truly invisible members of society are the dead and dying: “The dying are outcasts because they are deviants in an institution organized by and for the conservation of life (190).” In lieu of the death of the productivist economy, the metaphorical, spiritual, and physical death of consumers is the only way to freedom and creativity. Living long enough to die, living through death by tasting the savor that comes with invisibility is all that is left to live for in the modern productivist economy. 

I don’t want to kick off

No sir, no way,

before I’ve tasted

the taste that tortures me

the strongest taste of all.

I don’t want to kick off

before I’ve tasted

the savor of death.

-Boris Vian