The “practice of everyday life” builds an opposition between space and place that are linked to metaphors, metonymy, and quotation, inversion, tactics or doubling. For De Certeau, space is an ambiguous word that is held up in the present political and cultural situation. In his work, De Certeau combines his scholarly interest in developing a theoretical framework of consumptive and productive activities that are present in everyday lives.
Certeau argues that everyday life is very different from other activities that continually take place in day to day existence bearing in mind that daily life is not only unconscious but also repetitive. Therefore, the works of Certeaus do not only concentrate in studying the popular culture and resistance of regimes in power but instead focuses on means through which individuals move their ideas from the city lives to literary texts (Buchanan, 2000, p.78).
Additionally, Certeau differentiates the concepts of tactics and strategies. In his work, he directly links aspects of strategies with structures and institutions of power in the society. In the same angle, strategies are the main producers while consumers are individuals in society who use tactics outline and dictated by strategies in the environment.
De Certeau argues that “the city” is a notion created by strategies of corporations, government and other institutional entities that are responsible for production of things such as maps that describes a city as a “unified whole entity”. De Certeau illustrates this by using a skyscraper in the city of New York.
But contrastingly, the walker at the street moves tactically and uses strategies instead of applying the outlined plans of the organized institutions. Hence, according to De Certeau, everyday life operates in the same manner by poaching and grabbing in the territories of others, applying the products and rules that are already in existence in a particular culture in a manner that is influential but not determined by the same products and rules.
Consequently, the author’s account of power in today’s life can be related to occurrence of World Wars. After the Second World War for instance, there was establishment of United States centered power in addition to consolidation of various institutions not only through political means but also via cultural and social means.
Hence, when the cold world started, the world was divided into two. This made United States to launch their operations all over the world to challenge domination of soviet Union (Buchanan, 2000, p.90). According to De Certeau, everyday life is the situation of a number of tactics put in place to resistance the broader relations of power.
According to him, even though the most dominant culture progresses via strategies, practices that make use of foundation of marginal and operations, there is still need to apply tactics. Therefore, according to De Certeau, calculated actions in power relations can be determined by lack of sufficient locus and the space that is left by others as a result of not using proper tactics makers other individuals to occupy the left space.
Thus, the political situation of the Second World War was marked via profound change in aspects such as social and political relations of the authority. The capitalists systems were reconfiguring themselves while at the same time reconstituting their institutions and structures in the midst of being confronted with anti-systematic political actions and thoughts (Meagan, 1996, p.155).
According to De Certeau, if a nation or an individual emerges victorious in a given war by applying tactics, the nation or person should surrender the won power as this makes the victory to be temporary.
Therefore, application of tactics in a political situation can not result into structural change since use of tactics only gives the most powerful leaders in the society a chance to engage themselves in reforms which are pre-emptive as a way of counteracting the employed tactics by the rivals.
However, use of tactics in power relations only results into a continuous trial and error hunt in the “practice of everyday life” with an aim of establishing the best angles of attack and the weak points of the opponent.
Furthermore, the outlined works of De Certeau provides a way of enriching accounts of various scholars on resistance issue. According to Meagan (1996, p.155-157), De Certeau’s work can be used to gramscianize by adding the value of resistance on it. De Certeau further points out the two sided aspect of Foucault’s view on power technology.
He achieves this by distinguishing the elements between mechanisms of an institutional base with that of group strategies as an angle through which political power can be exercised in addition to identifying subjects which employ power by using various tactics.
Therefore, the strategic theory and the employed tactics in political relations can communicate the hegemonic relation while countering the hegemonic authority established by other scholars like Foucault. According to De Certeau (1984 p.330) in political relations it is important for both nations and individuals to introduce a means of thinking and re-thinking the tensions created in the power technology.
But in spite of Certeau introduction of various views in political tension, he contradicts the views of Gramsci. Gramsci holds that there exists ontological distinction which is absolute between tactics and strategies. On the other hand, Gramsci puts forward the existing difference between position war and maneuver war in addition to putting emphasis on the existing dialectical coexistence between the two.
In the same sense even though Certeau provides an important insight into the war of maneuver, he fails to give an elaborate account and position on how war modality can result into another war (De Certeau 1998, p.28).
On the existence difference between strategies and tactics, De Certeau points out that, political strategies need a subject such as a city that is so distinct from the environment entity. Furthermore, strategies require suitable place which he later describes as either institutionalized, regularized or rule governed location and they use the same in coming up with political relations with either their competitors or clients in the political sense(De Certeau, 1998, p.25).
On the other hand, tactics have no suitable localization and the entities are not separated from one another and just like wars, they take place in the territory of the opponent. Therefore, politicians use tactics in establishing political relations, whereby they take every opportunity and apply disparate mechanisms in gaining a momentary advantage over the others.
In conclusion, according to De Certeau, everyday life practices in political and popular cultural aspects are tactical in nature. This is because they quite often involve victorious conquers of the weak over the strong individuals and the same case is applied in both politics and culture by use of clever tactics in addition to having proper knowledge on how to elude form reality in the pretext of power and influence of existing popular cultural aspects.
References
Buchanan.I. 2000. Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist, London: Sage
Meagan, M. 1996. Banality in Cultural Studies.London and New York: Edward Arnold
De Certeau, M. 1984.The Practice of Everyday Life trans. S. Rendall Berkeley: Californian University Press.
De Certeau, M. 1998. Walking in the city. London: Modern Curriculum Press