Michel de Certeau - The practice of everyday life
https://midnightmediamusings.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/the-practice-of-everyday-life-by-michel-de-certeau-a-summary/
De Certeau’s essay centres on the idea that ordinary people are not merely passive and submissive consumers but active and can manipulate the environments around them through everyday actions. De Certeau divides society into two groups – the producers of culture (or the ruling class) and the users (the ordinary people). He also claims that culture is not just made up of products and systems, but of ways users interact with and appropriate these. De Certeau is interested in the operations and actions people use every day to resist the ruling structures and powers. [...] He gives an example of Indiansappropriating the culture forced on them by Spanish colonizers. Instead of rejecting it, they used it for the purposes the Spanish did not intend or understand. According to de Certeau, a similar thing is happening in consumer culture. Ordinary people (who he believes have become a marginalised majority) exercise this resistance through appropriating images, products and space to their own interests within the framework laid out by the elite.
De Certeau differentiates between “strategies” and “tactics” to explain this power struggle. A strategy is the overarching framework of the ruling institutions and their objectives (e.g. to discipline or gain profit), whereas tactics are the individual actions included in everyday activities such as walking, talking and reading. Unlike strategies, tactics do not seek profits and are not results of planning, but depend of the situations and opportunities.
