Michel de Certeau (1984), ÔGeneral IntroductionÕ, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.Steven F. Rendail, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. xi-xxiv.


In examining how individuals can reclaim a sense of autonomy from the forces of commerce and politics, de Certeau asserts that users operate opposing established rules in the most ordinary of circumstances (1984). The concern are the modes of operation, not human subjects as such but their actions, that together form a culture wherein models of action are characterised by users in ways that resist the idea of passive usage or consumption. In this way, the focus is what is made or produced through consumption, what is produced - that de Certeau calls 'poiesis' (from the Greek meaning to create, invent, generate) - examining what is made through using products imposed by a dominant economic order. In his terms, consumers negotiate discipline and power exerted on them by tactical forms and makeshift creativity; through what de Certeau calls 'antidiscipline' (1984: xv; referring both to Foucault and in turn Lefebvre).   

The tension here is between common use and the imposition of order by a dominant elite. Or rather, the relations between consumers and the mechanism of production is made complex - like that between reading (consuming) and speaking (making). In linguistics, this is analogous to the distinction between 'competence' and 'performance'; between the act of speaking and the established rules of that language. In other words, the speech act is privileged in de Certeau's work. Thus,
'speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocator) in a network of places and relations.' (1984: xiii)

The speech act, and ordinary language in particular, thus presents characteristics that are found in other social practices - his examples are walking or cooking (but we might add hacking). These are creative practices, ways of making associated with arts practice in the broadest sense - constituting what has become known as popular culture (the art of walking or the art of cooking, for instance) in which social relations are reconstituted or hacked. Thus, there is self-evidently a political dimension to everyday practices. Everyday practices, such as talking, walking, shopping, cooking, are potentially 'tactical in character' offering new and strategic ways of operating (1984: xix; in the manner of 'rhetoric' as the science of ways of speaking). Hacking might be usefully described in these terms, as as a form of 'bricolage' or a tactical re-using supplied materials and structures (programmes, rules); like speech transforming 'another person's property into a space borrowed' (1984: xxi). He continues: 
'These ways of reappropriating the product-system, ways created by consumers, have as their goal a therapeutics for deteriorating social relations and make use of techniques for re-employment in which we can recognize the procedures of everyday practices. A politics of such ploys should be developed.' 
This would be a politics that engages with 'social activity at play with the order that contains it'. (1984: xxiv)