CHAPTER 8: for de certeau the everyday is hidden and evasive. to attempt to attend to it requires a leap of faith. nothing could be more damaging to the study of the everyday that to greet it with a prescriptive “political” assesment. to reimagine it for the everyday: what would a politics be like that emerged from the everyday instead of one that was applied to the everyday. De certeau attempts a production of poetics of the everyday. poetics need to be understood bth as an inquiry into the forms that the everyday takes and as an iventive acitivty within language and life. hi writing insists on employing a series of binary terms: consumption vs production, reading vs writing, tactics vs strategies, space vs place, spoken vs written. the use of binary terms challenge the structure of binary thought.
Pierre Mayol’s intention is to study the way that the organization of everyday life is articulated on at least two registers. mayol divides these registers into behaviors and benefits. the correlation of everyday life and war which the terms strategy and tactics generate is useful for making vivid the formal differences of actions.
consciousness cannot completely eradicate the unconscious. there is never the possibility of direct access to the unconscious in conscious. it never declares itself but always inscribes itself in obscure and roundabout ways.
De Certeaus general poetics of everyday life evidences a tension implicit in the desire to produce a science of singularity. on one hand the generality of a science and on the other particularity of the actual. a general poetics of the everyday life is a science of the singular in that it allows for the differentiation of the relationships that link everday pursuits to particular circumstances.
