Product Description

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology - to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16095 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

Review
"The Practice of Everyday Life...offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau and why more of us have not done so. For one, the work all but defies definition. History, sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology all come within de Certeau's ken... De Certeau acts very much like his own ordinary hero, manipulating, elaborating, and inventing on the scientific authority that he both denies and requires."-Priscilla P. Clark, Journal of Modern History "De Certeau's book is to be praised for setting out some of the practical procedures, in which we are all implicated, that are used to invent what appears to us as our reality, and for finding at least some ways in which the totalitarian nature of our current systems of sense-making can be subverted."-John Shotter, New Ideas in Psychology

About the Author
The late Michel de Certeau was Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales in Paris and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Customer Reviews

how to survive living
this is a book I've been charged library fines for. i found it impossible to read straight through, I've been dipping in, reading it in chunks as the whole starts to make sense. That's why it's so brilliant - de Certeau has watched us in our everyday lives and unravelled the way we (consciously or not) play along with or undermine the games we have to play in order to live in cities.

He's seen us at work, blagging company time and resources for our own ends, and he's noticed and explains how we behave towards each other on the tube. He's been sitting in crowds and on the train, and he's been walking the streets. He's breaking down without breaking out of the spaces we live in.

This text can change the way you perceive what surrounds you. Wherever you are, it transforms people-watching into something strange and different, because it's suddenly all structures and sequences. It's quite disorientating (remember the story about when the centipede was asked how it managed to walk, and it promply forgot) but it offers so much as compensation. I'll read this in a week and think I've got it all wrong, but that's the beauty of it.

Cultural Studies for the optimist.
If you are reading this review while you are sat at you desk pretending to work then this book is for you!

Read it in conjunction with Paul E Willis's 'Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young' and you've finally got a political and thoretical justification for doing more or less whatever you want.