Discussion of Michel de Certeau's Idea that Everyday Life is Said to Exist Between the Lines - Term Paper Example

Everyday Life Russian are distinct in their projection of the unconsciousness in their writing. Dostoevsky (2006) used a series of dreams sequences in his Crime and Punishment in the mid-nineteenth century, almost half a century before the advent of Freud. The operation of the unconscious has served as a motive in their writing and sometimes has provided subtext for them. Tolstoy has also written about his perception of the working of the unconscious in his diary: “I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldnt remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if I had dusted it and forgot - that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” (Leo Tolstoys Diary, 1897, cited in Art As Technique by Victor Schklovsky, 1897) In this naïve narrative manner, Tolstoy has described the complexity in the working of the unconscious. But a closer look can tell us that it is more about the ‘habitual’ task that the individual is not conscious of. After the initial failure to remember the individual also feel that it is impossible to remember. The expression that the failure to remember that he has done the act is tantamount to the fact that he has not done it. The last sentence is more emphatic about the necessity of recording the act done. Three questions can be taken from the quote in order to read a hypertext that the observation appears to relate to. Is the implication of the last sentence serves as a metaphor, which links it to post-modernist doubt in the traditional representation of reality? If habit is responsible for the facile recognition of the inability to be conscious of something, then under what circumstances is the habit formed? How is the production (dusting) of the individual to be accounted? One of the central methodological issues to the theorists of cross-cultural studies is how to relate and conceptualize the existence of the everyday life that is always at odds with the archival representation of life. The heterogeneity of experiences is the unavoidable constituent of every day and the theorists of cross-cultural studies and comparative ethics must rely on heterology in order to capture the differential pattern of experiential reality. The totalizing and essentializing trend of the conventional historiography has tended to ignore this difference as an undifferentiated whole. The existence of the ‘other’ has never been acknowledged, for example, in the Western culture and its archives. Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), a French and cultural theorist has demanded that in order to retrieve the actual representation of the every day the archival records are to be read in between the lines. Attempt at totalisation by the Western culture has used the grand narratives of enlightenment, Christianity, progress of man, Marxism that has “erased and ignored the everyday” and thus the society is found to be “oblivious towards everyday” (Highmore, 2010, p. 26). This totalizing trend has led to an ignorance of the plural experiences. Archives of the popular culture as the repository of everyday life (belonging to both the native culture and the other culture that it encountered in the process of colonization), have been attacked by the contemporary cultural theorists for its misrepresentation. Highmore (2010) has delineated the realistic problem that lies in the edification of archives. The first thing to be considered in the organization of an archive that seeks to register the mass observation is what the archive should include and what exclude. The organization of the elements in the archive is even more problematic, as it includes letters, diaries, photographs, observations and so on. If the editor wants to allow the everyday ‘speak for itself’ then the archive would assume an unmanageable volume. Therefore the necessity to impose a limit on the material in the process of organization would curtail its ability to speak from within. Highmore (2010) observes that it is impossible not to submerge the infinity of the polyphonic everyday experiences under editorial voice. Consequently, the construction of archive oscillates between two extremes—on one hand, there is a necessity to accumulate the unmanageable singularities of details and on the other, there needs to be a form that can transform the contradictions into a well-organized narrative (Highmore, 2010, p. 26). But it is not justified to the theorists that the ‘particularity of the Particular’ should be erased and generalized for thee purpose of achieving an organic whole and this poses the challenge of balancing the details at the microscopic level that is supposed to constitute everyday and the macroscopic level that imposes totality through generalization. Nepolitano & Pratten (2007) observe that de Certeau has presented some of his concerns around the ‘practice of writing history’ and his works highlight the violence intrinsic to the method of writing history, which has led post-colonialist critics like Spivak and Said to attack the Western canons and epistemological assumptions. Chief argument of these critics regards the Western tendency of misrepresenting the plural subjectivity of the ‘other’. The above-mentioned writers note, Certeau “has called for epistemological self-awareness and ethical commitment from historians as they reconstruct the relationship between past and text” (Nepolitano & Pratten, 2007, p.3). In his influential book, The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau (1988) proposes new ways in which ordinary man and contemporary theorists can uncover the passivity and ‘rule-bound models of structuralist analysis’ to have access to the essence of everyday life as it was and is (Nepolitano & Pratten, 2007, p. 3). De Certeau has laid importance on the subjectivity of human beings that focuses on ethnographic details and defies the theorization. The skepticism generated by the post-modernist perspectives of questioning the validity of epistemological truth and ontological meaning leads to the understanding of language and culture as the forces behind the formation of power and identity (Ortner, 2005: 45; cited in Nepolitano & Pratten, 2007). Ortner also differentiates between the subjectivity in its real and lived expression and the ‘subjectification’, which denotes the process of influencing subjectivity through the critical encounter between the state of mind and the forces within the culture that ‘express, shapes and constitutes those states of mind’ (Ortner, 2005: 45 cited in Nepolitano & Pratten, 2007, p. 4). An understanding and if necessary a deconstruction of historical texts and the scriptures is helpful in revealing the everyday life in its true form with the singularity of the experience and subjectivity. A fragmented and ungeneralised form of subjectivity can be obtained according to Certeau by constantly connecting the historical narratives with the internalized subjectivity. As mentioned before the formation of habit is a crucial area of discussion. In the theorization of everyday as being something distinct from the representation by archives, the habit is not conceptualized as an instinctual repetitive response to stimuli as Pavlov took it to be. The formation of subject is more complex involving the unconscious functioning of an individual. The essential history of a repressed culture is found in the practices of an ethnically identical group, who are to be defined with their words, movement and habits. But these habits are not intrinsic to them, although in their externalities they appear to be so. Despite the non-elite orientation of their practices, their locations are “delimited by overt and covert operations of power holding elites and their accompanying ‘systems of representation’” (Franklin, 2004, p. 50). These culturally delimiting forces are resisted, ignored and endured in the work place and at home. Franklin believes that the “everyday evidences a discernible form and conceals a knowable logic” (Buchanan, 2000, 90 cited in Franklin, 2004, p.50). An understanding of this logic, the silences, ignored practices and the influenced habit and subjectivity should be central to the study of culture. This subject formation is an unconscious process of which no evidence can be afforded by the official records. Habit is formed through the action-reaction process in inter-subjective interactions. Following Freud, Certeau illustrated the formation of subject as the result of interaction among individuals “as a member of a collective—relation that operate at conscious and unconscious levels of recognition that coalesce within lifetimes and through succeeding generations” (Franklin, 2004, p.50). It becomes clear how Tolstoy’s reference to the inattention to the active response to a situation has been broad cultural phenomenon. According to Vis, “The practices of everyday life are simply ways of operation, distinct because of their repetitive and partially unconscious nature” (Vis, 2010, p. 35). A society is an organism that has been shaped with innumerable atoms in thee form individuals and the relation among the individuals is vital to the organic nature of the state or society. This relation determines the subjectivity of an individual the ‘plurality of the relational determinations’ interacts within the individual. Certeau is concerned with the system of operation within the society that “compose a culture and models of action that users adhere to, whilst being dominated in society as consumers” (Vis, 2010, p.36). Here Tolstoy’s observation regarding the unrecognisability of the production is relevant. One of the most important components of the struggle to retain identity is to be conscious of the production and consumption within a society dominated by a foreign culture. It is necessary to mention in this connection that Certeau repeatedly resorted to the discursive effect of the civilizing process undertaken by the West. He believes that the way to rescue the subjectivity is through the exploration of the relation between the dominant culture and the so-called ‘other’. The reason that such a tunneling method of understanding the construction of remix culture is possible is because the consumption pattern of the colonized has resisted the values and the assumptions of the colonizer and in this way the colonized has diminished the value of the colonizer. It is in this sense that consumption has been considered to be a form of production. “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of the others” (de Certeau, 1988, xii, cited in Vis, 2010, p.3 6). When Tolstoy speaks of someone who could have established the validity of the claim to accomplish something, it signifies the cultural responsibility of the thinker to recuperate the heterogeneity of different identity embedded within a society. Here arises the moment of reading in between the lines of the archival records to rescue the tension that was going on between the dominating culture and the colonized. This ‘consumer production’ (de Certeau, 1988, p. xii) has been clearly illustrated by B. N. Vis, who has embarked on the context of migration to enlighten this theory. According to him the residing nation of immigrants imposes their culture on the migrants and one of the way of imposing its national order on the migrant is through its production, which are to be consumed by the migrants. But the interesting fact after its production, the system can no longer indicate how then products are made use of. The migrant population in the new culture still acts in a way they were habituated with in their own nation. Thus they still carry out many actions by using the product of the new nation and in this way the product itself become ‘archaeologically unrecognizable’ (Burmeister, 2000 cited in Vis, 2010, p.36). In this way the archeological products become witness to the cultural fusion and the inherent tension between the cultural forces. In conclusion one may note that the everyday life of the mass can be understood in its real nature by poring over the nature of consumption of the colonized and the migrants. The common consumers of a culture are to be distinguished from the elites, who impose the culture and try to monitor the consumption but eventually fails. The representation of ‘other’ and the artifacts of a culture as in archives have no veracity. Certeau rationalizes, “The presence and circulation of a representation […] tells us nothing about what it is for ots users. We must first analyze its manipulation by users who are not its makers” (de Certeau, 1988, xiii cited in Vis, 2010, p. 37). The approach to the suppressed that was always present within the Western culture is not new to the post-modernist theorists but Certeau’s theorization is distinct because of certain proposition regarding the subject formation as the culturally envisaged form of interaction. The suggestion of the archeological limitation and also its value for understanding the formation of subject is novel. His differentiation between representation and practices has led to the necessity to use the archives in a reconstructive and deconstructive manner. “One of his points of departure was the assumption that images are fiction given to the eye that organize people’s everyday life” (Struver, 2005, p. 68) . References 1. Highmore B. (2010) Everyday life and cultural theory: an introduction, London: Routledge 2. Franklin M. (2004), Postcolonial Politics, Internet and Everyday life, London: Routledge 3. Napoilitano, V and D. Pratten, (2007), Michel de Certeau: Ethnography and the challenge of plurality, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Vol.15, No.1, pp. 1–12, available at: http://individual.utoronto.ca/v_napolitano/documents/intro-napolitano-pratten.pdf (accessed on August 20, 2010) 4. de Certeau, M. (1988), The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press 5. Struver A. (2005), Stories of the boring border, LIT Verlag Munster 6. Dostoevsky, P. (2006), Crime and Punishment, Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm (accessed on August 23, 2010) 7. Vis B. N. (2010), Built Environment, constructed societies, Sidestone Press Read More