The Practice of Everyday Life and Congolese Popular Painting

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984

Sanne Fleur Sinnige

Capita Selecta – December 19, 2022
Right: Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, Colonie Belge, c. 1970-1973. Acrylic on canvas. Institut de Théologie Saint François de Sales, Lubumbashi
(DRC)
 "In line with Michel de Certeau, whose Practice of Everyday
Life (first published in 1984) remains a precious antecedent for
visual analysis […] visual analysis is committed to understand
the everyday practices of a ‘tactics of seeing – a making do
that plays tricks on the established powers'."

Mieke Bal, "Visual Analysis", from: The SAGE Handbook of

Cultural Analysis, edited by Tony Bennett and John Frow, 2008,
p. 178.
 Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)

1974: a governmental institution commissioned De Certeau to study France's popular culture to inform political and financial decision-making (Wild 2021).

--> L'Invention du Quotidien (1980)

The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life ([1980]/1984)

Studies the modes of operation by 'users' (or

'consumers'), who, despite their status as dominated
elements in society, are not to be considered passive or
docile, but actively create 'culture'.
Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life ([1980]/1984)

Core elements of his study:

1. Usage/consumption - ways of using products imposed by dominant
economic order [e.g., representations]

= poiesis (manipulation, (re)appropriation, bricolage, adaption of dominant

cultural economy to user's own interests, clandestine forms of creativity,
artisan like inventiveness, clever tricks, knowing how to get away with
things, maneuvres, making do, tactics…)

= difference between production of the image and the

secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization.
Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life ([1980]/1984)

2. The procedures of everyday creativity, or, ways of

operating = antidiscipline

≠ Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975)

"If it is true that the grid of “discipline” is everywhere
becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the
more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being
reduced to it, what popular procedures (also “miniscule” and
quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline
and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally
what “ways of operating” form the counterpart, on the
consumer’s (or “dominee”’s?) side (de Certeau 1984: xiv)."
Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life ([1980]/1984)

3. Description + Literature Study =

"tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the

weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political
dimension to everyday practices" (De Certeau 1984, xvii).
Fernand Deligny, Wandering
line, c. 1950s. Archives
Jacques Allaire and Marie-
Dominique Guibal.
Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life ([1980]/1984)

Strategy:
• The calculus of power relationships by a powerful entity
relying on a space that can be claimed as its own

Tactic:
• Calculus determined by the absence of locus [temporal
victory over space]
• Isolated actions, blow by blow, opportunities seized on the
wing, poaching, guileful ruses
• = art of the weak
• E.g., reading (of a text or image), speaking, cooking.