Abstract
Challenging the Neo-Marxist and Situationist construction of the ‘everyday’, where consumer is a one-dimensional persona – a passive recipient (consumer) of ‘high culture’ produced by the power elites – Michel de Certeau, through his theory of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’, flips the production-consumption rhetoric to interpret consumption as a creative act of production. Through ‘tactics’ of subversion, the hoi polloi unconsciously resists institutionalised power (a school-going student customising her uniform, for instance), producing little cultures of dissent. Reading it with Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypes reveals a universal pattern of unconscious human behaviour – a collective subconscious archetypical phenomenon – where everyday acts of subversion become manifestations of a timeless human tendency to resist authority. Such a view, therefore, reconceptualises everyday as a site of creative unconscious resistance, outmanoeuvring traditional conceptions of power and passivity.
Keywords: Tactics, Strategies, Archetypes, Production, Power
“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they do not know is what what they do does.”
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation
A strand in the critical school of Neo-Marxists attributes the apparent ‘delay’ in the Marxian dialectical path to communism to the existence of ‘consumerism’ as a ‘mass culture’ plaguing the ‘everyday’, which is so pervasive and ubiquitous that some of them go to the extent of revising the fundamentals of Marxian structuralism, ‘swapping’ the ‘economic base’ with the consumerist ‘culture’. This strand of thought, therefore, associates the ‘everyday’ – something mundane, “repetitive , the ordinary, the slow rhythms of work”, which Anna Schober (2016) proposes to be in dialectic opposition to the “exceptional situation such as the celebration, the holiday, or the revolution” – with enfeeblement, debilitation, and powerlessness, where the once splendorous (hu)man, whom Hamlet referred to as “the beauty of the world… the paragon of animals…”, is reduced to a hapless “one-dimensional” persona (Marcuse, 1964) – the mindless consumer, ensnared in an ideological smokescreen mediated by the advertisement industry, walking backwards – exhibiting a “reverse dialectics” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2007) – towards slavery.
It is in this pretext that Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists (SI), who felt that daily life under ‘modernity’ was thoroughly routinised and degraded, fashioned the ‘theory of everyday life’, arguing that ‘masses’ were passive receptors of commodity culture, lacking any form of ‘agency’ (Lefebvre, 2008). The market dominates their choice, thus, they are consequently alienated from their ‘everyday’ life. Similarly, Guy Debord, who was a member of Situationist International, developed the concept of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’, in which he visualised modern society as one characterised by extreme alienation and fragmentation ensuing from capitalism and commodity production, where real life gets washed away by a deluge of spectacles and representations (Debord, 2014).
In other words, these theorists believed that people were passive and manipulated by consumption of everyday signs and images. It is at this juncture that Michel de Certeau (1988), a Jesuit priest and scholar, presents an outlandish take on the ‘everyday’ through his theory of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’. His propinquity towards psychoanalysis and poststructuralism has a bearing on his idea of the ‘everyday’. For de Certeau (1988), humans are no longer passive recipients, but active agents who silently subvert elitist producer ‘strategies’ in their everyday lives through various undercutting ‘tactics’. Therefore, rather than lamenting about the monotonously charred daily existence, he sought to locate subtle moments of creativity (or acts of production) in daily life, including the mundane acts of consumption people undertake daily. For this purpose, he analyses concrete daily practices like reading and walking and excavates practices of silent subversion skilfully hidden within these acts.
Consumption as Production in Disguise
The ‘production-consumption rhetoric’ of the neo-Marxists is biassed towards production. Production is, therefore, the nucleus around which acts of consumption are structured. Certeau (1988), in his The Practice of Everyday Life, shifts this discourse as he theorises that consumers also produce, thus creating a production-consumption continuum. He refutes the idea that masses passively consume and unquestioningly internalise the symbolic values attached to a commodity – instead, they creatively appropriate what they consume. Certeau (1988), thence, focuses on human beings whom he calls ‘users’ and studies the ways they operate and consume, trying to discern how ‘users’ tend to be silently subversive of the rules under which they operate in their daily lives. He argues how they resist and, in small ways, metamorphose the dominant order while remaining within the system.
To illustrate, consider a school which has a dress code – often manifested in the form of uniforms, to promote a sense of ‘equality’ and ‘discipline’ (it is pertinent to consider Foucault (1977) here, who considers school and prison on par, as enclaves of surveillance and factories of ‘governmentality’ or ‘discipline’. He asks, ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’). Here, the systems of authority (ie, the school or the teachers who enforce the code) impose a value on the ‘uniform’ with a specific intent and assumes that the children would unquestioningly oblige. However, students often find ways to slightly alter their uniforms, for instance, by supplementing it with different accessories like wrist watches or jewellery, specific hairstyles or makeup, a different shade or style of the uniform prescribed. While doing so, students scoop out a space for themselves and sign their existence as an author (or producer) on it. Therefore, consumption becomes a hidden form of production, where the act of consumption itself manifests as an act of production, where ‘little cultures’ are produced within the frontiers of the ‘great culture’, as none of the additions subverts the technical aspects of the latter, yet topples the very intent of the manufacturers of the ‘great culture’.
Tactics and Strategy in the Everyday
Certeau (1988), therefore, is interested in ‘anti-discipline’ over overarching power structures (or Foucault’s panopticon). He differentiates the two with the theory of ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’, respectively.
For Certeau (1988), ‘strategies’ represent the power structures that enforce discipline, and are, therefore, hallmarks of institutionalised power (for instance, school). They occupy an identifiable space where they produce, tabulate, and enforce ideas on ‘users’ (for instance, uniforms on students). On the other hand, ‘tactics’ refer to the tactical and creative manoeuvres ‘users’ employ to manipulate and divert the network of discipline (for instance, supplementing uniforms with accessories). They operate without a locus (base of operation) but also do not obey the law of the space. The students, in a sense, resist the system through the creative act of supplementing their uniforms with accessories, and thus undermine the network of discipline, yet interestingly, according to Certeau (1988), ‘unconsciously’ – unconscious not in the sense that they do not know “why they do what they do”, but they do not know “what they do does” – ie, they operate without a ‘locus’, not with an intent to challenge the system. In other words, the students who subvert the intent of the authority do so not with an intent to challenge the rationale of the institution (as they, in the first place, might not even be aware of the intent of the authority, here, to inculcate ‘discipline’ and promote ‘equality’), but for other reasons which might include creatively expressing themselves, flaunting their personal style, expressing their cultural backgrounds, or to stay up-to-date with the new fashion trends.
In this line of thought, Certeau (1988) introduces the idea of La Perruque. La Perruque, which comes from the peculiar French saying “de porter la perruque” or “to wear a wig”, is a ‘tactic’ or a practice by which the subaltern (‘subaltern’ in the sense as opposed to ‘authority’) subverts the power of the authority. To explain La Perruque, Certeau gives the example of an office worker writing a love letter in office time. The worker in consideration appears to be working under the system, but is in fact subtly defying it, by using the space for a purpose not prescribed by the system, ie, the ‘user’ pretends to do something as prescribed by the system, but is, en réalité, fooling it, however, not with an intention to subvert the authority, but to, in this case, express the user’s profound admiration towards their partner.
The Grammar of Everyday Practice
‘Strategies’ and ‘tactics’ are, therefore, complex sets of practices that constitute our ‘everyday’. Although there is a way in which ‘users’ subvert the elitist structures of power, there is no single logic that can properly locate it – the sheer ‘non-deliberate’ nature of subversion makes it all the more difficult to come to terms with. In this pretext, we believe that Certeau, in a sense, outlines the “grammar” of users’ everyday practices through his observation of the ‘strategies’ that govern everyday life and the ‘tactics’ through which users subvert this in the everyday. To this effect, Ben Highmore (2002) in his “Introduction” to the The Everyday Life Reader notes:
“Thus, one way of describing Certeau’s approach to the everyday is to see it as attempting to outline a grammar of everyday practices that will attempt to keep alive the specificity of operations while recognising formally similar modes of practice.”
Locating the subtle yet unintentional acts of subversion in what Highmore (2002) calls the ‘grammar of everyday practice’, however, opens at least two avenues to approach Certeau.
First, we may consider this idea in the context of language. Language itself is to be seen as a system produced by the elite grammarians who defined what language should and should not be. A certain variety of language may be considered ‘pure’ and ‘superior’. This language has a vocabulary produced within the framework of the language, which is in turn used by ‘users’ to frame sentences. The language is also governed by syntaxes, which act as rules that govern the usage of language in order to frame ‘meaningful’ sentences. But ‘users’ do not generally stay within these syntactic boundaries. Chomsky’s “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” does not make sense within the context of the language, but such a syntactic distortion may be possible while composing poetry (Erard, 2010). This would imply a subversion of the traditional grammar structure.
Furthermore, this idea of language as a system gains more prominence if one considers the power of language. Language is that which defines the ‘I’ (refer to Nandy’s (1995) ‘power to define’), and therefore, it is the one with the “superior” command of language that defines the ‘sign’ – ie, the “arbitrary link” between the ‘signifier’ (for instance, the spoken word ‘tree’ or the written word ‘tree’) and the ‘signified’ (the mental image of a tree when we speak or write ‘tree’) – within the system of deferred meanings (Saussure, 1959). For instance, heteronormative narrative being the dominant order, the language that defined the “I” possessed only the binaries of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Yet this discourse has had subtle resistances for ages – terms tangential to the dominant narrative, like ‘sodomite’ and ‘eunuch’ have dwelled in the linguistic cityscape for quite a long time (despite their derogatory nature), demonstrating “that [the binaries imposed by] language…cannot quite constrain the variety of human desires and practices” (Sedgwick, 1990). This proves that people do not merely passively consume ideas, but also resist these ideas. However, delving into this leads to a complex web of deferred ideas and dialectics.
In spoken language too this resistance takes place. When one does not know a language, one appropriates it in subtle ways. For instance, consider Indian-English, which came into existence, thanks to the “phonological difficulties that English presented to Indian speakers” (Kachru, 1983). Some two hundred years ago, such an appropriation took place, where the Indian English speakers modified British pronunciation based on “phonological structures specific to Indian languages…resulting in an intelligible yet distinctly Indian variety of English” (Sailaja, 2012), making it a subversive activity, a ‘tactic’ frowned upon by the system, as it fails to follow the system established. Similarly, code-mixing and switching takes place when two different language communities interact. None of these actions are intentional or even conscious acts of subversion. Nonetheless, they have slowly changed the system to their favour. Same happens with cultural appropriations (for instance, post-modernists like Butler (2021) consider culture as manifestation of language, where linguistics not only constitutes but actively constructs culture), hence, would justify Highmore’s (2002) interpretation of Certeau’s ‘tactics’ as “grammar of everyday practice”.
A Speculative Leap
If we go beyond Chomsky’s ‘colourless green ideas’ to look at grammar in a broader sense as something constitutive of a language – or for matter, the ‘thematic’ of a language – we can make some different observations by interpreting ‘grammar’ as some sort of a ‘meta-pattern’ in subversion than the ‘high culture’ that is to be subverted through ‘tactics’. A language is, thus, a language, and not a collection of some random signs, because it follows a pattern (grammar). That is, the answer to what follows ‘qu…” could be “a”, “i”, or “u”, but certainly not “b”, “c”, or “d” – or in other words, it follows a specific wavelength of entropy – an orchestral combination of elements – where individual elements come together to create meaningful phrases. Thus, could Highmore (2002) be hinting towards a pertinent ‘pattern’ in subversiveness when he refers to ‘tactics’ as “grammar of everyday practice”? To this effect, Certeau (1988) notes:
“It may be noted that these operations – multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed within devices whose mode of use they constitute, and their own ideologies or institutions – conform to certain rules. In other words, there must be a logic of these practices.”
Thus, the unconscious yet subtle acts of subversion — “an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolised” (Certeau, 1988) – must have an overriding yet enigmatic logic. Enigmatic because the ‘users’, unaware of the subverting effects of their acts, eventually manage to subvert the intentions of the producers of ‘great culture’, and such acts, according to Certeau (1988), are “massive and pervasive” to such a degree that they are universal – performed by “all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself” – yet these acts are unintentional and uncoordinated, making the majority consumers of great culture a “silent and marginal majority”. Is this the ‘grammar’ – etched into the very structure of cultural production – that Highmore (2002) talks about? Are ‘users’ designed, by nature, or simulated, by a programme, to act in a subversive manner? If not, then how come a ‘silent majority’ – disunited by a conscious subversive intention yet united by the subversive effects of ‘tactics’ – exists in the first place? So, is the ‘grammar of everyday practice’, a subconscious cultural phenomenon exhibited by every ‘user’? If yes, the entire episode breaks into a philosophical disposition on ‘free will’ – does a student’s decision to supplement their uniform with a bracelet constitute their free will, or is it part of a greater ploy etched into the structure of ‘cultural production-consumption continuum’, where ‘users’ are programmed to act in subversive ways, following a particular ‘pattern’, a pertinent ‘logic’ as in ‘grammar of everyday practice’?
A recent study by Roger Koenig-Robert and Joel Pearson (2020), of the University of New South Wales, concludes that ‘free choices’, like choosing an answer out of four alternatives, can be accurately predicted by analysing brain patterns at least eleven seconds even before one consciously thinks of choosing a particular answer, rendering the particular ‘free choice’ one makes nothing but an illusion, something pre-programmed into one’s brain. Though this study does not delve into the philosophical implications of the same, nor does it identify a particular behavioural ‘pattern’, it may be read along with a study by Dennis Shaffer et. al. (2004) of the Ohio State University, who identified a particular pattern in the navigational heuristics employed by dogs and human baseball players while catching frisbees – ie, the ‘unconscious’ heuristic reflexes follow a ‘pattern’, a pattern not just limited to humans but extends to dogs (or even other species). Reading the results of these studies together with Highmore’s (2002) choice of the word ‘grammar’ to describe ‘unconscious’ acts of subversion would prescribe a speculative jump, where Freud might have to come to one’s rescue.
Langston Hughes (2024) asks, in Harlem, ‘what happens to a dream deferred’? Freud has answers, hidden in the dimension of the unconscious. For him, the unconscious is “like a vast well of forces, deep and dark, filled with repressed emotions and wishes” (Jones, 1953) that subtly influences human actions, and these unconscious motives might never fully surface in the conscious awareness. Freud (1915) says, in The Unconscious:
“We obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us.”
Sukra, the preceptor of asuras in Hindu scriptures, says, ‘There is no greater happiness than that [derived] from self-rule’ (Sukra-Neeti, 3.646, quoted in Sarkar (1919)) – and subversions, being an unintentional human act, can be interpreted, in the Freudian framework, as the resurfacing of repressed human desires for autonomy within the systems of ‘knowledge-power’, surveillance, and control. However, a post-Freudian reading would be of a better utility here – as Highmore (2002) is talking about ‘grammar’ – a brood of system-subverting tactics, employed by a “marginal majority”, divided in the consciousness, united in the unconsciousness. It is no longer about what an individual does; it is now about humanity itself – or at least, the ‘marginal majority’ – the hoi polloi – the silent producers. What, then, explains a collective unconscious human activity?
For Carl Jung, the answer lies in our myths, dreams, and symbols across cultures – the images of ‘the hero’, ‘the shadow’, ‘the wise old man’, ‘the mother’, et cetera., find unique expressions in different cultures. Jung (1969) calls them ‘archetypes’, which:
“… is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, [which] indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere…”
These archetypes or primordial images, says Jung (1964), are:
“… impressed upon our unconscious minds, and through them, unconscious factors find expression in symbolic images or narratives. Mythological figures or narratives repeat themselves throughout human history because they represent universal human experiences or concerns.”
Thus, Jung’s archetypes present us with a framework which helps discern the universal patterns of unconscious thought and behaviour that humanity shares as a whole – something that transcends individual experiences and cultural settings, forming the building blocks of a collective human psyche. What is pertinent to our inquiry is specific archetypes like ‘the hero’, ‘rebel’, ‘trickster’, or even ‘outlaw’, that can be seen as primordial manifestations of that part of human nature which resists control or repression, to an extent humanity’s collective acts of subversion become a universally inherited tendency to resist power structures and assert individuality. As Green (1884) declared – ‘human consciousness postulates liberty’.
Thus, archetypes form the structure of unconscious subversion tactics, employed by the marginal majority, to respond to authority – these archetypes constitute the ‘logic’ or grammar that Highmore (2002) highlights. In essence, tactics manifest as archetypical expressions of collective resistance, transcending time and space.
Challenging the Fixity of ‘Text’
Michel de Certeau (1988) places a lot of importance on the subversiveness of the practice of ‘reading’ in his work The Practice of Everyday Life. Reading, here, becomes particularly interesting, as poststructuralism assumes everything to be a text that can be read. To this effect, Terrence Ball (2004) writes:
“According to Derrida, all attempts to ‘represent’ reality produce, not knowledge or truth, but only different ‘representations’, none of which can be proven to be better or truer than any other. All social phenomena and forms of human experience – wars, revolutions, relations between the sexes, and so on – exist only through their representations or ‘texts'."
Certeau (1988) sets up ‘reading’ against the binary of ‘writing’ – writing here is probably not the act of writing per se but the written text. He compares writing to ‘production’ and places reading as ‘consumption’. For Certeau (1988), writing is an activity that binds itself to a space and escapes the reaches of time. Like farmers who have settled on a piece of land, there is fixity in text. However, reading is different, as he compares readers to nomads who poach on the fixed space within the written text. While writing has fixity, reading has none. The reader who reads the text interprets and takes away what they feel is essential for them and not what is written in the text. Further, the reader is bound by time, doomed to forget after a point of time, and so are they likely to forget the initial interpretation after a point of time. Thus, the reader borrows the written work, encroaches on it, and creates their space in it, which may be radically different from the original space. Readers thus introduce and create art within the confined and fixed space of the text. Ball (2004) says:
“Ambiguities within the text only increase with the passage of time and multiple and varied readings, until the text’s signifiers float freely and playfully apart, so that the reader – not the author – constructs whatever meaning the text may be said to have. Thus ‘the death of the author’ refers not to a physical fact but to an artifact of postmodernist interpretation.”
Individuals are, therefore, ‘readers’, who, like nomads, poach on the space fenced by the authority, skilfully yet unconsciously subverting the authority’s original mandate. For instance, in the workplace, one might use office equipment, say printers, for personal use, which does not really align with the system’s mandate. In educational institutions, students are provided with free internet access to obtain study materials which may not be used for education per se. And while listening to a class, one may be writing poems distractedly, defying the authority of the teacher teaching. In a sense, ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’ form an intrinsic part of our everyday realities.
Conclusion
Users add and contribute often unpredictable elements in the system in which they negotiate, unconsciously making changes in these overarching systems with microscopic fissures. Certeau’s (1988) theorisation of ‘the everyday’ through his framework of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’, therefore, demonstrates that amidst rigid structures of power, authority, control, and domination, there exist fissures where individuality and creativity thrive. People bend the system passively to their advantage, ever so slightly in their daily lives – this is the grammar of everyday practice. This grammar is, however, not a conscious act of production – but an unconscious act of subversion that follows a logic, a pattern, or a law, even when operating without a conscious locus. One way to look at it is through Jung’s archetypes, which provide a framework that explains these universal collective acts of unconscious subversion as part of a shared human psyche – a universally inherited tendency in every human being to resist authority and assert individuality. As Ben Highmore (2006) rightly notes in Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture:
“The everyday world echoes with a clatter of footsteps: footsteps that are out of step with the rhythms of urban modernity. Everydayness is the movement that drags, that takes detours or constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot.”
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Adwaith PB is an alumnus of Ramjas College, University of Delhi, while Adithi Vijayan is a student at the University of Kerala.
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