de Certeau and de Saussure

This class was introduced by a series of dualities, such as

Particular / general
Agency / structure
Experience / institutions

Etc.

I feel that de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life offers a range of new and highly insightful dualities, which – if I read him correctly – all reduce down to this one dichotomy he makes early on in his book between 'strategy' and 'tactic'. Although this distinction arrives from the military theories of Clausewitz and the likes, de Certeau manages to embrace this duality in a commentary of modern life that is both critical and hopeful at the same time. A true feat!

As for the everyday – again, if I read him correctly – de Certeau maintains that people everywhere encounter 'strategies', or the results thereof. Powerful institutions have inscribed systems of social functioning on social agents who have to take these into account when going about their private business. However, even though the products of the actions of power are unavoidable, subjects are not forced to passively consume them: everyone has the possibility of employing individual 'tactics'.

An amusing example de Certeau mentions for such tactic is 'la perruque'; diversion practices of the kind where workers write love letters while at work, etc. True, the worker is surrounded by the strategies invested by a capitalist system, and the rules of a particular organization beneath it, and is therefore obliged to spend his or her hours on a designated desk spot. Still, by the diversion tactic, the worker chooses to spend this time on this spot to an activity of completely personal interest.

As I said, I view the remainder of Practice of Everyday Life as a logical expander on the 'strategy / tactic' scheme. Thus, on one side of the coin we can put

Strategy
Production
Writing
Mastering of place

And on the other – the everyday, the seemingly powerless – we place

Tactic
Consumption
Reading
Mastering of time (creating space)

It is truly intriguing to think of social life in this way.

In the remainder of this blog I will pose the following question; is it possible to relate de Certau distinction to the original duality of Saussure's structuralism? The latter, as we discussed, held 'langue' (the system of a language, consisting of an arbitrarily formed web of signs) and 'parole' (an actual utterance; a use of a language; a speech act).

Expressly:

'strategy' (de Certeau) = 'langue' (de Saussure) ?
'tactic' (de Certeau) = 'parole' (de Saussure) ?

I think this unification seems particularly plausible in de Certeau's discussion of 'spaces' and 'places' (p. 117-18). A "place", according to the author, is an "instantaneous configuration of position", and it "implies an indication of stability". A "space", on the other hand is "a practiced place", so that "the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers".

Isn’t this like de Saussure? My sense is that it is so.

What is particularly interesting in contrasting de Certau to de Saussure is that, rather that he offers a new clue to structuralism; the strategic is not more abstract than the tactic – it is only more general (encompassing a larger group of practices). Rather, the individual, the tactic, is the more abstract; only in the tactics of a single individual is it possible to reach a higher existential awareness, and a broader philosophical attainment. Strategies – like maps – are forced to discover the least common denominator between huge groups of individual practices and their uses, and can thus only be situated on a level of limited abstraction. In contrast, individual's tactics can couch the theoretically infinite array and sequence of life projects.


-- Alexander