Everyday creativity

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Everyday creativity

‘Everyday creativity’ is a concept that is related to the work of the French scholar Michel de Certeau. In his work ‘The practice of everyday life’ De Certeau (1984) presents a theory on production and consumption (which includes things like reading and walking (Social Issues Reference, n.d.)) in the context of everyday life, that is, he is interested in how individuals navigate through, for instance, the built environment, but also texts.

Inspired by scholars such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, the main contribution of De Certeau to social theory has been “to posit practice as the ground of resistance to domination (in addition to the reproduction of power relations)” (Social Issues Reference, n.d.). He elaborates on the ways in which ‘users’ (agents) produce “micro-like operations profilating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of “tactics” articulated in the details of everyday life” (De Certeau, 1984, p. xiv); procedures of everyday creativity.

Strongly linked to the notion of everyday creativity are the concepts ‘strategy’, but especially the already mentioned ‘tactics’: “Everyday practices of consumption […] are tactical in that they continuously re-signify and disrupt the schematic ordering of reality produced through the strategic practices of the powerful. The possibility of contestation of the social order, which is created through multiple strategies, is always implicit in the tactical practices of everyday life” (Social Issues Reference, n.d.). As De Certeau (1984) writes, in relation to the concept of contestation, the subject of his ‘The practice of everyday life’ is formed by the “procedures and ruses consumers [that] compose the network of an antidiscipline” (p. xv). In other words, everyday creativity is about ‘the ways of operating’ on the side of the consumers when it comes to resisting and dealing with the ‘discipline producing apparatus’ (De Certeau, 1984).

When it comes to the notion of everyday practice in relation to space, De Certeau (1984) states: “In the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalist space in which the consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space” (p. xviii); consumers as “silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist reality” (p. xviii).

So, although De Certeau (1984) doesn’t deny the existence of certain systems (e.g. certain established vocabularies, paradigmatic orders of space), he states that “the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop” (p. xviii). With this, De Certeau (1984) leaves room for notions such as meaning, signifying practices, and ‘artisisan-like inventiveness’.

References

De Certeau, M. (1984) Introduction. In The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. xi-xxiii.

Social Issues Reference (n.d.). Practices - Practice As Resistance: Michel De Certeau. Accessed 8 october 2010, on http://science.jrank.org/pages/10822/Practices-Practice-Resistance-Michel-de-Certeau.html