Television and Everyday Life

lignes d’erres,
indeterminate trajectories, through the structures, ‘the rocks and defiles’, of an
established order (de Certeau, 1984, 34). His operative distinctions are between place
and space, and between strategy and tactics; and the operative articulation is a
political one.
Strategies are the games of the powerful, occupying theoretical and material
places: a place for everything and everything in its place, physically,
bureaucratically, scientifically, panoptically, politically. The powerful turn time
into space (there can be no control of time without control of the spaces through
which activities can take place), and space into place. De Certeau sees the

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strategic as an occupied territory, whose successful maintenance consists in
its ability to transform and restrict temporal freedoms, the freedom of occasion
and opportunity. Tactics seize the time; they are the expression of an opportunist
logic: the rhetoric, the conceits and the tricks of the everyday:
strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that 
the establishment of a place
offers to the erosion of time; tactics on a 
clever utilization of time,
of the
opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the
foundations of power.
(de Certeau, 1984, 38–9, italics in original)
Tactics are, or can be, both self-consciously political and unself-consciously
apolitical. However culture is fundamentally political. And politics are cultural.
His primary interests are in the practices and procedures of the management of
daily life: living, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, cooking, dressing,
watching television; in other words, in all aspects of consumption, where public
and private culture meet and where commodities become objects. These tactics
of the weak are not to be considered as somehow apart from social life, as
somehow irrelevant to the exercise of power or to the shifts of social structure.
They 
are
social life and as such cannot be ignored.
There are at least two ways of reading de Certeau. One can find in his
theories an opportunity to explore, and in exploring celebrate, the private, oral,
poetic acts: the minutiae, the stubborn creativities, the potential transformations
of public cultures, which mark and sustain our identities and our places in an
overweening, increasingly imposing, contemporary society. Or we can recognise
the scale and extent of that imposition, and see in the same activities a kind of
superficial scratching, the equivalent to doodles on the backs of school exercise
books, making marks but not affecting the structures, and intermittently (when
our doodles are discovered) being punished for a lack of respect for the projects
and structures, and above all for the authority, of legitimate institutions and
values.
Despite the deliberate ambiguities of his arguments and his judgements, de
Certeau offers an approach both to consumption and television’s role in the
articulation of daily culture which is relevantly suggestive. In acknowledging
the tensions between industry, technologies, objects, tastes and identity
formations which I have just addressed, he opens up his own discursive space
for a consideration of the dynamics of appropriation and resistance (unstable,
uncertain, skewed, creative but also quite often sterile) which drive the
mechanics of daily life.
Not only do his arguments allow us to think more critically about the role
of television in the mediation between everyday life and the places occupied
by the Other (that is in science, politics and the other expression of public and
dominant culture), but they also offer a plausible route for the exploration of
the relationship between television, as medium, as institution and technology,

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Television and Everyday Life
with its audience. They above all offer a plausible framework for rethinking
the problem of the television audience as one of consumption, mediation and
‘action’—for defining the problem of the audience as a sociological and
anthropological problem—and they hint at possible methodologies for dealing
with it.
I am going to approach the problem of the audience head on in the next
chapter. For the moment I want to present the outline of a model of consumption,
drawing on the arguments of the chapter so far, and paying particular attention
to television’s role in this so central an activity.