Response II - Differing modes of analysis, de Certeau...or how to begin?

How might thinking through this exchange, be a mode of making, a poeisis; a productive activity connected to, but distinctly critical of, ways of using (modes of consumption)?

Michel de Certeau would suggest that a 'tactics of everyday life' brings 'clandestine' formations to life; it is the creativity of groups/individuals responding within the net of 'discipline'. A form of thinking; a mode of making, shaping, forming, responding.

But, is a philosophy of the everyday/'lived experience', really a subversive form of thinking? Are there instances/examples/utterances of experience in everyday life that provide critiques of the everyday (the everyday that binds us to an order, such as labouring activity)? Are there examples that tell us something about our sensations of shock, delight and disgust with the everyday? (I guess would signpost Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea as one significant example of this...perhaps?).

How might we find these intense experiences of the everyday in books, images, formed material objects, processes/techniques/practices of making? Are these 'modes' of making and their effects, the critical formation of differing social spaces; a social commentary on the existing social/economic ordering of the world?

How might reading an image such as yours, also be the formation of a critical social space?

How is a 'critique of the everyday' a compulsion or drive to connect with 'subaltern' experiences so as to transform social life.

For example, Michel de Certeau in his introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, writes the following:

'Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on.

The "making" in question is a production, a poeisis - but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of "production" (television, urban development, commerce, etc), nad because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called "consumption". The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order'.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp.xii-xiii

1. How am I not consuming in this exchange between photographic image and response?

• My resistance has already begun....perhaps I should begin by saying what I want to resist writing about?

2. How might I respond to this context (through that of de Certeau's)?

3. How might you respond to this context (through that of de Certeau's)?

4. I have already started the process of framing, of imposing a particular kind of social order onto your image.