Making Do: Uses and Tactics

Chapter III Making Do: Uses and Tactics (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, LA:University of California Press. (French version was published in 1980)

Moderators:

• Yiorgos Bagakis
• Inge Hoonte
• Laura Macchini

Keywords:

Summary of key points raised in the text:

• Tactics Vs Strategies.

• Strategies (in relation to space): They can produce, tabulate, and impose spaces when the various types of operation take place.

• Tactics (in relation to space): They can only use, manipulate and divert these spaces.

• Types of operation: ways of walking, reading, producing, speaking, etc.

• The relations between consumers and the mechanism of production. Thousand of people buy newspapers, magazines in supermarkets and urban spaces, watch TV..But what do they make of what they absorb? What do they do with it?

• Tactics as the art of the weak.

• The consumer cannot be identified by the commercial products she assimilates - There is a gap between the consumer and the product opened by the use that she makes of them.

• One can say that production furnishes the capital and that users, like renters, acquire the right to operate it without owning it.

• Strategy: The manipulation of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with power (eg a business, an army, a scientific institution) can be isolated.

• Every strategic rationalization seeks to distinguish the place of its own power from an environment - It is a way to delimit one's own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the other.

• The effects of the break between a place appropriated as one's own place and the other (place, owner) : (1) A triumph of place over time, (2) panoptic practice - objects that can be objerved, (3) power of knowledge - transforming uncertainties of history into readable spaces.

• Power and Knowledge: A certain power is a precondition for this knowledge. And this power reproduces itself through this knowledge.

• Trickery to wit comparison (Clausewitz) - Cross-cuts, fragments, cracks and lucky hits in the framework of a system, consumers' ways of operating are the practical equivalents of wit.

• The rhetorics of practice - double meanings and misinterpretations, displacements and alliterations, multiple uses of the same material, etc. They are manipulations of language intended to seduce and invert the linguistic position of the addressee. They are variants within a general semiotics of tactics.

to be continued...

Discussion Notes & Afterthoughts:

• We should not see the distinction between tactics and strategies in a strict catholic way - these mataphor re not black/white divisions.
• Think of the ways that The Practice Of Everyday life and the Hacking reading for the first thematic project are related/relevant to each other.
• How relevant (and still valid) is this early 1980s text to contemporary digital media and web2.0 internet.
• The practice of everyday life is still holding its place as a highly inspiring text. (eg design studios named after the book's title like london based APFEL