In essence, Certeau is challenging the rather despairing vision of Foucault's The Order of Things, with its image of the panopticon from which no one can escape. Certeau focuses on everyday practices to see how people do in fact escape the all-seeing gaze of the panopticon. In particular his distinction between "strategy" and "tactics" is useful and intriguing.

The language is highly poetic and at times difficult going, but *how* Certeau says what he says is in some ways as important as *what* he says. He wants to write in a way that at the same time uses and escapes the constraints of ordinary language. It takes some getting used to, but it is worth it.


good ideas, but painful reading   May 11, 2001
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DeCerteau's ideas in this book primarily deal with control and resistance: he finds that average people have developed various strategies that establishes their independence in a world that seeks to dominate them. He's especially interested in how people receive media: he thinks media producers (including writers) seek to impose meaning on media consumers, yet he rejects the notion that consumers consume mindlessly. DeCerteau examines the creative strategies employed by consumers, and he in fact sees them as a form of unrecognized producers (which is part of why this book is of interest to people studying 'fan fiction' and similar phenomena).

Like much French theory, this book functions like a poem, making its argument by way of symbolic relationships and analogy rather than by calling upon the causal / statistical relationships that characterize much American argument. This may turn some people off, and even by French-theory standards this book is not user-friendly at all. DeCerteau often uses common, general words (say, "writing," or "time") to refer to very particular, highly-nuanced concepts. Simply relying upon the commonly-accepted meanings of those words will not do, and yet deCerteau rarely takes the time to explain the meanings that he has in mind. The result is that the book reads like an enormous cryptogram: you can only decipher what he means by particular words by noting and crossreferencing the varying contexts in those words are used throughout the book-- a tedious process which forced this reader to continually question whether the nuggets of gold were really worth all the panning through silt.