Michel de Certeau

1. Chapter 8 Culture Within Society – Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau
ZELİHA UYURCA
ID 501 - Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design

2. Culture Within Society
Overview
• Presents a skeletal sketch,
• Clarify a few prerequisites and explain a few choices.
• Applies result of some practical analyses to few social and political
options,
• Allows to think of embedded and sedimented systems in plural ways.

3. Outline
ABCs of Culture
• The term culture
• Subculture & Counter culture
• Cultural Expressions
A Social Functioning
• The valorization of knowledge
• A restructuring of private life in relation to professional life
• The society of spectacle
• A neuter form: The cultural
A Topography of Questions
• Institutions and Initiatives
• Culture and Passivity
• Economic production and communicating
A Field of Strategic Possibilities
• Sociocultural units taking shape
• Institutional connections
Politics and Culture
• A condition of possibility: Political power
• The relation with authorities
• A necessary politicization
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

4. ABCs of Culture
Cultural Problems:
•Logic of a society based on production
elementary need, cultural needs
Economic plans & systems
Increasingly proportioned to “people who only want to have something”.
Decreasingly proportioned to those who “want to be somebody”.
Culture express a labor to be undertaken over expanse of social life
rather than values to be defended and ideas to be promoted
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

5. ABCs of Culture
prerequisites :
A Social Functioning Cultural represent: organizations and actions – symptoms and
responses in respect to structural changes in society.
A Topography of Questions The study of information concerning culture through seeking rifts for a
formulation of problems.
A Field of Strategic Possibilities Objectives specified as a function of analyses of given situations.
Political Implications Strategic decisions question organization of power. Through political
analysis, making this relation clear = returning to social system
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

6. ABCs of Culture
Cultural Problems:
impossible conceptual definition, meaning assigned to the use, “culture” and “cultural”
Culture : six different uses
Cultivated culture : cultivated human beings in stratified societies
Cultivated culture: patrimony of works to be preserved and diffused, or in relation
Understand the world by image, perception, comprehension needs a given social environment and time
Distinguishing one society from another through modes of behavior, institutions, ideologies, myths
Creativity that culture directs in spite of the things innate.
A system of communication,
Subculture – culture of subgroup, of a minority
Counterculture- the values and norms of behavior of a subculture
CULTURE
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

7. ABCs of Culture
Cultural: frequently used expression
Cultural Action : Union Action,Political Action linking the agent to specific goal
Cultural Activity : Activity located in an inherited culture
Cultural Agent: Who exercise one of the function or one of the positioned defined cultural field
Cultural Politics: Cohorent totality of objectives, means, actions aiming at modifying behavior by
principles or criteria
Cultural Discourse: All languages dealing with cultural problems
Cultural Development: Extension of production and consumption, ideology of continuity rather than
cultural revolution or structural changes
Cultural Problems: reclassification in long-range planning
Thematic: Idea of present and future
Institutions: Draw into structure of state and administration of long-term planning.
Objectives: Aimed at revising social equilibrium
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

8. A Social Functioning
1. Valorization of Knowledge:
Direct production Automation
•Value and Profitability Privileges knowledge
• transfer of knowledge from one party to another, a transfer that needs to result in
economic benefit.
2. A restructuring of private life in relation to professional life
New style of life a connection between productive labor and personal development
this tension is felt in nations whose coherence is stronger, history is longer
Need to find space for relation to private life institutions (family, marriage), need to explore other styles of
life: a cultural expression
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

9. A Social Functioning
3. The Society of Spectacle:
Collective representation Objects of folklore
Ideological instances Spectacles
Risk, creativity not in life.
After all, “cultural” growth- Symptomatic of the movement transforming people into “public”
Militants – cultural agents, planners
4. A Neuter Form: The Cultural
Culture - to be assumed indistinct and soft, non place in which everything goes in which anything can
circulate
generalities and recycles residues of politics, philosophy, religion. (Museums)
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

10. A Topography of Questions
1. Institutions and Initiatives:
Institutions obey the rule of two-sided game.
Their facade public organization, power belongs to social groups by owners’
innovation
Marginal development of counter cultures. Existence of creativity and nature of cultural institutions
paralyzed by bureaucracies.
Public organizations – remain in a place or extend themselves, but by repression their victory over
change in trap, deprived of power possibly their own.
Rejection of Initiatives toward marginality eradication of diversity.
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

11. A Topography of Questions
2. Culture and Passivity
in Leisure Activities ( compensatory for labor ), subjects are a spectator within a passivity.
Consumer Culture :
number passive
of actors subject
Social Selection through hierarchization intellectual level according to power of group or classes.
(gap between elite schools, universities, technical schools)
Cultural centers – for privileged layer of society and culture
Creators consumers
Lack of practical experiences creates the stuff of consumer literature such as power
relations, love, eroticism…
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

12. A Topography of Questions
3. Economic Production and Communication
Exchange economical relation
Products advertising
Enterprises, administrations and media powers values, and seek to restore human relations
Communication :
The press, radio fool or satisfy the consumers with celestial magic, exoticism of love,
terrors of drugs.
Humans are spoken by the language of socioeconomic determinism
Will it be possible for humans to create spaces for themselves in which their own speech can be
proffered?
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

13. A Field of Strategic Possibilities
1. Sociocultural Units Taking Shape
Alienation Consciousness-raising
cultural isolation. transformation of political organization and
Relation of cultural situations the conviction of collective groups
Both works in different way clientele fragmented, reclassified in other areas
Associations - no longer fallow the patterns of the same division.
- reunite people who take public transportation, use public park…
New set of social divisions - current between power of decision and law of consumption rather than
traditional lines of border between worker and bourgeois….
- new border produced between economic and political sphere
“Culture” - the act of understanding the environment and desire to change it, function of an action
undertaken in order to transform it. Social production – conditional of cultural production
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

14. A Field of Strategic Possibilities
1. Institutional Connections
English “open university”- example of institutional mix.
A system of relations rather than univocal places – a connection of spaces that are differentiated and
hierarchized
Interference between culture and labor:
• circulate cultural models
• by taking account of motivations, the use of surrounding space
• The development of collective participation, diffusion of common values.
Blockage of certain organizations (universities)
• Resistances that are tied to earlier stages of institutional development, that localize in
discourse the values slowly drive out of social practice.
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

15. Politics and Cultures
1. A condition of Possibility: Political Power
Cultural Actions ( for certain people) to their implications, margin of sociopolitical profit.
 Festivals.
 Discovery of possibilities, invention of encounters, experience of these departures of other places.
Politics:
Do not:
• Assure happiness,
• Give meaning to things
Does:
• Creates or refuses conditions of possibilities
• Prohibits or allows
• Makes possible or impossible
Cultural action collides with the interdictions that powers set forth in silence.
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

16. Politics and Cultures
2. The Relation with the Authorities
• Mass culture no longer has a colonizing • People procure access to decision making by
function belonging the productive groups
• The relation between the authorities starts to • Studying computer programming to be in
change, exploit culture without compromise. service of big company
• Cultural commodities serve class of those who
create them
The authorities
• Organized independently from body from which they draw their force,
• Suck off the richness investment in the different sectors of culture, from national television to
countless institutions that recycle the victims in the name of education or psychology
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau

17. Politics and Cultures
3. A necessary Politicization
Reintroduction of political problems in literally expression.
Cultural politics camouflages the coherence that links :
depoliticized culture decultured politics
used for ends used for heralds
Politics:
• Subtracted from democratic, ideological and cultural language as it is really practiced
There can be no cultural politics unless sociocultural situations can be fashioned in term of present forces and
commonly known oppositions.
Culture Within Society (Chapter 8)-Culture in Plural
Michel de Certeau