The conflict between practice and theory, between doing and producing knowledge about the practice itself, is the core problematic of Michel de Certeau’s “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life.” In his theorization of the everyday – or, rather, the methodologies employable to produce knowledge about the everyday – he posits that the knowledge of the quotidian is located within itself and refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s term “knowing ignorance” in order to explain how the knowledge of the Panopticon is reflected in the never verbalized “tactics,” or ruses, but not actually “knowable,” or theorized, by the practitioner.

My own research is not at all dislocated from the problematic of doing-versus-knowing as outlined by Certeau. My interest in queer cultural practices is, on the one hand, located on the level of the city, which is both queer and queered as an effect of its queer subjects’ movement and appropriation of its streets, parks, bars and other public spaces, which as a result produces a queer topography that is reproduced through practice on an everyday basis. On the other hand, the queer appropriation of popular culture, based in collective memory and a system of codifying certain features, aesthetics and practices of mainstream, normative culture as inherently queer (think Judy Garland, but also Eva Peron), is similarly based on daily practices, “tactics” and connections that are unknowingly made and consumed, and that make up the landscape of everyday life.

I would like to propose that we envision Certeau’s theorization of everyday life as our engagement with popular culture. I will start off by exploring some basic notions of popular culture as outlined by John Storey and ways in which they correspond to Certeau’s “Practice of Everyday Life.” Then, I would like to narrow down this exercise in theoretical cross-fertilization by looking at reality television specifically, and explore ways in which such a genre of popular culture speaks to and reproduces everyday practices, as well as how it becomes a practice unto itself.

In his book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey outlines four definitions of popular culture that are complementary rather than mutually exclusive: culture that is liked by many, “low” culture, works designed specifically to “win favors,” and culture that is made by the people, for the people (5). Two of these definitions of pop culture speak to Certeau’s vision of everyday life immediately. Firstly, “popular culture as folk culture” corresponds to Certeau’s claim that “storytelling produces effects rather than objects – narration rather than description” (35), in effect “performing practices.” If folk culture is rooted in narratives that house folk/everyday practices, then popular media culture also performs them through its venues. Conversely, Storey’s claim that popular culture is a “low culture” in the face of an established art practice (Instagram as opposed to analogue photography, for example?) speaks to Certeau’s description of tactics as a folk practice, determined as they are “by the absence of power” (de Certeau 7).

Granted, popular forms are not far removed from power – Hollywood, for example, is certainly a structure whose distribution, economy and familiarity leave “art film” on the margins of filmic discourse, where the latter must rely on tactics in order to come into being (lesser budgets, limited release in art cinemas or on the festival circuit, word-of-mouth marketing). However, popular forms are still resisted in other structures with different systems of values, such as academia, where taking up a pop cultural object of study, or as a theoretical referent, continues to raise eyebrows and remains a tactic. Furthermore, a tactic is predicated on the fact that it is operating within a system that holds economic and cultural sway, and not outside of it. Thus, popular culture, or rather its consumption and language, is, like Certeau’s table made out of stolen pieces of wood from a factory, fashioned from within the system, yet its relationship to the system is marked by a practice that is inherently divergent.

Certeau’s piece got me thinking of ways in which everyday practices are theorized and pointed to, in spite of the assumption that knowledge of them can only lie outside of the practitioner. In today’s Panopticon made up of practices and surveillance, I couldn’t help but think of reality television as both an object and a practice, an assemblage of relationships between structures, strategies, tactics, discourse and technology that I find so difficult to reconcile. It is my hypothesis that, at a basic level, reality television works on three distinct levels.

1. Reality television gives shape and produces knowledge about everyday practices that Certeau claims haven’t been turned into knowledge. It maps out everyday practices, and gives them shape, essentially theorizing them.

2. Reality television becomes a practice in itself, and witnessing the quotidian on an organized, visual level implies a set of tactics on the part of the viewer.

3. The knowledge offered by reality television is turned back into that most basic variant of knowledge (re)production, writing, which in itself becomes both strategic and tactical, especially in the field of academia (film studies, cultural studies, etc.). [Wild 5]

Reality Television as a Theory of the Quotidian

It is easy to argue that reality television banks on capturing the everyday. It is, in fact, its core characteristic. On the subject of surveillance, Storey writes how shows like Big Brother work to mimic the structures of surveillance, or mechanics of panopticism, by giving the viewer “the ability to observe without being observed, to be involved without being involved, and to judge without being judged” (132). People living out their lives in the Big Brother house is, in fact, nothing but people living out their everyday practices – cooking, cleaning, etc. in a highly constructed environment that is modeled after that of the everyday. And even if the “point” is for the housemates to ultimately fight or have sex – to provide “excess,” as theorized by Linda Williams as a visceral, bodily reaction in the viewer when engaging with such “bodily genres” as horror, melodrama or pornography – such practices in themselves emerge as tactics, “ruses” influenced by the housemates’ consciousness of the cameras and their desire to thwart this setup. Consider the competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race as another example, where the drag performers are rewarded for successfully approximating womanhood and “giving realness.” While that is only one of the show’s elements, and while the art and politics of drag are too complex for the scope of this probe to be mapped out in any comprehensive way, it suffices to say that the show builds upon the tradition of “passing,” present both in the cultures of queers and people of color (and especially in places where the two overlap). Thus, a practice of everyday life, a tactic in itself, gets theorized and valorized on reality TV in ways that make it quantifiable, observable and, most importantly, scrutinized.

Finally, shows that are not (explicitly) centered on competition but larger narratives, such as The Real Housewives or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, count on everyday practices in order to foster viewer interest and empathy. While these shows systematically place their subjects in outlandish situations, a cursory glance at fan forums or social media suggests that viewer’s loyalty to the characters stems from scenes of domesticity, friendship and the witty ways these performers filter everyday life through their own brand.

The Tactics of Watching Reality Television

After everyday practices are theorized through shooting, editing and broadcasting, they are then available for consumption in a form that, through its classification as a “reality” and its visual efforts, normalizes and naturalizes practices of everyday life. The “ruses” of its participants in their everyday practices now neutralized through narrative, they become a part of the observable Panopticon that, as Storey claims, provides the fantasy of surveillance while at the same time becoming its essential part by promoting a certain normativity (133). As internet critic Libby Hill notes in her piece on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, reality shows are fashioned in the tradition of the sitcom, in itself one of the least problematic and offensive of all television genres. Like the laughs of the sitcom, the appeal of the Kardashians comes out of a familiarity with the subject matter, and it follows that, like the sitcom, reality television remains conservative, carefully containing the practices that it will valorize or vilify through editing, marketing and distribution.

That said, it seems to me like the position of the viewer in this worldview needs to be opened up to include what Helga Wild calls “subversive poiesis” in Certeau – the practice of reading, which makes the difference between a dupe/passive consumer and a mindful participator (Wild 5-6). If reality television is a text that can be read, complete with its misrepresentations and ulterior motives, then its very existence provides a space for tactics to be performed. Selective watching, appropriation and judgment are all practices that accompany reality television watching, and the watchers’ tactics can go as far as actively opposing the intention of the program. For example, “loving to hate” a character is merely a tactic of recasting a villain as an (anti)hero; calling something a “guilty pleasure” is a way of tactfully opposing the valorization of certain media over others; “camping up” a text means recognizing a televised practice as a habitus and intentionally disrupting it.

Writing About Reality Television

As a way of wrapping up this maddeningly circular and paradoxical example of everyday practices and their relation to reality television, I would like to go back to the idea of writing. What happens with the viewer’s tactic once it is time to turn it into knowledge? Certainly, writing a blog post or a “recap” is in a particular kind of oppositional relationship with writing an academic article that seeks to “fix” this kind of knowledge. In this case, a recap be a tactic in itself, as it resists the structure of academic writing while still retaining its elements – a homemade table made out of Ikea discursive elements stolen from the factory Academy.

Finally, it seems to me that from this brainstorming exercise, reality television emerges as a technology in its own right (with roots in the technologies of film, television, etc.), that is also unpredictable and in flux by virtue of its human components, in ways that reject technological determinism and are closely aligned with concepts of articulation and assemblage as Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise define them (112). As such, I can’t help but wonder if everyday practices imbue reality television with material agency, and whether the practices of reality television (both those of its subjects and those of the viewer, as well as of the medium itself) constitute a bubble chamber of sorts, a technology of everyday human and material practice whose contours, as Andrew Pickering puts it, “are mangled in practice, meaning emergently transformed and delineated in the dialectic of resistance and accommodation” (567). In that case, it becomes a battlefield where the Kardashians and the Real Housewives battle for agency with the very technology that contains and theorizes their practices.

Works Cited

De Certeau, Michel. “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life.” Social Text 3 (1980): 3-43. JSTOR. Web. 26 Aug. 2015.

Hill, Libby. “Keeping Up With the Kardashians Embraced Female Archetypes and Created an Empire.” The A. V. Club. The Onion, 11 Aug. 2015. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.

Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 99.3 (1993): 559-89. JSTOR. Web. 31 July 2015.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Causality.” Culture & Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 101-14. Print.

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Fifth ed. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2009. Print.

Wild, Helga. “Practice and the Theory of Practice. Rereading Certeau’s ‘Practice of Everyday Life’.” JBA Review Essay (2012): p1-19. PDF.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991): 2-13. JSTOR. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.