Table of Contents
Personal Information
Abstract
Keywords
Theoretical Context and Rationale
Introduction: Politicizing the Ordinary and the Materiality of Culture
Hegemony, Power, and the Imposition of Institutional Strategies
Hegemony and the Naturalization of Power
Strategies: The Logic of Place and System
The Art of the Weak: Tactics as Ephemeral Resistance
Tactics: The Logic of the Opportune Moment
Examples of Tactical Appropriation
Collective Resistance: Subcultures, Intersectionality, and the Social Agent
Subversion and the Social Hierarchy
Consumption and the Subversive Agent
Conclusion: The Irreducible Politics of the OrdinaryReferences
Personal Information:
Name:- Trupti Hadiya
Batch:- M.A. Sem 3 (2024-2026)
Enrollment Number:- 5108240013
E-mail Address:hadiyatrupti55@gmail.com
Roll Number:- 31
Assignment Details:-
Topic: Everyday Life as a Site of Resistance: Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Ordinary
Paper & subject code:- 22410 Paper 205A: Cultural Studies
Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission:- 10 November 2025
Abstract
This assignment analyzes how Cultural Studies redefined the political landscape by relocating the site of struggle from spectacular events to the mundane realm of everyday life. It argues that the ordinary is not a passive domain of ideological reproduction but the primary site of resistance to power. Drawing on the theories of Michel de Certeau, the paper distinguishes between the institutional power of "strategies" (which occupy a stable 'place') and the creative subversion of "tactics" (the fleeting 'art of the weak'). Furthermore, integrating insights from John Fiske and Elliot Turiel, the paper highlights that everyday resistance is a common practice among those in positions of little power, operating as a continuous form of subversion that is often hidden or disguised rather than overtly articulated. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the "politics of the ordinary"—manifested through consumption, style, and micro-practices—proves that power is never total, affirming the irreducible agency of the socially situated subject.
Keywords
Everyday Life, Resistance, Tactics, Strategies, Hegemony, Cultural Studies, The Ordinary, Habitus, Appropriation, Micro-practices.
Everyday Life as a Site of Resistance: Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Ordinary
Theoretical Context and Rationale
The emergence of Cultural Studies in post-war Britain marked a decisive turn in understanding culture not merely as art or literature but as a lived practice deeply entangled with power. Raymond Williams’s declaration that “culture is ordinary” challenged elitist distinctions between high and low art, making everyday experience the legitimate terrain of critical inquiry. Later, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) extended this insight by linking cultural practices with issues of class, ideology, and resistance. Within this framework, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life offered a powerful methodological shift—showing that everyday actions like reading, walking, shopping, and dressing can become silent acts of rebellion. This assignment builds on that legacy, arguing that the ordinary is not a neutral backdrop but a battlefield where meanings are produced, negotiated, and contested through continuous tactical improvisations.
Redefinition of Culture:
Cultural Studies emerged in post-war Britain as a response to elitist conceptions of culture, redefining it as a lived and material practice rather than a collection of elite works.
Raymond Williams and “Culture is Ordinary”:
Williams’s famous assertion democratized the concept of culture, making the practices, beliefs, and expressions of everyday people legitimate subjects of academic study.
CCCS and Ideological Struggle:
The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) institutionalized this shift, emphasizing how culture operates as a site of ideological struggle and identity formation.
From Production to Consumption:
Cultural Studies extended analysis from media production to how audiences and consumers actively interpret, resist, or subvert dominant meanings.
Michel de Certeau Intervention:
De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life reframed ordinary behaviors—like walking, cooking, or reading—as creative and tactical responses to structural power.
Tactics vs. Strategies:
He introduced the distinction between strategies (tools of institutions) and tactics (everyday improvisations of the powerless), forming the basis for understanding micro-resistance.
John Fiske and Popular Agency:
Fiske expanded de Certeau’s framework to popular culture, arguing that consumption is an active and resistant process where audiences rework dominant meanings.
Intersectionality of the Everyday:
The everyday is shaped by overlapping structures of class, gender, and race—making acts of resistance simultaneously social, cultural, and political.
Politics of the Ordinary:
The ordinary is not passive or apolitical; it is a continuous space of negotiation where power is both exercised and resisted.
Objective of the Assignment:
This paper examines how these theoretical frameworks—Williams, Hall, de Certeau, and Fiske—demonstrate that everyday life is the primary terrain where power and resistance coexist dynamically.
1. Introduction: Politicizing the Ordinary and the Materiality of Culture
The intellectual intervention of Cultural Studies radically redefined what constitutes a political site, shifting focus away from "high culture" and institutional politics to affirm that "culture is ordinary." This assertion, foundational to the work of the Birmingham School (CCCS), validated the study of common, lived, and mundane experience.
This paper is based on the argument that everyday life is the crucial site of resistance where power is perpetually contested. This challenge to power operates not through grand revolutions, but through the "politics of the ordinary", an uninterrupted series of creative, small-scale acts of defiance. John Fiske argues that the culture of the socially empowered is defined by "distance" from the body, economic necessity, and the historical. In stark contrast, the culture of everyday life in subordinated social formations has no "distancing"; it is concrete, contextualized, and lived, inextricably linked to the materiality of deprivation and oppression. This very materiality makes the ordinary the most authentic field for oppositional practices.
2. Hegemony, Power, and the Imposition of Institutional Strategies
To understand everyday resistance, one must first grasp how power attempts to codify and normalize daily existence. Cultural Studies primarily analyzes this power through the lens of hegemony.
2.1. Hegemony and the Naturalization of Power
Stuart Hall, building on Gramsci, conceptualized hegemony as the process of achieving dominance not merely through force, but by winning the consent of the subordinate classes. This power structure embeds itself in the ordinary, making historical and contingent arrangements (like common-sense beliefs or consumption routines) appear natural and unchangeable. The everyday is described as the single plane of immanence where 'official' practices (codified and normalized) and 'unofficial' practices (resistant) interrelate.
2.2. Strategies: The Logic of Place and System
Michel de Certeau formalizes dominant power through strategies. Strategies belong to the institutions, governments, and corporations that possess a "place"—a fortress, a defined space, or a territory—from which to dictate and control. Strategies are maneuvers that establish clear boundaries and allow the powerful to calculate, predict, and manage social relations. They produce, normalize, and manage the total social structure, exemplified by bureaucratic forms, media scheduling, or retail organization. These macro-social forces attempt to ensure that individuals are simply subjects to the defined order.
3. The Art of the Weak: Tactics as Ephemeral Resistance
Against the strategies of the powerful, individuals perform tactics. This is the core mechanism by which everyday life becomes a site of resistance.
3.1. Tactics: The Logic of the Opportune Moment
De Certeau defines tactics as the maneuvers of the weak; they have no place of their own, constantly relying on the opportune moment and operating within the space established by the strategies of the Other. A tactic is a "hit-and-run" action: the powerful own the Map (strategy), but the user employs the Tour (tactic), creating a personal, unpredictable path through the system.
Scholarly discussion emphasizes that everyday resistance is fundamentally a practice, not necessarily a recognized consciousness or outcome. It is a form of subversion that is often hidden or disguised and individual, posing a unique challenge for research. As Vinthagen and Johansson affirm, this resistance is historically entangled with (everyday) power, echoing Foucault's claim that "Where there is power, there is resistance".
3.2. Examples of Tactical Appropriation
Resistance occurs when individuals poach and appropriate products or structures to achieve their own ends.
Reading: The book, as a mass-produced product, is a strategy. However, the reader's act of creating a private, personal meaning that ignores the author's intent or the publisher's packaging is a tactic of poaching.
The Schoolboy's Trick: The student who silently performs a subversive gesture, like a facial grimace, while the teacher's back is turned engages in a small-scale, hidden resistance that does not overtly challenge institutional power but affirms personal autonomy.
Fashion: The modification of uniforms or mass-produced clothing items into individualized styles is a tactic that temporarily resists the homogenizing forces of the apparel industry's strategy.
4. Collective Resistance: Subcultures, Intersectionality, and the Social Agent
The politics of the ordinary also extends to collective practices, where resistance becomes a shared act of re-signification, especially among subordinated groups.
4.1. Subversion and the Social Hierarchy
Elliot Turiel’s research confirms that resistance and subversion are common among people in positions of little power in the social hierarchy, particularly on the part of women in patriarchal societies. This subversion is often based on moral aims and social conflict over inequalities embedded in the structure of social relations. This micro-political struggle is often intersectional, engaging simultaneously with multiple power relations (e.g., class, race, and gender).
4.2. Consumption and the Subversive Agent
John Fiske argues that complexly elaborated societies produce "social agents," not mere subjects, and that these agents are capable of acting to promote their own social interests. The subculture provides a framework for this agency through bricolage—the tactical re-articulation of commodities.
Example (Punk Bricolage): By taking commercial products (e.g., ripped clothes, safety pins) defined by mass-market strategies and re-contextualizing them into a cohesive, oppositional style (a tactic), the Punk subculture temporarily destabilized the dominant meaning system and asserted class-based resistance. This act confirms that consumption is an active site of decoding and not passive reception.
5. Conclusion: The Irreducible Politics of the Ordinary
Cultural Studies successfully demonstrated that the ordinary is a political field of extraordinary significance. By analyzing power in the form of strategies and resistance as tactics, theorists like de Certeau, Hall, and Fiske revealed that power is not a monolithic structure but an entangled relationship that is perpetually contested. The politics of the ordinary is defined by a continuous stream of heterogenic and contingent micro-practices that resist the totalizing impulses of hegemony. This continuous, creative disobedience among those in positions of subordination asserts the irreducible capacity for subversion and agency, ensuring that the system is never perfectly obeyed and that the struggle for meaning remains active.
References:
1. Burkitt, Ian. “The Time and Space of Everyday Life.” Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 2–3, Jan. 2004, pp. 211–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238042000201491.
2. Fiske, John. Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life. Michigan Technological University, http://pages.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readings/CSReadings/FiskeCulturalStudiesCultureEveryday_Life.pdf. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.
3. Gutmann, Matthew C. “Rituals of Resistance: A Critique of the Theory of Everyday Forms of Resistance.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 2, 1993, pp. 74–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2633594. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
4. Langbauer, Laurie. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday.” Diacritics, vol. 22, no. 1, 1992, pp. 47–65. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/465237. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
5. Turiel, Elliot. “Resistance and Subversion in Everyday Life.” Journal of Moral Education, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 115–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305724032000072906.
6. Vinthagen, Stellan, and Andrej Johansson. “Everyday Resistance: Concept and Theory.” Resistance: Journal of Theory and Practice, 2013, https://resistance-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Vinthagen-Johansson-2013-Everyday-resistance-Concept-Theory.pdf.
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