The Invention of the Everyday: A Short Introduction Into the Cross-disciplinary Tactics.

Knowledge – both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary – is obsessed with strategies. It thinks big, it digs deep, it climbs to the highest heights but often remains blind to what is in front of its nose – the everyday life. An investigation into its practices requires, rather, a tactical approach and a radical change of perspective: away from the straight-forward relation between producers and consumers of cultural goods, theoretical concepts, artistic values or political ideas to the ways in which their users – assumed to be passive and guided by established rules – operate, that is, use them in their everyday practices. The class will read Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and will focus especially on the chapter "Walking in the City". The work in the seminar – close readings in groups and discussions – will be designed to prepare such a walk in the city of Vienna in the form of “poaching in the property of others”, which is, how the everyday life invents itself (de Certeau).

In the introductory discussion to the seminar, there will be more talk on the modernist (avant-garde) concepts of the everyday: Heidegger, Benjamin, Bakhtin, fascism, surrealism etc.

Readings:

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Translated by Steven F. Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988 (the book is legally available on the internet)

Consists in the active participation and contribution (discursive, textual and performative).

The module grading is based on the mentioned contribution, active in-class participation and

• - submission of written assignments (word minimum of 500 total)

 “Students from other departments or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.”