a panoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. This concretely illustrates de Certeau's argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products. According to Andrew Blauvelt, who relies on the work of de Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life: Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the 'arts of doing' such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these structures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations. References Bibliography de Certeau, Michel, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984 Cummings, Neil. Reading Things'', Chance Books, London 1993 Giard, Luce. Keynote Speech at Victoria and Albert Museum for Civiccentre, 15 April 2003 External links General Introduction on Ubuweb The Practice of Everyday Life at University of California Press 1980 non-fiction books Sociology books French books Works about everyday life