Reading through De Certeau’s book, checking if there’s anything that I should read or reread (I read a few chapters in the past). Struck by the fact that De Certeau is all the time assuming the existence of power-structure/master-discourse, against which the people/users devise their own counter-strategies. In that way a common poetics will always be defined as something which insinuates itself inside, is set up against, that which is in ‘power’. (Does this make sense — or have I been reading too quickly?)

‘Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s constructions of a text) intersect: a social hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform to the “information” distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy.’ Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, inThe Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley etc., 1984, p. 172