Essay idea

How the disadvantaged and supposedly powerless individuals of society might overcome or deal with their marginalized position has always been a very relevant and interesting question to me:

"If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "minuscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and [...] what "ways of operating" form the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order" (de Certeau, "General Introduction." p. xii)

Reading about de Certeau's project to analyze the way in which consumers consume (use) cultural products and thereby tactically navigate the strategies imposed within the production of the dominant was really interesting, seems to get at a more accurate, because complete, picture of how power functions (from and towards all directions) to shape the way things are, and I'd like to explore this picture more deeply. I'd especially like to step away from the kind of dualist dialectic constructed by cultural theorists who examine the distinction between the dominant and the dominated, which I think tends to ignore the idea - which I believe - that discipline is produced by those who are less advantaged just as it works to alienate those who are more so. That is, I'd like to explore the everyday as something within and during which all are caught in the relationship - which is not necessarily to say the conflict - between the discipline salient in modernity and the creative authenticity that might be available to them.