Chasing the Ordinary Way of Meaning: Amongst Language-Games and Everyday Practices /

In this article, we attempt to develop an essay on the concept of “ordinary meaning,” initially proposed by Michel Pêcheux. The concept, however, was not fully developed due to the French philosopher’s premature death in 1983. Thus, this essay aims to conjecture what this “ordinary way of meaning” might be. To do so, following Pêcheux’s suggestions, we will explore the “analysis of ordinary language,” as proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and its culturalist reinterpretation by Michel de Certeau in everyday practices. At the end of the path, we arrive at two hypotheses: the first is that the “ordinary way of meaning” would not configure an “aspect” of meaning (or the inclusion of new objects, such as conversations, etc.), but a new paradigm to practice Discourse Analysis based on a “practical materialism”; the second is that thinking about meaning in its ordinary way causes Discourse Analysis to take into account discursive practices and their diagrams of action. Finally, as a simple homage to the more than 660,000 victims of COVID-19 in Brazil, the discussion around language-games and everyday practices will be guided by the reading of a Memorial Inumeráveis post in one of its social networks.

With this task in mind, I set myself to chase the track of clues (or at least some of them) that Pêcheux has left us, notably the oeuvres of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel de Certeau. On his part, Pêcheux elaborates a long-standing dialogue with logic and philosophy of language, in which Wittgenstein has become an increasingly present figure.
This is the case, for example, in the book he wrote with Françoise Gadet, La Langue Introuvable (1981), in which the Austrian philosopher is characterized as paradigmatic of both currents (of Life and Law) that constitute the fundamental contradiction of the linguistic disciplinewithout, however, being reduced to any of them. In the same direction, in his conference, Pêcheux (1988, p.645) 5 openly acknowledges the possible advances of an approximation between the interpretive practices of archival reading (such as Discourse Analysis) and "practices of 'ordinary language analysis' (within the antipositivistic perspective that may be drawn from Wittgenstein's work)." Finally, for Maldidier (1990) Wittgenstein was definitely one of the interlocutors standing at the horizon of the colloquium.
In his conference, Pêcheux (1988, p.48) 6 also hints en passant at Michel de Certeau's L'Invention du Quotidien (1980) 7 as characteristic of the listening posture of "everyday circulations." However, the interest in de Certeau's reinterpretation of the "Wittgenstein model" was much more significant than his brief mention of it would have All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 us believe. Again, according to Maldidier (1990, p.81), 8 the everyday ruses seemed to offer Discourse Analysis the "new object" it sought, accentuated by the interest in the less stabilized circulations: "But how, in this new object, to seize the resistance of the language [la langue]? One finds once again the question that Michel Pêcheux has always asked." Therefore, the path ahead is designed as follows: starting from the possible contributions of the analysis of ordinary language to discursive studies, following its unfolding in everyday practices and finally closing it up on the discursive techniques for reading archives. With this approach, I intend to take the initial step towards the "ordinary way of meaning," feeding the fundamental restlessness of Discourse Analysis: the existence of language and the existence of history.

Ordinary Language and Language-Games
In his magnum opus, Les Vérités de la Palice (1975), 9 Pêcheux argues that either by empiricism or by rationalism the philosophy of language had gravitated around the phenomenological thesis according to which the construction of knowledge resulted from the subject's sensitive relation with the objects around him. The linguistic and mental representations of objects-to-know would thus be how this subject of knowledge could discover the truth or essence of things. One of the problems that would have been imposed on the philosophy of language, moreover, would be that of the link or even of the representational adequacy between language and thought. Echoing Pêcheux's theses, one can still easily maintain, as Helena Martins (2000, p.23, author translation) 10 does, that much of the philosophy of language is therefore guided by the essentialist inclination according to which "language is basically an instrument of representationwords function, first of all, as substitutes for extra-linguistic entities." Among the many philosophers who have engaged in this task, however, Pêcheux (1975) singles out Gottlob Frege as one of the few who, in turn, would have questioned 8 In the original: "Mais comment, dans ce nouvel objet, saisir la résistance de la langue? On retrouvait, éntiere, la question que Michel Pêcheux posait depuis toujours." 9 PÊCHEUX, Michel. Les vérités de la palice: Linguistique, Sémantique, Philosophie. Paris: La Découverte, 1975. 10 In the original: "a linguagem é basicamente um instrumento de representaçãode que as palavras funcionam, antes de mais nada, como sucedâneos de entidades extra-lingüísticas." the phenomenological premises, especially when the Austrian philosopher approaches materialist thought by demonstrating, through linguistic structures of embedding-in this case, relative clauses-that if mental representations of objects-to-know "appear" to the subject, he is but their bearernot their origin. Frege's objection would thus open space for considering signification outside of a sensible but material paradigm. However, the "blind spot" of Fregean materialism, as Pêcheux (1975) points out, was to treat every logical disorder caused by the non-coincidence between object and representation (the ambiguities, the contradictions, the polysemy, etc.) as "illusions" introduced into thinking by natural languages, delegating to the philosophy of language the development of a logical writinghis Concept-Script [Begriffßchrift] 11that should resolve or dispel them.
In a sense, even in his critique of the sensible premise, Frege and much of the philosophy of language would still respond to the ancient "Aristotelian desire," as Helena Martins (2004, p.466) 12 calls it, to "ensure (...) that language works in such a way that a term (...) objectively means the same thing in the multiple circumstances in which it is used." Thus, even if Pêcheux (1975) finds in Frege's work a way outside the phenomenology of the sensible to elaborate the discursive construction of objects-toknow, the Austrian logician, however, would still be trapped in the logicist ontology according to which objects and thought, as well as their link, would be of a calculable order. It's precisely due to how Wittgenstein, when facing similar problems to Frege's, deconstructs this Aristotelian desire, suggesting diametrically opposite outcomes, that his ideas can be of interest to Discourse Analysis.
All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 his first work served as an inspiration for the apex of the Aristotelian desire manifested among the neopositivists of the Vienna Circle 15followers of Frege, Bertrand Russell and the "first Wittgenstein" -, it was also the "second Wittgenstein" who inspired the analytic philosophy to refuse or deny it all. However, some contemporary commentators argue that behind the "Wittgenstein effect" 16 there is a process of theoretical redirection due to a new philosophical need: "the requirement that language must be capable of being compared with reality directly" (Hintikka;Hintikka, 1986, p.176). In other words, the ostensive principle which sustains the logicist ontologyand was summarized by Wittgenstein in the Augustinian scene on §1 17would no longer be adequate for explaining the ordinary link between language, objects, and meaning.
Facing these new epistemological constraints, the ethical-political posture of philosophy about language needed to be reviewed, which thereby unveiled "the fundamental misconception of a certain human intellectual endeavor, namely, the philosophical speculation about what things are, the search for the determination of their essences" (Martins, 2000, p.21, author translation). 18 Wittgenstein, therefore, would have advanced over the phenomenological position by questioning its "essentialist project, in a clear attempt to undermine the millennial wager on the existence of metaphysical absolutes" (Martins, 2004, p.471 For this purpose, the "primitive language" speculated in the language-game in §2 is exemplary: Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with buildingstones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block," "pillar," "slab," "beam." A calls them out;-B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. -Conceive this as a complete primitive language (Wittgenstein, 1967, p.3). 21 As said, ostension claims that the rapport between language and the world is referential: every word would point to the object it designates. Now, as its counterpart is the ontological propositionthat is, concerning the status of beingthat the fundamental relation between words and things are monistic identity relations of object-designation: "Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands" ( §1, emphasis in original). That is to say that each word fits one, and only one, object (and vice versa) (Barbosa Filho, 2008). It is in the designated substance (the object or thing) where the hidden essence of the words liesand the role of logic and philosophy would be to unveil and bring it to the surface.
At first glance, ostension would underpin the language in §2: each of the words announced by builder A ("blocks," "pillars," "slabs," "beams," etc.) would point to one (and only one) of the objects that the helper B must bring (the blocks, the pillars, the slabs, the beams, etc.), thus constituting its meaning. Since a prior identity is assumed to be somehow always present, the logical interest would be to construct, for example, a notation in which it would be possible to ensure that each word announced by A would always correspond to the same object picked up by B, no matter the situation in which they were spoken. However, taking a step back, Wittgenstein ( §19) questions the premises of this operation: how does B know, for example, that, when saying "slab," A is referring to the object slab as a whole, and not to its shape, color, etc.? Or that with "slab" A is always referring to the same object (slab) or, furthermore, that they are always All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 announcing the same command (to bring it)? That is, in what would consist, then, this identity designative act of pointing? How is it done? Wittgenstein rejects any "psychologizing" reply from the sensitive subject; his position is categorical: "What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word 'to remember'. We say that this picture with its ramifications stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is" ( §305). But, and perhaps even more importantly, by turning their interest to ordinary language, as Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka (1986) ponder, the multiplicity of objects to be defined is also much more complex than that of objects of immediate experience, as in "slab," "block," "beam," etc. That is, the stability of the relation between word and object is by no means guaranteed by the words or objects in question.
Thus, Wittgenstein criticizes the basic premise of logicist ontology according to which the name would establish a representative identity relation with its object, precisely because one central point of this thesis would be "that a word has no meaning if nothing corresponds to it" ( §40). To follow the object-designation monism would thus only be "to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name" ( §40)a great "metaphysical" specter that positivist logic fights against. One of his examples is surgical: "When Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies.
And it would be nonsensical to say that, for if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no sense to say 'Mr. N. N. is dead'" ( §40).
Unfortunately, the situation experienced in Brazil due to the global covid-19 pandemic, associated with the complete governmental neglect of the spread of the disease, allows us to exemplify with a certain empiricism this Wittgenstein's remark. Until the moment I am writing this text, more than 660 000 people have lost their lives due to the virus. In an ostensible perspective, since there is no way to assess their conditions of truth or falsifiability (their "concrete existence"), all these names would be, so to speak, "meaningless" names (Ouelbani, 2006). But to defend the representative identity of the names would be to ignore, for instance, that the name of each of these people is still capable of producing effects of meaning. As we will see later on, several popular manifestations are indications that this is not the case; on the contrary, the fact that these people died gives their names other meanings, precisely because of the neglect reflected in the avoidable conditions of their deathwhich re-signifies, therefore, not only these names but consequently the entire Brazilian political and social conjuncture.
Indeed, if one takes this fact as a starting point, there is no way to argue that these designations have no meaning ("it would be nonsensical to say that"); after all, it was the very event of the death of the "object" that incited these multiple designations and the new meanings evoked by them. The critical point of the ostensive position, therefore, is that even if there is the possibility of a monistic object-designation relation, it is still subject to another kind of determination: "So one might say: the ostensive definition explains the use-the meaning-of the word when the overall role of the word in language is clear" ( §30).
Facing this limitation, Wittgenstein alerts to the fact that "Words are also deeds" ( §546), and therefore that "the meaning of a word is its use in language" ( §43). To be able to understand and produce sentences would be to master a diagram of action (a praxis): "is not to decipher something that the isolated sentence represents, but to have some mastery over the moves it may play in the language-game as a whole" (Martins, 2000, pp.33-34). 22 In other words, "To understand a sentence means to understand a language.
To understand a language means to be master of a technique" ( §199). What he argues, finally, is that when we learn a language we are not taught to establish monistic designative relations, as supposed by the classical Augustinian model, but rather that we are trained to perform activities, to use words in regulated and regular tasks, and to respond in a certain way to what we are told ( §6)in short, to play language games ( §7). This is perhaps the most important aspect of the present consideration. Thus, I propose to explore it a little further, again through the problematic of pandemic and death, but now by the practices of mourning, specifically the Memorial Inumeráveis [the Innumerable Memorial]. 23 In Westernized societies, mourning ritualssuch as obituaries, memorials, funerals, etc.conform to a politics of memory, "they are practices to remind 22 In original: "não é decifrar um algo que a sentença isolada representa, mas ter algum domínio sobre os lances que ela pode desempenhar no jogo da linguagem como um todo." 23 As cautioned in the paper peer-review, although well conducted, this inflection would lead more to baffle than to elucidate the theoretical problem addressed here. However, this potential confusion does not seem negative to me in at least two aspects. The first is that the uncertain occupies a crucial space in the thought of both Wittgenstein and Certeau, as I intend to demonstrate here. Second, that a fundamental part of the discourse analyst's work is to confront theory (of language, discourse, history) with the "fact of language" in its political and social existence -it is only in and through analysis that theory gains body or interpretative legitimacy. For these reasons, I would like to thank the reviewers and assume the risks they have warned me about, in the hope of confusing in order to clarify. the living of tomorrow of the existence of the dead of yesterday and today" (Rodrigues, 2021, p.81). 24 Thus, as a practice, mourning is structured by a double organization of social life: on one hand, mourning performs the community function of "building a social bond upon the experience of death" (Rodrigues, 2021, p.75); 25 on the other hand, it performs the therapeutic function of giving concreteness to death "as a mechanism to elaborate all the losses that constitute us" (Rodrigues, 2021, p.70). 26 In short, a process in which the bereaved subjects engage in an attempt to fill the void (personal and social) left by the lost but still desired object 27an attempt, therefore, to name the nameless.
The impossibility to mourn the dead thus interdicts the work of mourning, becoming an obstacle to the recognition of the lossan obstacle aggravated when the interdict is unrestricted, as it happened during the pandemic, during which communal rituals were forbidden as an effort to contain the spread of the disease. It is in this context that the Uncountable Memorial appears, providing an alternative by building a memory policy that "takes the form of the writing act of a loss and the public circulation of these words in the digital space" (Baldini; Nascimento, 2021, p.76, author translation). 28 As Baldini and Nascimento (2021) explain, the memorials are composed in two ways: by a poetic prose written based on the account sent by those who wish to honor the deceased, prepared by a "witness" member of the Memorial team; and by a summarized version, published as an Instagram post on a dedicated page at the digital platform. In one of these posts, whose tributary goes by the name of "Wanderson Rêgo da Silva," one can find the following propositions: 29 (1) "Uanda era pura alegria, transformava o cotidiano em piada. Era impossível se zangar com ele." ["Uanda was a pure joy, he turned everyday life into a joke. It was impossible to be angry with him."] In these examples, the named "object" "Wanderson Rêgo da Silva" evokes at least four designations: the most generic are (2) and (3), with regular structure among the posts, which respectively indicate the name and provenance of the deceased person and contest the health statistics. Moreover, "Wanderson" also receives more singular meanings, typical of eulogizing obituaries (as is the case of Memorial), when described in (1) from his remarkable qualities, but also when rewritten as "Uanda," an affectionate nickname. is celebrated. It is the mourning rite thus practicedand not a "lost essence"that gives meaning to this name.
Thus, when Wittgenstein proposes that linguistic deeds happen as languagegames, much more than following pre-defined linguistic norms or patterns, he seeks to point out "that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" ( §23).
One speaks of language-games not only as a set of rules but as practices elaborated in communities in which the performance of these rules will be evaluated based on their consonance with social criteria of achievement ( § §242, 261, 269). In this sense, it is proposed that games compose, on the one hand, "schemes" of rules that grant words their meanings, that is, that assign the roles they must fulfill ( § §197, 563); on the other hand, that these games are the result of linguistic practice profiled by human institutions and sedimented over time through their continuous, habitual, and customary exercise ( §198).
In short, by inserting praxis within linguistic production, Wittgenstein's break makes the "common" and the "social" integral and fundamental parts of language performance, rather than their accessory exteriority. The call to "Seeing what is common" ( §72) thus refers to both the shared and the ordinary. 30 The identification of the deceased, for instance, participates in a different language game (follows other rules and engenders other relations) from those in which his eulogizing description or the forms of his naming (such as "Uanda") participate in. In a sense, language-games presuppose some sort of recursivity.
However, as Balthazar Barbosa Filho (2008) warns, one must keep in mind that much more than a slogan stating that "the meaning of a word is its use," the paradigm shift proposed by Wittgenstein with the primacy of language-games affects the whole language operation: if the role of a word is defined by its practice, one can no longer conceive language as the link between the experience of the subject, the things of the world and their essences, since there would be necessarily senses (uses) which are not referential or ostensive. Instead, one must conceive it as the foundation that enables us to act in the world utilizing words, being composed also by the total set of these diagrams of actionthat is, the language games ( §7). Therefore, the epistemological break operated The proposition of the primacy of language-games shows that the logical desire to normalize propositions or to construct a language of "crystalline purity" ( § §107, 108) should not only be refused but abandoned: "We think it [the ideal] must be in reality; for we think we already see it there" ( §101). In this sense, the philosophy of language should not solve the imperfections of language or unveil the hidden meaning of words, but only observe how they are practiced ( §81). With this, Wittgenstein states that logical writing does not resist the independence of the concrete world, since the subject is not a logical but a practical being ( §208). By refusing the ostensive primacy, therefore, philosophy could no longer be guided by the experience of the phenomenological subject, a refusal expressed in the new epistemology proposed by Wittgenstein: "don't think, but look!" ( §66)that is, do not calculate the meaning from the sensible data apprehensible by the subject, but observe it in action through his linguistic practices. Finally, to think of the "ordinary" would not be to circumscribe it to the banal or the mundane, but to oppose the idealization, to approach the use as it appears to us.
This proposition, as will be seen, satisfies Pêcheux's (2015, p.49)  to equivocity, and thus every statement is a linguistic series of "possible points of diversion, leaving room for interpretation" (Pêucheux, 1988, p.647); 33 (c) finally, that every discourse is subject to the destructuring-structuring of its conditions of production.
Indeed, through the primacy of language games, Wittgenstein adopts a descriptive, rather than elaborative, stance on language ( §66), since rules are in order as long as they fulfill their purpose ( §87): "'Inexact' is really a reproach, and 'exact' is praise. And that is to say that what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than what is more exact. Thus the point here is what we call 'the goal'" ( §88). 34 Moreover, if the exact and the inexact (the "right" and the "wrong") equally hit the target-that is, both are concrete and effective realizations of a given language game-it cannot be assumed, either, that the games are always played in the same way -that would only be to shift the essence from the thing-object to the thing-game. As to this, the Wittgensteinian angle is irreducible: the essence, now, is not something that can be found in an object (a thing), but in the acts of enunciation (a deed) ( §371) -"And an action, in Wittgenstein's eyes, is precisely something other than a thing" (Barbosa Filho, 2008, p.179, author translation). 35 To approach signification through ordinary analysis, therefore, would be to "bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is therelike our life" (Wittgenstein, 1969, §559).
With his primacy, Wittgenstein exposes the logical-positivist tautology between logical writing and the concrete use of language: there is no more ideal to compare the uses of language; the very desire of normalizing language -"to achieve a universe of 'fixed and unequivocal' statements embracing the whole of reality" (Pêcheux, 1982c, p.44) 36that would be nothing but an illusion, "an imaginary satisfaction in the mode 'as if'" (Pêcheux, 1982c, p.44 primacy of language games] is not greater or lesser than that which we can ascribe to the human life forms with which language maintains mutually constitutive ties" (p.39, author translation). 38 In this sense, agreement over the games is not reduced to a kind of contractualism of meaning or society: as he reminds us, people "agree in the language they use"i.e., not in their opinions, but in their forms of life ( § 241).
And so, the most strikingly anti-positivist aspect of the "logical writing" that Wittgenstein proposes is to take, in the same measure as regularity and repetition, that which is absent, unpredictable, and indefinite. 39 That is, in ordinary language, the lapsus ( §54) and the nonsense ( §282) also play their roles: they are no longer obstructions to be eliminated, but a consequence of the difference between games and forms of life, which are constituted in turn by the act of a sense taken out of circulation ( §500)a patent materialist position of language.
On the other hand, if Wittgenstein provides an understanding of language that can intertwine with Discourse Analysis, it seems to me that this approximation would necessarily have to go through a reworking of how the discipline understood the  way of life. It would be necessary, finally, to account for the performative aspect of the enunciationgoing beyond, of course, the concern with its "felicity": to account for the particular order of the different diagrams of action in which language meets history. It is something along these lines that can be found in "everyday circulations."

Everyday Practices and the Uses of Language
Like many others, Michel de Certeau's (1980, p.1) 42 reflection develops around the configuration of the "anthill society," a modern consequence of the emergence of the "masses," "who were the first to be subjected to the framework of levelling rationalities." However, the singularity of his investigations lies in the proposal of mapping popular culture through the glasses of what he called "anti-disciplines": addressing especially to Michel Foucault and the analysis of the disciplinary dispositive 43 , Certeau maintains that it is necessary to go beyond the analysis of the surveillance apparatus, claiming attention to the "dispositives of ruses that play with all these procedures and counteract them" (Certeau, 1979, p.26, author translation). 44 In a rather unusual way, therefore, de Certeau finds the problem that Wittgenstein had formulated regarding logic and language but now confronted with the forms of life proper to capitalist-western-modern societies: in what the scientific disciplinary order hides as insignificant, mistaken or "pure" mimesis, discover the transversal poetics "that ordinary people practice in their daily life, in their ways of doing things" (Certeau, 1979, p.24, author translation). 45 Thus, L'Invention du Quotidien (1980) canand possibly shouldbe read as an unappealing critique of the homogenizing treatment of culture by a social reading authorized only to a few legitimate experts, that ends by reducing individuals to the dictates of technical rationality.
To address these ruses, however, it was first necessary to distance oneself from the premise according to which consumersto which one could replace by "subjects" 42 For reference, see footnote 7. 43 Position expressed by Foucault mainly in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 2020) and in writings from the 1970s . 44 In the original: "Car, aux dispositifs de surveillance, répondent les dispositifs de ruses jouant avec toutes ces procédures et les déjouant." 45 In the original: "la circulation transversale que pratiquent, dans leur vie quotidienne, dans leurs manières de faire, les gens ordinaires." All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 without too much difficulty -, organized by the expansionist mappings of culture, would assume, like cattle on the prairies, "takes on the appearance of something done by sheep": "The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual" (Certeau, 1988, pp.165-166). 46 For de Certeau (1980, p.166), 47 this hegemonic position in cultural studies is untenableeven unbearablebecause it would be guided by a fundamental mistake: "This misunderstanding assumes that 'assimilating' necessarily means 'becoming similar to' what one absorbs, and not 'making something similar' to what one is, making it one's own, appropriating or reappropriating it." 48 It would correspond to this framework the figure of the "expert," a specialist who would bring light to everyday practices and reorient them toward less "alienating" and more "emancipatory" ways of livinganalogously, though with other values in mind, to how the philosophers of language did (and still do) through their prejudice of "crystalline purity." In other words, de Certeau also faces the theoretical setting that, according to Pêcheux (1988, p.646), 49 encloses the oscillation of meaning "in the inferno of the dominant ideology and practical empiricism. It has been considered as the blind point of a pure reproduction of meaning." That de Certeau (1980) turns to Wittgenstein as a "model," is, finally, no accident. As he acknowledges, Rarely, has the reality of language -that is, the fact that it defines our historicity, that it dominates and envelops us in the mode of the ordinary, that no discourse can therefore "escape from it," put itself at the distance from it in order to observe it and tell us its meaning -been taken seriously with so much rigor (Certeau, 1988, p.10). 50 Like "exact/inexact"as well as "serious/poetic" 51 -, the difference between "work" and "leisure" would not be a qualitative distinction marked on one side by labor  Gadet and Michel Pêcheux (1981) argue that in the face of the theoretical isolation of the "poetic" as something adjacent to language -a place for "special effects" -Saussure's break made it a coextensive foundation to it. There would be, then, no poetic language, but only work with language.
would thus mark a kind of "Sunday of thought." 52 There is, instead, a division of labor over language and over things, marked by the divisions inherent to capitalist societiesa division in which the daily practices of "popular culture" would be hegemonically conceived as trivial phenomena, mere reproductions of the prevailing order.
From this angle, the use of ordinary language allowed Michel de Certeau to shift his investigation away from this axiological division: in contrast, in ordinary everyday life, there would be no imperfections to fix or hidden workings to revealthat is, there is nothing that an expert could improve or enhance in culture for any purpose whatsoever.
Cultural practices are "in order" as they are; therefore, rather than trying to fix them, one should observe how they are practiced. 53 To rely on Wittgenstein's proposal, therefore, would be a way of reaffirming that we are strangers in our own home: we are thus submitted, even if not identified, to ordinary language and culture.
To avoid the reduction of everyday practices to assimilative consumption and the myth of mimesis, therefore, Michel de Certeau's solution is to turn his attention to the diagrams of action: to reveal what individuals do with the signs provided to them by language and history. Faced with the politics of "leveling rationalities" (such as criminal law, medicine, logic, biostatistics, etc.)and the "experts" who draw their power and legitimacy upon themhe aims to "wonder which tiny popular practices, which ways of doing things respond to the mute processes of socio-political ordering by the 'discipline' on the part of the practitioners" (Certeau, 1979, p.26, author translation). 54 See how, by and through these tiny practices, power unfolds and branches out everywhere, yet without conquering everything where it passes.
Therefore, a distinction that is imposed on everyday movements refers to "the formalities of practices," (Certeau, 1988, p.29) 55 and it is thus necessary to "specify the operational schemas" (Certeau, 1988, p.30). 56 Following a Wittgensteinian spirit, one 52 Concerning this issue, I refer to Michel Pêcheux's (1982b;1988) critique. 53 Albeit emphasizing his difference regarding the privilege Foucault gives to the dispositives of production in his "microphysics of power," Michel de Certeau (1979;1980) also approaches the proposal of a genealogy of power, especially in what it seeks to defend local knowledges, thus fighting "the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific" (FOUCAULT, M. should see how everyday life is constituted as the space of association between "Two logics of action" (Certeau, 1988, p.XX). 57 On one side there are the strategies of technical reason, rooted and legitimated by institutions, which construct disciplinary knowledge and normalize society. The strategies aim at establishing "proper" places, being able "to produce, tabulate, and impose" (Certeau, 1988, p.30); 58 they are actions of surveillance, (bio)metrification, colonization, etc., for which examples can be found in the disciplines of knowledge, of course, but also in all political forms of control and regulation of life.
On the other hand, there would be the tactical actions, which, lacking a proper place (or the power to produce one), would cunningly rely "on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the foundations of power" (Certeau, 1988, pp.38-39). 59 They are ephemeral and silent, "because it does not manifest itself through its products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order" (Certeau, 1988, pp.XII-XIII). 60 They are arts of deviation, of manipulation, of transformation, and their examples are more fleeting: tactics act on a pre-existing space, conforming to every kind of furtive gesture that gambits with the products of power: "We are concerned," de Certeau clarifies, "with battles or games between the strong and the weak, and with the 'actions' which remain possible for the latter" (Certeau, 1988, p.34). 61 Ordinary culture, or everyday life, is the battleground woven into this combat.
The two forms of action can be illustratively observed in the statement (3), discussed above. When stating that "Wanderson Rêgo da Silva" is not a number, one evokes the policies of social biometrics, which, while helping to combat disease by measuring population phenomena, also flatten social differences and inequalities: based on a purely statistical ratio (a life is equivalent to a number), it erases the subjectivities regulated and scrutinized by them. 62 At the same time, however, this statistical reduction, despite being recognized, is refused: even if it is possible to calculate the infections and the victims, the bodies are not reduced to this calculationa way of remembering that we are not dealing with numbers, but with lives. Here is very succinctly what would be at stake in this simple refusal: the agonistic between inscribing the body in a leveling apparatus and, on the other hand, taking advantage of the inevitable traces of this inscription to divert it to other ends.
To legislate, to educate, to mold, to regulate, to measure, to level, to normalizequintessentially, the colonizing practices of a power which is based on technical rationalities. This is also a central consideration for Michel de Certeau: what underlies the tension between power and astuteness is, finally, an undefined work over the body, this "volume in perpetual disintegration" (Foucault, 1984, p.83). 63 To those strategic practices correspond countless others, ephemeral and fleeting "consumptions" that take advantage of what is produced as waste, undesirable noises produced by the inscription of the body in a logophilic productive system. Listening to "the oceanic rumble of the ordinary" (Certeau, 1988, p.5), 64 therefore, has something to do with freeing "traces of the body" from the technical mechanisms that silence them.
Among these mechanisms, the one of greatest interest is certainly that of the "uses of language." For Michel de Certeau (1980), 65 the specific division of labor over language, marked by the relationship between scriptural activity (productive and active) and reading (silent and passive), more than one among others, would be translated as the event structuring capitalism, its founding myth: "for the past three centuries learning to write has been the very definition of entering into a capitalist and conquering society" (Certeau, 1988, p.133). 66 The scriptural activity, in which a subject of "will and power" (the Author) establishes and isolates a "proper" (the blank page) and manufactures in it his product (the Text) to modify and control the outside to which it was previously isolated (the reader/the meaning/society/individual), is thus configured as the capturing and colonizing diagram that is metaphorized in all of modern Western societies' strategic actions to impose a powerin other terms, the binomial "production-consumption" would have "writing-reading" as its general equivalent.
The establishment of the scriptural activity, thus organized in this "new" way of using languagesplit by the dual existence between that which can be measured and captured and that which is fleeting and therefore must be silencedis umbilically related to "the virtually immemorial effort to place the (social and / or individual) body under the law of writing" (Certeau, 1988, p.139). 67 The practice that founds modern Westernized capitalist societies is "the multiform and murmuring activity of producing a text and producing society as a text" (Certeau, 1988, p.134) 68 : isolating a "self" by removing from it everything that refers to the "body" and to that which marks its inscription in history.
It thus configures the basilar Cartesian gesture in which the ontology of the subject of knowledge is instituted and that excludes, in the name of (technical) reason, all traces of the living bodyreminiscent matter of the subject's inscription in history and, therefore, an untimely risk for the predatory activity of modern power. 69 However, if the colonizing practices of the scripture spread everywhere investing in the normalization of bodies, society is not limited by them: to all scriptural practices of power correspond multiform reading activities that deviate it, "trajectories, not indeterminate, but unexpected, that alter, run and change little by little the balance of social constellations" (Certeau, 1995, p.250, author translation). 70 Between scripture and reading, finally, there would not be a qualitative difference, but a prolongation instead: "there is no difference that divorces passivity from activity, but rather the distinction between different ways of socially marking the deviation made in a data by a practice" (Certeau, 1995, p.249, author translation). 71 Reading, a practice of generally silent production, is the tactical way of assimilating the products of power, of diverting and transforming them, eventually manifested in ephemeral productions, invested in and on 67 For reference, see footnote 7. There is also a long discussion in de Certeau (1980) about how modern scriptural politics produces the body on which it will inscribe its codes and laws, in such a way that the body does not pre-exist it. Unfortunately, it is not possible to go over this discussion here. However, I leave the indication for future reference (cf. Certeau, 1988, pp.131-164). 68 For reference, see footnote 7. 69 Michel de Certeau's critical examination of language policies at the time of the French Revolution also brings to light this double exclusion of the social and individual body -in this case in the name of absolute "national French." On the one hand, attempts were made to capture and silence Patois (a group of rural dialects of French) on the grounds that it varies, "It escapes the regularities and the fixations of a 'language'. It is the mobile voice through which the stabilities of the scripture vanish" Julia;Revel, 1975, p.110. In the original: "Il échappe aux régularités et aux fixations de la 'langue'. Il est la voix mobile par où s'évanouissent les stabilités de l'écriture.") On the other hand, the linguistic description of French gave preference to consonants, since vowels -produced though breath and therefore elusive -"marks in the language the singularity of the soil and the body Julia;Revel, 1975, p.114. In the original: "marque dans le langage la singularité du sol et du corps.") 70 In the original: "trajetórias, não indeterminadas, mas inesperadas, que alteram, correm e mudam pouco a pouco os equilíbrios das constelações sociais." 71 In the original: "não há a diferença que separa passividade e a atividade, mas que distingue maneiras diferentes de marcar socialmente o desvio feito em um dado por uma prática." the space postulated by a powerthus denouncing that the "audience" is not shaped by scripture, but "make do" with it: "to read is to wander through an imposed system" (Certeau, 1988, p.169). 72 In short, if strategic writing seeks to make us deaf to bodily noises, tactical readings allow us to listen to them, reinscribing them in and transforming social dynamics. Writing-producing the bodies; reading-consuming its traces.
I return one last time to Memorial's post. As discussed above, a pre-construct of logically stabilized characteristics -"a life is always equal to a number"underlies the statement ( However, as Baldini and Nascimento (2021) point out, while subjected to technical rationality, several similar initiatives, in the civilian sphere, demonstrate that the biopolitical ways of dealing with death (such as the hollow ceremonies of minutes of silence, of raising flags at half-mast, etc.) are insufficient, or, more simply, "a violence over which something must be done" (Baldini;Nascimento, 2021, p.75;author emphasis and translation). 74 In the face of the austerity of death, it is urgent to build ways for mourning to take place and to make the therapeutic of individual and social bodies: between the calculation of one death and another, the Memorial seeks to reinscribe that which was expurgated, that is, that to these numbers correspond singular subjectivities. 72 For reference, see footnote 7. 73 In the original: "a vida precisa continuar, apesar de tudo. E, no Brasil, denunciar a própria morte passa a ser obsceno, já que, no final das contas, a economia precisa continuar, apesar de todos." 74 IN the original: "uma violência a respeito da qual se deve fazer alguma coisa." As an example, this fabrication is materialized linguistically in the project's motto, "no one likes to be a number, people deserve to exist in prose," 75 but also in the statement (3), which accompanies all of Memorial's posts. As the maxim indicates, the tactical reading is not identified with a simple refusal of the calculation. Rescuing elements of technical rationality, such as the legal appearance data of the honored ("Wanderson Rêgo da Silva, 43, victim of the new coronavirus in Imperatriz (MA)"), the Memorial fabricates the occasion to restore the names of the "numbers," bringing along a little of the prose of the world that constitutes them: poetically, it narrates their affective relationships (the nickname "Uanda," for example) and some of their life experiences ("Uanda was pure joy, he turned everyday life into a joke. It was impossible to be angry with him"), thus building alternative ways to share the pain of individual and collective loss and to perform the mourning rituals in other ways. Insisting on the limits that modern power itself created for itselfthat is, the fact that "to measurable data corresponds a non-measurable riskthat of existing" (Certeau, 1995, p.251, author translation) 76 -, the Memorial assimilates (reads, interprets...) the data of the social biometry of the pandemic as the repertoire for its fabrications.
In everyday ruses, therefore, "these facts are no longer the data of our calculations, but rather the lexicon of users' practices" (Certeau, 1988, p.31). 77 These "arts of the weak" constitute a movement, a gesture, which despite being marked by the absence of its power, is a consequence of it: "It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of 'opportunities' and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. (...). It is a guileful ruse" (Certeau, 1988, p.37). 78 The weak, lacking the power to assert themselves alone, "make do" with the products of a power in the latitudes that, in turn, he himself offers.
The radical nature of Michel de Certeau's reasoning, therefore, is to show, at the very moment of interpellationin its philosophical and ordinary sensethe astuteness of a practical subject that fabricates, that itself "makes do": "clever tricks of the 'weak'  (Certeau, 1988, p.40) 79 by demonstrating that to every strategy correspond countless (and ephemeral) tactics of deviation, transformation, and alteration perhaps even "fleeting forms of appearance of something 'of a different order', minute victories that for a flash thwart the ruling ideology by taking advantage of its faltering" (Certeau, 1982d, p.218). 80 The everyday life of the societies of ants, rather than marked by a generalized passivity, is the space of combat in which the weak inscribe "In numerable ways of playing and foiling the other's game (jouer/dejouer le jeu de l'autre)" (Certeau, 1988, p.18 2020b) -, the way the practical ontology of ordinary language analysis is reinterpreted by de Certeau could meet some discursive readings of subjectification. This dilemma cannot be resolved here, but two considerations become important: on the one hand, as Ferreira (2020b) warns, by proposing a practical subject, Michel de Certeau (1980) does not assume a transparent agency to the subject: assimilation, as said, is as much "to become similar to" as "to become similar to oneself" -a matter more of social subsistence than of an individual choice or will, in which power is always present as a vital, productive, and conditioning necessity. increasingly putting in check interpretations of subjection that would enclose the subject in the dominant ideology as a place of pure repetitionaspect pointed out by Pêcheux as "one of the weak points of the Althusserian reflection on the ideological state apparatus, as well as of the initial applications of this reflection in the domain of Discourse Analysis in France" (Pêcheux, 1988, p.650). 83 Along different paths, therefore, de Certeau and Pêcheux find themselves on the same side of the quarrel against "the old elitist conviction which claims that the dominated classes never invent anything, as they're too absorbed by the logics of everyday life" (Pêcheux, 1982y, p.21). 84 To think of an ordinary way of meaning is to recognize in it a practical and resourceful subject facing language and power, showing how the urgencies of everyday life do not suffocate the dominated classes, but that they also invent.

Conclusions
At the end of this dialogue with the analysis of the ordinary, what seems to grind is theory itself, the epistemology of the techniques of readingarchive, language, culture.
The ordinary is not reduced, as one might think, to only those language-games which do not allow themselves to be so easily documented, such as rumor, 'popular poetry,' humor, gossip, chatter, etc., typically found in the "registers of everyday life" (Pêcheux, 1990a).
It is present in these forms of games, naturally, but it is equally present in those utterances with which archives have traditionally been built (the political, religious, scientific, media discourses, etc.)it is thus transversal to "logically stabilized" and "non-stabilized" spaces. Therefore, the ordinariness of meaning would not be a localized phenomenon, but a paradigm. Thus, it seems safe to say that listening to the ordinary way of meaning is more than increasing the list of Discourse Analysis objectsthe ordinary would not be an aspect of meaning -, but rather to retake how this interpretive discipline constructs them through its gaze.
It is important to reinforce that this hypothesis is supported by the concerns of Michel Pêcheux, for whom the approach with these authors is directly concerned with 83 For reference, see footnote 4. 84 In the original: "la vieille certitude élitiste qui veut que les classes dominées n'inventent jamais rien, parce qu'elles sont trop absorbées par les logiques du quotidien." "ways of working on the discursive materialities implied in ideological rituals, philosophical discourses, political statements, and aesthetic and cultural forms, through their relations to everyday life, to 'the ordinary' of meaning" (Pêcheux, 1988, p.645). 85 Therefore, the agonistic of everyday life are ordinarily present from the least to the most controlled fields of society. In this sense, the reflections of Wittgenstein and de Certeau bring at least two interesting problems for the archive reading within Discourse Analysis.
First, both strongly emphasize that there is a specifically performative order to speech; thus, both point to a particular enunciative dimension: the plane of language games and everyday practices. Far more than mere empirical rituals, it may be necessary to look at discursive practices also in their performative aspect, which would mean resuming dialogue with the long analytical and pragmatic tradition of "speech acts"bearing in mind, of course, that "there is no completely 'successful' identification; that is, there is no sociohistorical link that is not affected in any way by an 'infelicity' in the performative sense of the term-" (Pêcheux, 1988, p.648). 86 There are several possible paths, and some are already quite close to a materialist Discourse Analysis: such is the case of the concept of scenography, originally elaborated by Dominique Maingueneau (2006), which plays with the playful and legal roles of the enunciation. 87 Second, ordinary analysis proposes a practical subject, a subjectification that