De Certeau makes it clear, the chapter is intended to “the ordinary man,” whom he characterizes as “the murmuring voice of societies.” He believes that the ordinary is capable of defining a space by deviating from rule-governed practices as well as reorganizing the given structures through their everyday practices. De Certeau sees the ordinary acting out the text, universalizing the character and thus turning a seemingly mad discourse into (folk) wisdom. 

 

  Particularly, he aims to produce what he calls a science of singularity, that is to say, a science of the relationship that links everyday pursuits to particular circumstances. He concerns not directly the individuality or the subjects, but modes of operation, the practices of ordinary people and the ways in which they use, and “consume” social representations and normative modes of social behavior. These practices of consumption are tantamount to “ways of operating” or doing things (making do), and for de Certeau they should not be considered as passive forms of social activity. 

 

  Highmore draws on de Certeau to understand the study of everyday life, to which he contends that it is a creative process, a silent production, because each person reads a text or an image differently based on his or her needs and experience and draws different meaning from it. Not only are ordinary people making do with a ready-made culture, but also making with it through appropriation and reemployment. Everyday life thus witnesses the creative arrangements and rearrangement of bricolage. Resistance is the word used to say much as an activity born of inertia as it is the result of inventive forms of appropriation. Resistance is “both preservative and a creation of something new: rather than presenting the inverse of power, it offers a different and pluralized account of powers”.

 

 In The Way We Are, Tin Shui Wai serves as a creative site for ordinary people or even viewers to reappropriating or reemploying human activities in “the City of Sorrow”, which often reminds people of many tragic cases of domestic violence, suicide and other social and cultural issues. Ann Hui accentuates the film through an authentic portrayal of everyday life focusing on a web of human relationships, that goes against all the depressed and tragic image of Tin Shui Wai. She allows the viewers to see the food the family eats, the activities they carry out, and how Kwai is helping and taking care of her neighbour. Under the name of the City of Sorrow, tranquility and community cohesiveness can define what constitutes as “the way we are, the place we live.”

  Because everyday practice is the investigation of ways in which users operate or do things through a considered practice of the everyday and liberates it from the “obscure background of social activity”. One of the central questions is: how can uses and tactics be applied to everyday life as a necessary transformative practice, and employ them to “penetrate this obscurity” in order to articulate everyday life beyond its status as an imposed place of consumption?

 

  In “using” and “consuming” culture, ordinary persons are engaged, at the most basic level on which life is lived, in a “making,” a poiesis, but a “hidden one, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order.” In fact, consumption insinuates itself silently and invisibly everywhere to bring innumerable and infinitesimal transformations in the imposed order. The transformations that occur within the dominant cultural economy create a difference or similarity between the production of an image and its secondary production (hidden in its utilization). Thus these practices adapt the imposed order to the interests of the users/ consumers. 

 

  De Certeau’s definition of a strategy focuses on the power a party has over its surrounding place. However, the ordinary equip themselves with a weapon, tactic, the tricks or the arts of the weak – the “last resort” of the weak that helps them to inscribe displacements in the prevailing order for its reorganization. Tactics manifest in the modes of consumption or in spatial practices. According to Certeau, a tactic is “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” that becomes “the space of the other”. It reintroduces “popular” techniques – countless ways of making do by refusing the “strategies” of the dominant. It is analogous to la perruque that proliferates in the modern world to make spaces for the weak, the passive users or the consumers. Although we do not see much power-relation involved in The Way We Are, we can see that consumption appears to make spaces for the weak to forge bonds with others - Kwai shares the oil packs with her neighbour; On helps her to lift the heavy television set. Therefore, in de Certeau’s words, one may consider popularization of culture to be a gap of varying proportions opened by the consumers (users) through modes of consumption.