Ian Buchanan. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2005.
Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) was born in 1925 in Chambéry, France. He obtained degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon, and Paris. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1950 and was ordained in 1956. He completed a doctorate in theology at the Sorbonne in 1960, for which his thesis topic was the mystical writings of Jean-Joseph Surin. He taught in Paris and San Diego, and died of stomach cancer in 1986. He is especially well-known for his critique of historiography and his analyses of everyday life, particularly its spatial dimension.
Certeau’s career can be divided into three stages, with May 1968 as the crucial pivot point. Before then, his work was quite traditional, focused almost exclusively on history-of-religion questions. Then, quite suddenly, it took a very different turn, becoming both contemporary and secular or sociocultural in its interests. After a decade of speculating on social theory topics, Certeau’s thoughts returned once more to the history of religion, and he produced what would turn out to be his last book, a two-volume history of seventeenth-century mysticism in Europe (The Mystic Fable). A full evaluation of his work, encompassing all three periods, has yet to be written in English. For obvious reasons, social theory has tended to focus on the middle period. But this has sometimes resulted in a distorted view of his work, in some cases giving rise to the mistaken impression that Certeau lost his faith and renounced the church and his association with it. The fact is, he remained a Jesuit until he died.
The first stage of Certeau’s career, which extends from his early doctoral research on the Jesuit mystic Jean-Joseph Surin until 1968, culminated in a profound retheorisation of history. The intellectual high points of this period are collected in L’écriture de l’histoire (The Writing of History), which was first published in 1975. History, Certeau argued, has to be seen as a kind of cultural machine for easing the anxiety most Westerners seem to feel in the face of death. It consists in a raising of the spectre of our own inevitable demise within a memorial framework that makes it appear that we’ll live forever after all. However, Certeau’s project was never simply to write a history of historiography, as it were; he wanted to understand “the historiographic operation” itself. His principal means of doing this was a strongly Lacanian-influenced, structuralist semiotics. He belonged to that illustrious generation of semioticians that included Benveniste, Ducrot, Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, and Marin, and his work shows many signs of their influence, a fact that in the present “poststructuralist” era tends to be either overlooked or treated as quaintly old-fashioned.
Yet Certeau’s formalism enabled his analyses and gave rise to many of his sharper insights into the day-to-day operations of Western culture. The working premise of his justly famous study of the “historiographic operation” (the keystone text of The Writing of History) is precisely structuralist: It takes the position that historiography can be apprehended as a certain type of linguistic system. Envisaging history as an operation is the equivalent, Certeau argues, of understanding it as the threefold relation between a place, an analytic procedure, and the construction of a text. This admits that history is part of the “reality” it seeks to describe and analyse and that “this reality can be grasped ‘as a human activity,’ or ‘as a practice'” (Certeau 1988:57). A line of continuity traversing the three stages of Certeau’s career surfaces here, for in trying to articulate the “historiographic operation” for itself, Certeau was effectively trying to describe history in its everyday aspect, namely as a living enterprise.
In Certeau’s critique of historiography, we hear the first rumblings of what would become his catchcry in the second stage of his career, namely, the need to reconcile a live culture with a dead discourse. History poses the problem of accommodating death within the living in such a way as to make us realise that insofar as any representation of “living culture” proves itself unable to accommodate death, its discourse is privative. Ultimately, it is this privation of the living that Certeau’s “logic of practices,” as he characterises it in The Practice of Everyday Life, hopes to overcome: The move to logic should be read as an attempt to find an immanent ground capable of thinking death within life. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, especially (but not restricted to) Blanchot, Certeau did not hold the view that the everyday is invisible by definition. His position, rather, was that it is made so by the attempt to represent it. So his use of semiotics should be understood in these terms as the conscious effort to avoid duplicating what he saw as the signal error of previous attempts to articulate the everyday and its elements in its “everydayness,” namely, their erasure of the very thing they sought to enunciate.
This amounts to insisting that the everyday is there, only we’re too blind to see it, or else have allowed ourselves to be blinded. This argument is made especially vividly in “The Beauty of the Dead” (reprinted in Heterologies), which illustrates the obstinate persistence of an idea current in the middle of the nineteenth century that popular culture needs “saving.” Think of the salvage efforts of the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, for example. The real problem, though, this article argues, is that most of the available modes for articulating the everyday, due in part to their pretence to scientificity, are totally inadequate to the task. Clearing away the blinkers is not sufficient in and of itself to attain the clarity of vision Certeau desires; one must conceive of a new conceptual discourse as well. The primary fault Certeau finds with the vast majority of the “older” critical syntaxes (sociology, psychology, and anthropology) is their apparent inability to deal with culture as it lives and breathes. For the most part, he finds that sociocultural analysis treats culture as a static, unliving thing and, what is worse, seems to feel no qualms at all in “killing” culture, as though, in the end, cultural analysis is really just another mode of taxidermy or vivisection.
Certeau’s own gambit is to suppose that culture is at bottom logical, which is not the same thing as rational, but it does share the implication that culture is fundamentally a calculating activity, not a dumb, unconscious one. By further supposing that this logic might be found in nature itself, he makes logic into a kind of living algorithm, like DNA, instead of a dead metaphor, as most types of formalisation result in. The articulation of this primordial understanding of human behaviour would, de Certeau supposes, take the form of a combinatoire (combination). Its model, he speculates, “may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in Western culture” (Certeau 1984:xi).
The second stage of Certeau’s career began abruptly. It is literally the stuff of legend that in 1968, when the streets of Paris erupted in a paroxysm of student and blue-collar protest, Certeau underwent some kind of personal transformation, or “shattering” as he called it. Much of this legend stems from the fact that despite his unpromising training in the quite traditional discipline of religious history, he proved better equipped than anyone else to capture the essence of the events with his on-the-spot theorising. He realised that something profound had happened in Paris, and indeed globally, even though the events themselves were denounced as a dismal failure in that nothing much changed. Certeau drew a distinction between the law and its authority, arguing that although the law prevailed during the course of the events of May, its authority was destroyed. The strict letter of the law, he said, depends on our belief in its rectitude for its authority, that is, its ability to compel obedience and compliance. Once that is shattered, the law has only the naked exercise of violence at its disposal.
Although very topical, these essays (The Capture of Speech) have been of lasting interest to social theorists for the way in which they inaugurate a new kind of critical discourse, which Certeau himself would develop further throughout this stage of his career. His first real opportunity to do this came in the early 1970s, when he received a large research grant to study French culture on a broad scale and investigate more fully just how much things had changed in recent times, if it all. Two main collaborators, Pierre Mayol and Luce Giard, were brought onboard, and they contributed two very important ethnographic studies to the second volume, Mayol’s on “living” and Giard’s on “cooking.” The legacy of this work is rich indeed, and it gave us the two volumes of the Practice of Everyday Life (a third was planned but never completed). Prepared under different circumstances but still government funded (the OECD this time) is the work on migrants found now in Culture in the Plural. This interregnum lasted well over a decade, and it is from this period that we get the bulk of Certeau’s better-known social theory works.
In terms of their uptake in social theory, Certeau’s most important and influential concepts from this period, and indeed overall, are strategy and tactics, place and space, and la perruque. All of these terms are problematic inasmuch as Certeau’s definitions tend to be “open-ended,” a fact that has contributed greatly to their ambivalent reception. Certeau (1984) defines strategy and tactics as follows:
I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. (Pp. 35-6)
The essential point to observe is that strategy is a function of place, yet it takes a certain kind of strategic thinking or operating to actually produce a place. Tactics can be understood properly only when read against this background as the presence of a lack.
By contrast with a strategy (whose successive shapes introduce a certain play into this formal schema and whose link with a particular historical configuration of rationality should also be clarified), a tactic is a calculation determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of the tactic is the space of the other. (Pp. 36-7)
The common denominator is the fact they are both determined as calculations. In his early thinking on the subject, Certeau toyed with the idea of connecting the notions of strategy and tactics to modal logic and game theory, but this was never brought to fruition. The essential difference between strategy and tactics is the way they relate to the variables that everyday life inevitably throws at us all. Strategy works to limit the sheer number of variables that can affect it by creating some kind of protected zone, a place in which the environment can be rendered predictable if not properly tame. Robinson Crusoe offers an excellent example of strategic thinking. Crusoe is paranoid, and he works through his paranoia by building castles and defensive walls. One can say the same of virtually all the disciplinary procedures catalogued by Foucault: They too are paranoid, but they work through their paranoia by domesticating the body itself. By rendering the body docile, they arrest in advance the very impulse to rebellion.
The use of tactics, by contrast, is the approach one takes to everyday life when one is unable to take measures against its variables. Tactics are constantly in the swim of things and are as much in danger of being swept away or submerged by the flow of events as they are capable of bursting through the dykes strategy erects around itself and suffusing its protected place with its own brand of subversive and incalculable energy. Tactics refer to the set of practices that strategy has not been able to domesticate. They are not in themselves subversive, but they have a symbolic value that is not to be underestimated: They offer daily proof of the partiality of strategic control.
In support of this thesis, Certeau refers to the practice of “la perruque” (sometimes translated as “poaching”; strictly speaking, it should be rendered as “wigging,” but this lacks a vernacular equivalent in English):
La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on “company time” or as complex as a cabinet-maker’s “borrowing” a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room. (Certeau 1984:25)
The worker has no compunction about stealing time because he or she does not believe in the job he or she is performing. Put differently, the job holds no authority, and as such it is no longer a vocation in the old sense of being a calling, it is merely that which one does in order to pay the bills. “With variations practices analogous to la perruque are proliferating in governmental and commercial offices as well as in factories” (Certeau 1984:26). The point is that la perruque is not an exemplary instance of tactics in action so much as a symptom of a broader problem, one to which, moreover, Certeau seems prepared to lend an epochal character. And that indeed is how we should understand tactics: as both a symptom and response to late capitalism. Strategy and tactics can also be understood as spatial practices, which, for Certeau, is to say, all practices are spatial practices.
All spatial practice, Certeau (1984) asserts, must be seen as a repetition, direct or indirect, of that primordial advent to spatiality, “the child’s differentiation from the mother’s body. It is through that experience that the possibility of space and of a localisation (a ‘not everything’) of the subject is inaugurated” (p. 109). In other words, Certeau envisions spatial practices as reenactments of what Lacan called the “mirror stage.” In the initiatory game, just as in the “joyful activity” of the child who, standing before a mirror, sees itself as one (it is she or he, seen as a whole) but another (that, an image with which the child identifies itself), what counts is the process of this “spatial captation,” which inscribes the passage toward the other as the law of being and the law of place. To practice place is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, “to be other and to move toward the other” (Certeau 1984:109-10). From a psychoanalytic point of view, the mirror stage describes the instant of spatial captation: the moment, in other words, when children are suddenly able to formulate a clear and workable distinction between their own bodies and their environments, of which they develop an increasingly complex picture as time passes by experimenting with it. This moment, in general, corresponds to what Lacan called “the Imaginary,” which, it must be remembered, is always about to be superseded by “the Symbolic.”
The question that follows is how in this retelling of the mirror stage, the Imaginary is going to be brought under the yoke of the Symbolic. Without ever stipulating that it is this question he is answering, though it seems safe to assume that it is, Certeau suggests there are two main ways in which the anticipatory gestalt of that originary moment is rendered concrete. These, in fact, are the two main “practices” he suggests we use to locate ourselves in everyday life: (1) the attribution of place names and (2) the telling of stories about those places (Certeau 1984:103, 121).
In the spaces brutally lit by an alien reason, proper names carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meanings. They “make sense”; in other words, they are the impetus of movements, like vocations and calls that turn or divert an itinerary by giving it a meaning (or a direction) (sens) that was previously unforseen. These names create a nowhere in places; they change them into passages. (Certeau 1984:104)
In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that “one can’t do anything in them” to the legendary, long-lost attic that “could be used for everything,” everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space. (Certeau 1984:122)
It is worth noting that the ethnographic data for both of these practices of place, naming and storytelling, are taken from Pierre Mayol’s account (in volume 2 of The Practice of Everyday Life) of the “living” or “inhabiting” practices of the people of Croix-Rousse neighbourhood in Lyon (c. 1975-1977).
The third period of Certeau’s career is also something of a return to origins, or a closing of a circle. It began with Certeau’s return to France after nearly a decade in the United States, teaching at the University of California, San Diego (he replaced Fredric Jameson). By the same token, it revisited the topic with which Certeau’s career began, namely seventeenth-century French mysticism. But as with his critique of historiography, Certeau’s aim was not merely to add yet another catalogue of curiosities to an already well-stocked cabinet. Rather, he wanted to understand the logic of mysticism, to try to understand it for itself, as its own peculiar kind of discourse. In this respect, as he explains in the opening pages of the first volume of The Mystic Fable, his aim can best be grasped as the attempt to revive (literally, make live again) the lost discourse known as mystics, which, like physics, metaphysics, ethics, and so on, was once a discipline in its own right. But since in contrast to these other discourses, mystics has, in fact, vanished, Certeau also had to account for its subsequent disappearance. He argued that mystics exhausted itself because its project of trying to resurrect the word of God in an era that no longer knew its God simply could not be sustained. Mystics could through its bold linguistic experiments occasionally evoke the essential mystery of God, but it could not convert that into an enduring presence.
Overlapping the second and third periods was Certeau’s unfinished project on the anthropology of belief. This project would in all likelihood have constituted a fourth period but was cut short. As he was writing what would turn out to be his last books, the two volumes on seventeenth-century French mysticism, Certeau began sketching this project, which was to have been an analysis of heterological thinking in early anthropological discourse. Three essays from this unfinished project are to be found in Certeau’s existing work: One is in Heterologies (on Montaigne), another is in The Writing of History (on Léry), and a third (on Lafitau), yet to be anthologised, is in an issue of Yale Journal of French Studies devoted to the origins of anthropological writing. Each of these essays is concerned with the way these three forerunners to modern anthropology, Montaigne, Léry, and Lafitau, encountered the manifold differences of the New World as alterity and turned that alterity into a means of authorising their own discourse about the Old World.
The intellectual basis of this project can already be seen in his critique of historiography. By defining history as a confrontation with alterity in the psychoanalytic way he did, Certeau furnished himself with the means of answering the question he posed of why we should need history. However, in doing so, he knowingly raised—but never got to answer—a host of more directly philosophical questions not easily recuperated by the same means. Traditionally, “heterology” designates the branch of philosophy concerned with the Other as that which philosophy relies on without being able to comprehend. Corresponding to the first “problem,” the Other in this case, besides being “what I am not,” “where I am not,” and “when I am not,” is also infinite and radically contiguous. God, obviously, meets all of these requirements, but that does not mean the Other must be construed theologically. In fact, an unconscious deification (the structural equivalent of the projection of phantasms in a psychoanalytic sense) is one of the risks of heterology. Begun while still in the United States, the heterological project was put on hold so Certeau could complete his work on mysticism and, regrettably, never resumed. Since he died before formulating either a specific thesis or a particular method, we have no certain way of knowing what he actually intended by the term.
Although Certeau’s work has been widely embraced by social theory, it is difficult to determine his relation to social theory as a discipline. This is because his own intellectual origins and interests grew out of religious history and he really came to social theoretical questions only late in life. His formative influences were not those of social theory, nor was his writing ever intended as a contribution to it. In contrast to the work of people such as Stuart Hall and the other pioneers of what we today know as social theory, Certeau did not interest himself in the politics of identity or anything that smacked of what he saw as an egregious return to a politics of individuality. Indeed, like his contemporary Gilles Deleuze, Certeau was more interested in the impersonal, the nonindividual, that which spoke through the individual subject, rather than what he or she thought or had to say. He wanted to contrive an analysis of culture from the mute perspectives of the body, such as the cry and the murmur, none of which needs to be identified with a specific, knowable individual in order to be apprehended. So for Certeau, it was never a matter of authorising the study of the everyday in its particulars that he had it in mind for his newly inaugurated science to do. Much more boldly, he aimed at the legitimation of the everyday itself as a resource for the primordial understanding of human behaviour.