Michel de Certeau

Interpretation and Its Other

Jeremy Ahearne

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745613475
  9780745613468
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745665566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Since his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau's reputation as a thinker has steadily grown both in France and throughout the English-speaking world. His work is extraordinarily innovative and wide-ranging, cutting across issues in historiography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, theology, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

This book represents the first full-length study of Certeau's thought. It is organized around the central theme of interpretation and alterity, which Ahearne uses to illuminate Certeau's work as a whole. The author also examines Certeau's theory and practice of historiography; his reflection on the relations between changing historical forms of writing, reading and orality; and his distinction between the "strategic" programmes of the politically powerful and the "tactics" of the relatively powerless.

Ahearne places Certeau's work in its general intellectual context, relating it to the views of important contemporary thinkers, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and demonstrating the decisive importance to Certeau's thought of the writings of the early modern mystics and travellers.

This book constitutes an excellent critical introduction to Certeau's work, while also providing a comprehensive and nuanced reading for those already familiar with his thought.

Part I

Implications

1

The Historiographical Operation

Michel de Certeau’s analysis of contemporary historiographical production provides a useful starting point for an introduction to his work. Notoriously difficult to categorize as a thinker, Certeau tended when pressed by institutional necessity to define himself primarily as a ‘historian’.¹ I will show in this chapter how there emerges from his encounter as a practising historian with the alterity of the past a combination of questions concerning interpretation and otherness which will help us to elucidate the broader range of his writings.

Figuring Interpretation

Certeau conceives his historiography as a treatment for absence. He analyses it as an activity which is irredeemably separated from the presence of its object. This thwarted relation to its object constitutes for Certeau both the starting point and the vanishing point of historical interpretation. I shall begin by examining how such an existential situation is figured in his writing in a particular series of tropes. These tropes convey important information about Certeau’s understanding of the interpretative act, at a level prior to subsequent formal analysis.

The first set of figures I want to consider concerns the ‘sea’ and its uncertain and moving borders with the ‘land’. These figures present in a quasi-mythical form the interpreter’s initial encounter with the historical inscription which he or she must endeavour to render intelligible. They also place the interpreter’s relation to this ‘other’ in the shadow of a transcendent Other:

Like Robinson Crusoe on the shore of his island, before ‘the vestige of a naked foot imprinted upon the sand’, the historian travels along the borders of his present; he visits those beaches where the other appears only as a trace of what has passed. Here he sets up his industry. On the basis of imprints which are now definitively mute (that which has passed will return no more, and its voice is lost forever), a literature is fabricated. (AH 8–9)

The ‘literature’ of the historian, a ‘fabrication’ (whose metaphors I will go on to examine), brings us only a trace of a trace (here that of the footprint, which so obsesses Crusoe). Certeau returns repeatedly to such figures of the ‘trace’.² Yet it is equally characteristic that he should place the apprehension of this trace at the borders of that which has withdrawn its presence, which will return – in another of its protean guises – to erase the trace, and which finally exceeds and dissolves, in its vast and fluctuating indeterminacy, the determined limits of both trace and interpretation. The place of the interpreter emerges in Certeau’s writing as precarious, fleeting and finite. His apprehension of the other which he aspires to understand is both given to him and taken away by a larger Other which, precisely, can never be apprehended as such:

The violence of the body reaches the written page only across absence, through the intermediary of documents that the historian has been able to see on the shore from which the presence that left them behind has been washed away, and through a murmur that lets us hear – but from afar – the unknown immensity which seduces and menaces our knowledge. (WH 3/9)

The cumulative effect of such figures, or what one might call their performative force, is considerable. Certeau’s writing continually wears away at deep-rooted visually based models of interpretation, according to which the past might through the workings of exegesis reveal itself to the naked eye.³ In the quotation above, what the historian can see is destabilized by what he or she can at best indistinctly hear (it is a ‘murmur’). The visible ‘proofs’ of the historian’s trade (indispensable as they are) seem to assume an uncertain, flickering status against the encroaching background of what is invisible. Certeau challenges myths of interpretative transparency and mastery. He sets against these, in the very texture of much of his writing, the resistance of an opaque corporeal struggle, the confusion of distant voices and the mute unintelligibility of ‘hieroglyphs’ (MF 17/29). In the first instance, such figures disarm interpretation. They overturn the figure of the European conqueror which stands as a frontispiece to The Writing of History.⁴ At the same time, however, in the relationship full of menace and seduction which they establish between the interpreter and his object, they introduce into Certeau’s writing a diffuse ‘erotics’ of interpretation.

Such figures represent myths of historical interpretation in so far as they stage its activity in a ‘place’ which has no effective existence other than that of its poetic figuration. In more concrete terms, the flotsam and jetsam evoked above are the documents and archival traces which constitute the standard material basis for the work of the historian or literary critic. Certeau seeks elsewhere actively to reduce the relationship between the interpreter and this documentation to a peculiar kind of material banality. He adopts, so to speak, a cultivated naivety which paradoxically demands from us a certain intellectual effort if we are to break with habitual conceptions about our relation to ‘historical’ material.⁵ Certeau subjects this relation to a form of estrangement.

Generally, we think of these relics and inscriptions which come down to us as ‘belonging’ to the past. Given this a priori categorization (which one could hardly say is simply wrong), it would be the historian’s task to refine the ‘arrangement’ of these traces according to their originary provenance or respective position in time – time here being intuitively understood as an ordered geometrical space which one could lay out before oneself. Certeau problematizes this conception of time. He underlines that it represents not an adequate grasping of historical temporality, but rather a construction in and of the present. All those residual items which we come across – in museums, in archives, in books – do not really belong to the past. Whenever we apprehend them, they have always already been preselected and configured according to the structures of perception which govern our present. The vestigial organizations thereby produced are not history itself. We are given not the past in its immediacy, but rather a series of objects laid out and dispersed in the flatness of a present. Before such objects can in Certeau’s terms be called properly ‘historical’, they must become the object of a particular kind of treatment. They must be turned around, reordered:

No doubt it is an overstatement to say that ‘time’ constitutes the ‘raw material of historical analysis’ or its ‘specific object’. Historians treat according to their methods the physical objects (papers, stones, images, sounds, etc.) that are set apart within the continuum of perception through the organization of a society and through the systems of relevance which characterize a ‘science’. They work on materials in order to transform them into history. (WH 71/82)

Certeau defamiliarizes the historical artefacts which we perceive, foregrounding their status as artifices of contemporary systems of meaning. Furthermore, by bracketing, as it were, our common figuration of time as an organizing (and simultaneously reassuring, identificatory, consolidatory) principle, he emphasizes the degree to which the conditions of our temporal existence isolate us in the present, with no certain guidelines as to what to do with the debris we are given as ‘history’.

Nevertheless, the principal thrust of Certeau’s writings on historiography is precisely that the historian should indeed do something with these traces. Hence the importance of figures of ‘fabrication’: ‘what do historians really fabricate when they “make history”?’ (WH 56/63).⁶ It would be reductive to see such figures, or ways of presenting interpretative activity, merely as figures. Nevertheless, it is useful to begin by juxtaposing them as such to the figures evoked above based on the ‘sea’ and its borders. If the first set of metaphors, heavy with ontological and even cosmic resonances, serves to disarm interpretation, the second set, in a vigorously down-to-earth and ‘debasing’ movement (in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense), serves to return interpretative practice to its concrete tasks and conditions of possibility.⁷ It is the very movement between such contrasting figures, rather than a harmonious coexistence, which characterizes Certeau’s own interpretative practice. Their alternation and combination is itself significant. We distort Certeau’s thought if we privilege one of these metaphorical complexes over the other.

Historians, then, ‘fabricate’ the history which they produce. A disciplinary combination of rules, techniques and conventions defines for Certeau historiographical practice. These determine the treatment to which archival material will be subjected. They also work against the claims of any exclusively personal and intuitive response to the past. Certeau’s dissatisfaction with Raymond Aron’s classic critique of historical objectivity is revealing here.⁸ While Aron argues that all historiography is indeed a function of the specific intellectual ‘choices’ of the historian, Certeau questions the priority which he sees Aron as giving to the sphere of the conscious ideas which prevail in an intellectual milieu. This approach protects these ideas from – or blinds them to – what are for Certeau key determining instances of historiographical production:

The plurality of these philosophical subjectivities had … the discreet effect of preserving a singular position for intellectuals. As questions of meaning were treated amongst themselves, the explication of their differences of thought came to bestow upon the entire group a privileged relation to ideas. None of the noises of production, of social constraints, of professional or political positioning could interfere with the tranquillity of this relation: a silence was the postulate of this epistemology. (WH 59/66–7)

Again, in Certeau’s language, the silent assurance of visual contemplation or panoramic control is troubled and set off balance (literally ‘disquieted’) by ‘sounds’ – here those of the interpreter’s own techniques, and the localized affiliations which these suppose. Certeau stages these putative distractions as what in theatrical terms one might call ‘noises off’: they figure at first as interruptions to the smooth workings of the interpretative process, while actually pointing to more fundamental aspects of the productions in question. I propose to read such ‘noises off’ as a first form of ‘implicit’ alterity which Certeau discerns at work in historical interpretation. I will place under this rubric Certeau’s attempts to elucidate the unconscious or tacit effects on historiographical production of contemporary socioeconomic and technical configurations (or ‘complexes’).

Certeau argues that historical interpretation has often tended to erase its relation to the techniques on which it is founded, whether these comprise its ‘auxiliary’ sciences (from computer studies to folklore) or its own formal procedures:

It is as though history began only with the ‘noble speech’ of interpretation. As though finally it was an art of discourse delicately erasing all traces of labour. In fact, there is a decisive option here: the importance that is accorded to matters of technique turns history either in the direction of literature or in the direction of science. (WH 69/80)

Certainly, much of Certeau’s thought, contrary perhaps to the suggestion immediately above, will show that historiography cannot be defined once and for all either as a ‘science’ or as ‘literature’ – it is inevitably caught between the two.⁹ Equally, we will see in subsequent chapters how Certeau’s work questions the ‘noble’ or ‘full’ speech of learned interpretation by appealing to an unsettling series of ‘voices off’. What needs to be underlined here, however, is Certeau’s insistence that historiography is a concrete and limited form of production.¹⁰ Historiography cannot for him be a mirror which would simply reflect the past, and the historian cannot set up his or her discourse in a sphere uncontaminated, so to speak, by the practices which have rendered it possible.

Hence Certeau’s somewhat provocative figuration of the historiographical institution: ‘like the car turned out by a factory, the historical study is bound to the complex of a specific form of collective fabrication far more than it is the effect of any personal philosophy or the resurgence of some past “reality”. It is the product of a place’ (WH 64/73). Certeau emphasizes that the historian’s ‘production’ can be separated neither from the techniques and criteria which he or she shares with a larger workforce, nor from the demands addressed to the historiographical ‘factory’ as a result of its place in a larger whole. This larger whole may be represented in Certeau’s thought either by general epistemic configurations, or by larger social structures. Certainly, we should not lean too heavily on the figure of the factory. Certeau is drawn in his work above all to the limits of such social and intellectual ‘systems’. He seeks, precisely by delimiting these systems as such, to uncover the often surprising forms of inventiveness and ethical activity which orchestrate or elude in particular ways the objective constraints of a social order.¹¹ Likewise, Certeau focuses on how the ‘I’ of the historian may be inscribed in a more conflictual or intimate manner in his or her work.¹² Finally, as we shall see, he considers historical interpretation itself to be engaged in a rather paradoxical relation with regard to systems of productivity. Nevertheless, the lexis of ‘fabrication’ and ‘factories’ plays an important role in Certeau’s theoretical writing. It returns the practice of interpretation, which often seems to speak as if from an autonomous intellectual sphere, to the social and historical institutions which both limit it and make it possible.

The two sets of figures discussed above – both that referring to finitude and transcendence, and that referring interpretative activity to what it ‘fabricates’ – will recur in my analyses of Certeau’s work. They constitute an immediately striking aspect of his writing,¹³ and they betray much about his fundamental conception of what he is doing in this writing. They repeatedly re-present in it both the myth of an Other which ‘gives’ (and takes) all others, and the localized forms of ‘implicit’ alterity at work in interpretative practice. In so far as I will be dealing in what follows with historiography conceived as a contemporary ‘operation’, it will initially be the second set of figures which predominates.

Interpretation as Operation

I shall show over the course of this study how the apparently neutral or disconcertingly technical term ‘operation’ performs an organizing function in Certeau’s thought. He proposes for example in La culture au pluriel that ‘in cultural matters, we need to direct our research towards the question of operations’ (CP 221). Certeau’s analyses of historical interpretation are formulated in similar terms. He argues that

in history, everything begins with the move which sets apart, which groups together and which transforms into ‘documents’ certain objects which had been classified in another way.… The material is created through the concerted actions which cut it out from its place in the world of contemporary usage, which seek it also beyond the frontiers of this usage, and which subject it to a coherent form of re-employment.… Establishing signs offered up for specific kinds of treatment, this rupture is therefore neither solely nor first of all the effect of a ‘gaze’. It requires a technical operation. (WH 73/84)

Certeau emphasizes that the interpreter does not passively absorb the traces of the other, but ‘operates’ on them in such a way as to redistribute them. The material constituted by these founding operations of selection and ordering forms itself moreover the basis for a further series of operations, or ‘treatments’. Finally, the results of this treatment must be ‘written up’ – itself an operation of a particular kind. Certeau takes up all these facets of interpretative practice to present, as it were, a complex and ‘layered’ account of the ‘historiographical operation’. In my analysis of this account, I will examine firstly Certeau’s treatment of interpretative operations in so far as they can be ‘delimited’ by formal analysis, and secondly the forms of social practice implied by these operations. In both cases, I will indicate the modifications which Certeau’s employment of the lexis of ‘operations’ was designed to effect upon prevailing conceptions of historical interpretation.

Delimiting operations

If interpretative acts are to be conceived as operations, the suggestion is that they can, like other operations designed to fabricate other objects, be delimited and broken down into their constituent parts. That is, they can be shown to consist of specific formal rules, procedures and skills. Of course, there are important differences between interpretative practice and other more obviously ‘practical’ practices. Interpreters are seldom aware of the extent to which, or indeed of exactly how, they are following (or are led by) diverse rules and procedures. Moreover, there is likely to be a resistance on the part of interpreters to having all their mental acts reduced to formal (‘abstract’) operations.¹⁴ Yet it is precisely as a response to such innate resistance that Certeau sets out to place all interpretative activity under the rubric of ‘operations’.¹⁵ He seeks to prise apart any supposed intuitive bond linking the interpreter to his or her object, in order to foreground rather the ‘artificiality’ and projections (in the psychoanalytic sense) inherent in this relation, and the inevitable misprisions and forceful a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I : Implications
• Part II : Fables
• Part III : Strategies and Tactics
• Conclusion: Thought in Motion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index