Michel de Certeau

Cultural Theorist

Ian Buchanan

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780761958987, 9780761958970
• eBook ISBN: 9781446232859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

de Certeau is often considered to be the theorist of everyday life par excellence. This book provides an unrivalled critical introduction to de Certeau?s work and influence and looks at his key ideas and asks how should we try to understand him in relation to theories of modern culture and society.

Ian Buchanan demonstrates how de Certeau was influenced by Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Greimas and the meaning of de Certeau?s notions of `strategy?, `tactics?, `place? and `space? are clearly described. The book argues that de Certeau died before developing the full import of his work for the study of culture and convincingly, it tries to complete or imagine the directions that de Certeau?s work would have taken, had he lived.

1. The Plane of Immanence

A beginning must be found which is not yet the presentation of an intelligible phenomenon, but which is rather simply a special kind of awakened attention on our part.

Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style

The humbling breadth of de Certeau’s erudition taunts readers of his work into making unwarranted reductions – in the hope of making it manageable, no doubt. Specified either by period, giving us a specious early and late de Certeau, which holds that his early work as religious historian did not prepare him for his later career as cultural theorist, or biography, giving us an even more specious distinction between a religious and a secular de Certeau, as though to say in ceasing to focus on theological issues he somehow gave up his beliefs, de Certeau’s oeuvre has been carved up and repackaged several times over, and usually by the most well meaning of critics. Against an ideal model that, in Deleuze’s words (1995), takes an author as a whole, de Certeau’s work has been fragmented quite literally as well thanks to the curious order in which it was translated and its subsequently rather odd dissemination.¹ As it happens, the first translations to appear were not the first ones noticed by cultural studies; in fact, these early translations remain largely ignored (for example de Certeau, 1964; 1966; 1970a; 1970b; 1971). Because they appeared in the rather closed field of religious studies journals, these earlier pieces have been passed over in favour of the later more secular-seeming work.²

The key issue prompting all this intellectual prestidigitation is, I will argue, de Certeau’s religiosity. It is like a thorn in the side of strictly secular critics; they want to use his insights and methods but don’t know how to handle his religious conviction so they suppress it. This is easy enough to do because for the most part de Certeau’s remarks on religious topics are oriented either by historical concerns – what was the place of the mystics in seventeenth-century France? – or anthropological ones – what does it mean to believe? – which are readily assimilable by non-religious critical concerns. And since these secular-looking investigations were published in the latter part of de Certeau’s career a convenient quarantining of the thornier aspects of his thought can comfortably and plausibly be made on the basis of biography. In this respect, de Certeau has been somewhat a victim of his own success – the greater the popularity of the later works the greater the desire to suppress the earlier ones. From the outset, de Certeau has only ever been read in an instrumental way. Yet, I would also argue, it is precisely because of the narrow and instrumental way de Certeau’s work has been apprehended, by Anglophones at least, that it has been the success that it is.

For instance, Jeremy Ahearne commences his study of de Certeau by positing a ‘“founding rupture” (rupture instauratice)’ in de Certeau’s career that consigns everything published ‘before’ 1970 to the status of ‘other’, and though he is careful to acknowledge that these prior works may have prefigured this ‘“shattering” (éclatement)’ or watershed he does not dwell on the relationship between the two periods save to suggest that the later work is haunted by the earlier (1995: 5).³ Here, though, beneath this purely organisational manoeuvre, we encounter an even more insidious strategy of containment that licenses the admitted arbitrariness of the selection by claiming that the oeuvre itself was, in its own way, arbitrary too.⁴ According to Ahearne, de Certeau ‘was not interested in producing a systematic edifice, nor did he set himself up as the guardian of an erudite preserve’ (1995: 3). Whether or not de Certeau’s work was ‘conceived as an ongoing response to a series of appeals and solicitations addressed to him directly or indirectly by others’ (1995: 3) as Ahearne claims, thus making it seem an almost ad hoc adventure, is of only secondary concern, because what must really be addressed is whether or not de Certeau’s presuppositions were similarly fluid. My point is that denying the existence of an overarching thesis spanning the entirety of a career, to the extreme even of ignoring a consistency of method and a durability of epistemological substrate, is really just another way of avoiding the issue of de Certeau’s religiosity.

It is not just a matter of an accurate reading of de Certeau’s work that is at stake here. Also at issue is the relative value of his contribution to cultural studies. If one follows Jameson, as I do, in thinking that the absence of a determinate project is a fault amounting to a complicity with the very state of affairs that critics in our time ought to be denouncing as loudly and thoroughly as possible, then the issue of de Certeau’s religiosity takes on a whole new meaning. For as we shall see in the next chapter, de Certeau goes to great lengths to avoid or otherwise thwart the construction of anything smacking at all of being a ‘master narrative’ of the type endorsed by Jameson.

The system has always understood that ideas and analysis, along with intellectuals who practice them, are its enemies and has evolved various ways of dealing with the situation, most notably – in the academic world – by railing against what it likes to call grand theory or master narratives at the same time that it fosters more comfortable and local positivisms and empiricisms in the various disciplines. If you attack the concept of totality, for example, you are less likely to confront embarrassing models and analyses of that totality called late capitalism or capitalist globalisation; if you promote the local and the empirical, you are less likely to have to deal with the abstractions of class or value, without which the system cannot be understood. (Jameson, 1999: 267)

And insofar as de Certeau can be seen to promulgate a system of analysis focusing on precisely those ‘local positivisms and empiricisms’ that, in Jameson’s view, are the hallmark of our age’s anti-intellectualism, his position is exceedingly suspect from a Marxist point of view. Sadly, it seems that in cultural studies today it is precisely the misperception of him as an ‘ideology free’ skirmisher that actually accounts for a good part of de Certeau’s rising cachet. Unfortunately, it has been de Certeau’s fate, thanks largely to his persuasive and ultimately career-making (in Anglo-American circles anyway) elaboration of one such local positivism, namely his concept of tactics, to be seen as an invaluable ally in this disturbing shift towards the empty and unashamedly anti-theoretical position which, on the evidence of some of the recent uptakes of his work, cultural studies seems to want to occupy.

Yet, while it is true that de Certeau was in fact one of the more perspicacious critics of that form of generalisation Jameson calls totality and did indeed counter totalising gestures with his own brand of localising demystification, he was not, for all that, anti-theoretical, much less anti-intellectual. His most important demystifying weapon was doubtless the already mentioned notion of tactics, which, as I will try to show here, is neither anti-theoretical nor anti-intellectual in design or intention. Despite all the affirmations de Certeau generates from them, tactics are in fact his ‘negative’. Now, this is not to say that I think Jameson is wrong in his assessment of the ideological implications of the present rise in volume and valency of ‘local positivisms and empiricisms’ because it is perfectly clear that ‘if you promote the local and the empirical, you are less likely to have to deal with the abstractions of class or value’ without which the system of capitalism itself cannot be understood. Time and again, one sees that a pointed focus on the local is not only an alternative to a focus on the global or systemic, it is also a means of avoiding ever having to look at the larger picture. Such a tack, obviously enough, is at least as much ideologically motivated as it is theoretically driven; because while it is true that any half-way competent ‘adept’ of deconstruction, for instance, can demolish a totality with childish ease, their desire to do so is not so readily explained.

It would be a hollow exercise indeed if the only reason one deconstructed a totality was because one could, or more banally still, because it was there. It is more likely that a certain theoretical ability is preceded by a certain theoretical desire. Thus, after the manner of Lyotard (1993), it may be useful to refer to a ‘desire called the local’ when speaking of present anti-totalisation trends in cultural studies because the theoretical marginalisation it enacts is surely ideological in origin. A reality that is sometimes obscured by the fact that the bitterest opponents of totalisation claim to endorse the same doctrine as its proponents.⁵ The key question is of course whether or not de Certeau shares this ‘desire called the local’? The short answer is no; the longer answer is that what positive things de Certeau did have to say about the local were predicated by the very important caveat that the tactical is what people are reduced to when they are deprived of power (de Certeau, 1984: 38). By the same token, de Certeau did not refuse abstraction, as tends to be the case with most advocates of the local and empirical. On the contrary, his notion of tactics is a formalisation and, as it were, a raising up, of what would otherwise be merely local. The more interesting answer, though, is that de Certeau used a very similar means of meta-critique himself to the one deployed here, only he didn’t use the term desire as such.

De Certeau’s discussion of the ‘practices’ of everyday life – under which rubric he included the technical operations of historians, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and so on – did not stop at desire, an exceedingly contemporary notion, but reached for something more primeval still:

Perhaps these practices correspond to an ageless art which has not only persisted through the institutions of successive political orders but goes back much further than our histories and forms strange alliances preceding the frontiers of humanity. These practices present in fact a curious analogy, and a sort of immemorial link, to the simulations, tricks, and disguises that certain fishes or plants execute with extraordinary virtuosity’. (de Certeau, 1984: 40)

The immediate aim of this wild-seeming speculation is, as he goes on to explain, to free cultural analysis from its obsession with repressive hypotheses. Whereas Foucault (1978) repudiated the notion of repression with a dreamwork-like transformation of it into its opposite, making the exercise of power productive not repressive (so that no one can ever be fully repressed), de Certeau’s way is to proclaim a multi-millennial obstinacy, a perdurability of the practices of the weak proven by their continued existence since the dawn of time.

Its deeper aim, though, is to provide an ‘imaginary landscape’, as de Certeau puts it; something that, after Deleuze (1994), I would call the precondition of a ‘plane of immanence’, or, perhaps better still, after Bakhtin (1981), a ‘chronotope’, since what is fundamentally at stake here is in fact the elaboration of a time–space continuum on which to construct a new and indeed renewing image of culture and society. The ‘imaginary landscape’ ‘restores what was earlier called “popular culture”, but it does so in order to transform what was represented as a matrix-force of history into a mobile infinity of tactics. It thus keeps before our eyes the structure of a social imagination in which the problem constantly takes different forms and begins anew’ (de Certeau, 1984: 41). This long durée conception of the social as a stylised coalition of basically primordial practices has the added advantage, de Certeau suggests, of thwarting ‘the effects of an analysis which necessarily grasps these practices only on the margins of a technical apparatus, at the point where they alter or defeat its instruments’ (1984: 41). It does this by making ‘practices’ in their immemorial, pre-consciousness form the basis of all procedures, whether mundane and quotidian, bureaucratic, or even technocratic, in nature.

The procedures of this art can be found in the farthest reaches of the domain of the living, as if they managed to surmount not only the strategic distribution of historical institutions but also the break established by the very institution of consciousness. They maintain formal continuities and the permanence of a memory without language, from the depths of the ocean to the streets of our great cities. (de Certeau, 1984: 40)

Tactics, then, are not local positivisms or simple empiricisms, at all, but rather the precondition of de Certeau’s plane of immanence. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the notion of ‘tactics’ (as well as its cognate ‘practices’) has the same function in de Certeau’s work as ‘desire’ does in Deleuze and Guattari’s: it posits a flux in which all the old categories and ideas social inquiry in any of its modes – history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so on – still clings to, can be dissolved. Its primary function should thus be seen as ‘negative’ in precisely the dialectical sense Jameson (1999) fears is rapidly being lost to us as totalising methods fall into disrepute and disuse. Effectively, de Certeau uses ‘tactics’ to rewire cultural analysis according to an immanently conceived grid, instead of a transcendental one, which is of course what Deleuze and Guattari employ desire to do, the main difference between the two being de Certeau’s religiosity which, as I will explain in more detail below, demands he postulate at least one transcendental term, namely God. Of course, totalisation itself is by no means immune to the corrosive powers of this flux, it too must suffer redefinition and retooling. Its new form is that of the plane of immanence itself, or the body without organs as it is also sometimes known.

The fact that all the mechanisms of defence – and I do believe the psychoanalytic diagnosis is warranted – mentioned above, from the stipulation of early and later, through the fantasy of an apostasy, to the denial of intellectual consistency, are motivated by a single enigma, namely de Certeau’s religiosity, presents its own problems of course. Despite repeated affirmations of his Christianity, both direct and indirect, none more compelling I suppose than the simple fact that he never renounced his Jesuitical affiliation (even if he did eventually drop the telltale ‘SJ’ after his name), the enigma remains alive as ever because de Certeau constantly questioned the meaning of such an affirmation. He made belief his very topic of inquiry and perhaps by doing so made it seem that he himself no longer believed, as though to say that as soon as one exposes such a wan metaphysical concern to the bleaching light of scientific method one must surely be led to recant any attachment to it. In other words, atheism predisposes certain of de Certeau’s readers to think he must have turned away from God because according to their own convictions that is the only way they can think well of him. Yet, as I will argue, no such turning away occurred. That said, a purely theological (or, at any rate, an exclusively ‘religious studies’) reading of de Certeau’s work is equally unsatisfactory because it can only accommodate de Certeau’s doubt in religious terms, as the proper – and quintessentially Catholic – questioning of the limits of one’s faith, when in fact it seems to have run far deeper than that.⁶

De Certeau made belief an historical, philosophical, political as well as purely existential concern, and the full pluridimensionality (as I would want to call it) of his investigations needs to be considered if it is to be understood. Of course, saying it is one thing and doing it quite another. Inevitably, a reduction of some sort must be made, it being impossible (save in a Borgesian fantasy) to reproduce point for point in a single tome every nuance of a body of work spanning more than twenty volumes. By the same token, the very point of producing a study of an author is precisely to tender such a reduction of their body of work, so it would defeat the purpose of the exercise if one did in fact try simply to reproduce it point for point. Given that a reproduction is as undesirable as it is impossible, the key question is what type of reduction will be made, and what justification can be given? Such a question, as Deleuze has pointed out (1994: xix), is as much a matter of modesty as method, for it involves stipulating as fully and frankly as one can just what it is one wants to achieve. I should say then, that my aim, following a model inaugurated by Deleuze, is to produce de Certeau’s double, his body without organs in other words. A double is made up of the set of presuppositio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Plane of Immanence
• 2. ‘Blasting Free’, or, The Stylistic Inflection
• 3. Meta-historiography
• 4. Heterology, or the book we’ll never read
• 5. Strategy and Tactics
• 6. Unknotting Place and Space
• Select Bibliography
• Index