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Michel de Certeau

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT Jr ' i i X^ ' * i

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) certainly lived an academic life less ordinary starting as an ordained Jesuit priest working on their archives, producing enormously erudite studies of Mediaeval Mysticism w i t h his most sustained work on the spiritual possessions of medieval Loudun and popular religious mysticism. Contrastingly, he was also a member of Jacques Lacan's I'ecole Freudienne from its start to finish. These hardly seem likely starting points for someone who has become something of a shibboleth for work on consumption. It becomes clearer if we understand that de Certeau underwent something of a personal revelation through the events in Paris in 1968 and moved his later scholarship onto more topical urban matters. Through his work on urban anthropology he became seen as the champion of the common folk, of a street-level social theory, w i t h his key theoretical contribution a theory of practice which stresses how objects and happenings exceed our conceptualisations of them. To take an early programmatic statement:
T h i s essay is dedicated to the ordinary m a n [sic]. T h e c o m m o n hero. Disseminated character. Untold w a n d e r e r . I n invoking,

at the outset of m y narratives, this absent being w h o gives them their beginning a n d necessity, I question myself as to the desire of w h i c h he figures the impossible object. W h e n we dedicate to h i m documents w h i c h formerly were offered i n homage to divinities or to inspirational muses, w h a t do we ask of this oracle merged w i t h the r u m o r of history that w i l l authorize us to speak or m a k e believable w h a t we say? T h i s anonym o u s hero comes from w a y back. He is the m u r m u r of societies. (de C e r t e a u , 1980: 5)

Here lie several key elements of his project. For sure, there is clearly an attention to the everyday, and its alignment with spatial practices of walking and movement. More subtly though, is a roundaboutness to this object. De Certeau positions the everyday hero as 'impossible', yet generating rumours and inspirations. There is both the positive evaluation of the only half-heard (again not quite knowable) murmurings of social action described through aural not visual metaphors of knowledge - and the dangerous sense of such half-heard tilings authorising knowledge claims. Through examining such themes de Certeau's work has been picked up for: first, how it points to a critique of urban ideologies, and especially those of planning and rationalism; second, as offering an account of life that exceeds notions of planned space in terms of a model of active practice transforming spaces; third, a sense of local 'tactics' that, fourth, form part of consumption practices.

Michel de Certeau

skyscrapers ... A wave of verticals. Its agitation momentarily arrested by vision. T h e gigantic mass is immobilized before (lie eyes. It is transformed into a text urology ... To w h a t erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading s u c h a cosmos belong? H a v i n g taken voluptuous pleasure i n it, I w o n d e r w h a t is the source of this pleasure of 'seeing the whole', of looking d o w n on, totalizing the most immoderate of h u m a n texts. (de C e r t e a u , 1984: 9 1 - 2 )

Philosophically his work might be seen to be anchored i n two great traditions. First, the anti-Parmenidean approach that sees things always as exceeding and irreducible to our conceptions of them, and second as being inspired by work on language. I n terms of linguistic theories, the two great touchstones are clearly the theories of Jacques Lacan, and also those of Ludwig Wittgenstein. De Certeau used Wittgentein's analysis of ordinary language and his grounding of philosophy i n everyday language to resist claims for both a special domain of expertise 'beyond language' and claims for an extra-discursive position of authority. De Certeau thus commented 'We are subject to, but not identified with, ordinary language. As i n the ship of fools, we are embarked, without the possibility of an aerial view or any sort of totalization' (de Certeau, 1984: 11). His embrace of thinking from within ordinary practice follows from this and is best exemplified i n his most read work The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). It is i n this guise that de Certeau has become a darling to some, as a counterpoint to stratospheric theory, and villain for others, as an example of taking micro-theory too far.

This has keyed into a whole series of critiques of urban theory - that question the subject position and viewpoint of planners, the panoptic disciplining of space and the pretensions of social theory. Here he asks us to think about the enjoyment mobilised by theoretical and management accounts that offer us a privileged and 'powerful' view of urban process there is no innocent viewpoint and the gaze of theory offers to satisfy desires for knowledge and order. In other words, the popularity of these approaches is not just about their better insights but also how they position us as powerful knowing subjects. As such he is critical of visual metaphors for knowledge and practices of visualising society, arguing that:
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SPATIAL CONTRIBUTION
Possibly his most celebrated essay Walking in the City - often reprinted from The Practices of Everyday Life, opens w i t h what is now an anachronistic evocation of urban theory and its desire for an orderly view of what he calls the 'Concept city':
Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade centre. Beneath the haze stirred u p by the winds, the u r b a n island, a sea h i the middle of the sea, lifts u p the

O u r society is characterized by a ous growth of vi si on, m e a s u r i n g thing by its ability to s h o w or be and transmuting communication v i s u a l journey. I t is a sort of epic eye a n d the i m p u l s e to read. (de C e r t e a u , 1984: xxi)

His caution is that this converts the world into a 'texturology' that we can read, but in so doing it freezes urban life and thus occludes a great many urban practices. Thus he argues that representational art and science immobilise the city's 'opaque mobility' into a transparent text that offers only the 'empire of the evident' (1984: 204) where practices are often treated as inert contents or as

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

cultural attributes to be measured. This leaves theory 'mourning at the tomb of the absent' speaking about the laws or structures not the actions themselves. He suggests social theory often replicates the epistemological vision of the powerful. Thus even if its purpose is critical or oppositional, it too tends to believe in plans, regularities and structures, as though they were the limits of social life. Instead he looks to a 'scattered polytheism' of different systems of thought - the dispersed knowledges of practices that elude the gaze of theory. He does not see an aggregate sum of practices but an innumerable mass of singularities not because they are too numerous to count, but because they are ontologically uncountable. I n other words, it is not a lack of technical capacity that might be overcome by more surveys and larger datasets processed i n bigger algorithms. Instead he sees tactics transforming the places designed by hegemonic powers and envisioned as the neat and orderly realm of the concept city, into unruly spaces; that is, he sees practices as spatialising places.
Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, a n d m a k e it f u n c t i o n i n a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. O n this view, i n relation to place, space is like the w o r d w h e n it is spoken, that is w h e n it is caught in the ambiguity of a n actualization, transformed into a t e r m dependent upon m a n y conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), a n d m o d i fied by the transformations caused by successive contexts. ... I n short, space is a practiced place. T h u s the street geometrically d e f i n e d by u r b a n p l a n n i n g is transformed into space by w a l k e r s . (de Certeau, 1984: 117, original emphasis)

This rather unhelpfully inverts the usual geographical usage where space is associated with the abstract form of space and

place with the more lived and experiential. In part this stems from the translation of the French words lieu as 'place', and espace as space. In some sense the translation would be better with 'location' instead of place. The sense that de Certeau gives it (lieu) is clearer when we read it as 'the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed i n relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place)' (de Certeau 1984: 117). Here one can see the connection with the synchronic structures of structural linguistics, and thus de Certeau's turn to 'speech acts' and the use of everyday language, after Wittgenstein, is enacting a poststructuralist move. However, this version of place also invokes a deeper ontological sense from Lacanian analysis of the 'propre' as a purified centre organising knowledge. Here then he looks to the control of space as a matter of strategy which is orientated through the construction of powerful knowledges. In contrast, there are tactics the arts of making do, like reading, or cooking - which use what they find i n multiple permutations. This practical knowledge of the city transforms and crosses spaces, creates new links, comprising mobile geographies of looks and glances as people walk through and walk by these given places. Strategy claims territory and defines place; tactics use and subvert those places. The strategic vision of power and theory are thus transformed by small-scale tactics. Strategy, he sees, as the imposition of power through the disciplining and organisation of space - zoning activities, prescribing some activities in some places, proscribing them in others. Tactics are the 'ruses' that take the predisposition of the world and make it over, that convert it to the purposes of ordinary people. The giant order of urban planning and the concept city is thus both vast yet also strangely tenuous when set against the 'maritime

Michel de Certeau

immensity' of scattered practices - the city is an 'order-sieve' (1984: 143). The gaze of power transfixes objects but also thus becomes blind to a vast array of things that do not fit its categories. Thus empirically we might look at different modes of knowing the city - what he termed the 'wordless histories' of things such as ways of walking, modes of dress, cooking or childhood memories. These create absences and ghosts in the machine that render the city truly 'habitable' and inhabited. Thus, he is sceptical of knowledges that 'map' cities from a God's-eye view, and is more concerned with 'stories' as epistemologies of actually getting by in cities; and, i n spatial terms, he saw walking as a form of practical narration. The city is known by walking rather than looking down at a static plan. I n making this move one can see him setting himself against the geometric forms of knowledge and ordering of spaces, seeing such mathematical languages and forms of knowledge as leading inexorably to places being depicted as equivalent to one another. His work looks at the use of objects and places rather than their ownership and production - the French title of The Practice of Everyday Life is 'L'art de faire', which can also be translated as 'ways of making do'. So he turns our attention to how tactics appropriate what has been created by hegemonic knowledge systems. Thus children make jungles and castles out of apparent wasteland or 'spaces left over i n planning' or street signs become associated w i t h social memories that may reject their formal significance (instead of commemorating generals for instance they may be associated w i t h a first kiss, a riot or something different entirely) and monuments become refigured into popular culture (statues of reclining women in fountains i n both Birmingham and Dublin have earnt the local epithets of 'the floozy in the Jacuzzi').

The city for de Certeau is as much about dreams as things, and about doings not just knowings. It is through taking what is there and re-using it that locations become meaningful and inhabited. But if we were to look for conventional indicators of production or use then we would see nothing of this urban life. He has thus become associated w i t h seeing consumption not as an end point or afterthought to producing urban spaces and service, but as an active process. Although here he points to the overall framing of hegemonic power, he sees the Brownian movements of myriad practices within that system. The plurality of practices creates a 'piling up of heterogeneous places. Each one, like the deteriorating page of a book, refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socioeconomic distribution, of political conflicts and of identifying symbolism' (de Certeau 1984: 201); that is, multiple practices, some of which may be powerful and others residues of former systems of knowledge, overlap. Thus, for example, gentrified neighbourhoods may have been built to service factories that have disappeared, w i t h streets named after forgotten heroes of empires that have fallen. 'The whole [is] made up of pieces that are not contemporary and still linked to totalities that have fallen into ruins' (ibid.). If we look at de Certeau's wider corpus of work we can see that another key contribution is then analysing the organisation and production of knowledge. Here, his work draws on that notion of proper places producing organising systems of knowledge and argues instead these are largely artefacts of our ways of thinking. As he put it, 'it would be wrong to think that these tools are neutral, or their gaze inert: nothing gives itself up, everything has to be seized, and the same interpretive violence can either create or destroy' (1986: 135). Just as places are made up

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

of different clashing symbolic systems, he comments, as social scientists or historians present evidence, they actually freeze and dissect the dynamism of practices so that that they only appear in the text in a fragmented, wounded state, as perhaps a 'ruin'. He also looks carefully at this 'place' of analysis as being one where we can accumulate knowledge by subjecting it all to the same interpretation. This he says is part of an accumulatory economy or 'Occidental capitalization of knowledge' that serves to locate a privileged knowledge 'back here' in the place of analysis and sets that against a world 'out there'. He thus offers a critique of knowledge processes, seeing a quest for purity and conceptual order as linked to both the symbolic and historic economy of dominance of the West. Instead he sees the process as more itinerant, with us moving through different material in different places, in libraries, in the field, with a sort of textual and theoretical voyaging that complements empirical travels and travails; and argues for a conceptualisation of making knowledge through fortuitous encounters and tracing connections.

KEY ADVANCES AND CONTROVERSIES

De Certeau's influence i n geography has been w i t h respect to four main areas, in perhaps roughly chronological order: rethinking urban planning; developing conceptions of consumption; postcolonial approaches to historiography; and the theorisation of space. The earliest is perhaps, quantitatively, the second most prominent. Here, de Certeau has figured in planning and geography as

against totalising planning and urban theory. He has been set against, for instance, more pessimistic readings from Lefebvre or the Situationists that suggest capital is colonising the lifeworld to see a continued vivacity of urban practice. He has also been taken as a statement for the importance of not producing totalising, academic accounts - of refusing the powerful gaze of theory. His works here, thus, both figure in and against, accounts such as those by E d Soja, that seek to accord a liveliness to place and practices, yet continue to offer the grand vision of urban process as a whole. The second thematic on consumption built upon his twofold move of seeing consumption as creative praxis (thus liberating its study from being an economic epiphenomena) and as being capable of resistance. His work here chimed w i t h that of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and came into a confluence of work around resistance through consumption practices. It is important to recall that up until the 1990s very few studies had followed consumption beyond the point of purchase. The third strand, in terms of post-colonial historiography, aligns his work w i t h other historians (such as Hayden White) and emphasises that the politics of knowledge extend beyond the urban. Here his accounting of science's production of an exquisite corpse is coupled w i t h his powerful global spatial imaginary. It is notable here that in terms of reach, while the English translation of Practice of Everyday Life has some 5000 citations on Google scholar, Heterologies has more like 500. Finally, his determination to create a sense of place as actively constructed has been developed in theoretical accounts, especially taking his notions of the transformation of space through the conjunction of circumstances and memory - meaning its affordance change and it too is changed

Michel de Certeau

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limited, resistance. Such always dispersed, limited evasions, that he refuses to say could constitute an alternative order have frustrated those seeking just such an alternative model for society. Third, his empirical connection to practices of neighbourhood life and walking the streets connects him to an imaginary of urbane life that is located i n a European intellectual culture that may not reflect all urban lifestyles. Finally, these are linked i n the sense that de Certeau had a coherent overall philosophical view and project, w i t h its own language and terminology. The over-quick use of his terms and ideas in consumption studies can often sound like invocation rather than analysis and risks losing the subtleties of his work. Where current debates might look to develop new avenues from his work is more speculative. But it seems remarkable that w i t h the rise of non-representational work, his attention to the violence of representation has not been used, and his focus on practice chimes well where he says the ordinary actor 'always precedes texts' (1980: 4). Indeed he links the triumph of power w i t h the triumph of vision and representation (1980: 5). But more surprising is that i n that nonrepresentational work's attentiveness to the unsaid, and the unsayable, to the felt and indeed almost spiritual, it has not found support in his work on mysticism and the unrepresentable.

(Crang and Travlou, 2001). His work has emphasised the invisible myths that do not merely ornament places but deeply structure their uses. It is worth pausing to think about the limits of the adoption of de Certeau into social theory. He has perhaps been too easily co-opted as the champion of the common man (it is perhaps notable that it is only w i t h Volume 2 of the practices of everyday life that he and a collaborator, Luce Giard, have chapters on cooking and neighbourhoods that really address the gendering of spaces). One might build three sets of critiques of how he has been used and especially his urban thinking. First, his conceptualisation of power tends to see a totalising and powerful form of knowledge pitted against the ordinary citizen. This lacks a more sociological sense of the mediation of power by different institutions and actors w i t h i n those institutions, all of w h o m have their own agendas (or dare one say tactics) about their work. De Certeau stands accused of having such a powerful version of power, it is almost inoperable. Second, the opposition of tactic and strategy is thus rather more like a series of gaps or misalignments in a dance than how it is often portrayed as resistance or transgression. De Certeau's tactics are actually not politically oppositional, they are evasive of the orders and plans of the dominant knowledge rather than forming a coherent, and equally

DE CERTEAU'S KEY WORKS

de Certeau, M. (1980) 'On the oppositional practices of everyday life', Social Text, 1:3-43. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Original edition, LArts de faire, (1980) Editions Minuit. de Certeau, M. (1986) Heterologies: Discourses on the Other. Manchester: Manchester University Press, de Certeau. M. (1988) The Writing of H/'story Trans. T. Conley New York: Columbia University Press.

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Key Thinkers on Space and Place

de Certeau, M. (1992) The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans. M. Smith, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Certeau, M. (1997) The Capture of Speech and other Political Writings. Trans. T. Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Certeau, M. (1997) Culture in the Plural. Trans. T. Conley Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, de Certeau, M., Giard L. and Mayol, P. (1998) The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking. Trans. T. Tomasik. Vol. 2. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Original edition, ^Invention du quotidien II habiter, cuisiner, 1994, Editions Gallimard.

Secondary Sources and References

Ahearne, J. (1995) Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buchanan, I. (2000) Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. London: Sage. Brammer, M. (1992) Thinking practice: Michel de Certeau and the theorization of mysticism', Diacritics, 22:26-37. Carrard, P. (2001) 'History as a kind of writing: Michel de Certeau and the poetics of historiography', South Atlantic Quarterly, 100:465-82. Conley, T. (1992) 'Michel de Certeau and the textual icon', Diacritics 22:38-49. Crang, M. (2000) 'Spaces of practice: the work of Michel de Certeau', in M. Crang, and N. Thrift (eds) Thinking Space. London: Routledge. pp. 126-40. Crang, M. and Travlou, S.E. (2001)'The city and topologies of memory', Society & Space, 19:161-77. Frow, J. (1992) 'Michel de Certeau and the practice of representation'. Cultural Studies, 6:52-60. Giard, L. (1991) Michel de Certeau's heterology and the New World', Representations, 33:212-21. Lock, C. (1999) 'Michel de Certeau: walking the via negative', Paragraph. 22:184-98. Meagher, S.M. (2007) 'Philosophy in the streets', City, 11:7-20. Olwig, K. R. (2006) 'Place contra space in a morally just landscape'. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 60:24-31. Reynolds, B. and Fitzpatrick, J. (1999) 'The transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault's panoptic discourse and the cartographic impulse', Diacritics, 29:63-80.

Mike Crang, Durham University