Michel de Certeau E-Book

Jeremy Ahearne

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Michel de Certeau

Interpretation and its Other

JEREMY AHEARNE

Polity Press

Copyright © Jeremy Ahearne 1995

The right of Jeremy Ahearne to be identified as author of this work hasbeen asserted in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Pressin association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2005, 2007

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Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I Implications

1  The Historiographical Operation

Figuring Interpretation

Interpretation as Operation

Systems and Re-employments

Working on Limits

2  Interpretation and its Archaeology

The Concept of an ‘Archaeology’

Archaeological Diagnoses

Economies of Writing

Part II Fables

3  Voices in the Text

Jean de Léry: Heterology and Myth

The Possession of Loudun

Reflections and Interruptions

4  Mystics

Absence, Difference, Repetition

Manners of Speaking

Appropriations and Alterations

Part III Strategies and Tactics

5  Strategic Operations

The Concept of Popular Culture

A Politics of Language

The Disciplining of Society (Foucault)

Theory and Practice (Bourdieu)

Imaginary Displacements

6  Turns and Diversions

Strategies and Tactics

Readings

Itineraries

Problems

Conclusion: Thought in Motion

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank especially Ian Maclean and Luce Giard for their discerning and generous guidance over the course of this project. I would also like to thank Malcolm Bowie, Maddi Dobie, Alex Dracobly, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Mike Holland, Ann Jefferson, Jacques Le Brun, Jacques Revel and Wes Williams for reading and commenting on earlier drafts from this work, and Christina and Bernard Howells for directing me towards Michel de Certeau’s work in the first place. I am grateful to John Thompson for asking me to write this book and to Ann Bone for her deft and expert copy-editing.

This book is dedicated to my parents, with particular thanks also to Katy and Molly for new perspectives.

The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from the following: Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley, copyright © 1988 by Columbia University Press; Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, tr. Michael B. Smith, copyright © 1992 by The University of Chicago; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall, copyright © 1984 by The Regents of the University of California. They are also grateful for permission to use a number of translated quotations from Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel, une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois, copyright © Éditions Gallimard 1975.

Abbreviations

I shall refer to Certeau’s major texts using the following abbreviations.

AH

L’Absent de l’histoire

CP

La culture au pluriel

E

L’Étranger ou l’union dans la différence

FC

La faiblesse de croire

H

Heterologies: Discourse on the Other

HP

Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction

MF

The Mystic Fable,

vol. 1 (French:

La fable mystique,

vol. 1)

PE

The Practice of Everyday Life

(French:

L’Invention du quotidien,

vol. 1:

Arts de faire

)

PL

La possession de Loudun

PP

La prise de parole et autres écrits politiques

UPdL

une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois

WH

The Writing of History

(French:

L’Écriture de l’histoire

)

Publication details for these editions are given in the bibliography. Wherever possible, I have given references to English translations. In abbreviated references I cite first the abbreviated title, then a page reference to the English translation, then a page reference to the French edition. Thus (MF 295/407) refers to a passage which can be found on page 295 of The Mystic Fable, and on page 407 of La fable mystique. Where a passage or article can be found in translation in the collection Heterologies (which does not correspond directly to a French volume), then the reference takes the form (H 119/CP 45). Where only one page reference is given (i.e. UPdL 15), this means unless otherwise indicated that no translation is yet available.

I have used the excellent published translations where they exist, though I occasionally modify them in order to emphasize particular nuances or connotations contained in the French. Otherwise I have produced my own translations.

Introduction

To each their strangers

Julia Kristeva

Michel de Certeau died on the 9 January 1986, leaving behind him the memory of an ‘intelligence without bounds’ (Roger Chartier), but also ‘without fear, without fatigue and without arrogance’ (Marc Augé), of ‘one of the boldest, the most secret and the most sensitive minds of our time’ (Julia Kristeva), and of a ‘spoken word bathed today in shadow and light’ whose writings ‘continue to call to us in our most intimate recesses’ (Edmond Jabès).1 Since 1984, with the translation of The Practice of Everyday Life, his writings have begun to circulate increasingly across a plurality of disciplines throughout the English-speaking world.2 The present book represents the first full-length study of Certeau’s thought, and is designed as a guide to draw out the exceptional range but also the overall coherence of a challenging and incisive body of work. My book presupposes no prior knowledge of Certeau’s thought, but should also be of particular interest for those readers who are already acquainted with at least one facet of his prismatic work and who wish to explore how their understanding of this may be reconfigured by a reading of the oeuvre as a whole.

Certeau was born in Chambéry in 1925. He obtained degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon and Paris and, rather later, a doctorate in religious science at the Sorbonne in 1960. He joined the Jesuits in 1950 (with the hope of working in China), and was ordained in 1956. Asked to undertake research into the origins of the Jesuit order, he had become by the mid-1960s a leading specialist in early modern religious history (working notably on Pierre Favre, a companion of Ignatius, and then on Jean-Joseph Surin, a strange seventeenth-century mystic). At this time he was editing and contributing regularly to a number of broadly Catholic reviews (in particular Christus and Études, Jesuit journals devoted respectively to spirituality and to culture). In 1968, he published a seminal analysis of the symbolic ‘revolution’ of that year, entitled La prise de parole. Pour une nouvelle culture [Starting to speak: Towards a new culture]. In retrospect, this can be seen to have heralded a watershed in his intellectual itinerary, confirmed by the publication in 1970 of the historical study La possession de Loudun [The possession of Loudun]. While many of the fundamental questions informing his thought would remain, their expression no longer bore the marks of an orthodox religious affiliation. Likewise his writings henceforth became disseminated across heterogeneous social, political and intellectual sites (Annales ESC, Politique Aujourd’hui, Recherches de Science Religieuse, Esprit, Traverses, Le Débat, Le Bloc-Notes de la Psychanalyse, to list only some of the journals in which his later work appeared). His writings were now clearly situated in relation to a range of contemporary problematics, and cut across issues in psychoanalysis (Certeau was a member of Jacques Lacan’s École Freudienne from its inception in 1964), historiography, epistemology, semiotics and the social sciences. At the same time, in the wake of La prise de parole, Certeau had been drawn into a number of official and unofficial interlocutory networks addressing questions relating to contemporary cultural practices and policies.3 Some of these investigations emerged in book form as La culture au pluriel [Culture in the plural] (1974) and The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). The course of his work also took him across Europe, the United States and South America (he occupied a full-time post in California from 1978 to 1984). The extraordinary intelligence at work in his thought from the late 1960s onwards is the product of this untiring textual, cultural and interlocutory ‘travel’, coupled with a form of interior distancing or ‘quiet’ born of a life-long immersion in the demanding texts of the Christian mystics. This singular combination of engagement and detachment reverberates through his more properly erudite and historiographical production of the period: L’Absent de l’histoire [The absent of history] (1973), The Writing of History (1975), une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois [A politics of language: The French Revolution and patois] (1975), and the first volume of The Mystic Fable (1982).

Certeau has left us, in the words of Jean Louis Schefer, with ‘the image of an open work’.4 He was not interested in producing a systematic doctrinal edifice, nor did he set himself up as the guardian of an erudite preserve. Indeed, I shall argue that his intellectual strategy consisted precisely in an endeavour to discern and to make ethical and aesthetic space for particular forms of interruption. His work was conceived as an ongoing response to a series of appeals and solicitations addressed to him directly or indirectly by others. In the light of this, I shall not myself extract an interpretative system from Certeau’s work. In the mode perhaps of a ‘travelogue’, I have sought rather to map out and to correlate a set of intellectual itineraries which took Certeau through an intriguing combination of intellectual fields. I show how these itineraries are organized by a recurrent set of questions, and I explore how the different treatments which these questions receive can be used to shed unexpected light on each other.

The reading contained in this study is by no means the only way of moving across and analysing Certeau’s work. It could have taken a very different form. It could, for example, have followed the route mapped out by Wlad Godzich in his introduction to Heterologies, a collection of Certeau’s articles translated into English and published in 1986. Godzich inscribes Certeau’s work in a philosophical ‘countertradition’ which ‘in shorthand, could be described as being deeply suspicious of the Parmenidean principle of the identity of thought and being’ (H vii). He invokes the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, as well as Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz and Edward Said, and uses them as a framework through which to articulate the nature of Certeau’s work on alterity. This is a legitimate and helpful exercise. It corresponds to the way in which Certeau has often been received by anglophone readers, and even constitutes a viable research project. The danger which it runs, however, is that of flattening or erasing the specificity of Certeau’s oeuvre. As Godzich himself observes, few of the authors cited above (with the notable exception of Foucault) are explicitly at issue in Certeau’s thought. I have therefore opted for a different approach. If nothing else, this should provide an interesting detour to be undertaken before reinscribing Certeau into a comprehensive heterological ‘countertradition’.

I have concentrated in this study on those intertexts which work most powerfully in Certeau’s major writings. These comprise, broadly speaking, contemporary French historiographical production; the writings of early modern mystics and travellers; Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu; Freud read in a somewhat oblique manner (itself marked by Certeau’s critical participation in Lacan’s École Freudienne); the linguistics of ‘utterance’ and a range of work on contemporary cultural practices. The principal objective of my work has not, however, been to produce a general comparative study based on a flow-chart of influence and critique. I have sought rather to draw out a set of problematics which are distinctive either in their form or their treatment to Certeau: the history of early modern and modern ‘economies’ of writing, reading and speech; the gap between representations and practices; the relation between ‘strategic’ social and intellectual programmes and ‘tactical’ political or poetic activity; the question of religious belief and desire; the operations of thought in their bodily complication (psycho-analysis and socio-analysis); the development of what might be called an ethics/aesthetics. I have organized my study around one central problematic – ‘interpretation and its other’ – which cuts a transversal line across the multiplicity of Certeau’s intellectual engagements. The interpretation in question is generally a ‘certified’ form of interpretation (the homophony may possess more than a passing significance), institutionally based and founded on a set of written authorities. I examine Certeau’s reflection on the relations between such practices of interpretation and that which lies ‘outside’ them, either historically or culturally, and which they aspire in various ways to control.

In the course of my analyses, I will endeavour to gloss a variety of terms which are peculiar in their usage or connotations to Certeau’s writing, and which are liable to unsettle a first-time reader (‘scriptural economies’, ‘fables’, ‘re-employments’, ‘formalities’, ‘operations’, ‘insinuations’, ‘poeisis’, ‘strategies’, ‘tactics’, etc.). I will also introduce for the purposes of demonstration a number of my own categories. These are designed to help clarify my reading of Certeau’s work on alterity, and to prevent the term from becoming an undifferentiated catch-all or rhetorical device. They enable me to elucidate more effectively just what Certeau is doing at different points when he refers or appeals to otherness. I will talk therefore of ‘implicit’ forms of social or historical alterity, of a transcendent Other, a projected ‘other’, a fantasmatic other, a ‘virtual’ or ‘secreted’ other, etc. It will be most helpful to unpack these terms as and when they are needed. I would like here simply to emphasize their limits. They are themselves conceived not as a fantasmatic or technical nomenclature for alterity. I use them rather to distinguish particular forms of ‘alteration’ as they are analysed by Certeau. As concepts, they cannot themselves remain immune from the complex and ubiquitous effects of alteration for which they provide a necessary schematization. Indeed, I should also alert the reader to the organizing presence in my own writing of the lexis of ‘complication’ (implication, explication, complex, complicity, multiplicity, duplicity, etc.). The etymological force of these terms (from the Latin, plicare) provides a means of approach to the vertiginous and properly mani-fold interweaving of alterity and identity which emerges from Certeau’s work.

I have focused on the work which Certeau published from 1970 onwards. This date marks what Certeau himself might have called a ‘founding rupture’ (rupture instauratrice).5 His work broke away from the restricted networks in which it had circulated throughout the previous decade, and entered into a more ‘common life’. This is by no means to say that one should disregard the work which led up to this turning point. In many ways it prefigures the ‘shattering’ (éclatement) which was to follow, and I will frequently use it as a means of illuminating his later work.6 Neither should one overlook the haunting presence in his writing of Surin, whom Certeau was later to call ‘the ghost who has haunted my life’.7 Nevertheless, the body of his writings after 1970 constitutes the principal object of this book. Given the nature of Certeau’s intellectual activities, it is hardly possible to treat these writings in a strictly chronological manner. At any one time, Certeau would be working in a heterogeneous set of intellectual spaces. He would produce texts (or ‘communications’) for different publications and addressees, and would intermittently combine (‘re-employ’) these texts with other writings in order to form coherent books. I have based my study for the most part on these books, supplemented by the posthumous collections of Certeau’s essays edited by Luce Giard, La faiblesse de croire [The weakness of believing] and Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction [History and psychoanalysis between science and fiction]. I have produced a thematic analysis, treating my corpus as though it were a synchronic collection, while also introducing diachronic nuances. This seems the most helpful way of introducing the reader in a limited space to both the breadth and rewarding complexity of Certeau’s 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 appropriations which constitute the interpretative act. As Terence Hawkes writes of Roland Barthes’s project in Mythologies, Certeau aims ‘to take us “behind the scenes” as it were of our own construction of the world’.16 This does not mean, however, that we are given access to a single full and deeper reality beneath the manifest play of interpretation. Certeau’s task is more circumscribed:

By envisaging history as an operation, we may attempt, in a necessarily limited manner, to understand it as the relation between a place (a type of recruitment, a milieu, a profession, etc.), analytic procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (a literature).… This analysis of the preconditions which its discourse does not take up will allow us to specify the silent laws which organize the space produced as text. (WH 57/64)

Certeau is not simply stating as a matter of truistic principle that we approach the documents of the past in terms which are not those of the past. He seeks rather to bring into relief the concrete historiographical processes of dissection and configuration which reorder the traces of the past. By scrutinizing these processes of dissection (or what Foucault calls ‘découpes’), Certeau hopes to uncover some of the largely unconscious or unspoken laws which govern contemporary interpretative activity. I want to suggest that these laws constitute for Certeau a first form of ‘implicit’ alterity at work in learned interpretation. They complicate and overdetermine the relation of the interpreter to the historical ‘other’ which he or she aspires to comprehend. I shall take up in a summary manner Certeau’s tripartite division of the historiographical operation (place, procedures, text), organizing my exposition around examples which are of strategic importance in Certeau’s thought. These concern the relations between historiography and the practice and products of writing as such.

(1) The allotted place of historians has for Certeau traditionally been that of ‘clerks’, dealers of the written word. This has meant that they have privileged written documents – and consequently certain segments of society – in the representations they propose of what is significant in society as a whole. Certeau argues that their disproportionate concern with authoritative writings has led historians to reproduce deep-rooted forms of social hegemony:

Despite attempts to break down such barriers, the intellectual labour of historians is established within the circle of writing: in this written history, it places first and foremost the very people who have themselves written, in such a way that historiographical works reinforce a sociocultural tautology between their authors (a learned group), their objects (books, manuscripts, etc.), and their (cultivated) public. (WH 65/74)

We have seen how Raymond Aron does not in Certeau’s view take the institutional setting of historiography properly into account, locating the writing of history in an intellectual sphere isolated from the ‘noises’ of its own and others’ production. Certeau maintains in addition that historians have long paid insufficient attention to the far-reaching implications for their interpretative practice of their position precisely among the ‘writers’ of society.17

I will examine critically in chapter 2 Certeau’s historical analyses of successive ‘circles of writing’. It is worth indicating here, however, an initial complication. Certeau traces how such ‘circles’ work at one level as a form of implicit alterity in learned interpretation. They seem for him to structure the historian’s enterprise like a social unconscious, confronting the historian ‘with a praxis which is inextricably both his own and that of the other’ (WH 45/58). At another level, however, the effect of their operation is precisely to reproduce the ‘Same’, and to exclude other forms of alterity. This two-way slippage underlines the impossibility of analysing Certeau’s work in terms of a single category of alterity. It shows how the ‘same’ and the ‘other’ are themselves not stable entities in Certeau’s thought, but must always be differentially and positionally defined. The ongoing work of alterity upon identity serves also in Certeau’s writing to direct narrowly circumscribed discourses beyond themselves. By delimiting the sociocultural ‘tautology’ (a repetition of the same) implied by the operations outlined above, he sets up a space – and a desire – for a set of ‘heterologies’ (discourses ‘on’ the other). Certeau’s own heterological operations address notably questions of orality and of reading. I will explore in subsequent chapters how the supplementary questions which these heterologies provoke are designed to shake the assurances of fellow writers. They reveal what for Certeau constitute unavowed forms of enclosure. He seeks to introduce fragments of alterity into the established edifices of written knowledge, and thereby to alter our conceptions of this knowledge. This is not to say, of course, that Certeau can himself claim to proceed from an abstract sphere removed from the sites of written production.

(2) The procedures deployed by historians to interpret historical material are evidently related, though not reducible, to the places where they work. Certeau isolates notably two modes of interpretation used to analyse the transition from a religiously organized society to a secular society.18 He calls the first ‘literary’ or ‘ideological’, and the second ‘sociological’. Both may produce instructive forms of intelligibility, and they can be defined as follows. A literary approach is characterized by a close attention to ideas as ideas, to subtle levels of linguistic innovation in the text being studied and by a greater or lesser bracketing of (social) context in order to examine (literary) content. In a sociological analysis, by contrast, documents and ideas are not examined for their own sake, on their own terms, but as passive signs of something else. They are read and quantified as symptoms of larger movements (the prevalence of a particular ‘mentality’, the extent of dechristianization, the localization of superstitious or folkloric ‘residue’, the spread of literacy as such, etc.).19 The former approach treats knowledge as knowledge, so to speak, while the latter uses it to make social classifications. At an initial level, they constitute simply two distinct interpretative techniques.

Certeau, however, questioned the concrete applications which historians were making of these procedures. He noted that in the historical analysis of dechristianization over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each distinct method tended to correspond to a different section of society. A ‘literary’ analysis was used to interpret the ideological productions of a cultural elite, and a ‘sociological’ analysis to read off the traces remaining of the mainly rural ‘masses’ (WH 118–19/125). He explores the implications of this interpretative dichotomy.

Certeau argues that historians and literary critics were employing ‘literary’ procedures to interpret those texts which in sociological terms most resembled their own – in other words those of a cultural elite. Other texts and documents were reduced by contrast to the status of statistical information. To some extent this division is still inevitable today given the nature of the documents now available.20 More fundamentally, however, Certeau suggests that such a methodological bifurcation works to separate the society under consideration into two extremely unequal parts. On the one hand, it presents a small section of society which is mentally and linguistically proficient, and whose productions are worthy of serious consideration. On the other hand, it presupposes that the ‘productions’ of the vast majority of the population are hardly worth the name, and that their mental, linguistic and practical activity is inevitably derivative, inculcated, superstitious, recalcitrant or passive. Certeau emphasizes that this representation is not a direct reflection of historical reality. Rather, he shows it to be the product of a diverging set of formal procedures, which are themselves largely determined by the place of historians in contemporary society.

Of course, there had already been attempts to move beyond the interpretative dead-end set out above, and to apply a ‘sociological’ model of interpretation to the ideological productions of an elite. An emblematic example here would be Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God.21 Yet Certeau can in many ways be seen as a pioneer in his repeated and varied advocacy of the opposite inversion. His work shows how one can ‘read’ in what might provisionally be called a ‘literary’ way those productions which are not obviously (or at all) ‘literary’. This development is rendered possible by the way in which Certeau delimits or denaturalizes the conventional operations of historiographical interpretation. We will see in subsequent chapters how it allows him to uncover creativity or difference where a standard interpretation might see only uniformity. Equally, it permits him to discern sociohistorical mutations at a level beneath that of explicit ideological proclamations. If this approach can initially be labelled ‘literary’ in so far as it seeks to uncover creative twists and turns which had hitherto escaped interpreters’ attention, it is important to note that it does not do this by bracketing off what is distinctively historical about such moves. Certeau shows rather how these moves are constituted in their turn precisely by active operations within and upon the elements of a historical context. In effect, Certeau’s work serves to reconfigure prevailing oppositions between the ‘literary’ and the ‘historical’, by fostering a close attention to the textual historicity of overlooked operations.22

(3) The ‘writing up’ of historical or literary research is reducible neither to the transparent presentation of an object, nor to a simple exposition of results, but represents rather for Certeau an operation in its own right. I shall introduce here just one key aspect of this operation. Certeau shows how a practice of ‘citation’ enables the historian to construct what he calls a ‘layered text’ (un texte feuilleté). Certeau uses this term to designate a form of writing which combines in a single text both the language of the interpreter and the fragmented language of his or her object. The end-product of this process is a ‘discourse which “contains” [comprend] its other’, and which ‘attributes to itself the power of stating what the other unknowingly signifies. Through “citations”, references, notes, and the whole apparatus of permanent referral to a language which precedes it … historiographical discourse sets itself up as a knowledge of the other’ (WH 94/111). The construction of the historiographical text is no mere transcription, but represents rather a form of ‘staging’. Certeau foregrounds the peculiar textual operation to which the interpreter subjects his or her material. He plays on the ambivalence of the ‘citation’ which ostensibly closes the interpretative process. Like a judge, in a position of authority, the interpreter ‘summons’ others to appear, assigns to them their place and ‘cites’ them before other judges. This (inevitable) technique of ‘citation’ both confirms the historian’s own place, and constitutes a linchpin of the process through which historiographical texts are put together: ‘the split [dédoublée] structure of such discourse functions like a machinery which extracts from citation a narrative verisimilitude and a validation of knowledge’ (WH 94/111). The practice of ‘citation’ represents in Certeau’s analysis the culmination of a series of operations. These allow the historian to ‘tame’ the fragmentary traces which had initially figured as a disarming or perplexing lacuna in a body of knowledge. The historian circumscribes these traces, and thereby converts them into the very proof of epistemic mastery.

Certeau seeks in his own interpretative practice to problematize such a conversion. I will show in chapter 3 how he focuses on the points of articulation between interpreting and interpreted language. He suggests how processes of citation may backfire to put in question the very interpretative edifices which they are designed to support. He himself experiments with other uses of citation. This supplementary work, however, is again predicated on a prior delimitation. Certeau analyses interpretative discourses as the products of particular strategic and literary operations. He is able thereby to expose certain limits of these operations, and to suggest both what they reveal of the human subjects who propose them, and also how these subjects ‘miss’, in various senses of the word, the objects of their interpretation.

The illustrations above have revolved around questions of writing and textualization. They have also demonstrated what one might call the ‘delimitative’ function of Certeau’s analyses. By breaking down interpretative activity into a series of formal operations, Certeau is able to push this activity up against its borders. This is not to say that he can simply overstep these borders. His work produces rather what he himself in a different context calls a ‘vibration of limits’ (WH 38/50). He constantly unsettles pre-established frontiers between inside and outside, self and other. One could perhaps see in this practice the reason for the ‘permanent anticipation’ which characterized Certeau’s position in diverse intellectual fields.23 His work exemplifies what it is tempting to describe as a basic ‘heterological’ law: the operation which draws up a limit to familiar space insinuates by the same movement foreignness into that space.

Interpretative operations as real activity

The preceding discussion of the formal or irreducibly ‘artificial’ nature of interpretative operations may have raised understandable reservations in the mind of the reader. If all interpretations inevitably ‘miss’ their mark – or at least the mark of the other – does this mean that they float in some abstract sphere forever detached from the reality they aspire to comprehend? To adopt such a position would in effect be no less problematic than asserting that the historical interpreter can have direct and intuitive access to the object of his or her interpretation. Moreover, the examples above were designed to demonstrate precisely that the interpreter cannot operate in an entirely abstract or detached sphere. The interpreter’s enterprise is structured through and through by – though by no means reducible to – social and institutional presuppositions and constraints. These are not generally explicated as such in interpretative discourse. They tend to work rather as what Pierre Bourdieu might call a cultural ‘unconscious’. For Certeau, they inevitably implicate interpretative activity in a social reality which it cannot necessarily master.

By analysing historiographical work as a series of operations, Certeau aims to underline that it should not be reduced simply to the artefacts which it finally turns out (books, papers, programmes). He envisages it rather as an ongoing form of social practice. He argues that we should take seriously ‘expressions which are loaded with meaning – “doing history”, “doing theology” – whereas we are all too liable to erase the verb (the productive act) in order to privilege its complement (the object produced)’ (WH 20/28). Hence, by turning historiography back upon its own place and procedures, Certeau does not divert it from the ‘real’. Rather, he confronts historiographical discourse with its concrete and finite (real) conditions of possibility:

The situation of historiography makes the question of the real appear in two quite different positions within the scientific process: the real as that which is known (what the historian studies, understands or ‘brings to life’ of a past society) and the real as that which is implicated in the scientific operation (the present society to which the problematic of the historian, his procedures, his modes of comprehension and finally a practice of meaning all refer). (WH 35/46–7)

Certeau thus conceives what he designates as the ‘real’ both in terms of the intended historical object of interpretation, and also as a function of the ‘implicit’ social forces and technical apparatuses which organize interpretative activity. Furthermore, he argues that it is only by explicating the latter that the interpreter can come to a lucid conception of his or her relation with the former.

Certeau’s use of the word ‘real’ (réel) needs at least a brief comment. Tom Conley notes that we cannot always equate this term with ‘reality’ (réalité). In Certeau’s usage, ‘reality’ tends to constitute instead ‘what the subject strategically chooses it to be’.24 It represents an effect of historiographical discourse, analogous to the ‘reality effect’ (effet de réel) which Barthes analyses in realist fiction.25 The ‘real’, by contrast, – a term which in Conley’s view Certeau often uses in a similar way to Lacan – refers to that which resists direct symbolization, and which strains all representations and systems of knowledge.26 Certeau does not therefore in his analyses seek simply to substitute one conception of reality (the present) for another (the past). He traces rather how the ‘effects’ of the ‘real’ not only surface in the elusive object of historical research, which inevitably breaks away from the systems of intelligibility governing this research, but also emerge in historiographical production as symptoms of the interpreter’s own contemporary position and project. For Certeau, historiographical discourse is not so much detached from ‘reality’ (it produces ‘reality’ through processes of interpretation) as involved in a ‘real’ which it can alter but cannot fully contain.

These considerations could take us back to the tropes of trace and finitude which I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. However, I would like for now to concentrate on the more specifically social and epistemic aspects of the reversal outlined above. Firstly, Certeau turns interpretative procedures and discourses away from their intended objects and towards their own localized conditions of possibility. He then shows how these procedures are implicated as concrete modes of productive practice in the societies and scientific communities to which they belong.

Certeau argues that any historical interpretation must be understood in terms of the social organization which enabled, shaped and constrained its production. More specifically, it is indissociable from the contemporary state of those sectors of society – the ‘scientific community’ – which most directly provide it with its status and rationale. He underlines as a ‘fundamental’ fact that ‘a “historical” text (that is to say, a new interpretation, the application of distinctive methods, the elaboration of other criteria of relevance, a displacement in the definition and use of documents, a characteristic mode of organization, etc.) expresses an operation which is situated within a larger body of practices’ (WH 64/73). Certeau provisionally brackets off the relation of an interpretation to the real which it professes to interpret, in order to foreground the question of the yield which any particular historiographical work must produce in the terms of a contemporary intellectual community. Certainly, the question of the historical real cannot be erased, and I will suggest below how Certeau considers that it must indeed, through historiography, return (like the repressed) in order to haunt and disquiet contemporary organizations of meaning. Equally, the ‘contribution’ which historiography makes to knowledge will be shown to be somewhat paradoxical. Nevertheless, the question of its interest and pertinence must for Certeau be referred in the first instance to a contemporary organization of knowledge. This problematizes the more traditional imperative assigned to historical interpretation of corresponding ‘adequately’ to the past. Certeau argues that it is through the effects which controlled historiographical operations can exert on contemporary understanding that they can themselves be conceived as a concrete practice in the present.

Yet Certeau does not analyse historiographical practice with reference purely to the preoccupations of the strictly scientific or intellectual sectors of society. For these preoccupations are themselves caught up in larger social processes. Indeed, intellectual labour may also for Certeau be characterized as a form of controlled work on more general configurations of knowledge, sites of concern, or ‘common sense’: ‘what is “scientific”, in history as in other disciplines, is the operation which changes the “environment” – or which makes a social, literary or other kind of organization into the condition and site of a transformation’ (WH 72/83). Historiography in Certeau’s account, like other forms of ‘scientific’ practice, denaturalizes (or historicizes) what is considered as ‘natural’ in order to produce something different or ‘useful’. In the case of historiography, this operation has an inescapably literary dimension. I have referred already to the ‘defamiliarizing’ effect of Certeau’s historiographical analyses. This can also be placed in a wider perspective. Certeau argues that his task as a professional historian is to work upon the generally circulating narratives (histoires) which he reads and hears around him.27 Ordinary men and women tell each other familiar stories about the development of society, the history of sexuality, the truths of nature, the 1960s, the demise of religion, etc. They articulate their social, historical and personal identities by exchanging these stories. Historians