"] 3 Michel de Certeau

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT

J r ' 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 wi th 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, wi th 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:

This essay is dedicated to the ordinary m a n [sic]. The common hero. Disseminated character. Untold wanderer. I n invoking,

at the outset of my narratives, this absent being who gives them their beginning and necessity, I question myself as to the desire of w h i c h he figures the impossible object. When we dedicate to him documents which formerly were offered in homage to divini­ties or to inspirational muses, what do we ask of this oracle merged with the rumor of history that w i l l authorize us to speak or make believable what we say? This anony­mous hero comes from way back. He is the m u r m u r of societies.

(de Certeau, 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

Philosophically his work might be seen to be anchored in 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. In 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 in 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 in 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 in his most read work -The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). It is in 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.

"~ \ L SPATIAL CONTRIBUTION

Possibly his most celebrated essay -Walking in the City - often reprinted from The Practices of Everyday Life, opens with 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 up by the winds, the urban island, a sea hi the middle of the sea, lifts up the

skyscrapers ... A wave of verticals. Its agita­tion momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before (lie eyes. It is transformed into a text urology ... To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of 'see­ing the whole', of looking down on, totaliz­ing the most immoderate of human texts.

(de Certeau, 1984: 91-2)

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:

Our society is characterized by a cancer­ous growth of vision, measuring every­thing by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic of the eye and the impulse to read.

(de Certeau, 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. In other words, it is not a lack of technical capacity that might be overcome by more surveys and larger datasets processed in 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, and m a k e it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. O n this view, i n relation to place, space is like the word w h e n it is spoken, that is w h e n it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualiza­tion, transformed into a term dependent upon m a n y conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), a n d modi­fied by the transformations caused by successive contexts. ... I n short, space is a practiced place. T h u s the street geometri­cally defined by urban planning is trans­formed into space by walkers .

(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 in 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 post-structuralist move. However, this version of place also invokes a deeper ontological sense from Lacanian analysis of the 'pro-pre' 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 in 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, in 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. In 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 in planning' or street signs become associated with social memories that may reject their formal significance (instead of commemorating generals for instance they may be associated with a first kiss, a riot or something different entirely) and monuments become refigured into popu­lar culture (statues of reclining women in fountains in 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 with 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, with 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, wi th 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 in geography has been wi th respect to four main areas, in perhaps roughly chronological order: rethinking urban planning; develop­ing conceptions of consumption; post-colonial 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 wi th 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 wi th 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 Em

(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 with 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 within those institutions, all of whom 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

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 in a Euro­pean intellectual culture that may not reflect all urban lifestyles. Finally, these are linked in the sense that de Certeau had a coherent overall philosophical view and project, with 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 with 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 with the triumph of vision and representation (1980: 5). But more surprising is that in that non-representational 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.

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.

nn 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. Min­

neapolis: 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 Geog­

raphy, 60:24-31. Reynolds, B. and Fitzpatrick, J. (1999) 'The transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault's panoptic discourse and the carto­

graphic impulse', Diacritics, 29:63-80.

Mike Crang, Durham University