Michel De Certeau: Analysing Culture

201 Pages·2006·0.76 MB·English

by  Ben Highmore

Michel de Certeau
Analysing Culture
Ben Highmore
Continuum
Michel de Certeau
Also available from Continuum:
Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur, Michael Grenfell
Michel de Cer teau
Analysing Culture
Ben Highmore
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Ben Highmore 2006
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 0-8264-6072-0 (hardback) 0-8264-6073-9 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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Tolisten is already to be open to and existentially disposed towards: one inclines
a little to one side in order to listen.
Ranajit Guha
‘Subjugated’ standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more ad-
equate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But howto see
from below is a problem requiring as much skill with bodies and language, with
the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ techno-scientific visualizations.
Donna Haraway
Practice is both the starting point and the testing ground of our conceptualiza-
tion of the world. What is needed is not so much the recovery of practical phil-
osophy as the recovery of the philosophy of practice.
Ngu˜g˜ıwa Thiong’o
Contents
Abbreviations of works by Michel de Certeau vii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
1 Ways of Operating: Introducing Michel de Certeau’s
Methodological Imagination 1
2 An Epistemological Awakening: History and Writing 23
3 The Oceanic Rumble of the Ordinary: Psychoanalysis and Culture 51
4 Zones of Silence: Orality, Archives and Resistance 81
5 The Zoo of Everyday Practices: Literature, Narratives, Voices 117
6 An Art of Diversion: Cultural Policy and the Counter Public Sphere 149
7 Cultural Studies: A Practitioner’s Art (Conclusion) 177
Index 183
Abbreviations of works by Michel de Certeau
CP–Culture in the Plural, translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997).
This was originally published in France in 1974 as La culture au pluriel. The
English translation doesn’t include the important essay ‘The Beauty of the
Dead’ which can be found in English in Heterologies.
CS – The Capture of Speech and other Political Writings, translated by Tom
Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
The first part of this book consists of a pamphlet La prise de parole originally
published in France in 1968, other materials date from 1976, 1983 and 1985.
H – Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Massumi
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).
There is no French equivalent to this book, though Michel de Certeau, Histoire
et psychanalyse entre science et fiction(Paris: Gallimard, 2002) contains many of
the same essays.
MF–The Mystic Fable: Volume One – The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,
translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
This was originally published in France as La Fable Mystique, XVIe–XVIIe Siècle
in 1982.
PEL1 – The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
This was originally published in France as L’invention du quotidien, I, arts de
fairein 1980.
PEL2 – Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of
Everyday Life – Volume 2: Living and Cooking, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
This was originally published in France as L’invention du quotidien, II, habiter,
cuisiner, in 1980.
viii Abbreviations
PL – The Possession at Loudun, translated by Michael B. Smith (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000).
This was originally published in France as La Possession de Loudunin 1970.
WH–The Writing of History, translated and introduced by Tom Conley (New
York: Colombia University Press, 1988).
This was originally published in France as L’écriture de l’histoirein 1975.
The above initials will be used for referencing within the text. Where the above
titles include work co-written with others (or editorial writing by translators and
editors) this will be indicated by including the relevant name(s) after the page
number(s). All other materials used, including other work by Michel de
Certeau, are referenced in footnotes.
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book is written with a particular ambition in mind: to use the work of
Michel de Certeau, not as an end in itself, but as a way of locating some method-
ological co-ordinates for studying culture – for cultural studies or cultural
analysis. The ‘cultural studies’ that I have in mind is a disciplinary field (or inter-
disciplinary field) disabused of a certain self-regard. Cultural studies as a project
has, in the past, thought of itself as a subversive and wily, non-disciplinary-
discipline. If it had a flag of allegiance, that flag was more likely to be a political
one than a methodological one. Always ready to launch a new intervention in
the cultural terrain, cultural studies had to be flexible, not tied to particular ways
of operating. In this way its tactic was to pilfer and retool methodologies fash-
ioned elsewhere.
There are several things wrong with this self-understanding, the major one
being that it now rings false (if, indeed, it ever rang true). In the first decade of
the twenty-first century it seems clear to me that cultural studies is, de facto, a
discipline, replete with a raft of dedicated journals, various international asso-
ciations, and a whole panoply of undergraduate and graduate courses. The false
heroics of imagining that cultural studies is some sort of academic subculture,
always intervening on the side of the oppressed, must strike students as particu-
larly odd, especially as they submit to the process of being schooled and judged
byseasoned and not-so-seasoned professors. One sign of cultural studies’ pecu-
liar attitude to its own status is its constant anxiety about its beginnings. The
stories cultural studies tells of itself are unrelenting in the way that they conjure
a ‘good’ and radical project, which through a process of ‘disciplinary’ auto-
critiques continues its radical mission. Such narratives always seem to begin
with tales of radical interventions against the elitism of the ‘establishment’. Yet
now, in many ways, a loose cultural studies orientation is the academic estab-
lishment in much of the humanities and social sciences. Writers working in lit-
erary studies, for instance, are as likely to be writing about telegraphy or dust as
about Shakespeare or Chaucer (and when they do write about Shakespeare and
Chaucer the approach is rarely hagiographic). And they are likely to think of
themselves as doing, however loosely, a version of ‘cultural studies’ (however