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M ICHEL DE CERTEAU: E THNOGRAPHY AND THE
C HALLENGE OF PLURALITY^1
Valentina Napolitano
David Pratten
The saliency of Michel de Certeau’s work cannot be condensed into a paragraph, a page, or even an entire article as the nature of his analysis defeats neat disciplinary categorizations. The number of intellectual biographies (Giard, 1987, 1988; Giard et al., 1991; Geffré, 1991; Ahearne, 1995; Buchanan, 2000; Ward, 2000; Dosse, 2002, 2006; Highmore, 2006), and journal issues ( Diacritics 1992 (22, 2), Social Semiotics 1996 (6, 1), New Blackfriars 1996 (77), Paragraph 1999 (22, 2), and South Atlantic Quarterly 2001 (100, 2)) devoted to his work and published since his death in 1986 attest to his broader influence. De Certeau’s work has therefore been revisited and reassessed in numerous disciplinary circles. Curiously, however, anthropology, so seemingly sponge-like in its theoretical fashions, has not engaged extensively with de Certeau’s work.^2 This is despite the fact that de Certeau’s primary thematic concerns were peculiarly anthropological in nature. Issues of representation and resistance, marginality and minorities, power and plurality dominated his studies which spanned topics as diverse as early modern mysticism, travel narratives of the new world, urban everyday life, and contemporary policy on multi-culturalism. Furthermore, de Certeau was an architect of a theory of practice and of historical enquiry both of which have gained considerable relevance to anthropological perspectives since the 1960s. We are not arguing here that de Certeau has been completely forgotten by anthropologists, of course and for examples see (Pandolfi, 1992; Ivy, 1995; Ferme, 2001; Hernândez, 2002), but that his recognition in anthropology is very limited compared to that in other disciplines (history, literature, religious studies, cultural studies). So why has de Certeau’s thinking been so little used in our discipline? The papers collected here originated out of an attempt to consider this question. Each contributor, from their own perspective, asks why de Certeau is not cited
more extensively in anthropological discussions on subjectivity (Mitchell, Napolitano), on the textual ‘turn’ (Highmore), on resistance (Cornwall) and on religious experience (Pratten). What relevance then does de Certeau’s work, written mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, have for anthropology today?
Michel de Certeau’s research interests, which focused on marginality, otherness and de- centredness, mirror something of the themes of his own career trajectory. He was born in 1925 in Savoie from a provincial aristocratic family. De Certeau had an itinerant education having studied at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon and Paris as well as various Catholic seminaries. As a young man he was attracted to the Carthusian monastic life, but joined the Society of Jesus in 1950 and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1956. It was during this period that his interests in Christian theology, philosophy and mysticism were consolidated and became a platform for his later work. The Jesuit Order’s interest during the 1950s in their first spiritual authors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led de Certeau to study Pierre Favre, a contemporary of Ignatius of Loyola. His work on Favre’s spiritual diary (1960) earned De Certeau a doctorate from the Sorbonne. Later, and throughout his career, he studied the life and devotional literature of the Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin. De Certeau edited his Guide Spirituel pour la perfection (1963) and Correspondance (1966) as well as examining Surin’s role as the exorcist in the ‘theatre of devils’ at Loudun between 1634 and 1637. This analysis would be published as La Possession de Loudun (1970b) (English translation 2000). During this period de Certeau was also engaged with editorial roles on the Jesuit journals to which he also contributed including Études and Christus. During this period he played an important role in the development of a radical Catholic theology in France (Dosse, 2002: 74).
In 1974 he published together with Jean-Marie Domenach, the Director of the journal Esprit and a good friend of Michel Foucault, a collection of essays entitled Le Christianisme Eclaté (De Certeau & Domenach, 1974). In this interest in the transformation of the Catholic Church, de Certeau set out what would later be seen as the foundation of his thinking, the transition from early modern orality and mysticism to modern practices of writing and religion he termed the ‘scriptural economy’ (Dosse, 2002: 207).^3 He would continue his studies on these themes throughout his life and published La Fable mystique, Vol.1: XVIe- XVIIe siècle in (1982) with an English translation appearing as The Mystic Fable in (1992). The Mystic Fable directly reflects his earlier interest and involvement with the Freudian School and
In Paris de Certeau taught theology, phsychoanalysis, anthropology and history before applying for a position at L’École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1977 for which he was turned down. He, as Deridda and Latour later, had been enthused by University of California- Paris connections. Hence, the American West Coast became his intellectual hub as a result, and from 1978 he taught literature at San Diego before becoming a full professor in comparative literature in 1983. De Certeau returned to France as Directeur d’Études , a full professorship at EHESS, in 1984, just two years before his death, in January 1986, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 61.
This brief and compressed intellectual biography at least marks the eclecticism and innovation of his approach which combined religious studies, history, anthropology and psychoanalysis. Commentators are often forced to ask themselves whether, as a result, a common thread or theory can be identified in order to mark the integrity and coherence of his work. Identifying such a framework is complicated not only by the ‘unnerving’ diversity of his subjects and the interdisciplinarity of his approach, but also by his dense and frustrating prose style, by his apparently deliberate evasion in elaborating his overarching claims, and by his reluctance to pursue many of the avenues to which he points. De Certeau’s rich and evocative descriptions and his insightful and uncanny turns of phrase are therefore often matched in equal measure by obscurity and dead ends. As such de Certeau’s legacy is as provocative as it is broad, as suggestive as it is unsatisfying.
We can nevertheless, identify related areas in de Certeau’s work which may present problems and possibilities for critical ethnography. These related points may both answer our original question of why he has not been embraced by anthropologists, and suggest observations that may be of relevance in our practice. Ben Highmore, for instance, suggests that the coherent thread of de Certeau’s diverse range is not a ‘high’ theoretical theme, but a method, a way of operating which encourages heterogeneity and allows alterity to proliferate. It is a method, that Highmore argues can open up pathways through the epistemological scepticism generated by the post-modernist turn. In addition we argue that de Certeau provides a potentially productive synergy of registers with which to engage the study of human subjectivity that defies neat theorization and invites a focus on ethnographic details. De Certeau sees processes of ‘othering’ and religiosity as fundamental registers of everyday social
formations in this context, and points us to privilege the plurality of histories, phenomenologies and embodied narratives that compose an ethnographic field over reductionist singular interpretations. His work also illuminates micro-history as a central heritage for the anthropological project, especially for the dynamics that language plays in articulating political identities through historical narratives. And he sheds lights on geographies of subjectification and resistance in a model that contrasts strategies and tactics which continues to provide new possibilities for anthropological critique. Let us take these points in turn to flesh out some of the possibilities and weaknesses of de Certeau’s work for anthropology.
SUBJECTIVITY, NARRTIVE AND ABSENCE
Based on a reading of Geertz’s theory of culture, Sherry Ortner argues in a recent article that to engage with the complexity of subjectivity we need to connect a critical understanding of culture and language to the formation of power and religious understanding. For Ortner, subjectivity, in its lived expression, is different from the processes of subjectification, as it is located at the critical encounter between the ‘state of mind of real actors embedded in the social world, and … cultural formations that (at least partially) express, shape and constitute those states of mind’ (Ortner, 2005: 45):
This culturally/religiously produced subject is defined not only by a particular position in a social, economic and religious matrix, but by a complex subjectivity, a complex set of feelings and fears, which are central to a whole argument (Ortner, 2005: 37). In her view this critical encounter between the subjective and the social generates anxieties over the mastery of practices and process of signification.^4
Ortner’s call critically to re-engage with the question of subjectivity in social theory points us to the potential, de Certeau acknowledged, of historicizing the tension between ‘states of mind’ and ‘cultural formations’ as produced in the plurality of social practice. He provides a methodology, it is argued, to grasp subjectivity in its fragmented forms since he unsettles models of internalized subjectivity (and therefore its confinement to a cognitive/psychological level) by constantly connecting internalization to modes of political , historical critique and the production of narratives. More than ever this applies to the emergence of fragmented selves in an age of late capitalism, both as sense of loss and as sense of (ironic dis-)connection. This human subjectivity encompasses multiple forms that
Williams a concern for the social hierarchies produced by both residual and emergent narratives (Williams, 1977) and a sensibility to the importance of structures of feelings.
Thinking of identity formation through a process of loss and irreducible pluralities opens up interesting questions for ethnographic engagements. In the passage between the plurality of experience and an ethnographic narrative there is both a dramatic loss and a pluralistic desire for interpretation. Hence ethnographic texts are perpetually cursed with a loss of embodied meanings, but also potentially blessed by pluralistic desires and impulses (De Certeau, 1988: 227). We are not here arguing that anthropologists have failed to engage with this problematic juncture. There is a burgeoning literature on the anthropology of the senses and on the phenomenology of the body (Jackson, 1996; Stoller, 1997, 2002). Perhaps, nevertheless, we should resist reducing our ethnographic research to an anthropocentric paradigm and take a renewed interest in the study of plural ontologies, especially in the forms of an ‘ontology that eludes the powerful’ (see Pratten this issue). In this respect de Certeau’s work can be read as anticipatory of current reflections on the nature of this paradigm. That is to say a rethinking of intersubjectivity and agency of non-human agents against our own anthropocentric distinction between ‘natural’ objects and ‘human’ subjects. In a wonderfully rich reflection on Amerindian ontologies Viveiros de Castro puts it:
Though there are Amazonian cosmologies that deny to post mythical non-human species any spiritual dimension (widespread, as is well known, throughout the continent) of animals or plant, “spirit masters” supplies the missing agency. These spirit masters, equipped with an intentionality fully equivalent to that of humans, function as hypostases of the species with which they are associated, thereby creating an intersubjective field for human/nonhuman relations even where empirical nonhuman species are not spiritualized. Moreover the idea that nonhuman agents experience themselves as their behaviour in the form of (human) culture plays a crucial role: translating culture into the terms of alien subjectivities transform many natural objects and events into indices from which social agency is derivable. The common case is that of defining what to humans is a brute fact of object as an artefact of cultured behaviour: what is blood to us is manioc beer to jaguars, a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house (Viveiros de Castro, 2004: 470-471) see also (Pandolfo, 1997).
Rethinking the location of intentionality in the relationship between epistemologies (as productions and consumptions of narratives) and ontologies (as localized and (dis)embodied transformations of knowledge) in this light is central to Valentina Napolitano’s contribution. Anthropologists, she argues, need to address the presence of the unseen and unintelligible in the events and objects that constitute their fieldwork. In a move that echoes de Certeau’s
debt to Lacan, Napolitano highlights a ‘mirroring’ of hearts that flash across migrant itineraries populating the Roman urban landscape which, she shows, reveal both the circulation of deep-seated anxieties both about the pollution of a migrant Other and the present Western cardiovascular paralysis as well as the possibility for renewed forms counter- narratives from the periphery. In this context Napolitano evokes de Certeau’s insights on alterity, space and visibility. Juxtaposing official, ‘visible’ migrant histories with those hidden but observed and intimated through ethnography Napolitano contrasts discourses on the cultural heritage of the Roman landscape with practices of migrants’ re-appropriation spaces within Santa Maria della Luce church (where the Catholic Latin American mission is based), and contrasts the texts of clerical discourses that stress monogamy Catholic households with practices of adultery, intimacy and eroticism.
Jon Mitchell also sets out to examine the kind of theory of practice, resistance and subjectivity that de Certeau might offer to anthropologists. He observes that de Certeau’s evocative description of everyday and bodily forms of resistance open to the modern subject is difficult to criticise. In his view the utility of this approach as a theoretical model, comparable with those of de Certeau’s contemporaries, however, is limited. Yet, where Bourdieu and Foucault view subjectivity more as a reflex of broader structural processes for de Certeau agency and the capacity to resist seem to originate in the irreducible essence of the person, the human soul. Hence, Mitchell suggests that de Certeau’s work is better seen as a theology than a theory since he sees the action of everyday resistance as relatively autonomous from socially-derived subjectivity and rooted in the redemptive qualities of human action. De Certeau’s theory of agency is animated by unknowable, immemorial depths of knowledge, an explanation of the capacity to subvert which cannot satisfy social anthropologists and which leads to a ‘thin’ historical and ethnographic account of agency and resistance. Mitchell therefore locates de Certeau’s perspective on subjectivity within a tension between a theory of subjectivity that locates the capacity for agency within the given structural conditions of a time and place versus capacity located within the transcendent features of the person conceived as an eternal soul. Mitchell suggests that these debates form part of a trajectory of tension between Socialism (from Gramsci to Bourdieu) and Catholicism (from Croce to de Certeau).
exchange’ (Conley, 1988: xvi). This diversity arises not only in the versions of history, but specifically in the range of sensorial experience (or the réel which he derives from Lacanian psychoanalysis) which is filtered through systems of knowledge and belief and out of history. It is a plurality then that historians and ethnographers confront in their practices of selection and exclusion and when they encounter a world of forms, lapses and silences that resist the intelligibility of writing (Pieters, 2000; Peltonen, 2001; Weymans, 2004). In contrast to Lacan, however, de Certeau does not see narratives in irreconcilable schism from their subject. Rather more hopefully he suggests that the un-intelligibility of experience is a possible engine for social transformation – a possibility at the edge of the symbolic order that may transform the symbolic order itself.
De Certeau recognizes the same rich, creative, polyphonic world of heteroglossia that Bakhtin describes, but for de Certeau there is always the problem that when this aspect of everyday life becomes the topic for disciplinary scrutiny, it is cut, managed and its radical and unsettling plurality is controlled. Anticipating the ‘literary turn’, Ben Highmore suggests that de Certeau’s view on the ‘writing culture’ debate would have taken a different direction. De Certeau insists on our obligation to connect to the ‘real’ in the face of epistemological scepticism concerning the ‘constructed’ nature of authoritative narratives. De Certeau does not side-step this scepticism, Highmore argues, but embraces it with a radical recognition of the ‘situatedness’ of knowledge. Like Bakhtin, therefore, de Certeau embraces fiction through the novel, the folktale and the narrative in its capacity to stage complexity, multiplicity, and embodied experiences. De Certeau’s commitment to multi-vocal versions is manifest in the historiographical method he adopted in writing The Possession at Loudun (Weymans 2004: 166). Where de Certeau differs from Bakhtin, Highmore argues, is that he does not recognize a constant presence of heteroglossia, but instead its strategic appearance and disappearance. In presenting different overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories each of a different period and each rooted in the political and epistemological transformations de Certeau not only retains a non-authoritative authorial stance, but more importantly illustrates to the reader that which is lost, missing and fragmentary in the process of writing history.
POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITES
Within political anthropology it may seem that de Certeau’s never more than fleeting influence has now waned. He was invoked briefly and rarely in detail in work on resistance by anthropologists because he sought to discover and describe the ways in which populations manage and ‘make do’ in the face of disciplinary mechanisms (Keith & Pile, 1997). More familiar to an anthropological audience is the analysis of ‘infrapolitics’ made famous by James Scott in his analysis of the hidden transcripts and sequestered social sites of everyday resistance (Scott, 1985, 1990, 1998). Scott’s project, like de Certeau’s, has been described as the flip side of Foucault as an archaeology of resistance. De Certeau offers a distinctly alternative analytic though it has been criticised for drawing too rigid an opposition between the official (the proper) and the everyday (the popular), for failing to recognize relationships of complicity and processes of consensus, and for providing only a partial cartography of the spaces between compliance and resistance.
Yet, Michel de Certeau’s insights can further illuminate the micro-political processes by which people ‘make’ postcolonial modes of governance and ‘make do’ in the face of their disorder. To focus on modes of domination is not peculiar, de Certeau argues, but to do so exclusively is to underplay the political agency of ordinary people:
The privilege enjoyed by the problematics of repression in the field of research should not be surprising … But this elucidation of the apparatus by itself has the disadvantage of not seeing practices which are heterogeneous to it and which it represses or thinks it represses. Nevertheless, they have every chance of surviving this apparatus too, and, in any case, they are also part of social life, and all the more resistant because they are more flexible and adjusted to perpetual mutation. When one examines this fleeting and permanent reality carefully, one has the impression of exploring the night-side of societies, a night longer than their day, a dark sea from which successive institutions emerge, a maritime immensity on which socioeconomic and political structures appear as ephemeral islands (De Certeau, 1984). From this perspective it is possible better to understand the heterogeneous practices through which ordinary people survive by wit and improvisation, practices that are necessarily obscured from the glare of repressive governmental apparatus. Our attention, therefore must focus on an analysis of what de Certeau alludes to here as the ‘night-side of societies’ to describe the ambiguous, shadowy quality of institutions and individual motivations that populate the political landscape, for it is here that Certeau’s everyday practices ‘hollow out’ other spaces within a panoptic space (Conley, 2001). Indeed, following Timothy Mitchell’s
De Certeau’s work unsettles the use of theory as a point of arrival that solves, or pacifies, the struggles between a multiplicity of everyday practices. De Certeau’s approach questions theory as a logic which reads ethnographic encounters as fully translatable into an accepted way of knowing. In this sense he is an anti-theorist wary of theories of interpretation though no less alive, as Highmore suggests, to the possibilities of alternative interpretative modalities. In different ways the articles in this issue show how de Certeau is central to an anthropological ‘sympathy’ with the plurality of formations which constitute subjectivity and by keeping a healthy scepticism about the bounding nature of that which is accepted as visible and knowable at particular historical conjunctures, he compels us to dwell on the margins of signification.
There are multiple readings of de Certeau’s work on these issues of subjectivity and historical narrative and this issue does not claim to provide an exhaustive endpoint. Nonetheless de Certeau’s contribution, within its limitations and convolutedness helps us to reflect on the encounter between the plurality of everyday practise, its irreducibility and un-intelligibility, and the narratives of and at the margins. In a recent introduction Das and Poole argue that margins of the state are fruitfully explored by engaging ethnographic narratives of legibility and illegibility:
In our seminar discussions, however, we soon realized that our ethnographies worked against the notion that the state is somehow “about “ its legibility. Rather, our papers seemed to point instead to the many different spaces, forms, and practices through which the state is continually both experienced and undone through the intelligibility of its own practices, documents and words (Das & Poole, 2004: 9-10 author's italics). In their readings margins of the state are not mere stories and sites of exclusion, they can be dangerous process of re-articulation of sovereignty, especially when they demarcate states of exception where biopolitics meet the politics of death and terror. We are clear that de Certeau’s analysis of biopolitics did not have the sophistication of current debates, but we think that it is to these current debates that de Certeau offers useful insight. By engaging with the Other within ( not transcending) immanent and everyday practices de Certeau foregrounds a political ontology that sees otherness not only as a space of annihilating death, but as the starting point to take the irreducibility of everyday practice as a creative challenge. Recognizing that de Certeau’s approach is framed within long-seated theological histories of redemption, we can nevertheless ‘think the margins’ both as dangerous and creative. We may therefore be able to take seriously the challenge of
‘translating’ the irreducibility of the everyday life into ethnographic practice, and with it explore human subjectivity in its narrative (mis)translations in more nuanced and ethically engaged ways.
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Viveiros de Castro, E. 'Exchanging Perspectives:The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies', Common Knowledge 10, 2004, pp. 463-484. Ward, G. (ed.) The Certeau reader , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Weymans, W. 'Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation.' History & Theory 43(2), 2004, pp. 161-178. White, H.V. Metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Williams, R. Marxism and literature , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
NOTES
- We would like to thank all the participants and respondents at the Workshop: “Michel de Certeau: Ethnographies of Everyday Life and Anthropological Returns of Histories’ held at the University of Sussex, 1 June 2005 and in particular Professor Richard Fardon for his inspiring and thoughtful remarks. We would also like to thank Peter Pels for his patience and significant editorial support.
- This certainly applies to British and North American anthropological traditions. On his role in French anthropological circles see Dosse, 2002.
- De Certeau’s initial idea of the multiplicity of paths can be read as part of a French Jesuit’s response to the Holy See’s publication of a 1968 encyclica Humanae Vitae that condemned, among others non-natural forms of contraception Ibid. p.209.
- For a critical review of the claim that practice theory mediates the distinction between social and subjective see Reyna, 1997.
