Michel de Certeau

Michel de Certeau (Chambéry, 1925- Paris, 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Michel de Certeau was born in 1925 in Chambéry, France. Certeau's education was eclectic. After obtaining degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon, and Paris, he undertook religious training at a seminary in Lyon, where he entered the Jesuit order in 1950 and was ordained in 1956. Certeau initially entered the Jesuits hoping to do missionary work in China. In the same year of his ordination, Certeau became one of the first founders of the journal Christus, which he would actively be involved with for much of his life. In 1960 he earned his doctorate in theology from the Sorbonne after completing a thesis on the mystical writings of Jean-Joseph Surin. Certeau was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud and was, along with Jacques Lacan, one of the founding members of L'Ecole Freudienne, an informal group which served as a focal point for French scholars interested in psychoanalysis. He came to public attention after publishing an article dealing with the events of May 1968.

Certeau went on to teach at several universities in locations as wide spread as Geneva, San Diego, and Paris. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he produced a string works which demonstrated his interest in mysticism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis.

To date, Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In The Practice of Everyday Life, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture,” nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.

The most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Strategy, according to Certeau, is a technique with which a subject of “will and power” isolates itself from an “environment” (The Practice of Everyday Life, xix). This technique “postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serves as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed” (ibid., 36). Through this “mastery of space” a one triumphs over time by accumulating advantages, preparing for future expansion (i.e. prediction), and thus giving oneself “a certain independence with respect to the variability of circumstances” (ibid). By establishing a “proper” or “autonomous” place one also gains a perch or vantage point from which to observe and read a landscape. This process of “reading space” allows one to look into vast distances (both macro- and microscopic) and to gaze into the past (history) and the future (prediction) as if time is itself a landscape. Finally, this technique of circumscribing a space allows one to inscribe new forms of knowledge.

In opposition to strategy, Certeau offers the concept of tactics. Like strategy, tactics operate in space. However, unlike a strategy which creates its own autonomous space, “a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. … The space of a tactic is the space of the other” (ibid., 36-37). A tactic is deployed “on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.” One who deploys a tactic “must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them” (ibid. 37). Tactics, then, are isolated actions or events that take advantage of opportunities offered by the gaps within a givne strategic system yet the tactician never holds onto these advantages. Tactics cut across a strategic field, exploiting gaps in it to generate novel and inventive outcomes.

Major Works by Michel de Certeau

In French:

• La Culture au Pluriel. Union Generale d'Editions. 1974.
• L'Ecriture de l'Histoire. Editions Gallimard. 1975.
• La Fable Mystique. vol. 1, XVIe-XVIIe Siecle. Editions Gallimard. 1982.
• La Faiblesse de Croire. Edited by Luce Giard. Seuil. 1987.
• L'Invention du Quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de Faire. Union générale d'éditions. 1980.
• With Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel. Une Politique de la Langue: La Révolution Française et les Patois, l'enquête de Grégoire. Gallimard. 1975.
• La Possession de Loudun. Gallimard. 1970.

In English:

• The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
• The Certeau Reader. Edited by Graham Ward. Blackwell Publishers. 1999.
• Culture in the Plural. Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
• Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brain Massumi. University of Minnesota Press. 1986.
• The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by Michael B. Smith. University of Chicago Press. 1995.
• The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press. 2002.
• With Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2, Living and Cooking. Tanslated by Timothy J. Tomasik. University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
• The Possession at Loudun. University of Chicago Press. 2000.
• The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. Columbia University Press. 1988.

Works about Michel de Certeau

• Michel De Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other. By Jeremy Ahearne. Stanford University Press. 1996.
• Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. By Ian Buchanan. Sage Press. 2000.
• Michel de Certeau: les chemins d'histoire. Edited by Christiàn Delacroix. Complex. 2002.
• Michel de Certeau: Le marcheur blessé. By François Dosse. Decouverte. 2002.sk:Michel de Certeau