De Certeau, Michel (1925–1986)

A historian of religion, Michel de Certeau became one of the most inventive, interdisciplinary, and collaborative contributors to what we now call cultural studies. De Certeau was born in Chambéry, southeastern France. He was a youth when France capitulated to Germany in 1940. Vichy collaboration disillusioned and enraged him;the extent of the Church's compliance was particularly disillusioning. De Certeau's genius owed much to his ability to feel these passions without capitulating to cynicism.

In the wake of the war, in 1950, he joined the Society of Jesus, and he was ordained in 1956. His scholarly work was focused on the origins of the Jesuits, and on mysticism in early modern Europe, but domestic and world events stimulated a critical and dramatic enlargement of his scholarly concerns.

When in May 1968 French students and laborers took to the streets, de Certeau was editor and contributor to several Catholic journals and magazines. The “Events of May,”he said, exposed a breach between what needed to be said (by workers, by youth) and what could be said (as prescribed or authorized by the reigning conventions). Because what needed to be said could not be said, the protesters were capturing speech, by practicing the social conventions, but in ways that disrupted their authority.

The May protests faltered. However, the fruitfulness of de Certeau's approach would be elaborated in reference to a vast range of themes, including the “discovery”of the Americas, urban experience, language and politics, psychoanalysis and history, and religious belief.

In all this work, de Certeau displayed a keen interest in the microdynamics of social change. His best-known work in English translation, The Practice of Everyday Life, discusses the ways of making do that ordinary people fashion out of the dictates of their social position. Always, he attended keenly to these ruses—witting and unwitting—by which those who are situated as objects of knowledge and of power manage to use, and slip by, the structures intended to confine them.

Perhaps most important is the general thrust in de Certeau's body of work to interrogate the advance toward knowledge (the story of history, in an unusually general sense of the word). De Certeau conceived of the writing of history as a recovery of other voices. [Page 436]Of necessity, history appropriates the voices on which it relies in ways that reflect historians' techniques and institutional expectations.

De Certeau demonstrated how these techniques and expectations were often repressed from the record, thereby constituting—along with the voices appropriated—a veritable hubbub of activity quite unlike the concentrated self-possession of so many historical narratives. In his own histories, he always strived to enable his voice to be altered by its relations to these various others. In this way, de Certeau provided a model of openness to otherness that could not be fixed by his own or any system's tendency to present others as objects of knowledge and as tokens of power.