Certeau, Michel de

Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) was born in 1925 in Chambéry, France. He obtained degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble, Lyon, and Paris. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1950 and was ordained in 1956. He completed a doctorate in theology at the Sorbonne in 1960, for which his thesis topic was the mystical writings of Jean-Joseph Surin. He taught in Paris and San Diego, and died of stomach cancer in 1986. He is especially well-known for his critique of historiography and his analyses of everyday life, particularly its spatial dimension.

Certeau's career can be divided into three stages, with May 1968 as the crucial pivot point. Before then, his work was quite traditional, focused almost exclusively on history-of-religion questions. Then, quite suddenly, it took a very different turn, becoming both contemporary and secular or sociocultural in its interests. After a decade of speculating on social theory topics, Certeau's thoughts returned once more to the history of religion, and he produced what would turn out to be his last book, a two-volume history of seventeenth-century mysticism in Europe (The Mystic Fable). A full evaluation of his work, encompassing all three periods, has yet to be written in English. For obvious reasons, social theory has tended to focus on the middle period. But this has sometimes resulted in a distorted view of his work, in some cases giving rise to the mistaken impression that Certeau lost his faith and renounced the church and his association with it. The fact is, he remained a Jesuit until he died.

The first stage of Certeau's career, which extends from his early doctoral research on the Jesuit mystic Jean-Joseph Surin until 1968, culminated in a profound retheorisation of history. The intellectual high points of this period are collected in L'écriture de l'histoire (The Writing of History), which was first published in 1975. History, Certeau argued, has to be seen as a kind of cultural machine for easing the anxiety most Westerners seem to feel in the face of death. It consists in a raising of the spectre of our own inevitable demise within a memorial framework that makes it appear that we'll live forever after all. However, Certeau's project was never simply to write a history of historiography, as it were; he wanted to understand “the historiographic operation” itself. His principal means of doing this was a strongly Lacanian-influenced, structuralist semiotics. He belonged to that illustrious generation of semioticians that included Benveniste, Ducrot, Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, and Marin, and his work shows many signs of their influence, a fact that in the present “poststructuralist” era tends to be either overlooked or treated as quaintly old-fashioned.

Yet Certeau's formalism enabled his analyses and gave rise to many of his sharper insights into the day-to-day operations of Western culture. The working premise of his justly famous study of the “historiographic operation” (the keystone text of The Writing of History) is precisely structuralist: It takes the position that historiography can be apprehended as a certain type of linguistic system. Envisaging history as an operation is the equivalent, Certeau argues, of understanding it as the threefold relation between a place, an analytic procedure, and the construction of a text. This admits that history is part of the “reality” it seeks to describe and analyse and that “this reality can be grasped ‘as a human activity,’ or ‘as a practice’” (Certeau 1988:57). A line of continuity traversing the three stages of Certeau's career surfaces here, for in trying to articulate the “historiographic operation” for itself, Certeau was effectively trying to describe history in its everyday aspect, namely as a living enterprise.

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