De Certeau, Michel

Theoretical Background

Michel de Certeau's background as an ordained Jesuit priest working on their archives and a member of Jacques Lacan's l'école Freudienne from its start to finish, whose most sustained work was on the spiritual possessions of medieval Loudun and popular religious mysticism, hardly seems like obvious origins for theorizing urban affairs. De Certeau underwent something of a personal revelation through the events in Paris in 1968 and moved his later scholarship onto more topical urban matters. Through his work on urban matters, he became known as the champion of the common folk, of a street-level social theory. It is in this guise that de Certeau has become a darling to some, as a counterpoint to stratospheric theory, and villain for others, as an example of taking micro theory too far.

His most cited essay, “Walking in the City,” opens with what is now an anachronistic evocation of urban theory and its desire for an orderly view of what he calls the “concept city”:

This has keyed into a whole series of critiques of urban theory that question the subject position and viewpoint of planners, the panoptic disciplining of space, and the pretensions of social theory. Here he asks us to think about the enjoyment mobilized by theoretical and management accounts that offer us a privileged and “powerful” view of urban process—there is no innocent viewpoint, and the gaze of theory offers to satisfy desires for knowledge and order. In other words, the popularity of these approaches is not just about their better insights but also how they position us as powerful knowing subjects. As such, de Certeau is critical of visual metaphors for knowledge and practices of visualizing society, arguing, “Our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic of the eye and the impulse to read.” His caution is that this converts the world into a “texturology” that we can read, but in so doing it freezes urban life and thus occludes a great many urban practices. Thus he argues that representational art and science immobilize the city's “opaque mobility” into a transparent text that offers only the “empire of the evident,” where practices are often treated as inert contents or as cultural attributes to be measured. This leaves theory “mourning at the tomb of the absent,” speaking about the laws or structures but not the actions themselves.

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