Literature and varieties of history

[Part 8]

Last week I discussed the importance of the work of Michel Foucault as a historian and how he could inspire innovative thinking about literature. In today's column my focus will be on another distinguished French historian, although an unorthodox one, Michel de Certeau (1925-1986). He has been influenced by Foucault's writings, and at the same time has sought to go beyond them, pointing out their deficiencies and shortcomings. Michel de Certeau has gained wide recognition as a perceptive cultural critic, innovative historian ( one of his main areas of interest being early modern religion), a scholar of religion who advocated a form of open and compassionate Catholicism.

He entered the Jesuit order in 1950 and was ordained in 1956.Certeau is as important, in my judgment, as the often discussed intellectual luminaries like Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu. He was influenced by their formulations but was also able to go beyond them opening up unmapped territories for historical and cultural exploration.

Michel de Certeau is well-known within the walls of campuses in North America, and he is gaining a world-wide repudiation among academics in many parts of the world.

He is not as well-known in Sri Lanka as the other French thinkers that I alluded to earlier .A commentator in the journal French History was spot on when he observed, 'Although he (Certeau) has not yet gained the international reputation of a Foucault, a Bourdieu, or a Derrida, the late Michel de Certeau was in their class as a thinker and his spectrum of interests was even wider than theirs, ranging from theology, sociology and anthropology.' Certeau was interdisciplinary by temperament and his works bears the traces of this inclination.

His early education was in classics and philosophy, and his doctoral work was on history of religion. Later he was attracted to psychoanalysis, Freudian and Lacanian varieties, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, literature. However he is best known as a historian and that is how he wished to be remembered.

Historian

Michel de Certeau is the author of twelve scholarly books in French and many of them have been translated into English. In today’s column I wish to focus on four of them because my interest is in his significance as a path-breaking historian and his relevance to understanding literary discourse. The four books that I wish to comment on are The Practice of Everyday Life, The Writing of History, Heterologies and Culture in the Plural.

My analysis is based on my response to these works, and I dare say, some historians might differ from my interpretation of his writing. Certeau is not an easy writer to read; he can be obscure; he likes to be allusive and metaphorical and often draws on historically important religious movements with which we in Sri Lanka are not too familiar. As Tom Conley, an able critic of Certeau’s work remarked, in the texture of his writing one can detect the power of religious mysticism, psychoanalytic dialogue and Renaissance prose.

The Practice of Everyday Life, in my judgment, is a highly influential work that has inspired scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. It addresses a theme that is of central significance to both contemporary social scientists and humanists, namely, the idea of resistance. He explores this concept from fresh angles of analysis and dispelling the clouds of pessimism that has invariably gathered over it.

What he has sought to do in this book is to come up with a theoretical framework that will enable us to understand how the weak, disempowered, marginalized in society can make use of the strong and fashion for themselves spaces of creative action and self-determination within the restrictions imposed on them.

Investigation

In his General Introduction to the book Certeau says,’ The essay is part of a continuing investigation of the ways in which users – commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules – operate. The point is not so much t discuss this elusive yet fundamental subject as to make such a discussion possible; that is, by means of inquiries and hypotheses, to indicate pathways for future research.’

He goes on to say that his goal will be realised if everyday practices, ways of operating, or dong things, no loner appear as merely the obscure backdrop of social interaction and to formulate a body of theoretical questions, categories, methods, that will allow us to penetrate this obscurity and make it possible to comprehend them. This mode of inquiry has had a great impact on modern cultural studies.

The Writing of History is again a book that had a transformative influence on historians and cultural critics. In this book he aims to re-examine and redefine historiography as understood in the west by drawing on the disciplines of religion, history and psychoanalysis.

Here he investigates into the changing conceptions of the very role and nature of history—writing itself; he starts with the efforts made by seventeenth century historians to formulate ‘a history of man’ to Freud’s Moses and monotheism with which he re-describes historical practice as a unction of the sense of loss experienced by human beings, the ideas of mourning and absence.

The book is full of original insights, but it is an exacting work in that the disjointed nature of the work, the partiality for German metaphysics, metaphor-laden prose and the challenging postmodern sensibility place so many challenges to easy comprehension.

The following synoptic comment by Tom Conley captures the essence of The Writing of History which contains many of the privileged tenets of his writing. ‘the historian’s relation with death; the presence of the past as a return of the repressed force; the fact that western historiography cannot fail to stress the crucial importance of religion and community at the center of the discipline; the importance of everyday life in the study of the past; the viral rile that mysticism plays in the historian’s relation to writing; the birth of the modern world when voice, image, or scheme become discrete languages..’ These and related themes figure prominently in Michel de Certeau’s writings.

Similarly, his book Heterologies invites close study. It consists of sixteen thought-provoking essays on themes dealing with history, literary studies and psychology, and they deal with the problem of Otherness. He coined the term heterology to designate the science of the other. He had always been interested in the plights pf the other – the outsider, alien, subvert, dispossessed.

The general tendency in scholarly writing had been to exclude them, render them invisible or swallow them up. Both moves had the unfortunate consequence of erasing them from the public consciousness.

Wlad Godzich who wrote an introduction to the book says that it represents a philosophical counter-tradition just like the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Bataille. He says that the book us deeply suspicious of the identity of thought and being.

Exploration

The fourth book that I wish to discuss briefly is Culture in the Plural. It is an exploration into the concept of culture from Certeau’s distinct vantage point.

He reveals the distinctive social and political conflicts and tensions that culture is designed to mask. He goes on to investigate the idea of culture from a number of theoretical and methodological perspectives, taking pains to situate culture in a pluralised space. He advances his formulation of culture, which stands in sharp contrast to the generally accepted notions of the best that has been thought and said and as a harmoniously shared world. It is clear that in discussing the function of culture in modern societies he has anticipated some of the current debates related to multi-culturalism and identity politics. An interesting facet of his approach to culture, as evidenced in this book, is that rather than looking for an easy harmonies and overarching schemes, he wanted to comprehend each moment in the plurality that its constituent elements display.

He was also keen to grasp and clarify the tensions, antipathies and contradictions that culture represented. The book consists of ten essays all of which have a direct relevance to cultural studies.

I found the essays on the imaginary and the city, the language of violence, universities versus popular culture, spaces and practices particularly stimulating.

It is interesting to note that many of the essays gathered in culture in the plural had their origins during student uprising in France in 1968, and in that sense long preceded the current spate of writing on cultural studies and multi-culturalism.a point that Certeau makes with special conviction is that cultures need to be understood as flexible, mutable, self-transforming, able to change their shape in order to avoid confinements by externally imposed structures and processes the ability to work stealthily, according to him, is a mark of culture.

My comments on Michel de Certeau’s approach to history and culture are based largely on my understanding and interpretation of these four books, although towards the end of this column I wish to touch on another of his books titled,’ The Possession at Ludun.’ This tells a story about possessed nuns focusing on mysticism, sorcery, religious practices and possession in seventeenth century France. It deals vividly with issues of deception, victimhood, credulity, psychology, theology, mysticism and politics.

As Stephen Greenblatt, one of the foremost literary scholars in the united states remarked, ‘the whole complex, interlocking structure of French society in this period was touched, lightly but decisively, by the writings of a group of young cloistered women in a small provincial town and linked to these individuals and these institutions are obscure but momentous changes that Certeau brilliantly evokes.’ Certeau was a demanding thinker and difficult writer, but this book, unlike his other works, is accessible.

Influence

Earlier I referred to his important work The Practice of Everyday Life which has had a profound influence on thought-patterns of scholars both in the humanities and social sciences. There are a number of significant concepts that rise up from within its pages and begin to illuminate diverse areas of human behaviour. In this regard I wish to direct your attention to three concepts – they are strategy, tactic and spatial practice. Let us first consider the pair of concepts strategy and tactic.

This is how he defines strategy, admittedly in a somewhat convoluted way. ‘I call a strategy the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject if will and power 9a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution0 can be isolated from an environment.

A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as a basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it….political, economic and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategy model.’ Strategy, then, is exercised by those who have power and whom society has sanctioned and designated as true power-holders.

The tactic, on the other hand, is pressed into serve by the weak and those who lack power. As Certeau observes, ‘I call a tactic, on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a proper (a spatial or institutional localisation), nor this on borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other.’ It is important to note that tactical agents have to meet their needs by manipulating and diverting those spaces which strategies alone are able to fashion and impose.

Jeremy Ahearne, in two telling tropes explains the difference between strategy and tactic a in the following manner. ‘to tactics, as it were, the nocturnal stealth of the poacher; to strategy the infernal glare of surveillance.’ Michel de Certeau with his deep interest in the Other, the powerless, the silenced was more concerned with tactics. Both these concepts can prove to be of inestimable value in literary analysis.

Space

The third concept of Certeau that I would like to highlight is that of space. For him, space is not a physically given. It is mapped through discourses and brought into being by movements of human bodies. Let us, for example, consider an urban neighbourhood,; it can be laid out in conformity to a street plan. However, it does not attain the status of space until people begin to use it and human bodies begin to interact with it.

That is how place becomes space. Therefore, when we examine the true nature and significance of urban space we need to focus on the embodied practices and social interactions that give meaning to it. This is indeed a concept that can illuminate in interesting ways certain areas of literary analysis.

In this series of columns on literature and varieties of history, understandably, my target has been the uncovering of the approaches to history advocated by various historians and meta-historians. Hence, I would like to examine the vision of history that informs Michel de Certeau’s work. There are a number of very important points that needs to be made in this connection. He saw the writing of history as an engagement with absence.

There is a vast temporal gap that separates the object of inquiry from the inquirer. This becomes for Certeau the point of departure as well as the point of contention for historical analysis. This has the effect of placing a heavy burden of responsibility on historical traces and calling attention to how they are understood and interpreted by the historian. As he sees it what happens in history is not a recovery of the past on the basis of available traces but a re-arrangement, a re-construction of those traces in the light of present agendas and imperatives.

This is indeed a point that he makes repeatedly in his writings, Let us, for example, consider books, papers, objects, museums that bear the historical traces that we are discussing.

Perceptions

What is interesting is that when we seek to understand them we realise that they have already been pre-selected and ordered in accordance with the perceptions that are shaped by the present. What we obtain is not a recovery of unmediated past but a construction of and in the present. It is important to recognise that before objects can be counted as historical evidence they must be subject to a specific mode of understanding and recognition.

As Certeau asserted, ‘no doubt it is an over-statement to say that time constitutes the raw material of historical analysis or its specific object. Historians treat according to their methods the physical objects (papers, stones, images, sounds etc.) that are set apart within the continuum of perception through the organization of society and through the systems of relevance which characterise a science. They work on materials in order to transform them into history.’

Historian

What Michel de Certeau is stressing here is the constructivist role played by the historian; he or she does something to the traces that he finds most important. Hence his question, ‘what do historians really fabricate when they make history?’This question has a deep relevance to Certeau’s concept of history and it is intimately linked to all his analytical observations on the historian’s craft. For him the term fabrication carries a wealth of relevant meaning.

Historians construct narratives on the basis of the available traces. This construction is guided by institutionally sanctioned rules, conventions and techniques. They give form and shape to the traces. Moreover, what is interesting about this effort to fabricate is that the historical interpretations tend to turn a blind eye on the rules and conventions and techniques that were involved. As Certeau said, ‘it is as though history began only with the noble speech of interpretation, as though finally it was an art of discourse delicately erasing all traces of labour. In fact there is a decisive option here; the importance that is accorded to matters of technique turns history either in the direction of literature or in the direction of science.’

These observations of Certeau serve to underscore two important facts. First historiography should not be regarded as a mirror that unproblematically reflects the past. Second, the various practices which have facilitated the production of history should be given due recognition. At one point Certeau somewhat provocatively says that, ‘like the car turned out by the factory, the historical study is bound to the complex of a specific form of collective fabrication far more than it is the effect of any personal philosophy or the resurgence of some past reality. And he makes the emphatic statement it is the product of a place.

This notion of place of production is extremely important to his line of thinking. The rules and conventions that the historian is subject to the institutional structures that support him or her are all vital outgrowths of place. In his book Culture in the Plural he maintains that ‘in cultural matters, we need to direct our research towards the question of operations.’ The same desideratum, in his mind, applies to historical work.

Objects

Michel de Certeau contends that, ‘in history everything begins with the move which sets apart, which groups together and which transforms into documents certain objects which had been classified in another way…..the material is created through the concerted actions which cut it out from its place in the world of contemporary usage, which seek it also beyond the frontiers of this usage, and which subject it to a coherent form of re-employment.’ It is important to bear in mind, as Certeau demonstrates, the historian does not effortlessly assimilate the traces of the other; instead he, to use his word, ‘operates’ on them so as to bring out new recognitions. This operation includes such activities as selecting, coordinating, ordering and emphasizing. Furthermore, the outcome of his re-ordering effort has to be written up as a historical narrative, and this involves questions of institutional procedures, academic conventions and inter-textual legitimisations.

Certeau sees the effort of historical operation in terms of three categories – place, procedure and text. Let me explain each of them briefly so as to acquire a better understanding of his vision of history By place he is not only signifying the space from which a historian does his writing but also the institutional setting, intellectual environment in which the historian operates.

This is an aspect of writing history that Certeau has dealt with forcefully. The second is the idea of procedure. The procedures of making history, according to him, have not received adequate attention and hence historians and meta-historians need to pay closer attention to this topic. It is his contention that the procedures summoned up by historians in their investigations to interpret historical material are vitally connected to the place from where they operate. Third the idea of writing up of history is a topic that stirred Certeau’s deepest imagination. If history is fabrication as he stressed on numerous occasions, then the act of writing deserves more sustained attention than it has received so far.

Opaque

As Michel de Certeau sees it, writing historical accounts cannot be reduced to a transparent depiction of an object or event; it is more than the simple communication of results. For him, this writing is opaque, multi-faceted and is subject to numerous intellectual and institutional pressures. If we are to attain a proper understanding of the nature of history-making this dimension needs to be teased out. He takes a a common example such as citing undertaken by historians and points out how it involves impositions, hierarchical estimations, and power plays.

As one commentator aptly stated, ‘Certeau foregrounds the peculiar textual operations to which the interpreter subjects his or her material……like a judge, in a position of authority, the interpreter summons others to appear, assigns them to their place and cites them before other judges. This (inevitable) technique of citation both conform the historian’s own place, and constitutes a linchpin of the process through which historiographical texts are put together.’

There is a clear political edge to Certeau’s approach to history. He, for the most part, dealt with the disposed and the marginalised and how they put up resistances against the existing power structures, and hence in terms content there is a political density in his work. In addition, he focused as we saw earlier, on the very process of writing. It is his belief that writing is a vehicle through which we produce the only world we can possibly know and historians exemplify this fact consistently.

Dynamics

According to him writing should be perceived as a way of imposing a rational order on the world. This of course goes hand in hand with the dynamics of colonisation. For example, discussing the writings of Amerigo Vespuci and others that represent the people of the new world, which for him should e seen as colonisation through the discourse of power, Certeau says the following.

‘This is writing that conquers. It will use the new world as if it were a blank, savage page on which western desire will be written. It will transform the space of the other into a field of expansion for a system of production.’

According to Certeau because history is writing, verbal fabrication, all history needs to be seen as fiction – fiction in the etymologically sense of the term meaning something made up. As he observed,’ the past is the friction of the present.’ As he has pointed out on numerous occasions, historians do not record history, they produce it, they manufacture it. Some critics might argue, not without justification, that Certeau is over-stating his case. However, throughout is career he peddled this line if thinking. The idea of history as fabrication is vitally connected to the places of writing, the institutional structures and academic traditions and therefore carries a heavy freight of political agendas.

Thinker

I stated earlier that Michel de Certeau as a thinker was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis and this is clearly evident in the way he deployed certain concepts privileged by Freud and Lacan. For example, he was deeply interested in the phenomenon of ‘the return of the repressed.’ It was his conviction that it is not possible to totally repress because the repressed will always find ways in which to return. He takes this psychological concept and invests it with political meaning as he urges critics of history to assist the process of the return of the repressed by subjecting the very mechanisms of history-writing to a self-reflective and rigourous form of interrogation. Keith Windschuttle, not necessarily a cheer-leader for all fads in modern history said that by questioning the theoretical basis of texts, the auspices under which they were composed, the status of the documents consulted, and generally holding up for critique how histories are produced they can assist in this process. As he says, ‘careful examination of the texts, especially the shards they create and the remainders they leave aside, can allow the critic to find the hole through which the forgotten voices can return to right the wrongs of history.’

Michel de Certeau for the most part dealt with religious mysticisms in the seventeenth century; however, it is evident that he is equally familiar with modern transformations. For example, he has certain interesting observations to make on computers and the writing of history.

He believes that to the extent that modern historians depend on the computer they are connected to the present not the past. As he observes, ‘the computer is inscribed in the historian’s discourse as a massive and determinist contemporary fact.’ what he means by this is that historians make use of computers to give objectivity to their work he believes that computer technology enables to perpetuate the myth that history is not fiction but truth. As he remarked, ‘computer technology facilitates the production of statistics which, according to him, creates the illusion of objectivity through mastering of numbers, constructing regularities and determining time frames. However, statistics are not recovered; they are the outcome of operations performed by the historian. This line of thinking is of a piece with his general orientation to historiography.

Michel de Certeau is very often lumped together with other post-structurlist theorists like Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan. However we have to be careful not to make hasty generalisations. While he drew profitably on the writings of Foucault and Lacan, he was also critical of them. For example, he is critical of the way Foucault has sought to use documentary evidence for his own purposes. Through the process of selecting documents related to the imprisoned and insane to construct his histories about prisons and mental institutions. He argues that Foucault has used these documents for his own purposes rather than those of the imprisoned.

Creativity

He is also critical of Foucault for ignoring the creativity of groups and individuals undaunted by dominant power structures. Similarly he accuses Derrida of privilege the act of writing.

What I have attempted to do so far is to examine the importance of Michel de Certeau as historians and to explain some of his more prominent concerns and interests. It seems to me that three stand out: the focus on everyday life, the giving of voice to the silenced and examination of the mechanisms of history-writing.

All these have deep implications not only for history but for literary studies as well.

Against this background of thinking, let me try to make some connections with modern Sri Lankan literature. In the interests of space, let me identify four of them. First, as I stated earlier, Certeau was deeply interested in the ways in which historians construct their histories. In this regard he emphasized the importance of place, procedure and text. This line of thinking can be applied to literary production with profit.

What is the place of literary production? What are the institutional pressures and intellectual imperatives that the writer is subject to? What is the relationship between knowledge and power? Such questions, which were uppermost in the mind of Certeau can have great implications for literary analysis. Second, Certeau emphasized the importance of the cunning of reading – reading as a form of poaching. He wanted the reader of historical texts to grapple with the meaning of texts and subvert them for his or her own purposes.

This kind of aggressively critical readings looking for contradictions and slippages is extremely relevant to literary study. Third, Certeau was constantly interested in making the invisible visible, and giving a sense of agency to the marginalised. His writing strategies and reading strategies were geared to meeting these ends. Here gain literary scholars and literary critics can learn a great deal from his efforts and use that knowledge to strengthen their own endeavours.

Folk literature

Fourth, there are certain areas of literature, folk literature for example, with the subtle ironies and tongue-in-the-cheek utterances that can be explored in the light of Certeau’s ideas and moves. Similarly, Certeau has done some extremely important work in the areas of mysticism, religious ecstasy and possessions, as evidenced in a work like The Possession at Loudun that I referred to earlier.

His formulations and analytical approaches in these spheres can, I believe, be used effectively to re-understand various aspects of Sinhala folk literature. Fifth, the way he discussed the production of space, how it is invested with human meanings, can be of great value to students of literature. He said that place allows us to reflect on possibilities of human action and human action serves to define place. Certeau asserted that space is a practised place. What this suggests is that no place can be regarded free of social practice and history.

If we consider a novel like Martin Wickremasinghe’s Kaliyugaya this fact becomes abundantly clear. In this novel, the life of the city is manifestly central to the meaning of the narrative discourse. How the urban space, through cultural practices and human interaction comes alive is vividly reconfigured by the novelist.

The observations of Certeau on what he terms spatial practices and spatial stories are extremely germane to the intent and interests of Wickremasinghe. Michel de Certeau is a difficult writer; if you are prepared to engage his demanding and elliptical prose, you will, no doubt, will be rewarded with rich insights both into history and literature.